Fierce Defender: Book 2, Hard to Handle trilogy

by Kane, Janine

  Gray walked over to the bunk that wasn’t made and put his stuff down on it. Though he already knew who he was dealing with, the floor staff had alerted him about his new cellie. They weren’t going to put a mongoose in with a cobra without a little warning. Ayden eyed him for a while longer as he made a show of combing out his long gray beard and mustache.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Caleb Gray,” Grayson told him. “And you are?”

  The man smirked, and Gray knew why. Information in here traveled faster than wireless internet. Ayden was sure that “Caleb” already knew who he was. “Ayden Styles,” he said. “But you can call me General Styles.” Then he lay down on his bunk and turned to face the wall. He was dressed only in his boxer shorts, and his entire back, neck, and arms were covered with tattoos. One on his back was similar to the one Gray had gotten, only above his swastika the word “General” was lettered.

  “Forgive me, sir, it’s been a long ass night,” Gray said.

  “It’s gonna be a longer weekend, boy,” Ayden rumbled, not turning back around.

  ***

  Freeman was cursing Gray in his head as he lay on his bunk. Fucking Alexander, man. I got tickets to see Lady Antebellum this weekend, and this mother son of a bitch has me locked up. He owes me.

  There were six bunks in the cell he was in. Four of them were full, counting him. One cellmate was a huge black man that Freeman thought looked really familiar. For a field agent stuck inside a cell, that probably wasn’t a good thing. The other two were Mexicans. They looked like skinny little gang bangers.

  Figures that the white guys get the double cells, he thought, disgruntled.

  Freeman knew, though, that it really wasn’t about being white—it was about being Aryan. They had become one of the biggest and most vicious groups in the Texas prison system. Their reach outside the prison walls was far, but inside they ruled. The only reason they would put a known Aryan in the same cell, or on the same yard, as a black gang member, which Freeman now was on paper, was if you wanted to watch a bloody fight. Housing was one of the main concerns within the jails and prisons because of it.

  He lay there, just about to drift off to sleep, when a shadow suddenly fell over him. He opened his eyes to the mountain that was one of his cellmates, and as he recalled where he knew the guy from, he said:

  “Fuck!”

  ***

  Gray could hear the commotion coming from Freeman’s cell. He almost blew his cover and called out for help, but he knew then he would be as good as dead himself. He wasn’t a praying man, but as he heard the pounding of flesh and crunching of bone, he prayed for two things: first that Freeman was going to be okay, and second that once this was all over, he didn’t kick Gray’s ass for suggesting this operation.

  He wasn’t the only one pressed up against his cell watching as the guards ran up the hall. Most the inmates were. The noise in the block had reached a deafening roar. The guards banged against Freeman’s cell, telling those inside to stop fighting or they would spray them. One of the guards had a can of OC pepper spray ready. If Freeman got sprayed, Gray’s ass was as good as kicked.

  Gray heard the officer with the OC canister holler out one more warning before whatever was happening in the cell stopped. Hands extended through the food port, two at a time, and the officers cuffed them. When they finished the process of restraining the men, they went in. One of the officers radioed for the medical staff.

  Two Mexican guys were escorted out and told to stand along the wall in their cuffs. They both looked uninjured and were smiling. Gray couldn’t see what was happening inside the cell. The medical staff got there quickly, and after a few minutes inside, he heard them radio for an ambulance. It was a long ten or fifteen minutes before the paramedics got there. Gray watched, waiting anxiously for them to bring out the other two men.

  They moved the Mexican men… somewhere. Then the paramedics came out with a gurney that was literally full of man. He hung over each end and both sides, out cold as they wheeled him by Gray’s cell. It wasn’t Freeman. He still hadn’t seen any sign of his friend, and after another ten minutes, he was close to blowing his cover again by yelling out for him.

  But luckily, the paramedics came back, and in a few minutes, they rolled Freeman out. He had one eye open; the other was swollen shut. His nose looked like it was broken, and he was bleeding around his mouth. As they rolled past Gray, Freeman slowly raised the middle finger on his left hand. Gray breathed a sigh of relief. Freeman was alive, and for now… so was he. But if he did get out of here alive, Freeman might just kill him.

  When Gray turned back around, his cellmate was sitting up on his bunk watching him. “What’s so interesting out there?”

  “Nothing. I was hoping they killed each other, but it doesn’t look like we got that lucky,” Gray said as he lay back down on his bunk.

  ******

  Stockdale, Texas

  Friday Evening

  Vincent tapped the vial on the mirror in front of him, dumping out a small pile of the coke. Then he used the razor blade in his right hand to chop it into fine powder. Just as he aligned a hundred-dollar bill up with the line of powder, his phone rang.

  Marcella, lying naked on the bed behind him, sat up and handed him the phone. Vincent looked at the ID and smiled. It was the call he had been waiting for. “Give me the good news, Armando,” he said as he answered.

  “We have him, sir.”

  Vincent smiled and did another line. “You have no idea how exultant that makes me, Armando.”

  “Do you want us to kill him, sir?”

  “No, Armando. I desire to do that myself. I think he and I have a lot to talk about first. Where do you have him?”

  “He’s in the car with me… Well, not with me, sir. He’s in the trunk. I caught him getting off a bus in Chicago. You were right, as usual, Boss. He went home to roost.”

  “So you’re still in Illinois?” Vincent asked as he held the back of Marcella’s head as she took her turn at the magic dust on the mirror.

  “Yes, sir,” Armando replied. “If I start back now, we should be there in sixteen to eighteen hours.”

  “I’ll be in ecstatic anticipation of your arrival.” Vincent hung up the phone, licked the small mirror in front of him, and kissed Marcella. He was a happy man. He was going to be back on top of the world, as he once was, and he had met the woman that he would allow to sit on the throne next to him. He had visited the bakery again today. He was getting addicted to more than just the bear claws.

  “We need to celebrate,” he told Marcella.

  Marcella smiled and said, “What can I do for you, Señor?”

  Vincent pulled his wallet out of his pocket and took out a business card. “Escort Services” was embossed in gold with a phone number underneath it. He couldn’t stop thinking about the auburn-haired woman at the bakery. “Call and get me a redhead. Tell them to make sure she’s a real redhead.”

  Marcella was always disappointed when he needed someone besides her to satisfy his needs, but he knew she understood. She had to. He was a great man, and great men had great needs. She took the card and dialed the number.

  While she spoke to the person on the other end, Vincent started to tamp out two more lines on the mirror, but stopped. Instead, he sprinkled a small amount on one of Marcella’s nipples and licked it off. She giggled as she tried to give the person on the phone the credit card number they were using, and she had to start over. He poured some onto the other nipple, and as she was wrapping up the conversation, she moaned loudly as he sucked it off. She ended the call just as he dropped his pants and drew a line on his cock and said, “This one’s for you.”

  ******

  San Antonio, Texas

  Bexar County Jail

  Monday Morning

  Gray hadn’t slept all night. He refused to. He still didn’t know what had gone wrong with Freeman. If these guys knew he was a cop, his cellmate would slit his throat without hesitation. He wanted
to stay awake, but the damned blue contact lenses were irritating his eyes, making it even harder for him to keep them open. They were dry, and he didn’t have any fluid to moisten them. He splashed water in them often, which at least helped him stay awake. He hadn’t slept the night before, either. He was running on adrenaline at this point, and when breakfast was served, he gulped the bad coffee down quickly.

  Things had been going well with his cellie, though. The general had asked him a lot of questions, and using the cover he had created to infiltrate the Sons of Satan motorcycle gang recently, he had answered them all appropriately. At least he assumed he had. The older man had yet to slit his throat, so that was a good sign.

  They had also talked a lot about their bikes. The man told Gray that he owned a motorcycle shop, and tinkering with his bike was like therapy for him. Gray told him about his Harley, Stella, whom he had spent the past five years restoring. They both rode soft tail Harleys, and Ayden was impressed that such a young guy knew so much about bikes that had been made in the sixties and seventies, before he was even born. Gray told him his brother had left Stella to him when he died. He didn’t tell him the truth about how he had died, however…

  “Gray!” he heard after breakfast had been served. “After you eat, get your jumpsuit on. You’ve got court.”

  Gray knew that he didn’t have court. It was Gomez. He had told Gray if he needed to talk to him, or get him out of there, that was how he would do it.

  His cellmate looked up from his breakfast and said, “What are they charging you with?”

  “Possession of a controlled substance with the intent to sell, and possession of an unregistered firearm,” Gray told him.

  “You got a lawyer?” Ayden asked.

  Gray had told Ayden in one of their talks the day before that he had just got in from Nevada. He used the same story he had for the bike gang he had infiltrated: “I’m just in from out of state. I’ve been in Nevada meeting up with a couple of other Nomads out there… arranging some business deals.”

  In response to Ayden’s question about the lawyer, he said, “I got one out in Nevada. I haven’t found one here yet. I got pulled coming back into town by an overzealous pig who decided to tear my bike and my pack apart because he didn’t like my tattoos.”

  “When you get in there, tell the judge you want the blonde lady. There are only two white ones, her and a fat guy. Fat guy doesn’t give a shit. The broad, she’ll fight for you like you’re a decent citizen. Her name is Thurston. If she tries to get out of it, just tell her Ayden sent you,” he told him with a laugh.

  Gray had to ask... “She get anything back in return from the Brotherhood?”

  Ayden shrugged. “Not that I know of. Maybe she just believes in us.”

  After changing into his jumpsuit, Gray kept Ayden’s words in his head as he was cuffed and led down the long hall. They stopped in the back room, and he was strip searched and then re-dressed and led out the back to a waiting police van already loaded with three other inmates. He thought about Danielle some more on the way to the courthouse. He wasn’t just bothered by the fact it was possible that an officer of the court could believe in these guys, he realized. What really bothered him was that Danielle could believe in these guys. He didn’t want it to be true.

  He and the other inmates were led down another long hall when they got to the courthouse and placed in holding cells. Gray sat in his for about fifteen minutes before one of the guards barked, “Gray, Caleb!”

  Gray stood up and said, “Here.”

  “Your lawyer needs to see you.” Gray was once again handcuffed, but this time he was led to a small conference room. The officer attached his cuffs to a table and said, “Be good, I’ll be right outside.”

  Gray was feeling even more exhausted now than he had earlier in his cell. He lay his head over onto the arm that was cuffed to the table and had just closed his eyes when he heard the door jerk open. Antonio Gomez walked in, looking like he hadn’t gotten much more sleep than Gray had.

  “How’s Freeman?” were the first words out of Gray’s mouth.

  Gomez raised an eyebrow and took a seat. “He’s busted up. His nose is broken, his left arm is dislocated, and he got a few teeth knocked loose and lots of cuts and bruises. He says none of that is anything compared to the ass kickin’ you’re gonna get when you get out of here. Oh, and he also said something about you owing him a hundred and fifty bucks for Lady Antebellum tickets.”

  “Well, that’s a relief,” he said. “If he wants to kick my ass, and he’s counting up what I owe him, he’s feeling okay. What the hell happened? Did he get made as a cop?”

  Gomez laughed. “No, actually, that’s the funny part. The big dude who kicked his ass was from Freeman’s old neighborhood. The guy was a crack addict and his wife was somewhat of a…”

  “Loose woman?” Gray said, phrasing it nicely for him.

  “Yeah. Anyways, this guy’s out scoring some crack one night, and Freeman, who was just out of high school at the time, hooks up with the wife. Big guy walked in on them but was too high to do anything. Freeman said he dodged him a few more times before he got the hell out of the neighborhood and headed to the police academy. He forgot about him until the other night.”

  “Small world, isn’t it?” Gray said. He was really going to owe Freeman for all this.

  “How are you doing?” Gomez asked. “Are you ready for me to pull the plug?”

  “No,” Gray said in a tone that left no room for argument. “I need to see Danielle Thurston, though. Can you see if she’s in court and get her in here?”

  “Thurston? Isn’t that the public defender you can’t stand?”

  “Yeah, she can’t stand me either, so try not to tell her it’s me you’re bringing her in to see. Tell her it’s someone that Ayden referred and see what she does with that.”

  Gomez nodded and started to rise, but then Gray said, “What about Tammy? Have you guys heard anything?”

  “No, the director’s got Sam playing the part still. Tapped all of his phones, though, and has him being watched twenty-four-seven so he doesn’t do anything stupid.”

  Gray nodded and watched Gomez leave. He didn’t know what he was going to say to Danielle, but for some reason, he had to know what her fascination was with these guys.

  Fifteen or twenty minutes went by, and Gomez came back in, followed by Danielle. She had her long blonde hair pulled into a ponytail at the nape of her neck and was wearing a pair of glasses with frames the same color as her eyes. Gray noticed how pretty it made her eyes look, but since he didn’t want to think nice things about her, he told himself it was probably part of her strategy to win over the jury.

  She stopped dead in her tracks when she saw Gray and then glanced at Gomez and said, “I guess all of you DEA agents have a tenuous grasp on the truth.”

  “I’m sorry,” Gomez said. “He didn’t think you would come if I told you it was him.”

  “This is a sentence you won’t hear me say twice, but he was right.”

  “Danielle,” Gray said. “Give me five minutes, please.”

  She looked at her watch and said, “Five minutes… go.”

  “Do you want to have a seat?” he asked.

  “You just wasted thirty seconds,” she said.

  Gray sighed. He wanted to throttle the woman, and he had never so much as thought about hitting a woman in his life. “Okay, tell me what your relationship is to the Aryan Brotherhood.”

  Danielle’s jaw dropped. “How dare you. I am an officer of the court. A public defender at that. I don’t pick my clients; they’re assigned to me.”

  “My cellmate, Ayden Styles, referred you.”

  “And?” she said, arms folded and eyes narrowed.

  “And… he’s a general with the Brotherhood.”

  “He was a client, assigned to me by the court. That’s all.”

  Gray watched her face. She was looking him in the eye and gave the impression she was telling the truth, but he
still got the feeling that she wasn’t telling him everything.

  “Will you be my lawyer?”

  “What?” Now she was looking at him as if he had grown a second head. “No, you’re crazy. I don’t want any part of this… whatever game you’re playing.”

  “You think this is a game? My partner is in the hospital recovering from getting the shit beat out of him. I’m sleeping three feet away from a general in an organization responsible for more deaths behind bars than any other. The reason that we’re doing it is because we’re trying to catch a drug dealer and a murderer, who by the way has kidnapped an innocent woman and either killed her or kept her hostage for the past month, and God only knows what indignities she had to suffer either way. So no, little girl, this is not a game.”

  Danielle didn’t speak for a long time. When she did at last, she simply said, “What are your charges?”

  ******

  Stockdale, Texas

  Late Monday Afternoon

  “You look well for a man who has been in the trunk of a car for twenty hours,” Vincent said with a cruel smile.

  Hank didn’t speak; he knew better. Every time he’d tried to say anything, it had been greeted by a backhand to the mouth. He had a tendency, one might say, to learn things the hard way, but eventually he did learn.

  “I trust the drive out was a pleasant one?”

  Hank still didn’t respond. He was soaked in the sweat and dust of two thousand plus miles, as well as just a little bit of his own vomit. He hadn’t pissed his pants, thanks to the kindness Armando had doled out on him… an empty Gatorade bottle. His hair had something sticky in it that he didn’t even want to chance a guess at, and he was so hungry that he thought the acid in his stomach might, at this very moment, be eating through the outer lining. He had nothing good to say, so as the phrase went… he was saying nothing at all.

  Vincent Heston continued to taunt him. At first, Hank hadn’t even recognized him. He had never looked very Hispanic, with his fair skin and green eyes; but now, looking at him with his fake blonde hair and blue eyes, Hank felt like he was looking at a completely different person… until the son of a bitch opened his mouth.