by Zoey Parker
But he hadn’t even bothered to look at me when he finally answered. He just shook his head and went back to eating his dinner. “No,” he’d said dismissively. “Not an option.”
“But, Dad—”
“I said no, Carmen. I don’t want you to ask me that again.”
And that was the end of it. There was never any arguing with him, even when he was in the best of moods, but especially not when he had his serious face on. Come hell or high water, I was going to live at home. That was right where I belonged, according to Papa James. Right where he could make sure I was safe.
I wouldn’t have called it “safe,” though. “Trapped” might have been a better word.
“So, anyway,” Lori said abruptly. She could always tell when I started flicking through unhappy memories in my head. She was my best friend for a reason, and there was no one else in the world who was better at pulling me out of a funk. “Are you going to text Dan back?”
“I don’t know,” I replied, biting my lip nervously. “What would I even say?”
“Anything! Jeez, it’s not that hard. Say you’re free tonight! Tomorrow! Next year! Just say something, ya goon.” Lori pretended to pull her hair out in frustration with me. I laughed. She’d always had such an easy time with boys. They flocked to her, and it was obvious why. She had brown hair that fell in a shimmering curtain almost all the way to her waist, and a body to die for. Plus, those bright blue eyes of hers always had that half-innocent, half-mischievous look that drove the dumber sex wild. Over the years since we’d first become friends, I’d seen any number of boys do crazy things just to catch her attention.
It wasn’t just her looks that did it, either. Lori was so comfortable with flirting, with the push and pull of banter. I was super jealous of her ever since I could remember. When it came time to talk to a boy, I felt stupid and clumsy all of the sudden, like I’d never had a conversation before. The way things had gone down with Dan this morning was a perfect example of why I would never be able to find a man of my own.
“Ugh,” I said as I buried my head in Lori’s lap. “But you weren’t there this morning! You didn’t see how badly it went!”
She stroked my hair. “I’m sure you’re imagining things far worse than they were.”
“No,” I protested as I bolted upright. “It was bad. Really bad. Like, by the time he left, I was bawling my freaking eyes out.”
Lori tilted her head to the side and gazed at me with concern written all over her face. “Crying because of Dan in particular, or because of the whole situation in general?”
“I don’t know. Both, I guess. I don’t think I realized how much my dad’s rules have really been grating on me lately. Or maybe I’ve just ignored it.”
“I think that’s exactly what’s happening. You need to talk to him,” she urged.
“Which one, my dad or Dan?”
“Either! Both!” She whacked me with a pillow. I fell backwards, giggling and shielding myself from further attack. “Talk to anyone!” But her voice softened as she dropped the pillow and touched my thigh again. “But I’m serious. Talk to your dad. He’s gotta let you grow up at some point. You can’t be his little girl forever.”
I started chewing my fingernails, which was a nervous habit I detested but couldn’t seem to get rid of. I’d run the gamut of treatments to make me stop, but nothing did the trick. “You’re right,” I admitted eventually. “He’s gonna blow his stack. But I have to talk to him. I’m not some princess in a tower. If he wants me to be happy, he’s going to have to lighten up at some point or another.”
“There you go,” Lori exulted, throwing her hands to the ceiling. “Praise the Lord, she finally starts speaking some sense! Hallelujah!”
“Enough already,” I snapped as I pretended to be angry. “You’re too much sometimes, you know that?”
She dropped her voice low and gave me a teasing, sultry glance. “Baby, this is only a taste of it.”
I rolled my eyes. “Oy, you’re ridiculous.”
“I’m just getting started, babelicious.”
“I’m going home.”
Lori smacked my ass jokingly as I climbed off her bed and bent over to pick up my backpack from the floor. I yelped and jumped straight into the air. “What on earth was that for?” I screeched.
Lori rolled on her back, legs kicking in the air, cackling her ass off. “I just wKisha get you ready for Danster,” she teased. “There’s a whole lot more where that came from!”
I muttered, half to her and half to myself, as I turned to leave the room, “I can’t believe I’m friends with you.”
“You love me and you know it.” She leaped off and planted a friendly kiss on my cheek. “Let me know how the talk with your dad goes.”
I swallowed hard. It was not going to be a pretty conversation.
Chapter Two
Ben
I brought the stacks of cash to my face and took a deep inhale. Nothing in the world was better than that crisp shit. Brand new bills were like an aphrodisiac. Hell, the smell made me hard all by itself. Good thing I was in my office alone or I might have gotten some weird looks.
I set down the first two stacks and picked up two more. These I hefted in my hands. The weight, the clean edges—there really was nothing in the world that felt so immediately right when I held it. In this life, there were rare moments of perfection, and this was one of them.
I sighed like a fat man after a big, delicious meal and leaned back in my chair, folding my hands behind my head. I surveyed the room. It was my office, fairly plain and Spartan, just the way I liked it. Painted on the far wall in a massive mural was the crest of the Dark Knights MC. My MC.
“Hey, prez,” said a voice at the door. I looked over and saw Slick sticking his shaved head just inside the cracked doorframe.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“Got a few more with me. You want to take a look at ’em?”
A huge grin spread across my face. “Does a bear shit in the woods?”
Slick chuckled as he opened the door farther and dragged in two more heavy duffle bags overflowing with bound stacks of dollar bills. With a grunt, he hefted each of them on top of my desk, next to the two that were already there.
“Goddamn,” he said with a low whistle, shaking his head side to side in disbelief, “what a haul.”
“Ain’t it beautiful?”
“It sure is, prez; it sure fuckin’ is. Can’t believe those jokers were dumb enough to keep it all in one place.”
“A fool and his money are soon parted, amigo,” I said wisely.
Slick snorted. “You sound like a goddamn fortune cookie.”
I laughed. On a day like today, I’d let his comment slide. I was just too damn happy to worry about something as petty as an insult from one of my men. Other times, he might not have been so fortunate as to avoid a classic Ben Killmore storm of wrath. But with all this money in front of me, I was like a virgin teenager at the whorehouse. Where should I even begin?
“Slick, my good man, this calls for a celebration.”
He raised an eyebrow. “What you got in mind?”
“The works. I want a fuckin’ blowout. Pack this clubhouse full of pretty sluts and enough liquor to kill an army. After pulling this off, we deserve to treat ourselves.”
“Couldn’t have said it better myself.”
“Of course not. That’s why I’m the president and you’re the one dragging these heavy-ass bags down the hallway to my office.”
“You’re an asshole, Ben.”
“The richest one you know.”
Slick laughed as he turned and headed down the hall to assign men towards getting ready for the party tonight. Just before he walked out the door, he paused. “Oh, prez, I just remembered. Jay said he wanted to talk to you. Wanted to debrief the raid.”
“Always business with that guy, isn’t it?”
“You’re tellin’ me.”
“He’s probably right, though. Send the basta
rd in.” I heard Slick step into the hallway and shout Jay’s name down towards the bar area.
“He’s on his way,” he confirmed a second later with a thumbs-up.
“Good. Now get outta here before I bean you in the skull with one of these blocks of money.”
Slick coiled in mock horror. “Don’t do that! Those things are so heavy they might kill me.”
“What a way to die that would be.”
He chuckled before disappearing down the hall.
Jay walked in a moment later. He stopped and leaned against the doorjamb to light a cigarette. Taking a long drag and then another, he swept his eyes over my loaded desktop and gave me a bemused grin. “You look downright giddy, Mr. President,” he said wryly.
“Jay,” I said magnanimously, spreading my arms wide like a king, “how could I be anything but? Are you not seeing what I’m seeing? This is like my birthday and Christmas and the day I lost my virginity, all wrapped up into one! I’m ecstatic!”
He strolled over to the seat in front of my desk and plopped down, spreading his legs wide. He looked thoroughly unimpressed.
“C’mon, Jay baby,” I joked, “just gimme a little smile. Just some Spark so I know you’re human underneath that tough guy act you love to put on so much.”
He took a long drag. “It’s a lot of money,” he said evenly.
I threw my hands into the air in exasperation and leaned back. Jay was who he was; there was no changing him. Then again, that was the reason he made such a damn good number two. He was as even keel as they came, with motherfucking glaciers in his veins. There’d been times when I’d seen him elbow deep in blood as he worked on extracting information from some poor sap from a rival club, and he had looked just as calm as a Hindu cow. All business, all the time. He just did what needed to be done. Money couldn’t buy a better man. Jay was truly one of a kind.
“All right,” I said, “let’s hear what you gotta say.” I lit up a cigarette of my own as he started talking.
“There were some mistakes made on the raid,” he said. “A couple of the new guys got a little sloppy.”
“Who?”
“Duncan and Spark.”
“What’d they do?”
“The usual shit they like to get up to. Toying around with the guard instead of just putting the bastard out of his misery real quick. They grabbed this from him.”
He tossed a gun onto my desk. It was a small pistol with a red knife logo emblazoned on the bottom of the butt. I recognized it as the insignia of the Wild Kings. I grunted and picked it up, hefting it in my hands as I thought about what to do.
Duncan and Spark were two of the guys who’d just recently patched in. We’d made them take some extra time in the prospecting process to try to iron out some of their kinks, but it looked like they’d gotten a little carried away in their first taste of action. “I’ll take the blame for that. I was the one who suggested they go with you.”
I’d been hoping that getting into an actual piece of work would be good for the two of them. They were still teenagers, not even twenty years old. Being the toughest kids in the high school was all well and good, but this was the big leagues now. I’d figured that maybe seeing some blood and bullets would’ve scared them into tightening their acts up a little bit. Looked like I was wrong, though.
There was no room for acting like a dumbass on jobs like the one we’d just managed to pull. The margin of error was always thin, but in this case, it was practically nonexistent. This wasn’t some upstart chump MC we were striking at; it was the Wild Kings, James Sanders’ club. Public enemy number one. Or, at least, my enemy number one.
Taking a huge gamble like this and failing would have obviously been a huge embarrassment. But even more so than that, it would have put us in an extremely dangerous position. James was a notoriously unstable son of a bitch, and I was adamant that this strike had to be clean and anonymous. No traces. No sign of our involvement, just in and out with the money. If it turned out Duncan and Spark had screwed up that critical part of the job and James had discovered who was responsible for stealing this stash, there’d be hell to pay.
“Think there’ll be any fallout from it?” I asked Jay.
He shrugged. “Hard to say. We didn’t stick around to canvas the security system. If they got footage, then, well, they might have our number. Only time will tell.”
“Those idiots. Send ’em on the next long-haul run. Maybe a cross-country babysitting job will teach them to stop being such morons when they’re on the clock.”
“You’ve always been an optimistic one, Ben.”
“Compared to you, I’m a beam of fuckin’ sunshine, buddy.”
“More power to you. One of us has gotta be the realist.”
We sat smoking in silence for a while. My eyes kept roaming over the mountains of cash in front of me. I felt like that old cartoon where the miser duck dives into the vault of coins. Everyone made fun of that greedy bastard, but if you asked me, that was just because they didn’t know how goddamn good this felt.
“So is that it?” I asked after a few minutes. “Anything else?”
“Not really,” he answered. “Aside from the numbskull younglings, it was more-or-less textbook. Just like we planned.”
I looked over at the big whiteboard next to my desk that still bore the traces of the plan we’d laid out weeks prior. It was pretty much as simple as they come. A few months back, we’d noticed some unusual movement right on the fringe of the territory controlled by the Wild Kings and decided to devote spare resources towards keeping an eye on a seemingly empty warehouse there. Lo and behold, it turned out that the Kings had expanded some drug shipping operations to this new location. What was even more exciting was the discovery that not only were they conducting business there, but they were using it as a stronghold for cash that was waiting to be laundered through the variety of outlets they used for shit like that.
Slick and Jay, along with a few of the other lieutenants, and I had agreed it was in a prime location for us to take a swipe at it. The trick was avoiding retribution from our rivals, so it had to be a quick job, one that couldn’t be traced back to us. The diagrams on the whiteboard laid out exactly what needed to be done: take down the two guards at the side door, send one man down through the roofing into the storage room, bust it open from the inside, and get out before the rest of the patrol detail noticed. From what Jay said, most of it went well, and now we were reaping the benefit of one of the ballsier moves we’d pulled of late.
“James’s gonna shit himself when he finds out,” Jay added.
I grinned ear to ear. “That’s the best part,” I said. “My only regret is that I can’t be there when it happens. Just to see it for myself.”
Chapter Three
Carmen
The house was silent when I walked in. “Daddy?” I called into the musty stillness. “Daddy, are you home?”
No answer. I didn’t see any lights on the ground floor. Dropping my keys into the dish on the island counter in the kitchen and slinging my bag to the floor, I padded upstairs to check his office.
As I reached the top of the stairs, I saw the door to his office was shut, but I could see a thin sliver of warm light coming out from under the bottom edge. He must be inside.
I stopped in the darkness, one hand on the railing, and closed my eyes. C’mon, Carmen, I thought to myself. Just go in there and state your case. Tell him you’re eighteen years old now and all you want to do is go on a simple date with a very nice boy. It’s just dinner, nothing more. Not a thing in the world for a father to worry about. I let out my breath in a long, slow exhale. Then, steeling myself, I knocked on the door.
“Daddy, it’s me,” I called through the thick wood.
“Come on in, Car Girl,” he said back, using the nickname he’d had for me since I was just a little girl.
I twisted the knob and walked in. His office was fairly sparse, with only a rickety desk and a small lockbox safe tucked in one corner. H
e was seated behind it, calmly flipping through the folder he held in front of him. With his reading glasses on and a long-sleeved Henley shirt covering up most of his tattoos, he looked like the world’s most normal dad. He could have been an accountant or a lawyer or some other ordinary, suburban job like that, the kind of dad who told corny jokes and brought home flowers for his wife in the evenings. He wasn’t any of those things, of course. But sometimes I liked to pretend.
“Hey, sweetie,” he said, looking up and smiling at me as I entered. “How was your day?”
“Fine,” I said. “I just studied at the park for a bit, then I went to Lori’s.”
“Ah, the infamous Lori Greene. How’s she?”
