by Layla Wolfe
“Of course not. But she sure was adamant about finding some. Anson…”
Oh, fuck me dry. What else was Ford about to lay on me? I gritted my teeth.
“She told Wild Man she’d, ah, sleep with him if he had any.”
Rage blinded me. I literally could not see.
I knew I was walking around in little circles. I knew I was tossing up my hands, reaching for the nine-millimeter Ruger I kept shoved into the back waistband of my 501s.
Was I going to shoot Ford? I had been slipping lately. My boss had referred to some cheese sliding off my cracker when he’d told me to go for R and R. This was a common thing in the world of private intelligence contractors. A guy would start to lose it, get “battle fatigue,” begin jumping at shadows. The worst was if a guy got trigger-happy and couldn’t be trusted with a piece. I hadn’t nearly gotten to that stage yet, but they sent me stateside anyway.
The next thing I remember, Lytton and Knoxie came running out from the hangar bellowing, “Hey! Hey!” I felt the heft of my iron in my hand, but I was well aware I was aiming it at the sky. I remember also thinking about that guy in Echo Park about ten years ago on New Year’s Eve. Out of sheer exuberance, he shot into the air. The bullet came down three miles away, piercing some twatwaffle’s shoulder and jugular, killing him.
So I didn’t shoot. I know I didn’t. But suddenly guys were yelling “Hey! Hey!” and “Whoa! Whoa!” and I blinked several times to clear the haze of thick, red rage from my line of vision. I remember shouting, “Wild Man! Where’s Wild Man? I’m gonna fucking give him a piece of my mind!”
It wasn’t easy for the three bikers to disarm me without me squeezing the trigger. My muscles clench into an instinctive, fight-or-flight, adrenaline-fueled slab of unmovable cement when I am threatened. It’s one of the features of being a battle-hardened, shell-shocked soldier. Certain protective mechanisms come to the fore. Such as dreaming. I haven’t had a dream in years. I know they say everyone dreams. I don’t. I blocked them all out ages ago.
I finally unclenched my hand through sheer strength of will, and gave the Ruger up to Lytton. With hands held high in a surrender, I protested,
“I wasn’t about to do anything! You guys know how it is. I was just reacting to something Ford here told me.”
Lytton dropped the magazine on the Ruger. He pulled back the slide to eject a nonexistent round from the chamber. “Well, from where we were standing it looked like you didn’t have all the dots on your dice. What were you telling him, Ford? Something about Riker?”
I exploded. “I fucking wish it was something about Riker! You guys won’t tell me jack shit about my own father. Don’t you know your secrecy is going to make me wonder even more what the big fucking secret is? Where is he? What was he like? I don’t expect you to have a Bare Bones fucking photo album with puffy stickers of Hello Kitty and Angry Birds or whatever, but you can’t even tell me where the fuck he is. I know he came out alive from that showdown in the desert. You, Ford, Turk, and Riker made it out alive. Where is Turk, anyway? God dammit! You guys have to hand me a bone here. You have to understand where I’m coming from.”
“I get you,” Ford said immediately, holding out calming hands. “I just don’t think you’re fucking ready to hear the truth about Riker, man.”
“Case in point.” Knoxie snorted. “Whipping out your piece in the presence of our President.”
I felt bad about that, I really fucking did. I had not maintained my cool. Ford was just trying to tell me something about my daughter that I did not want to hear. No one wants to hear things about their daughter. No one. Even when they don’t know their daughter very well.
I said, “I know I don’t appear to be a man who’s willing to…hear things.” I didn’t want to make excuses about my behavior by placing it at the feet of being a combat veteran. Ford Illuminati was a former SEAL. Everyone has their tragedies, his breaking point. Not often does a man come along who is both hard as flint but soft as the clouds. I felt I was constantly veering from one extreme to the next. One moment I was solid as a boulder, the next drifting like fog. I could see the contradictions in the hearts of men—the paradox of horrible hurricanes and serene peace, both existing at once. I had seen family men blow away the brains of others, then sit back to light a cigarette. The extremes of war bring all these aspects of men to the surface. But I seemed to run hotter and colder than most.
“Maybe you’re right,” I said through clenched teeth. “Maybe Sheena does have a problem with drugs. I know lots of people in that…neighborhood in Gallup do.”
“Dude,” Knoxie said softly, “she asked me if I had an eight ball.”
I exhaled mightily, hands dangling at my sides. I didn’t want to ask if she’d offered him sex in exchange for it. In fact, now that I sobered up in the cold, cruel light of day, it was starting to come back to me. Last night, I had stumbled back into the game room upstairs after talking shop with the mechanics down in the hangar. Sheena had been leaning against a wall talking to Wild Man, her back to me.
“I’ll even take some shake and bake,” I had distinctly heard her saying.
Then I had said something drunk and moronic, like, “Hey, Wild Man! I remember when you were just a little fucking Prospect! Last time I saw you, you were making a weed pipe out of a package of Starburst.”
I knew shake and bake to be a very lower-echelon, cheesy way of making meth. People just threw cold pills into a two-liter plastic soda bottle, added some household chemicals, and voila, enough meth for a few hits. Then they tossed the used bottles on the side of the road, creating an explosive disaster for anyone who tried to open the bottle. It was disgusting, pathetic, and sad. And I had to admit my daughter had been looking for some.
“Guys,” I said, “I’ll deal with my daughter on my own. Confront her, do an intervention, or whatever they do these days.”
Knoxie said, “Interventions don’t work.”
“Yeah,” said Lytton. “They’re out of favor with current psychological thinking. They were just backfiring right and left, and maybe even making things worse. People don’t like having fingers pointed at them. They might pretend to go along, but just for the short run. It’s going to cause more resentment ultimately.”
“Besides,” said Ford, “you have to offer the addict something to go for, instead of drugs. Some other goal, some hope. Those rehab places just turn them loose into the care of a relative. The boredom is what gets them to relapse sooner rather than later.”
I nodded. Stoically I said, “I thought that being…in her condition, she’d naturally stop. I expected her to be clean when I returned this time.” By saying this, I also admitted she had not been clean last time I’d seen her. That I had known it, and done nothing about it.
Ford said, “When an addict is in as deep as she seems to be, even becoming pregnant doesn’t stop them.”
Everyone stared dumbly into the middle distance for a few seconds. The relief was palpable when a loudspeaker mounted to the top of the hangar doors crackled, and a burly guy barked out, “Dispatch to Veep. Dispatch to Veep. Come to dispatch immediately.”
For some reason, Lytton saluted us, and jogged off toward the building.
“Why’s he going?” I asked. “Is Turk on a mission?”
Ford and Knoxie glanced at each other. “Turk’s in Lake Havasu City,” Ford said. “Starting up a new MC chapter.”
“What?” I whispered, in awe. That didn’t just happen arbitrarily. Setting up a new MC from scratch was earth-shaking business in the MC world, I knew. Why the fuck would Turk suddenly depart the club that had held him in its bosom since his short pants days and create a whole new MC hellaway in western Arizona? It didn’t make any sense.
But apparently that was a big fucking secret, too, because quickly Ford said, “Yeah, it’s a whole new venture for him. Anyway, sort of reminds me of something he was mentioning to me on the phone this morning. Sounds like a mission for you, actually, Anson. If you’re not going back
to Afghanistan pronto, that is.”
Was Ford giving me a raft of shit? I guess I hadn’t told anyone I wasn’t really allowed back into those overseas theaters at the moment. I was supposed to be chilling out, surfing in Hawaii, and taking some sort of fucking PTSD medication. “No, I have no mission. Does this involve my father, Riker?” I said that name pointedly. I actually pointed at the tarmac.
Again, those two shared looks. “No,” said Ford, “but maybe if you help us out to our satisfaction, we’ll start filling in some of the gaps regarding Riker for you.”
Knoxie nodded. “We need to trust you.”
All right. That was fair enough. I wasn’t exactly a member of their MC, had only come to a couple of their fish fries over the years, and just ran into them randomly here and there. I had never done an errand for them, although I was certainly capable. “Fair enough,” I said cautiously. “What’s the mission?”
Ford warmed to his subject. “Well, Turk opened up a new medical pot dispensary in a suburb of Lake Havasu.”
“Herbal Legends,” Knoxie said with pride.
I nodded. Pretty good name.
Ford continued, “Only, he’s already been hit by some armed bandits a few days ago. All were wearing masks of course but he could tell they were Indians—he thinks Navajo.”
I frowned. Security was my game. “He didn’t have a guard on duty? Did he get any footage?”
“There’s footage for you to review. A guard was on duty but there were four bandits with Russian ladies. They overpowered him. Turk was the ganjier on duty and of course he was packing, but he just surrendered. They weren’t fucking around. They got out with five, maybe six hundred pounds of weed, some from the Emerald Triangle, but a lot of it Lytton’s pride and joy.”
“Eminence Front,” I said. Everyone in Arizona knew about Eminence Front, grown only on Lytton’s plantation. I didn’t smoke the stuff—I was piss tested frequently in my job, and THC stayed in the body the longest of all drugs, so my company didn’t allow it. If a guy had a legal pot card, he just wasn’t hired. But I knew about many aspects of my enforcement field. I stayed on top of things.
“Eminence Front,” Ford echoed back. “Can you help track it down? Turk’s new partner is a professional bounty hunter, but he’s out on some tracking job right now. And we figured—”
“Since I’m half Navajo, I’d be the man for the job.” I wasn’t bitter. I really wasn’t. Ford was just being logical. After all, he was half Anglo, half blanket-ass too.
He chuckled. “Since you’re ‘White Power,’ yes. Isn’t that what they called you in school when you played basketball?”
“Yeah, right,” I admitted, and took the assignment.
Now that, people, was how I pulled myself out of the massive funk I’d found myself in. I vowed to address my daughter’s drug problem, even though I didn’t know her very well, and she’d probably resent the intrusion. I was her father, after all.
And I vowed to start doing right for the world, you know? To help the underprivileged, the disenfranchised, the downtrodden. I would take the zeal that I had used in hitting any soft target that got in my way of retrieving a downed American soldier, and I’d help people right here in my homeland of Arizona.
I might eventually find out the saga of my father, Riker. I might not. But once again, I’d be coming from a righteous place of upright integrity. I could gain my self-respect back. Sheena couldn’t respect me if I didn’t even like myself.
I took the mission, and I rode out to Lake Havasu that night.
CHAPTER TWO
ORMOND
“So how long you been a fag?”
Sergeant First Class Justin Van Winkle looked at Ormond from under his lashes as he mixed a couple drinks at the hotel room’s counter.
It was sort of an odd question to ask, but Ormond Tangier had been asked that before. In his world of uniform fetishes, many of his marks were just bicurious men who were relative cock virgins. They were so inexperienced with other men, they were just bursting with questions. It was a common assumption that men “became” “fags” at some point in their adult life or adolescence. Ormond loved enlightening these naïve men. It increased their attractiveness, actually, that they were so innocent about what two men did together. Ormond was a submissive, more of a power bottom, really, and above all he adored the rush of sudden realization that came over a cock virgin the first time they came in another man’s mouth. In a way, their virgin spunk tasted…sweeter.
He liked to think he’d gotten more than one bi-curious man in a uniform hooked on dick.
“My whole life. I knew I was more attracted to boys than girls—I even kissed my best friend on the mouth—but I wasn’t certain about it until I was about twenty-one. I moved here from Madrid, then moved to Hollywood to work in special effects makeup.”
“Oh, like painting lipstick on guys? Is Madrid near Cozumel?”
Ormond frowned. “Cozumel?”
“Yeah, you know. In the Yucatan peninsula. I went there on R and R once. Talk about one big wall-to-wall party. Course, then, tourism was down. Everyone afraid of the cartels.”
“I’m Spanish, from Spain,” Ormond patiently explained. He got that a lot too. Gabachos seemed to assume anyone even remotely Latino was Mexican. He was far too tall to be Mexican, for one. And his periwinkle blue eyes and chestnut hair with streaks of ash gave him that exotic Mediterranean vibe—so he thought. If the truth was known, deep down he sort of resented having to explain that he wasn’t Mexican.
Sergeant Van Winkle came around to Ormond’s side of the counter, handing him his gin and tonic. He stood way too close, way too confrontationally, for a bi-curious basically straight man. This Dom was blunt, to the point, forthright. Ormond liked that in a man. Van Winkle knew what he wanted. He had fucked other men before, Ormond could tell. “I think I went there once. Vicenza.”
“Oh, that’s Italy,” Ormond said conversationally. He liked to think of himself as a very conversational, friendly person, easy to get along with. He could calm the rawest of nerves in the most skittish cock virgin. He was non-threatening—soothing, really. “Because you’re 173rd Airborne Brigade, you must have been in Caserma Ederle.”
Justin pointed at Ormond with his drink. “That’s it. Caserma Ederle.” He pronounced it with no flair, though, no delicious accent. Ormond felt slightly disappointed. Justin sipped. “So listen, ah, you found out you were a fag in Hollywood? You blow any famous actors? You know, get down and dirty in the back lot behind some scenery, take his big dick into your mouth? You like to suck, I’ll bet. You look like a good cocksucker.”
Ormond actually had blown a few famous guys in his time, but he wasn’t one to kiss and tell. He was a professional on the set—usually—and usually pretended he hadn’t heard or noticed overtures. He was far too polite a fellow to directly snub anyone, but he also didn’t believe in mixing business with pleasure. Today he’d spent all day in his new makeup studio a few doors down from Turk’s shop, Herbal Legends. Turk was Prez of the MC Ormond had helped co-found, The Bent Zealots. In the front window he’d placed some prosthetics he’d worked on over the years, some cowls from some Lord of the Rings movies, some Planet of the Apes flicks. Occasionally people even came in to watch him working. He didn’t mind. He liked it when people got excited about special effects makeup.
Today some loping stallion had come in alone. Leaning against the front counter, he crossed his legs and displayed his package as Ormond struggled to unmold an alien head. He nearly dropped and shattered it when out of the corner of his eye he caught the dude fondling his erection through his pants. But he soldiered on, pretending he hadn’t noticed. Eventually the guy got bored and went away. Ormond was a professional if nothing else.
Ormond gulped his drink, then set it down. He tilted his head and looked at Sergeant Van Winkle assessing him. Ormond knew he was sultry, with flawless skin the shade of melted caramel. He knew he made men’s mouths water. He brushed the back of his hand against
the sergeant’s buzzed temple. “I am known for my cocksucking, yes.”
That statement seemed to push the sergeant over the edge. All at once he was on Ormond. Like a many-armed hydra, his hands were everywhere, gripping Ormond’s ass, plastering their erections together, zippers clashing, practically creating sparks. Van Winkle’s open mouth clamped down over Ormond’s and they kissed viciously, like wild bulls snorting, the sergeant squiggling his tongue every which way inside Ormond’s mouth.
Even accustomed to the world of cruising like he was, Ormond was swept away. Rarely did bi-curious men come on like gangbusters like this. It set off a red flag. He had just picked the guy up in a tourist bar in downtown Lake Havasu. The guy hadn’t been overly willing to leave the bar with Ormond. His hesitation had made every hair on Ormond’s balls stand up with excitement. The hesitant ones were the most scrumptious.
Usually straight pickups were a lot more circumspect, tentative, experimenting, squeamish yet fascinated with every little touch. Ormond told himself Sergeant Van Winkle just had more experience than he’d given him credit for, but he still pushed the army officer away.
Grinning and fluttering his lashes, Ormond panted, “Well! We are eager beavers here tonight, aren’t we? So when did you realize you wanted cock?”
Oh, son of a biscuit. Wrong thing to say.
Ormond instantly realized his mistake when a veil snapped shut over Van Winkle’s eyes. All the spark and fire went out of them, and a darkness pooled in there. His eyes became hooded like a hawk’s, and he unhanded Ormond. He even lifted his right hand a bit, the back of his hand facing Ormond, as though he wished to backhand Ormond into submission.
So that was the game. Ormond could shoulder it.
“I’m not a fag,” Van Winkle snarled.
Ormond held up his hands. “I get it. I really do. You were just curious. I get that a lot. Hey, that’s my favorite kind of guy.”
