Chapter Nine
“Do you know what you’re keeping me from?” Zach asked about two point two seconds before his balled fist collided with the ugliest mug he’d ever seen.
With a groan, the banger crumpled to the ground.
Pussy.
He glared up at Zach, blood trickling from his lip, and raised his middle finger.
Christ, this ugly fucker didn’t have two brains cells rattling around in his empty skull.
He had a crooked nose. Not like broke-it-once-in-his-life crooked. But the kind of crooked that indicated someone smashed the hell out of his face a time or two. And his front teeth were missing. Guess pushing smack didn’t rake in enough cash to visit a fucking dentist. Plus, Zach was pretty sure his right eye was glass instead of flesh.
Poor fucker. Bones was his name.
He already looked like he’d been hitched to the back of a truck and dragged for miles. The beating Zach was in the midst of delivering sure wouldn’t do him any favors.
Zach smiled. That’s what happened when you crossed into Handler’s territory.
Still smiling the smile of a man who enjoyed his work, Zach gripped the Gray Dragon’s hair and yanked him to a kneeling position. “I asked you a question, asshole. Do you have any idea what I could be doing right now if I didn’t have to deal with your fugly ass in my town?” As he spoke, he placed his booted heel on the guy’s calf and pressed down.
Hurt like a sonofabitch. Zach knew that from first-hand experience.
Bones mashed his teeth together and screamed through them. “No,” he ground out. That one good eye bulged as though it would pop right out of his head. Wouldn’t that suck for old Bones?
“I’ll tell you,” Zach said easing back on the pressure. “You see, there’s this hot little number I know. And every evening, around this time, she sits out on her porch.” He leaned forward and pushed against the man’s calf again. The hiss of pain was music to his ears. “Now when I say hot, I mean H-O-T. Tits, ass, face, the whole package. And I was planning on getting all up in that tonight. Driving up on my bike—chicks love that shit. Gets ’em going. So, you see, you’re keeping me from getting my dick taken care of.”
“S-sorry,” Bones said. His face was growing redder with each passing second.
The chance of his dick actually getting taken care of by Toni was probably around twenty-five percent. What was more likely to happen was a roll of her pretty eyes. It didn’t make any sense. She was attracted to him. The way her breathing hitched and her gaze lingered on him was all he needed to see to know she wanted him. So why play hard to get? Why not give into a mutually satisfying few weeks? What was the hold up? Zach was determined to discover what lay beyond her walls.
But first…
“Don’t you think I deserve to have my dick tended to, Bones?”
“Y-yes. Oh fuck,” he whispered as Zach tightened his grip until a few of Bones’s short greasy hairs burst free of his scalp.
Now for the fun part. Zach leaned down so he was eye to eye with his new friend. “So why the fuck are you selling heroin in my town and making me miss time with my girl?”
Slight exaggeration. Okay, bold faced lie.
My girl.
Sounded kind of nice.
Too nice.
Nice in a way that Zach was not interested in. Nice in a flowery, matching slippers kind of way.
“I’m j-just following orders,” he said between pants.
“Just a good little gang soldier, huh?” He released both his hold on Bones’s hair and the press of his boot.
Bones’s relief was instantaneous. With a loud gasp, he sagged to the ground on all fours.
“All right,” Zach said, running a hand through his hair as he paced in front of Bones. “You’re the fourth Gray Dragon piece of shit that I’ve chatted with this week. Either you’re all too afraid of Shark to bring our messages back or too stupid. Which is it?”
Jigsaw had called about a half hour ago with the tip. Someone saw Bones dealing behind an abandoned shoe store on the edge of town. Guy was smart enough not to wear his colors, but it didn’t even matter. All Gray Dragons had a bright red dragon tattoo on their left hand. Never made any fucking sense to Zach, but it was a dead giveaway when trying to identify one of the bastards.
So, he’d dropped what he was doing—working on the class schedules for the gym he managed—and hightailed it to the shoe store.
Sure enough, Bones.
“Fuck you.”
Guy was getting a little mouthy in the absence of acute pain. Zach sighed. Why couldn’t it just be easy? Why couldn’t this little shit just open his mouth and rat out his gang?
Not that Zach didn’t respect the loyalty. He, himself, would die before turning on the club. But that wasn’t usually the case with these gang members. They were young, stupid, and selfish. Each and every one would crack with the right motivation.
And fear for their life was typically right on the money.
“Guess we’re going to do this the hard way.” He drew his sidearm from the small of his back at the same time he shoved Bones to his back with a kick. There wasn’t time to grab Louie after Jigsaw’s call, so a gun was the only weapon available to him.
Before Bones knew what had hit him, Zach was kneeling with one knee on Bones’s chest and his pistol jammed against Bones’s kneecap. “You the one who roughed up our girls?”
“Fuck you.”
“Does Shark know what happened to the other three guys I roughed up?”
“Fuck you.”
Zach cocked the gun and returned it to the skin below Bones’s shorts.
“How many loans has he purchased from our clients?”
“Fuck you.” Despite the bold words, a line of sweat broke out across Bones’s forehead.
“So the really hard way, then?” Zach pulled out his phone and scrolled through his contacts. “Hey, Viper, gonna need a cleanup crew, ASAP.” After getting confirmation from Viper that three prospects would be there in under ten minutes, Zach returned the gun to Bones knee.
“Okay, last chance. You the one who roughed up our girls?”
Sweat was running in rivulets down Bones’s red face now. “You’re not going to shoot me in broad daylight. Fuck you.”
Zach pulled the trigger sending lead straight through Bones’s knee. The howl of pain was epic. A high-pitched squeal worthy of a slasher movie. “Shit, man, you scream like a scared high school girl. Do I have your attention now?” He held the gun against Bones’s chest.
“Oh shit. Oh fuck. What the fuck did you do to me? I’m gonna lose my fucking leg?” Bones writhed on the ground and was actually sniveling.
“Bring it down a notch or two there, drama queen. If you shut up and answer my questions, you’ll be at a hospital in under twenty minutes. You won’t lose your damn leg. So…from the top?”
Then the floodgates opened and Bones forgot all about loyalty to Shark and the gang. “Yes. I was the one who had orders to go after the girls when the strip club closed. Shark knows you’re coming after the guys you find here. He doesn’t give a shit.” Pausing to breathe, Bones tried to shift and ended up flopping to his back and groaning.
“Keep going. What’s the end goal here? Money?”
Eyes closed and face ashen, Bones shook his head. “No. Drive you guys out. Create chaos in town by dealing H. Weaken you financially with the loans. Move in and push you out.”
Shit. Shark’s balls were getting too big for his brain if he thought he could drive the Handlers out of Townsend. His numbers were impressive, but if all of them were blubbering little boys like Bones, he didn’t stand a chance. Still, if a war ensued, lives would be lost on both sides. Arrests would be made. It would be a costly fucking mess.
The rumble of a motorcycle alerted him to the cavalry’s arrival. While he waited for the prospects to find him, he leaned closer to Bones. “Tell Shark he’s wasting his time. He could come at us with a hundred of you shit-for-brains little boys and he’d still lose. He can take every fucking penny we have and we’ll still gut him and your entire gang. Stay the fuck out of Townsend.”
With that, a van and two bikes pulled to a stop about twenty feet from Zach. Confident Bones wasn’t going anywhere, Zach moved to meet the prospects.
“Hey,” Screwball said. He was Zach’s favorite, despite his name, which was given to him because he was always screwing around. The guy was the master of practical jokes. Always had the brothers cracking up. Unless they were the ones at the butt of the joke. Then they wanted to kill him.
He kept his antics to parties and down time. At twenty-three, the dark haired, former Marine was eager for the patch and did every fucking thing asked.
“Hey,” Zach bumped his fist against Screw’s. “Take this sack of shit and dump him outside the ER in their county. Sorry about the mess.” He pointed to the blood puddle expanding across the asphalt.
“No worries. Bleach ought to take care of it. Hey, LJ,” he called to the prospect emerging from the van. “You and Fox wanna load him up? I’ll get started on clean up.”
“On it.” LJ, short for Little Jack, who was not little in the least, hopped in the driver’s seat and backed the van close to Bones who was ashen and whose chest was rising and falling in a shallow but rapid pattern.
“Need me to stick around?” Zach only asked because he knew they’d say no. No prospect worth his salt would make a patched member help with the shit detail. They’d appear lazy. Unwilling to pull their weight. Not brother material. Because if they weren’t willing to take on a menial job, how could they be trusted when shit got real?
“Nah, we got this. You did the hard part.” Screw stuck his head in the back of the van and pulled out a bucket and a gallon of bleach.
Zach snorted. “I had the fun part.”
“Can’t argue with that.” Screw barked out a laugh. “We need to be gentle with this guy or is it okay for him to get a bump or two on the way?”
“Treat him however you’d like. If he’d been more willing to talk, you could be at the bar drinking instead of cleaning his DNA off the ground. Told him I’d get him to a hospital. As long as he can speak well enough to give Shark my well wishes, I don’t care what condition he arrives in.”
Prospects had to be able to have a little fun sometimes.
“Sounds good. See you tonight at the lodge?” There was a big club bonfire that evening. Viper’s ol’ lady was turning twenty-five for about the thirtieth time.
“I’ll be there.” And if the stars aligned, he’d be able to talk Toni into coming with him.
He left Bones in the prospects’ capable, though not tender, hands.
With each mile that brought him closer to home, Zach’s excitement grew. Toni would still be out on her wraparound porch, wineglass in hand, enjoying the sunset. It had become her ritual. And while Zach had been too busy to pop over in the last week, he’d found some excuse to run to his house or past his house almost every evening.
Just for a glimpse of her. The woman who turned his head. The woman who accepted him and his brothers by allowing them in her family business without knowing a damn thing about them.
After making the twenty-minute trip, he slowed and turned into his long driveway. The house he’d grown up in was set about a hundred feet back from the road. Toni’s was even farther, another fifteen or so feet, so though they were next door neighbors, the houses weren’t side-by-side. His bedroom, however, lined up with a window in Toni’s living room.
Any excitement he’d been feeling died out when he realized she wasn’t in her usual spot. She wasn’t outside at all. Damn shame. The air was warm and the sky clear. Good day for sunset gazing.
“You’ve gotta be shitting me,” Zach muttered. Toni may not be outside, but she was in the house, visible through the window. And she had a visitor. A suit-wearing, douche bag of a man who wasn’t worth a smile from Toni.
Under her reserved exterior, Toni burned hot. Zach could sense it. For some reason, she was denying that part of herself, to him at least, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t there. And it didn’t mean it could be ignored forever. A man like the suit wouldn’t know what the hell to do with a woman like Toni. Wouldn’t know how to coax out the passion and fire she’d buried under a layer of seriousness.
Zach did.
Zach knew just how to tease a response out of Toni that would shatter her defenses and have her screaming his name.
And that’s exactly what he planned to do.
She just had to agree to let him touch her.