SIX
Shane
“Was that Lea hightailing it out of here?” Mark asked when I walked back into the weight room. “What? Did she finally get a good look at that ugly mug of yours?”
“Fuck off,” I said, in no mood for the ribbing. My dick was still half fucking hard after that interaction in the changing room. She’d wanted me. Everything about her had been a testament to that fact: her breathing, her arms encircling me, her lips responding to me, her throaty moans, her wet fucking pussy. Everything. She wanted me. And nothing about Lea seemed to imply she was the kind of woman to deny herself things she wanted. So the issue wasn’t as simple as not wanting a good fucking. It wasn’t even her unexplained urge to try to deny the attraction between us. It was something else, that was clear.
Because she was a shit liar. Her eyes gave her away every time.
“Still not getting any, huh?” Mark asked, either oblivious to or unconcerned by my shitty mood. “Maybe she isn’t into the Hulk thing. I should give her a…”
“I swear to fuck, Mark…” I started, moving toward him, my body tight. Normal men would have shrank away from a man like me closing in on them in anger. But Mark wasn’t normal. Mark grew up in the same house with me where we weren’t exactly discouraged from using our fists to solve problems. I’d kicked his ass countless times; he had kicked mine just as many.
“Do you really think it’s good business to bring your personal shit in here?” Ryan asked from behind me, making me exhale hard. Partly because he was right and partly because him showing up in the middle of the day could only mean one thing.
“What’s up?” I asked as I turned to find him standing there in a gray suit, gray shirt, and red tie. That was Mark, a loanshark enforcer who looked like a fucking lawyer.
“Mo.”
“Oh, you’ve got to be fucking shitting me,” I groaned, running a hand through my hair.
“Dad’s talked to him. So have I.”
“Me too,” Mark said, sitting up on the bench.
“So it’s your turn.”
“Yeah, but did any of you fucks spill blood? In case you’ve forgotten, Mo is a Henchmen.”
Ryan shrugged at that, bringing his arm up to check his watch. He was the only man I knew under sixty who still used a watch to check time. “Talk to Reign first. Reason with him.”
“Reason with a biker?” I asked, lips tipping up.
“He runs a tight ship. It doesn’t look good on him to have his men welshing.”
“How much does he owe Pops?”
Ryan shook his head. “Eight K.”
“Shit.”
“Yeah.”
“Alright. I’ll get changed and head over to the compound,” I said with about as much enthusiasm as I did when I got all my wisdom teeth pulled.
Navesink Bank had an interesting economy. Meaning, it was wholly dependent upon most of the criminal organizations. And we had our fair share. My family aside, there was The Henchmen MC who ran guns, Richard Lyon and his imports, V and his skin trading, the Third Street gang and their heroin and prostitutes, Lo and Hailstorm’s various talents, Lex Keith and his reign of terror, and the Grassi family and their docks. Then there were the independent players: Shooter and his contract killing, Breaker and his hired muscle, hell, even Barney and his forging. It was a delicate balance between all of us to know what lines could be crossed and which ones couldn’t. For instance, I’d go out for beer and skirt chasing with Shooter and Breaker any day and I would have a meal at the Grassis’ restaurant. But I didn’t get involved with the more volatile of them.
Reign and his Henchmen were in a period of general peace after the shitstorm that hit our town when his father’s leadership was tested and ended with half of his men and himself dead, making Reign take the role young. But that didn’t mean they were weak. While Reign wasn’t a fan of chaotic violence for the fuck of it like his father was, Ryan was right, he ran a tight ship. His ranks were small, but growing, and he didn’t tolerate any of them bringing undue scrutiny on his organization. That being said, he had blood on his hands. Hell, he likely had more on his hands than I did and I had bathtubs full of the shit on me. The difference was that I didn’t take lives; Reign did. Not often and only when it was needed, but it happened.
So stepping to him, even about one of his men fucking up, didn’t exactly feel right.
I threw on my jeans and white tee and drove over toward the main street in town, parking out front the gates to The Henchmen compound which was a low, windowless building that had once been a mechanic shop on a large piece of land. Probates were seen at all hours, walking around the perimeter, keeping it safe. I got out of my car and grabbed a crowbar, hooking it into the belt loop behind my back, and made my way up to the gates.
“I need to talk to Reign,” I said to one of the probates who stood there in his cut, arms crossed over his chest. He was young for them, definitely no older than his early twenties with dark hair, light blue eyes that suggested they had seen some shit, and a scar running down the whole side of his face. I knew him by sight and his reputation as classic car restorer. Repo.
“Shredder,” Repo said to the other one standing nearby, “go see if Reign has a minute.”
With that, the other kid ran off inside the building where, even in the middle of the day, I knew a fair amount of bikers were hanging around, drinking, fucking, or bullshitting.
I hoped Mo was one of them. It would make my life easier.
“Mallick, huh?” A deep, gravely voice called as he walked out of the building. Reign was tall with a medium strong build, dark hair, and light green eyes. He had one of those faces chicks soaked their panties over, all jaw and brows. “Repo, you can head in,” he told the probate in the dismissive kind of way the older bikers always spoke to the young bloods. “Which one are you? You fucks all look the same.”
“Shane,” I said, not offended. I had been hearing that shit my entire life.
“Shane,” he said, brow raising. “Alright, tell me why you’re walking up to my gate with a fucking crowbar or we’re going to have problems.”
“One of your men owes us eight grand. Charlie talked to him. Ryan talked to him. Mark talked to him.”
Reign exhaled hard, nodding. “So now it’s time to stop talking,” he guessed.
“Afraid so.”
“Which one is it?”
“Mo.”
“Oh, fucking Mo. That piece of shit,” he said, raking a hand through his hair like the man had been nothing but a headache for a long time.
“Is he here?”
“Got in from the tracks twenty minutes ago.”
Blowing whatever cash he did have. Which I assumed meant my visit wasn’t going to do much good. But it still had to be done. “Are you going to send him out here?”
“No,” Reign said immediately, making me jerk back, surprised. “We aren’t having this shit getting around. We both have appearances to keep. I’m not having it getting around that my men don’t settle their debts. We have a shed out back,” he said, jerking his chin toward the back lawn. I knew all about the shed. That shed had been around for generations. I heard there was a fucking drain in the floor to get rid of the blood spilled there. “Come on,” he said, gesturing toward the front door. “Let’s go get Mo so you can get this over with.”
“Shane, you piece of shit,” I heard called as soon as I walked inside the clubhouse that was complete with a full bar, a giant TV, a pool table, and half a dozen bikers. “You stole that fucking redhead with the lush tits right out from under me last month.”
I turned with a smirk, knowing who I would find. Reign’s younger brother, Cash, was as different from Reign as possible both physically and personality-wise. Where Reign was dark, Cash was blond, half his head shaved up one side to peach fuzz, the other side left long. The bone structure was similar, but Cash’s eyes were dark green to Reign’s hazel. And where Reign was stern, severe, cold, and dangerous, Cash was more lighthearted, carefree, and laid-back. It went without mentioning that Cash was also one of the biggest ladies’ men around. We were constantly scooping up the others’ women at bars without even realizing it.
“Not my fault you dropped the ball, Cash,” I said, shaking my head at him as he moved toward me, slapping a hand on my back.
“I get the next one with freckles,” he demanded. “You here for a drink?”
“He’s here for Mo,” Reign clarified.
“What’d he do now?” Cash asked, rolling his eyes.
“The kind of thing that requires a crowbar-wielding visit from a Mallick.”
“Right,” Cash sighed. “I’ll go get him for you. Shed?” he asked his brother, who nodded.
With that, I was led through the clubhouse, stopped two or three times for Reign to say something to his men, before I was led out the back door and across the yard. By the time we got to the shed, Cash was standing outside the door looking resigned.
“Do what you got to do,” Reign said, waving a hand. “We’ll be out here.”
I nodded, reaching for the door and going in. I couldn’t exactly say that I enjoyed my work. It wasn’t that kind of job. You didn’t do it with a smile and a light heart. You did it because you understood the necessity of it. It wasn’t my place to feel empathy for a gambling addict. No one forced these guys to beg money from people they knew could break their knees if they welshed. Loansharking was a necessary part of the criminal underbelly and I figured, at least my family had scruples. We didn’t do shit to fuck with your family. We never touched women. And we gave you at least two shots to make good before we spilled your blood.
It was, for all intents and purposes, fair.
And we were raised from a young age to view violence differently than others. I don’t think there was a week of my life from five on that passed where I wasn’t covered in mine, or someone else’s, blood. All that bullshit about violence not solving anything, yeah, that’s some politically correct new age crap. Violence is one of the only things that permanently fucking solves anything. I’d never seen a bully at school who kept that shit up when they got their nose, eye socket, and ribs broken by the kids they used to pick on. And, well, a wife beater couldn’t go on beating his woman if she suddenly cut off his fucking hands, now could he?
“I just need another day,” Mo said before I even closed the door. There was almost a trace of relief in his tone, like he was worried the reason he was in the shed was about Henchmen business, not the money he owed us business. Mo was a small, sniveling imitation of a real biker. While he was tall, he was gaunt, with greasy brown hair and a nasal voice.
“Why, so you can go lose more money at the tracks? This doesn’t work that way and you know it. Pops talked to you; so did two of my brothers. It’s time to stop talking.”
“No, man. You don’t understand…”
Oh, the excuses. The whining. The woe-is-me-ing.
That was the worst part of the job.
“I understand that you made a deal and you backed out of it. That’s what I understand. Now I’m telling you to be a man and take what’s coming to you without whining like a bitch about it.”
I moved in on him as he backed away, curling my lip at the cowardice of that. I swung out, my fist colliding with his jaw hard, making his head snap to the side. Before he could even register that, my fists went to his center, my blood getting charged with adrenaline. It was easy once you started to get into it, deaf to the screams, somehow fueled by the sight of blood.
“Stop! Stop!” Mo screamed, wiping his bleeding nose with his forearm, holding his hands out to me. “I’ll trade you information.”
I stiffened at that, a swirling feeling churning in my stomach, having a feeling things had just taken a turn for the worse for sorry ole Mo. “Information?” I prompted, curling my hands to fists at my sides.
“Yeah, yeah. Anything you want, man. Forget about the eight thousand and I can… I dunno. I’ll tell you where the gun vault is. Or where the next drop is going down. It will easily be worth twice that. Maybe three times.”
Oh, fuck.
I exhaled hard, knowing what had to be done. See, I didn’t condone what was bound to follow, but I understood one thing about our lifestyle: nothing mattered more than loyalty. Our organizations depended on it. It kept us alive. It kept us all out of jail. And snitches didn’t get stitches as the saying went. I didn’t know where the fuck that pansy ass shit came from. No criminal empire worth its salt would let a snitch get away with breath still in their lungs. And The Henchmen, yeah, they were worth their salt. What’s more, biker clubs understood that nothing, not even family, was more important than brotherhood.
Mo just signed his death certificate.
Metaphorically.
His body was never going to be found if I knew anything about these gun runners.
“Good to know,” I said, nodding and moving toward the door.
I stepped outside, drawing not only the attention of Reign and Cash, but the mammoth bearded man beside them. Now Cash was capable when he needed to be; Reign was deadly; Wolf, yeah, Wolf was a wild fucking animal when he got angry. He was a silent giant with freaky as fuck honey-colored eyes and a past that had the blood me and Reign spilled look like amateur hour.
“That’s it?” Cash asked, giving me a confused smile. “No wonder guys are welshing. You are losing your touch.”
“Reign, we got a problem,” I said, making him stiffen. “Actually, you have a problem.”
There was a short pause, Cash and Wolf getting equally as tense. “What problem do I have?”
“Mo seems to be playing it fast and loose with club secrets.”
“The fuck?” Wolf growled. Growled. I did mention he was a crazy fuck.
“Sniveling little Mo?” Cash added.
“Seems he is willing to trade his debt for the information on where your next drop is.”
“You gotta be fuckin’ kidding me,” Reign barked, hands curling into fists, eyes blazing.
“I know loyalty is important to guys like us. Figured I would let you know you have a rat.”
Reign raised a hand, scraping it down his face. It was moments like this that you could see the weight of leadership literally weighing a man down. His shoulders lowered; his jaw got tense. He knew what had to happen. He knew it was necessary, but he didn’t enjoy that fact at all. He didn’t get off on spilling blood. But some things couldn’t be avoided.
“Fuck,” he said, resigning himself to the inevitable. “I appreciate you telling us this. I will have the eight grand to you by the end of the week once… things get handled,” he said, jerking his head toward the shed.
Just then, as if sensing or maybe overhearing what we were discussing, the door to the shed opened and Mo flew out.
See, there’s this thing I learned camping with my Pops and brothers when we were kids. If there was one thing you didn’t do around a wild animal, it was run. Across from me, Wolf let out a growl, his massive form moving faster than you would think was possible, tearing across the yard and snatching Mo up by the back of his neck and dragging, fucking dragging the screaming man back to the shed.
“I’ll leave you to it,” I said, accepting the hand Reign had extended to me, aware that his focus was on the shed, mentally preparing for what was to follow, and not on me. Cash gave me a chin jerk, all his laid-back, jocular lightness gone, replaced with Cash, the criminal biker. It was an almost unsettling thing to see as he moved back toward the shed.
“See you around, Shane,” Reign agreed, leaving me to see myself out as he moved toward the shed as well.
I left feeling heavier than I had when I arrived. I drove my bike back to my place, washing off the blood, throwing my clothes in the wash (ever conscious of the possibility of DNA evidence). I changed, paced my floors for a long minute, then tore back down to the parking lot, grabbing my truck, and heading to the goddamn mother fucking home improvement store.
See, one thing that had been weighing on me since I heard Lea’s irate and obnoxiously sexy voice on my machine about her shower breaking, was the fact that she was living in a half-dilapidated building a stone’s throw from the Third Street gang and all the seedy people they got involved with. Alone. The fucking most gorgeous woman I had ever seen in my life, and I’d seen and put my hands on my fair share of them, lived alone in a ghetto without even having a fucking locking door.
It wasn’t that I didn’t give a shit about my businesses. But I understood my tenants. They laid low on purpose. If the place they lived in suddenly looked like the goddamn Hilton, cops would get suspicious about how a bunch of seemingly unemployed people managed to pay the rent there. They would snoop. Then I would lose tenants. So I let the place fall into disrepair and literally never had one complaint about it.
But Lea wasn’t my typical tenant. She’d moved in because she was genuinely low on cash. For fuck’s sake, she had an empty stomach when I brought her to my parents’ house. She wasn’t the kind of woman who was comfortable living in an apartment building that offered her no safety whatsoever. She lived there because it was the cheapest place in the county. And that, well, it didn’t sit right with me. Not because she didn’t seem like she could handle herself; she seemed like a certifiable hardass. But that didn’t mean she stood a chance against some lowlife fuck who broke in to steal shit or because he got an eye-full of her and decided to take what wasn’t offered. That wasn’t a situation she should ever find herself in just because I didn’t make a couple alterations.
I pulled up in front of the building an hour later, jumping out and grabbing my crowbar again, heading not to my building, but the junkyard next door. One of the things that needed to be fixed was the shitty fence separating my land from Carl’s and his rabid beasts. I rapped on his front door with the crowbar, shaking my head at the dogs who charged the fence toward me, mouths snarling, foam flying everywhere. I understood wanting to keep shitheads off your property, but they were a public menace.
“Shane?” he asked, eyes immediately going to my crowbar, making him stiffen. A Mallick at your doorstep with a pry bar was never a good thing. And while we had definitely done business with Carl before, he wasn’t currently in our debt.
Carl looked exactly like his name and exactly like the kind of man you could see running a junkyard. He was in his forties with a protruding beer belly that he barely kept contained by a tight white wifebeater. His hair was stringy and unkempt around his meat-oily face. His seventies porno ‘stache was fucking criminal.
“You need to get your beasts away for a while. I’m taking down that fence before one of my tenants gets rabies.”
“Shane, man, it’s not like I can go out there and get a leash on…”
“I don’t want to hear your fucking problems,” I cut him off. “Get your dogs put away or I will call in the SPCA and see what they have to say about them living outside year round with no shots. They’ll get taken out of here and you know what will happen to them in a shelter. They’re vicious and they’ll get put down. Then you’ll have nothing to guard your shityard from thieves. So get your fucking dogs away in the next twenty, or we’re going to have problems.”
With that, I headed back to my truck, throwing down the wheelbarrow and filling it up with the posts, steel fence sections, buckets, and cement for grounding the posts. I watched through the green shit in the chainlink fence as Carl came out with a tranq gun and shot his dogs who didn’t even whimper at the impact. Ten minutes later, they were all passed out and he moved out and dragged them into a garage at the side of his property. He offered me a salute and I went to work.
It was a few hours later when I smelled cigar smoke and looked over to see Barney standing over me. “‘Sup, Barney?” I asked, swiping my arm over my forehead to wipe the sweat away.
“You know that girl hates these dogs,” he said casually. “Told me she was mauled once. Got stitches and all that. When she gets out of her car and hears them, she runs her pretty self to the door. The door that doesn’t lock,” he said pointedly.
I gave him a smile, liking that she had someone in the building looking out for her, even if it was an old arthritic forger. I motioned over toward my pile of supplies to the new door I had laying there. It wasn’t some piece of shit hollow wood door. It was a security door with a dozen internal metal bars that would mean a fuckuva lot more work for me to install it. “Got that covered too,” I said.
“You’ve seen her, right?”
“She works for my sister-in-law,” I said with a nod, standing to go grab a bottle of water.
“Pretty girl like that with no man to watch over her.”
“I’m watching over her,” I said without thinking.
What the fuck?
I wasn’t watching over her. That was ridiculous.
Except that, I was.
I spent several thousand dollars to fix up my apartment building. For no other reason than her living there.
“Good. That’s good. She needs a man like you.”
“Why’s that?” I asked, genuinely curious. Barney, for all his years in the underbelly, had keen eyes and good instincts. I wanted to know what he thought of Lea.
“Because she’s not what she appears. Pretty? Sure. Self- sufficient, hard working, smart mouthed, and tough? Yes. But she’s something else too.”
“You gonna tell me or what?”
He shrugged his frail shoulders, taking a long drag of his cigar. “It’s the little things.”
“Such as?”
“Such as the way she looks around the lot when she gets out of her car.”
“It’s a shitty neighborhood. Any woman would check around.”
“Nah, not like her. And she stiffens when she hears a bike. And she doesn’t get mail. Not even an advert. Nothing. Now, I’ve made fake IDs for every kid in this area. And I’ve made passports to get crime lords out of the country before they get hauled off to jail. But you know who comes to me the most?”
“Who?”
“People who get themselves into shit that they can’t untangle themselves from with their identities intact.”
“You’re saying Lea is on the run from something.”
“Girl like that, smart and funny and good as she is, no way is she alone in the world, you know? She’s got people somewhere. Why isn’t she with them?”
Yeah, well, that was a good point. It didn’t escape my notice how easily she got on with Fee and my brothers. She took their shit and gave it right back. There was no hesitance, no awkwardness. She was social. And yet she lived alone. Fee said she didn’t seem to have any family or friends. It didn’t jibe with her personality.
“Just figured I’d plant that seed,” Barney said with a shrug. “If you’re watching over her, figured that would be good for you to give some thought to. I’ll expect those keys,” he said, gesturing toward the new door, “under my door.”
“Got it Barney. Thanks for the info,” I said as he moved away, waving at me.
With that, I got back to work, finishing the fence then moving on to ripping the old door out, drilling holes for the new bars in the catch, then attaching the security door. I slipped the keys under all the doors in the building, but found myself pocketing hers for later.
I knew from the very forthcoming Fee that Lea was working that night. And, well, I just so happened to have a key to the building in case of an emergency.
I felt like Lea having a key to her apartment in a very bad area seemed pretty damn emergent.