SEVEN
REBEL
Turns out Keeler spent the night away from the compound, visiting his sister in Cedar Crest. At the moment he’s one of our primary tattoo artists at Dead Man’s Ink, though. Today is his day to cover the shop, so Cade and I ride into town and to wait for him. We cut Bron’s body down and drive her back to the compound first, of course, hiding her out of sight, where the other guys won’t find her before we have chance to tell Keeler. Cade and I sit in the shop in silence, me bleeding through my stitches, staring at the walls, neither of us knowing what to say to one another. This isn’t the first time we’ve seen fucked up shit. Afghanistan was a savage place. The things we saw there… That was the first time I really understood, really knew the evil man was capable of committing against his fellow man. Nothing will ever be more brutal than the atrocities we saw there. But this is different. This is here, on our fucking doorstep, and this isn’t fucking Kabul. This is regular small town Americana, and this was one of our own.
Keeler’s first appointment is at ten thirty, so Cade and I sit and stew for a good hour and a half before the low rumble of Keeler’s motorcycle rattles the glass in the shop’s window frames.
“How you gonna handle this?” Cade asks.
“I don’t know. I guess we’re about to find out.”
Keeler looks surprised when he opens the shop door and finds Cade and me sitting at the counter. Concern flashes across his face. He’s young, mid-twenties. Good guy. Not ex-army like most of the Widow Makers. He was beaten by his father from the moment he could walk til the moment he ran away from home—spent some time pin-balling between different drug gangs before he wound up on the wrong side of the law and serving three years for possession with intent to supply. He got his shit dialled in prison. He’d been out for a month when he walked through the doors of Dead Man’s Ink for the first time, looking for work. Cade gave him a job on the spot. Took him a clean year to convince me to let him prospect for the club, though. Now I’m feeling really fucking guilty that I caved and swore him in.
“Hey, guys. What’s up? Did I leave the door open or something?” He eyes us cautiously, like we’re about to ream him out.
“No, dude. Come in. We gotta talk to you about something.” I pull out a chair by the counter, gesturing for him to sit down. He looks like he’s about to shit his pants.
“Uhhh… should I be freaking out right now? ‘Cause I’m freaking out.” He slowly walks into the shop and lowers himself into the seat.
“You haven’t done anything wrong,” Cade tells him. “It’s—it’s about Bron.”
I watch the nervous smile fall from Keeler’s face. “What about her?” he says slowly.
I take over. I’m the president of this club. I’m responsible for the people who have joined, and I should also be responsible for their loved ones. I should have known this was going to happen. I tell Keeler what’s happened, doing my best to provide as few details as possible. It’s impossible to keep the truth from him for long, though. The guy stares at me, as though I’m making it all up.
“Come on, man, stop fucking around. That shit ain’t funny.”
“I’m sorry. I swear to god, I am so sorry, and we are going to make this right, Key.”
“She’s dead? She’s dead?”
“Yes.”
“They…they cut off her head?”
I scrub my hands over my face, blowing all the air out of my lungs. “I’m sorry. Yes.”
“Where is it?”
“What?”
“Where is her fucking head, man?” Keeler’s voice is nothing more than a whisper, yet his eyes are screaming with rage. He’s about to flip his shit.
“We don’t know. We’ll find out, though. We’ll make this right.” God, I really hope I’m not lying to this kid.
As predicted, Keeler explodes. Cade and I sit back and watch as he trashes the shop, punching a fist through the door to the back room, throwing the sterilizing equipment, destroying anything and everything he can get his hands on. We let him rage.
By the time he collapses into a heap on the floor, sobbing silently, shoulders jerking up and down as he weeps, there’s barely a stick of furniture in the place that remains unbroken.
“Take him back to the compound,” I tell Cade. Keep him away from everyone until I get back. No one leaves today, though. Tell the rest of the club they’re on lockdown. Tell anyone with friends or family living here in town to make sure they pull everyone in. I’m not having his happen again.”
Cade says he’ll get it done and then leaves. As soon as he’s managed to half carry, half drag Keeler out of the shop, I double over and clutch my side, breathing through the white hot, burning pain that’s tearing through me. “Fuck.” Breathing is hard again. I don’t know if that’s from the pain or from Keeler’s complete devastation. He deserved better. He deserved for his girlfriend to be safe while he was out of town. I should have fucking known this was going to happen. Hector Ramirez is a sociopath. He’s clinically insane. The life of an innocent bystander means nothing to him. He’d murder the entire town if he thought it would make his point. So I should have known.
“Well, that was quite the display.”
My head snaps up at the sound of the voice, already knowing who it is. Already assessing how I’m going to proceed. Hector Ramirez stands in the open doorway of the shop, one hand braced against the frame, the other hand casually in the pocket of his suit pants. He looks mildly amused, like the scene of destruction before him is entertaining. His gaze settles on my side, my hand still pressing against my wound, and his eyebrows slowly rise. Taking his hand out of his pants, he places something small into his mouth and bites down on it, crunching.
“You know,” he says. “It really is a shame you snuck up on my guards the other night. They’re very jumpy men. They tend to react without thinking sometimes. If you’d simply have made your presence known to them and told them you wished to see me, I’m sure they would have treated you in a far more…civilized manner.”
I grind my teeth together, mentally scanning the shop for a concealed weapon, something to do some serious damage to the evil piece of shit that is strolling into my property like he owns the damn place. Problem is, we don’t keep guns or knives here. The shop’s raided by the cops on a fairly frequent basis, and precautions have been necessary in the past.
With a slight grunt of distaste, Hector steps over the smashed coffee table between he and I, his leather shoes crunching as he treads on shards of glass. “I imagine you found my little gift this morning?” he says. “I worried that you might not see her. Raphi suggested we leave our present to you right on your doorstep where you wouldn’t miss it, however that seemed a little too obvious. I didn’t want the police arresting you for murder because there was a mutilated corpse propped up against your boundary wall. Where would the fun have been in that?” He puts something into his mouth again and chews—candied almonds. The bastard always has a pocket full of them. Makes him smell like an old woman.
I curl my fingers to make a fist, hate charging through my veins, seeping into my pores, infecting every last part of me with a rage that won’t go unanswered. Can’t go unanswered. I tried to do this the legal way, I really did. I wanted Ramirez and his men in jail for what they did to my uncle. I wanted them to suffer every horrifying, dark, awful violation possible while they served their time, knowing they were going to die as incarcerated men, never to walk free again. The time for that has past now, though. Now, I just want them all dead. Preferably in the most painful manner possible.
“You shouldn’t have killed Leah. You should never have stepped foot on my father’s property in Alabama. You should never have followed us back here, and you really shouldn’t have harmed a hair on Bron’s head, Hector. You think there won’t be consequences?”
Hector Ramirez shrugs, pulling a fat cigar from the breast pocket of his suit jacket, apparently done with his almonds. He bites the end off the cigar and spits it onto the ground, then proceeds to light it with an engraved silver lighter. “From where I’m standing, the Widow Makers aren’t the formidable force I assumed them to be when I undertook this little adventure to New Mexico, Jamie. When Raphi dealt with your uncle back in Seattle and your second in command made grand gestures, inciting war between our people, I thought to myself, ‘well, okay now. This might be interesting. Something to distract you from the tedium of every day life, Hector. Thank the lord.’ But no. I arrive here to this dust bowl you call home, and I find a rag-tag group of misfits living out in the desert, sticking their dicks into the locals, tattooing people for money.” He gestures at the trashed shop, disgust warping his features. “I have to admit, I’m more than a little disappointed.”
He makes it to the counter where I’m still bent double, trying to remain calm. Trying not to give away the fact that my right hand is resting on the one weapon we do keep in the shop—a prime maple Louisville slugger. I’m in a shit load of pain and my head is spinning, so I have to wait for the perfect moment. If I launch myself at him too early, I’m going down hard and I won’t be getting back up again. That means I need him close. Closer than he is now, anyway. And that means I have to keep him talking.
“You made a huge mistake in coming here, Hector.”
“Ahh, you think so?” He pouts, pulling on his cigar, holding the smoke in his mouth before he blows it out in a thick cloud. The smell reminds me of my father—he always smokes after dinner, ever the traditional southern gentleman. It takes me a mere second to connect the dots when I see the familiar Havana Red paper seal of my father’s favorite brand wrapped around the rolled tobacco leaves in Hector’s hand. He is literally smoking one of my father’s cigars. This is an action designed to piss me off, to drive me crazy, but all he’s succeeding in doing is distilling my anger into clarity. I don’t see red. I don’t react. My recklessness the other night, the recklessness that got me stabbed, isn’t normally how I operate. Push me to the edge and I get smart. Poke and prod at my buttons and I come up with new and interesting ways to return the fucking favor. I’ve got my shit handled now, but then Hector Ramirez doesn’t know that about me. He knows nothing about me whatsoever. He’s massively underestimated both me and my club if he thinks he’s going to succeed in baiting me into stupidity twice.
He comes closer, standing on the other side of the counter. “You know…I believe I recognized the woman with you at your father’s home, Jamie. Can it be that you arranged for Julio Perez to purchase my little One Eighty-One on your behalf?”
One Eighty-One, the number he assigned to Sophia in order to sell her. Motherfucker. I glare at him, willing him dead. It’s the only way I can maintain my relative calm. If he says her name…if he so much as mentions her again…
“That was very underhanded, you know. I can’t say that I like you tricking me out of her like that. Bad business. My good friend Raphael has aired his concerns about her association with the Widow Makers. He’s…worried about her safety. Normally, I’m careful to ignore Raphi’s council, however in this particular instance I think he may have a point. I want her back, Jamie.”
My vision blurs in my peripherals, my heart rate doubling. No way. No fucking way is he having her. “You’re certifiable if you think I’m handing her over to you, asshole.”
Hector shakes his head, as though he expected more from me. He looks away, out of the shop window, biting down on the fat cigar in his mouth. “I’m sorry to hear that. But I suppose these things can’t be helped. If you are not willing to return the girl to me, I will simply take her from you. You won’t be able to stop me. And this way, when she is back within the confines of my household, performing for my pleasure, I will not treat her well, my friend. I will treat her like the whore she is. I will ruin her. I will make her obey me in everything. She will be degraded and tortured, and when I have had my fill of her, I will kill her. And this time I will make sure to send you her head and her hands instead of the rest of her body. No. I will keep the rest of her body. A pussy is still a pussy, after all, no?”
I don’t feel the pain in my side anymore. My head is no longer fuzzy, my vision no longer blurred. Everything is crystal fucking clear, and my body is vibrating with fury. Only a second ago, I was clinging to the fact that his provocations wouldn’t work on me, and I honestly believed that to be true. But now, with this? I cannot stay calm. I cannot keep a cool head. Sophia is a game changer. I swore I would protect her, and now Ramirez is threatening to violate her dead body?
No.
Just. Fucking. No.
He doesn’t see the baseball bat coming. I whip it out from under the counter so fast that he has zero time to react before I’m swinging. Back in Alabama when I was a teenager, my father used to force me to stun his livestock with a sledgehammer before their throats were slit—‘one fierce blow to the temple, boy. What’s the matter? Are you a fucking pussy or an Aubertin? God, you disgust me.’
There were other, far more humane ways to end the animals’ lives, but my father derived some kind of sick pleasure in watching me cry as I swung that sledgehammer at his cattle. He had me do it over and over again, hundreds of times. I hated every second of it, disorienting those cows so they could be slaughtered, but the experience taught me a lot. I’ve had plenty of experience. So when I slam the baseball bat into the side of Ramirez’s head, it’s with a precise and brutal force.
Ramirez’s head rips around, the cigar flying out of his mouth. He drops down to one knee, making a low, gurgling sound at the back of his throat. Blood. There’s blood all over the baseball bat, and Ramirez’s head is pouring more of the bright red liquid down his face, soaking the crisp white collar of his shirt. I vault over the counter, already lifting the bat in my hands, ready to bring it down on his head again. I’m prepared to keep on lifting it and bringing it down until the man in front of me never gets up again. I can’t have him hurting Sophia. I won’t fucking allow it.
I’m two seconds away from landing another, terrible blow when Ramirez starts laughing. That was the gurgling sound he was making—laughter, while choking on the blood gathering in the back of his throat. “You…you really caught me with that one,” he says, grinning. His teeth are covered in blood—bright white obscured by crimson. “Oooh, Jamie. You should see yourself,” he growls, looking up at me, dark eyes burrowing into me. “You look fearsome. You look like the kind of man who’s unafraid to kill another to protect what is his. Perhaps you’re not such an unworthy adversary, after all. Your father was wrong. You do have a backbone.”
“My father can go fuck himself. And so can you, motherfucker.” I swing, and this time the bat connects with Ramirez’s shoulder, sending him crashing to the floor. The crazy bastard curls up on his side amongst the shattered glass and laughs long and hard. He’s insane. Has to be. He must know he’s about to die, and yet his only response is this complete and utter hysteria. “Like I said,” I growl. “You should never have come here, Hector.” I raise the bat over my head, gripping it in both hands, and I’m ready. It’s been a long, long time since I’ve killed a man, but this right now is well deserved. Hector killed Ryan. He killed Leah, and Bron. And now he’s a threat to Sophia? I won’t even feel bad about ending him. My conscience will be clear. There’s nothing on earth that can stop me from finishing this, here and now.
It’s at this exact moment that I’m thrown off my feet. It feels like I’ve been hit by a Mack truck. My back smashes against the counter, and my body wants to sink to the floor but I can’t because my muscles have locked and my jaw is clenched so tightly that my teeth feel like they’re going to shatter. Pain claims every nerve ending I own from my head to my toes. I can’t make a sound, but if I could I’d be yelling out in agony. Barely able to even move my eyeballs, I look down at the source of my pain and realize that there actually is something on this earth that could stop me. Two things, actually. The first, a fifty thousand volt Taser gun, the prongs of which are embedded into my chest. The second, the female police officer standing in the shop doorway.
******
“You wanna run that by me one more time, asshole?”
Detective Lowell, DEA, does not seem entertained by my response to her questioning. In fact, she looks severely pissed off. She likes things tidy. I can tell that just from looking at her—her immaculate gray pant suit, and her immaculately styled hair, and her immaculately understated make-up speak volumes. And questioning me in my messy, smashed up shop while two paramedics make sure I don’t have any lasting injuries from where she shot me with her Taser is making her less than congenial. Funny, really, since I’m feeling so bright and shiny. If bright and shiny could also be described as fucking broken and in serious amounts of pain.
“I told you. I was just showing a prospective client some of our sporting memorabilia.”
“I assume you’re talking about the baseball bat?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And you were showing it to him? By pile driving it repeatedly into his face?”
I glance up at her, wincing as one of the EMTs uses an alcohol swab to clean a cut above my right eye. “You saw me hitting that guy with my bat?” My tone of voice is borderline shocked. “That doesn’t sound like something I would do at all.”
Lowell exhales sharply, hands on her hips. “You had the thing held high over your head. Your potential client was prone on the ground, laughing. It sure as hell looked like you were about to use the thing to shut him up.”
“Why would he have been laughing if I was beating him, Detective? That sounds crazy.”
Lowell looks like she’s about ready to pick up the bat and smash me over the head with it. She jerks her head toward the offending article lying on the ground where I dropped it. “Doesn’t look like sporting memorabilia to me. Looks brand new.”
“Not true. It’s signed. Super valuable.”
“I can’t see a signature anywhere on that thing.”
“It’s there. It’s just hidden underneath all the blood. See…there.” I point. “David Ortiz.”
David Ortiz hasn’t signed the bat. But I did when we hid it under the counter. It’s a fairly decent forgery. Lowell gives me a cold, dead-inside kind of look. “You think you’re funny? You think this is a joke? This is jail time right here, buddy. Serious jail time.”
“Detective, please. He’s telling the truth.” On the other side of the room, Ramirez is being aided by another EMT; his left eye has almost swollen shut and his arm is in a sling from where I dislocated his shoulder. “He was just showing me the bat,” he says. “I fell and hit my head. I assure you, there was nothing untoward taking place when you shot at Mr Aubertin.”
Lowell glances between the two of us, her brows drawn together, scowling furiously. “You’re both horrendous liars. You think I don’t know who you both are? You think I’m stupid? You think it’s a coincidence that I am here, in the middle of bum-fuck-nowhere Hicksville, New Mexico, sitting here with the both of you? Because rest assured, it is not.”
I shrug, giving her my best I-don’t-know-what-to-tell-you face. “I’m no one special, Detective. I run a tattoo shop. And this gentleman—” I choke on the word. “—Just came in asking about getting some work done.”
Lowell laughs a hard, stony laugh. “All right, just stop. Don’t fucking bother. I’m sure I’ll get the truth out of you back at the station. You’re both under arrest.” She reads me my Miranda rights first, and then repeats the process with Ramirez. As soon as the EMTs are done assessing me, I’m cuffed and bodily dragged out of the shop by two deputies. Ramirez isn’t far behind. As I’m shoved into the back of a police cruiser, I catch Ramirez grinning at me out of the corner of my eye.
I know him. I know he won’t change his story at the station, and neither will I. Lowell is about to be frustrated at every turn and I suspect I’m likely to spend the next twenty four hours in a holding cell, but I couldn’t care fucking less. It’ll give me time to think this thing through. It’ll give me time to make plans.
I’m sure Hector Ramirez will do the same.