Beard Up

by Lani Lynn Vale

  But my gravesite rendezvous with Silas were being interrupted by my former club members, I’d had to watch them mourn me over and over again.

  They were still mourning me, as a matter of fact.

  God, this was a fucking mess.

  Fuck. My fucking parents.

  “Goddammit,” Sebastian got up then hauled ass out of the room.

  I winced.

  “Fucker’s gonna give us all the shits and pukes by the time we’re done here,” Cleo muttered darkly.

  I looked at him, and his eyes were still on me.

  His narrowed, and I steeled myself, letting him study me straight on.

  He took his time, and it was a few long, uneasy moments for me.

  “Son of a fucking bitch!” Cleo exclaimed.

  Lynn walked in with Silas behind him.

  The minute that Lynn sat down, the entire room quieted. Conversations that the others were having quieted, and I tensed. But not because this was about to go down, but because Cleo was now standing.

  He leaned over the table, his hands steepled on top of it, only a few feet separating us.

  “I can see you’ve figured it out,” Silas drawled.

  The tension didn’t break.

  “What out?” Kettle asked, looking at Silas.

  “Tunnel, you mother. Fucker.”

  Every head in the room swiveled around at that, and I scooted my seat away from the table and stood up.

  “Everybody, sit the fuck down.”

  Nobody listened.

  “I said sit down!” Silas bellowed.

  Cleo was halfway around the table now.

  I was turned to face him, waiting.

  And the others in the room from the Benton Dixie Wardens were now standing as well.

  “Fuck me.”

  That came from Torren.

  Cleo didn’t stop until a clearly just-puked-his-guts-out Sebastian came back in.

  The moment he realized what was going on, he stepped in the middle of Cleo and me, all the while hugging a trashcan.

  Cleo’s hands were fisted tightly at his sides, and he was staring at me with such betrayal on his face that it was hard to watch.

  I held his glare, though.

  I deserved the hate.

  A gunshot rang out, and I looked over at Silas, who was standing with his gun in his hand.

  Above his head was a forty-five caliber hole in the drywall.

  We all stared.

  “I said sit. The. Fuck. Down,” he repeated, this time his tone clearly allowing no room for argument.

  I didn’t sit until everyone else did, but this time, it was with my back to the wall, and nowhere near the goddamn table.

  If I was within reaching distance of any of these boys, they were going to fucking stab me, likely with the pen or pencils that were gathered in a cup in the middle of the table.

  God, this goddamn room was giving me heartburn.

  This was the Benton chapter’s clubhouse.

  This was the place where I finally felt at home for the first time.

  This was the place of my rebirth.

  “Everyone needs to fucking listen to what I have to say before they go off all half-cocked,” Silas growled, his eyes on Cleo.

  Cleo didn’t bother to move his gaze off of me.

  “Show ‘em the pictures,” I told Silas.

  Silas grunted. “Ghost…”

  “His name isn’t fucking Ghost,” Cleo said through clenched teeth. “Let’s go ahead and call him Tunnel. I mean, that is his fucking name, right?”

  Hearing my name out of anybody’s mouth but Mina’s was enough to make my heart race.

  It felt wrong. It felt like that was the only link that my parents needed to have to take the last little bit of my life that I had left to me.

  “No,” I said, purposefully coming off as hard and unyielding. “That’s my name now. Nobody calls me Tunnel anymore, and before you get all pissed off, you need to understand why I had to do what I did. If you still want to kick my ass afterward, fine, so be it. Do what you have to do. But until then, save your judgement.”

  Cleo’s eyes narrowed. “My wife still has nightmares about having a part in your death, and she still carries that guilt,” he hissed. “She has my loyalty. At one time, you did, too, but you no longer do.”

  I looked over to Silas.

  “Show them the goddamned pictures.”

  Silas didn’t hesitate. He pulled up the pictures, and then set them on slideshow.

  I’d seen them, of course, but each time I did, it was enough to make a sickness roll through me that left my belly rolling for hours.

  The pictures were not your everyday pictures. Ones you’d share with your family on Facebook.

  They were ones that you shouldn’t fucking share, because you shouldn’t even have pictures like this.

  The first photo filled the screen, and every eye in the house, including a very pissed off Cleo’s, went to it.

  It was a picture of my baby, Sienna. She was lying on her back in the water. The plastic tub that she was lying in was bright green, and it wasn’t one that I’d ever seen before. It had a yellow rubber duck floating up by her head, and the bubbles were floating around her body. Everything was covered with bubbles except for her privates.

  The next photo filled the screen. This one, she was on her belly. She was up on her pudgy little elbows and she was looking at the camera that was positioned behind her. Her legs were slightly parted, and you could also see her privates.

  It continued like this, over and over again, picture after picture.

  At one point, a picture came up with Sienna playing with white frosting. She was sitting up on her butt, legs spread in front of her, and she had a cupcake in her hands. White frosting was smeared all over her, and she had a satisfied grin on her face as she leaned forward, mouth open wide, to get a bite of frosting.

  “Awwww,” one of the men said. “She’s a cutie.”

  I closed my eyes.

  The picture scrolled to the next photo.

  “This photo, along with the other thirty-two photos, were found in my daughter’s room,” I said with zero emotion. “Mina and I didn’t take them.”

  The room went absolutely silent.

  “My father abducted Sienna in the middle of the night, while Mina and I slept. I didn’t even know that it’d happened. When Mina went to work, I went into Sienna’s bedroom to get her ready for daycare when I found those pictures, printed out for me to see, in the crib next to her.”

  A low growl came from somewhere down the table from me.

  “They don’t look that bad, until you pair the photos together with the fact that my father is a fuckin’ sick mother fucker,” I growled.

  “He just wanted you to know that he had her long enough to take all of these photos?” Cleo asked, all anger gone from his voice.

  “That,” I nodded my head and turned to him. “And the fact that he’s the head of a criminal organization known for abducting kids and then selling them to sick people, just like him, who have a secret fetish for young children.”

  The room went absolutely wired.

  “I, of course, didn’t know how deep my father’s sickness went. I just knew that right before I ‘died,’” I said, making air quotes in the air. “My father wanted me to work for him. Wanted me to use my job at BPD to help smooth a few things over for him while he continued to run his business.” I cleared my throat. “I refused. Multiple times. The day I died, though? Yeah, that was the day that I got a picture of my wife taken through the scope of a rifle. That was the day that I knew my father was going to kill my wife if I didn’t finally cooperate with him. So I agreed.”

  Cleo’s eyes went sharp and ruthless.

  I tugged my shirt off and stood.

  “These weren’t a lie,” I said to him. “These scars? They were the burns that you saw when I was carried out of that building.” />
  All eyes went to my chest.

  It was even more fucked up than my face.

  Scars from my many burns, skin grafts, and lung transplant littered the hard expanse of my chest.

  “They killed some guy whose only crime was to be an organ match with me—and I still haven’t figured out how they could’ve found that out—to give me his lungs. They nursed me back to health in a state of the art facility in the basement of my childhood home.”

  “You were dead.” That was from Torren.

  I looked to him.

  “I was. Clinically. Twice,” I said. “But I was brought back in the ambulance. All the CPR y’all did…it saved my life.”

  My eyes, all the thanks that I could fit into them, were aimed at the man who’d pulled me out of that burning building.

  “Your parents aren’t God. How the hell did they get away with all of this?”

  That came from Kettle, who’d been silent up until now.

  I reached for my shirt and slipped it back on over my head.

  “I can answer that one,” Lynn finally chimed in. “The Morrisons are trust fund babies. They had millions to do whatever they fucking pleased with, and they used it to commit some petty crimes when they were younger. Van Morrison, Tunnel’s father, is the scum of the Earth who grew up with a silver spoon in his mouth. He got what he wanted and he was never told no.”

  I snorted. That was the damn truth.

  “Candace, well she would do anything for her husband; lie, cheat, steal. It was all of no consequence to her when it came to anything that Van wanted,” Lynn continued. “Bribe a police officer? No problem. Hold a doctor’s family hostage? No biggie. She’d do it for him. Kill a judge just so they could get who they wanted, who had the same ideals as them, on the bench? Done. Multiple times.”

  My parents were sick fucks.

  “If Van named it, Candace made it happen,” Lynn said finally. “Right now, we believe that there are four judges, just as many police officers, and hundreds of other people in their operation that make what they do run smoothly. They are the heads of the largest organized crime syndicate in the south right now.”

  “What do you need us to do?”

  That came from Sebastian, who was still hugging the trashcan.

  His face looked even more green.

  “And what the fuck do we have to do to get those pictures back?” Cleo growled.

  I dropped my head as relief poured through me.

  “We have all of the pictures back except for the ones directly on Van Morrison’s personal jump drive,” Silas answered. “We’ve tried for over six years now to bring this operation down. Each time we get a leg up, something else comes down on it and shatters it before we can make our next move.”

  “You have a mole.”

  That came from Big Papa.

  I didn’t disagree.

  I’d been thinking the same thing for a very long time now.

  Lynn had someone in his operation who was hindering it, and one of these days, very soon, I would figure out who it was. When I figured out who it was, I was going to tear them a fucking new one and make them taste it.

  This operation should’ve been over and done with a very long time ago. We’ve had ample opportunity to bring them down, but each time something solidified that we could pursue, it would be gone in a matter of hours.

  The only thing we kept doing right was interrupting the shipments of children. We’d broken up each and every one over the last few years and had saved a total of forty-two children from being brokered and sold. Forty-two children had been reunited with their parents.

  Forty-two times, I’d had a major role in making sure that my parents’ livelihood didn’t thrive.

  When those tips came in, we acted on them fast, not giving whomever was in the operation time to contact their bosses or thwart our plans.

  The bad thing was that we could never tie any of those child kidnappings to my parents. If anything, their men were loyal to them. Either my parents had something so huge over their heads that they kept silent, or they’d somehow won their loyalty and kept their silence.

  Whatever the reason, I knew my parents were involved, and I couldn’t pin a damn thing on them.

  On the outside, they appeared clean. On the inside, though? Yeah, they were dirty as dirt could be.

  “So, what the hell are we going to do?” That was Cleo again.

  “We’ve tried it the right way,” Lynn finally said. “Now we do it the final way.”

  The final way meant killing them.

  Even across the room from him, I could read the intent in Lynn’s eyes.

  The funny thing was that I felt the exact same way.

  And I’d been thinking it for a very long time now.

  Something released in my chest, allowing me to breathe for the first time in what felt like forever.

  Before I couldn’t react to the desire to wipe them out from this Earth, but now? With the power of sixteen Dixie Wardens and Lynn, who I was pretty sure had the authority to close this case by whatever means were necessary, I felt confident that I would make it home to my wife after taking their organization down—and without spending the rest of my days in an orange jumpsuit.

  ***

  I saw the punch coming, but I didn’t do a damn thing to stop it.

  I deserved it, though, so I allowed the hit.

  Cleo didn’t stop there, however. The next hit came from the other fist, and this one took me right in the gut.

  I took that one, too.

  I’d take them all. Every last one of them, if it’d take that fucking look out of that strong man’s eyes.

  I’d never seen Cleo look this devastated…or pissed.

  He literally looked like he wanted to take my head off, then cradle it lovingly in his arms as he told me he missed me.

  Then he dropped to his knees and stared at me with such a forlorn expression that I started stuttering right off the bat.

  “I’m sorry y-y-you had to go through that.”

  “I see the stutter is back,” he rasped. “Thought you only did that around your wife?”

  That was true. At least mostly. I did it in during high times of stress, or when I was excited.

  The entire fuckin’ lot of the Dixie Wardens were standing around me. Eight from the Benton, Louisiana Chapter, and eight from the Alabama Chapter. They surrounded Cleo and I, watching, waiting.

  “It’s the heart rate,” I explained. “When it gets up there, I forget to control it.”

  Cleo stopped, his chest heaving, and stared at me.

  I stared back.

  Which was why I never saw the other fist coming at my face until it was too late.

  Torren’s fist hit me square in the jaw, and I turned my head to the side at the last second, which likely saved it from breaking.

  “Fuck,” I spat, blood landing on the concrete with a wet splat.

  I turned a glare on the man.

  “I gotta do stuff with this mouth tonight,” I told him. “And my wife hasn’t had it in six years. If you’re going to hit me, go for the fuckin’ kidneys. I, at least, have two of them.”

  Torren didn’t hit me again.

  Instead he stared at me like he’d seen a ghost.

  “All this time, we thought you were gone,” he rasped. “We’ve spent many Friday nights at your grave, mourning you, and you were alive this whole time.”

  I stared at him gravely.

  “I was,” I confirmed. “But my wife and daughter’s lives trump your feelings any day.”

  He stared for a moment. “As they should.”

  Then, for a few long seconds, we stood in awkward silence as the men around me stared at my bruised and bleeding face.

  Then, with a suddenness that surprised me, Sebastian was in my face and taking me into a bear hug that surprised me.

  “Fuck, I’ve wanted to do that for a really long time now,” Sebast
ian said.

  And then he threw up.

  Thankfully, not on me.

  Chapter 24

  If my life had to have a narrator, I’d choose Samuel L. Jackson. No offense to Morgan Freeman, but my life requires the use of multiple ‘fucks.’

  -Meme

  Ghost

  I walked into my house at around eight in the evening, and immediately regretted it when the book in Sienna’s arms fell to the floor. It hit the stained concrete floors with a dull smack, causing everyone in the room to freeze.

  “Ghost!” she cried out and ran to me. “What happened?”

  Mina’s head whipped around from where she was cooking dinner, fajitas by the smell of it, and her eyes widened once she got a look at my face.

  Yeah, it was pretty bad.

  Sienna rushed over to me, and I caught her up in my arms and lifted her to my chest, just like I used to do when she was younger. Her hands went to my face, and those big green eyes of hers stared at me intently.

  “You look bad,” she whispered none too gently.

  My mouth quirked.

  “I got in an accident,” I said by way of explanation. With kids, less was better. Because where there was an explanation, there would then be at least a four-question follow-up.

  Luckily, Mina stopped any further questions when she came up to my side and stared up at me.

  “Sienna, would you please go set the table?” she asked carefully, trying valiantly to control her emotions that I could see just beneath the surface of her eyes.

  “Yes,” Sienna sighed. “If you’ll let me play with my iPad later.”

  Mina looked at her child.

  “You can play on your iPad if you read. Otherwise, no sir-ree-bob.”

  Sienna sighed and wiggled.

  I took that for my cue to put her down.

  She went directly to the table and started to clean off the paper that she had used for coloring at some point in the day.

  “Did you get that because of some case you’re working?” she whispered, trying not to raise her voice so that Sienna wouldn’t overhear.

  My lips twitched. “No. Definitely not from one of my cases. These were more what you would call, very pissed off friends.”