The Bare Bones

by Layla Wolfe

  Thou Shalt be BADASS

  RACE WITH THE DEVIL

  The Bare Bones #8

  by Layla Wolfe

  Copyright 2018 Layla Wolfe

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  Cover Art by Dawuud Taiwo

  Cover Model Photographed by Yuri Arcurs

  Edited by Crissy Sutcliffe

  Format by: Liberty Parker

  Regarding E-Book Piracy

  This book is copyrighted intellectual property. No other individual or group has resale rights, auction rights, membership rights, sharing rights, or any kind of rights to sell or to give away a copy of this book.

  This literary work may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, including electronic or photographic reproduction, in whole or in part, without express written permission.

  All characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.

  DEDICATION

  RACE WITH THE DEVIL was based on the real events occurring in Montana in 2013 involving newlyweds Jordan Graham and Cody Johnson.

  Thanks to the Benicia Outlaws for finding every misplaced comma and dreaded adverb. And to all the real-life animal rescue advocates.

  Thou Shalt Be Badass.

  Tanner Principato is a gruff, surly combat vet who has cobbled together a livelihood flying rescue dogs to forever homes. When Tanner makes good on a promise to Bare Bones MC lawyer Slushy and brings a puppy to a lonely member, he is caught in the middle of a mystery. Tanner’s innate kindness means he volunteers to track down the missing bride of the club’s fentanyl dealer, Tutti Morgan, the “Walter White of Flagstaff.” Bare Bones territory looks even more inviting to Tanner when he’s paired up with a friend of the vanished newlywed, Unity Mitford.

  A rape victim, Unity’s job as spokesmodel for cannabis companies brings her into the limelight with many men. Men she teases. Men she avoids. Terrified of intimacy, Unity has developed a wide array of survival skills to keep men at bay. When she starts working with Tanner, for the first time she questions some of these methods of isolation. Does she really want to resist the dashing, commanding, and carved pilot? He calls her the Queen of Heaven after a Kama Sutra position, and he leaves his mark on her heart.

  Their fling—and detective partnership—comes to a grinding halt when Unity finds out what Tanner spent ten years in prison for. She can’t throw her missing friend under the bus, but she will never—never!—waste another minute in the presence of such a vile asshole as Tanner Principato.

  Like the injured and abused animals he’s worked with, Tanner knows to proceed slowly with Unity. If terrified by sudden movement, animals can keel over, dead. And Tanner knows that . . .

  if you’re going to race with the devil, you got to be fast as hell.

  Publisher’s Note: This is Book #8 in the Bare Bones MC series. This book is a standalone and can be read out of order, but the series is best read in order to gain the full experience. This is not your mother’s contemporary romance. Daring readers will encounter violence, gun play, and a backstory involving rape, one MM encounter, and a HEA. It is not for the faint of heart. It’s a full-length novel of 66,000 words with no cliffhanger. Recommended 18+ due to mature content and possible triggers.

  Thou Shalt Be Badass.

  RACE WITH THE DEVIL

  The Bare Bones #8

  by Layla Wolfe

  CHAPTER ONE

  Tanner

  I’d been given the GPS coordinates to the airfield by a very strange dude.

  Even the guy’s name was suspect. Wolf Glaser. Like a craftsman from the old country. He was anything but. “Here’s how it’s going to go down, my man. You land on Mescal Mesa. Unfortunately, it has nothing to do with the psychedelic, but you might have to avoid hitting a few hippies during their morning ablutions, waving smudge sticks around to avoid getting sucked up into the psychic vortex. You then proceed, carefully I might add, tiptoeing with that precious cargo of yours, past the Unexploded Ordnance shed . . . “

  UXO my ass. I was getting in and getting out, especially after what he’d told me about the hippies. I’d grown especially attached to my fleecy dog I was delivering to this assclown. Beetle was, as best as I could estimate, a Leonberger-Great Pyrenees mix about three months old by now. He’d been born with Swimmer Puppy Syndrome which meant that, left alone, he’d never walk. His limbs stuck out to the side and he “swam” along the ground. In this case, it was probably caused by the owner raising the pups on a slick surface like newspaper where they could get no traction.

  The backyard breeder decided to euthanize Beetle, but my friend Brandi came to the rescue. Literally. She scooped up Beetle and brought him to me for a few weeks of training. I hobbled him. I made a sling so he didn’t sleep on his stomach, massaged his limbs, and encouraged him to walk up a rocky hill in my garden. He was a plucky little guy. Because my favorite dog, Paddington, had been born with Swimmer’s Syndrome, I felt especially close to this trooper. I knew he was destined for greatness. But . . . Wolf Glaser?

  I became even more tore up as the asshat continued. “Now, don’t be deterred by the ocean of Harley Davidsons outside the hangar. That’s just us, the Bare Bones MC. We’re a motorcycle club, see? If you can’t handle that, then you need to turn tail and run crying back to St. Louis or whatever Midwest hellhole you hail from. Because we’re badass and we know it.”

  I took several issues with this. St. Louis was God’s country, even though I didn’t even really “hail from” there. It had saved my ass after barely stumbling half-alive out of the Arkansas Department of Corrections, Tucker Unit. Getting away from the setting of my painful youth did me a world of good, so how dare this yahoo from the tie-dyed land of Arizona poke fun at it?

  Then. Prison. Harley Davidsons. I think I could take on these dudes.

  As for a guy named Wolf Glaser being badass, well, we’d see about that. I couldn’t believe I was handing over my beloved Beetle—and he’d probably rename him something like Diesel or Mack—to this airheaded dotard. But it was something I owed Slushy, the club’s lawyer. I’d vowed to Slushy of my own free will and I was bound to follow through on it.

  So I really wasn’t surprised to be forced to wade through maybe twenty woo-woos who dotted that pitted, decrepit runway. I’d flown into old military airports like this before. Unused for decades, the government was turning them over to civilian use, building McMansions, which was a damned shame. We’d regret that one day when some twatwaffle from the Orient proved to us how big his button was. The hippies drifted toward me like zombies, their arms out to touch the puppy, walking unsteadily on a leash. He’d been kenneled while flying from St. Louis in my four-seater Piper, but when we landed we practiced leash walking.

  “Okay, Scruffsters,” I said. “Like it or not, this is your new home.” He stood alert like a sphinx, his head a powderpuff of cuteness, as he looked to the hangar. Well. There are always plenty of motherly chicks hanging around bikers. They’ll spoil him.

  True, it was fairly gorgeous out there. I shook myself rid of the featherheads and strode up a butte of red crimson sand. It was still morning in the middle of autumn, so the cliffs alternating with cherry and garnet were lit up like a church window. Wolf worked here, sort of a supply man for the bikers’ construction company. I consoled myself that Beetle would get the run of this colorful joint. Just don’t rename him Bear.

  There were two sets of steps, one up each side of the hangar, so I chose the one with the most Harleys parked out front. However, a couple of civilians smoking on the landing told me to try the other wing, where Wolf was in “church.” Heading that way, I called him on my cell, but it went straight to voicemail.

  I shoved open the heavy metal door
that led to a long hallway. It thudded hollowly behind me, not unlike a prison door. Not a peep in the place, though. I peered into a few rooms. Looked like people lived there. One had cheerful, feminine touches, like a calendar on the wall, a poster of a kitten hanging from a rope, and a flowered bedspread. Another reminded me of Cell Number Four in my old barracks with its unkempt single mattress clothed in filthy sheets. Except I never had a desktop computer tuned to a porn station. Or a bunch of weed strewn across an open copy of Newcummers magazine.

  Okay, so boys and girls shared this barracks—I mean hangar. Beetle vibrated eagerly as I went from door to door, listening. Nothing.

  Finally, muffled and heated voices emanated from a room. I practically put my ear to the door. I only caught fractured sentences.

  “Fentanyl!”

  “Built his own mass spectrometer!”

  “Busted cooking meth in Oklahoma!”

  “A fine man!”

  “Tutti Morgan!”

  “Anusbrain!”

  “Condom breath!”

  “I vote we terminate!”

  Now we were getting into my comfort zone. I may have been out of prison for eight years, but I have to admit I still gravitated naturally toward crime. And if this wasn’t crime, then I’d take a bath with a toaster. I opened the door and stuck my head in.

  A couple guys at the back noticed me, but said nothing, too caught up in the heat of the moment. I edged in farther, my back to the door. One enormous white plastic bucket by the door held twenty cellphones. Another held everyone’s piece. As though if they went in there armed, they might use it against their fellow club members. I had no piece, so I wasn’t worried. Who needed a piece when flying rescue dogs around the western states?

  At the head of the long table sat, I assumed, the President, or Prez as I’d heard them called in other clubs. He was a very striking fellow WOP with silken eyebrows and dark flashing eyes. He poked the table with a determined finger, a gavel in his other hand. “I’m telling you, I’ve always had a bad feeling about Tutti Morgan. What sort of guy builds his own mass spectrometer?”

  A redheaded guy straight from Dublin spoke. “A guy who knows his shit, Ford. A guy who wants nothing but the most impeccable purity for his product.”

  “A mass murderer!” cried another guy who looked like Ford’s twin. “That’s who, Fox! Speaking as a producer of product myself, if I was making something fifty times stronger than heroin, my goal would be to kill people, not ensure purity!”

  “Weed is different than fentanyl,” said an extremely French guy I could barely understand. “The only way cannabis kills you is if it falls on you.”

  A goofy-looking guy chuckled. His leather jacket looked to have been purchased from Sears, despite the club “colors” emblazoning it. One of the patches read, “Biker Boys Make Good Toys.” “Remember that guy who was trying to steal weed from the Ochoa’s warehouse? A stack of about a ton of feminized White Widow went crashing over his head.”

  An older craggy guy whose face should’ve been sculpted into an Aztec pyramid chuckled too. “I remember that, Wolf. I don’t think it killed him, though. And it was Critical Mass, not White Widow.”

  Wolf pointed at the craggy guy. “True that. Has heavier, fuller buds. Colas just dripping with trichomes.”

  “I wouldn’t say that,” said Ford’s twin, the herb farmer. “The Ochoas never grew Critical Mass. I think it was a bale of garden variety Sour Diesel loaded with those chemicals they loved to spray.”

  “Broke the guy’s neck,” said Wolf brightly. I had to hand it to him. He was cheerful.

  Ford banged his gavel, once. “Let’s get back to the fucking subject at hand. Tutti Morgan. Bottom line, last night three people died at one of his stupid sideshows. They went into comas and eventually cardiac arrest, according to our contact at Pure and Easy General. One of them was a friend of Duji’s grandson.”

  “Yeah,” said an older, gravelly guy, who looked as though he wished he had a cigarette. “Sonny said they were doing it real big in the mall parking lot by Target when a guy doing a donut in an Impala suddenly rolled over some crash cushions, completely DOA. Two other guys followed suit soon after.”

  Ford shook his head sadly. “This is bad business, men. I vote that we stop moving product for Tutti. Sooner or later the pigs’ll be all up in our shit. Besides, what’s the point of making something purer and more deadly? It’s not like he’s up for a science prize.”

  I had to quit playing possum then. I could not keep my mouth shut, one of my worst qualities. Or best, depending how you looked at it.

  I had long been the sort of guy who needed to stick his two cents in. Call me a know-it-all. A show-off. But I just can never sit still and take it when people are laboring under some kind of delusion. These men were attacking what they saw as the root problem at hand. Get rid of the dealer, bam, the problem vanishes. Not so.

  I never could resist a challenge. I had busted into their clubhouse, their “church.” Now I would lecture them.

  “You’re not getting something,” I started, lifting an illustrative hand. “Our emotions are powerful enough to launch rockets, build the Great Pyramids, or make us cry at hearing Madame Butterfly.”

  “Who the fuck are you?” barked Ford, the Prez.

  “Let him talk,” said his twin.

  I did. “We share ‘survival circuits’ with other animals. Our feelings are the way they are today because their basic structure helped animals survive and reproduce. This is exactly why drugs can ruin lives. Swallowing or injecting opiates in doses far too high for our bodies to reward us with pleasure completely derails a body exquisitely designed over millions of years. These narcotics hijack our inner mechanisms, getting rid of the necessity for the animal—us—to enter a code or a behavior before receiving the chemical.”

  Duji nodded soberly, as though it was normal for a stranger to enter his church and hand him a sermon. “I’ve heard of this. Sort of like the Pavlovian reward structure.”

  “Right!” I said, as though pointing at the older biker with a piece of chalk. “You don’t need to act decently, to straighten up and fly right, to help the downtrodden or even your own children before getting your reward. You skip that vital step. Drugs that we abuse make a neural signal that falsely informs us of a huge fitness gain when there is none. Street drugs—and prescription drugs too—give us a fast track to the feeling that we’re doing something useful when we’re not. This is important to understanding the nature of addiction. Being able to get our paws on these substances, we don’t have to ‘work’ to get them, to hunt, improve, flee, reproduce. Instead, these creatures go directly for reward. The drugs give his brain the impression he’s become more fit, but he hasn’t done a damned thing.”

  “So, you’re saying,” said the twin, clearly the more open-minded of the two men, “that the problem isn’t the dealer at all. It’s the addicts.”

  “The problem is the fentanyl being made fifty times stronger than heroin. Such a thing shouldn’t even exist. Why waste an evening socializing and getting to know people, or signing ten new clients, when you can obtain a more intense reward with a few snorts of coke? Or—some of you can relate to this—why suffer through half an hour of stilted small talk at a gathering when a few beers can make you think you’ve already bonded with those people?”

  “Ha ha!” cried Wolf Glaser. He actually yelped “ha ha!” “Ho, how many times has that happened at our fish fries? Remember that time Mergatroyd put his arm around Bobo Segrist’s gash and started walking her into the back room at the Bum Steer? He’d gotten so carried away with liquid courage it didn’t seem to matter to him anymore.”

  Even Ford was laughing now. “It sure mattered to him when Bobo stuck the barrel of a .45 in his temple.”

  I thought my speech would soon be forgotten. It was actually Duji who kept it going. “So these kids are just like Pavlov’s dogs looking for reward. Only they don’t have to hit the red dot, or whatever those dogs did
to get the treat.”

  “Right,” I said. “Drugs are turning them into a bunch of lying, lazy shitdongles who don’t know if their opioid molecule comes from a pipe or having mind-blowing sex. They can’t tell if their dopamine rush came from a meth spoon or the high of getting ten phone numbers at a bar or turning in a paper on deadline. They’ll stop doing the real work in life. Their brains are telling them they already did.”

  Fox said, “You wouldn’t believe how many layabouts there are like that in our turf, in and around Pure and Easy. I train birds for a living, birds of prey, and yeah, sometimes they want a reward. But sometimes they do things, obey or do tricks, just for the sheer joy of doing something right. So in a way they’re more advanced than the tweakers.”

  I said, “I don’t mean to give up on tweakers. They’ll find their reward somewhere else if you take it away from them. But it sounds like this Tutti Morgan guy needs to be cut off. At the knees.”

  Everyone murmured among themselves like a party soundtrack. I was about to turn and leave when Ford barked at me, “Who are you?”

  The room fell silent at that. Just then, Beetle chose to emit the most adorable whine, like a toy puppy in jeopardy. Each biker, down to a man, perked up their ears at the fluffy sound. No one was immune to the power of the pup. Some guys, including Wolf Glaser, half-stood in their seats.

  “Oh, ah,” I said, suddenly unsure of myself. “I’m just here to bring Wolf Glaser a little—“

  “Puppeh!” Wolf practically pole-vaulted over the long table in his eagerness to get to the pup. “Stay away from it, it’s mine! Get off it, you goon!”

  “I’m not on it, you fuckboy!”

  The bird trainer, Fox, had been closest to Beetle. He squatted there now, petting the pupper. “Can I pick him up?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Just don’t overwhelm him. Stand back. Wolf, you sit there. He hasn’t seen too many people. I’ve acclimated him to other dogs and a few people, but not a crowd of bikers.”