Playing With Monsters

by Layla Wolfe

  To make it worse, Wolf commanded, “Make like a banana and split.” Now it sounded more like he’d been binging on Police Squad. But it was the most intelligent advice, and Roman did so, practically ploughing through a minefield of chollos.

  “Are the plates on this cage untraceable?” Roman wondered.

  “I think so.”

  The other girl was moaning painfully in the back seat.

  “You got a bag for her?” Roman asked, prompting Wolf to rustle around in the glove box. “Who are you? A friend of Gudrun’s?”

  “Yes,” groaned the girl. “I’m Tracy. They drugged us and they fucking took Shannon away in her own car.”

  “What’s their end game, do you think?”

  Tracy pushed away the plastic bag Wolf offered her. “End game?”

  “What’s their goal, what’s the point of them drugging you?”

  Wolf interrupted. “I think they’re fucking human traffickers.”

  “Shut up,” said Roman. “Let the girl talk.”

  Tracy said, “I think they’re human traffickers. Who the fuck are you? How’d you know to come get us?”

  “I’m a, ah, a relative of Gudrun’s. I guess she made a call to her mother, who called my stepfather. Anyway, you’re safe now, Tracy. Where we taking them, anyway?”

  Wolf shrugged. “The clubhouse, I assumed.”

  “I don’t like the feeling of those dirtbags taking videos of us. Whoever’s behind this human trafficking ring might decide on payback, and more drama is the last thing these women need.”

  Tracy held her stomach. “No drama. No drama please.”

  Roman asked her in the rearview mirror, “Did you get any names?”

  Tracy groaned. “They were all like Miguel, Santiago. The white guy who gave us drugs was named Alcatraz, I definitely remember that.”

  “Alcatraz,” mouthed Roman. That was certainly a name that stood out. Shouldn’t be too hard to track that motherfucker down. “Anything else?”

  Tracy accepted the warm bottle of water Wolf handed her. “A few times they mentioned some asshole who seemed to be a kingpin, Tony something. He had a funny name, like someone in a movie. Tony Evil. Tony Bastard.”

  “Tony Malevolent,” suggested Wolf. “Tony Vicious.”

  “Something like that,” said Tracy, sounding better for the first time.

  “Okay, just relax,” Roman advised the poor girl. “We’ll find your friend Shannon. In the meantime, we’ll protect you, get you better. I don’t think it’s smart for you to go home for now. These cartel assholes have a way of finding out where you live, finding out if you turned and squealed.”

  “Why can’t we just call the cops?” asked Tracy. “We can tell them where the house is.”

  That was a logical question. Tracy couldn’t have known that a motorcycle club would have a strict policy of not fraternizing with the enemy. The MC wouldn’t seek the help of their enemies the police even if someone’s life was on the line. They were mortal enemies to the core, Stalin versus Trotsky, Hatfields versus McCoys, Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner. Never the twain would meet. The Bare Bones took care of their own beefs. They especially took care of their own families.

  “Well find those bastards,” Roman assured her. “Is Gudrun all right?”

  Tracy moved Gudrun’s hair out of her eyes. She shrugged. “She’s breathing. Who are you guys, anyway? Your vests say The Bare Bones. What’s that?”

  Wolf answered. “Only the best fraternity of men to ever exist.”

  Roman glared at the Prospect. “The village called. They want their idiot back.” In a lighter tone, he told Tracy, “A brotherhood of men who are going to get revenge for what those fuckers did to you.”

  Theoretically, they already had gotten revenge. After all, they’d buried four men back there. But one girl was still missing, and if Roman knew his club like he thought he knew his club, there would be more payback on the horizon. They might even go to the mattresses.

  The idea he was in at the ground level on an op of this magnitude filled him with a sense of purpose, the purpose he’d been looking for.

  He was at peace with the world.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  GUDRUN

  I came to reluctantly. I came through the grey haze as though fighting my way up from the bottom of a deep ocean. Clawing, half-heartedly scraping my arms through the thick, oily water of my consciousness, I fought like a slo-mo ocean monster, refusing to accept my situation.

  As I rose to the surface, I did an assessment of my lumps and pains. Pussy not sore, good. God knows in my photographer’s model days, I’d woken enough times with a sore cunt. I ran my hand up my front, between my breasts, recoiling to feel a flaky film in the process of molting off my skin. Ugh. Patches of my hair were stuck together too. Gingerly I pressed various spots on my skull where Alcatraz—that name would be seared into my memory—had bashed me with his stupid fucking fists.

  I had run into some abusive, scary men during my model years. But none as crude, vicious, and plain old mean as that biker asshole. As I squirmed in the darkness of the unknown bed, I vowed to find a better way to get painkillers. My mother could ask Armando, for example. Or didn’t my dad work for a fucking cartel, as usual? He was a lawyer and had an in with shit like that. I couldn’t keep stealing from the poor—the seniors at my home—or I’d be fired.

  My new, moral and uplifting vow sent a surge of energy through my cells. Sitting up in bed, my eyes adjusted to the darkness. Muffled voices came from down the hall, the sound of clinking bottles and rolling pool balls. Soon I could see a poster on the wall. Apparently Metallica had been touring with Limp Bizkit and Linkin Park at some point. I was heartened that I could read this. Alcatraz hadn’t blinded me.

  But I was naked, and who the fuck had put me here?

  Taking the seemingly clean blanket with me, I stood and slid my hand around on the wall for a light switch. My throbbing leg told me that what little painkiller had been given me had already worn off. I searched back in the archives of my mind. Alcatraz, infuriated with me due to a lousy blowjob. The Molly that wasn’t Molly but was cut with something else. Dizzy, nauseous, Suck me! Then I can sell you for a hundred million dollars. What a strange sum to pull out of thin air. Even the most hoovering, cum sluttiest supermodel couldn’t be sold for a hundred million, and one of my legs was shorter than the other with angry scars running from thigh bone to hip. What the fuck had he been talking about? Should I sic Armando and his crew on Alcatraz?

  A flickering fluorescent light revealed a simple and clean room. The bedspread I clutched was emblazoned with a Harley Davidson logo, and motorcycle shit was scattered here and there. A whiskey bottle shaped like a bike. Impossibly tall and thin jeans slung over a chair. Black engineer’s boots lined up neatly against the wall. Looking out the window, I saw I was in an industrial area of town. A queue of Harleys told me I’d somehow wound up in another motorcycle clubhouse. One of Alcatraz’s cohorts must have taken me onto the next step in what seemed to be a human trafficking operation.

  Most interestingly, though, was a five by seven photo on the desk. A guy and a very pretty girl. She looked directly at the camera like most women did, but the man had eyes only for her. He was a hawk-nosed, exotic-looking guy with a shock of straight black hair curtaining his pierced eyebrow. This was my new captor, I assumed. Good to know he had an old lady and would probably just be expediting my shipment to the next trick house. He struck me as a typical low-level thug, albeit a neat and tidy one. He’d be armed, of course, but if he had any pretentions to intelligence at all, maybe I could just convince him to let me go.

  It was absurd to think you could just steal human beings like this. That you’d suddenly own them, and they’d just placidly go along with it. The year was 2015, for fuck’s sake. At what point in the journey were we not supposed to kick out the door and run off?

  Well, my slinky tank with the giant armholes was here, slung along with the overly tall jeans. I tossed the t
ank over my head, braless. I was just stepping into the tall jeans when the door opened. The hallway light was on, giving the person the look of an alien exiting a space ship. This is the guy. He was tall enough to wear the jeans I was stepping into.

  “Hey.” When he entered the fluorescence of the bedroom, he shut the door behind him. That was to be expected. He had droopy eyes that might’ve been called “bedroom eyes” in a more innocent time. Long, tapered fingers wrapped around the smoke he sucked on. He was my captor. For now.

  “Hey,” I said, stepping into the jeans. Not only were they over a foot too long, they were way too narrow for my fat ass. I couldn’t even button the first button, so I yanked the tank down.

  He laughed and squinted at my antics, moving to stub the smoke out in an ashtray. “You’re not going to get very far in that outfit, not in this part of town. I’m here to tell you you don’t need to bother running off. I’m Roman. Your dad sent me to get you from that trap house. That Alcatraz asshole is dead, along with those other goons. Your friend Tracy is here—she’s fine—in fact, she’s out there playing pool with the guys.”

  My heart leaped about a hundred levels of happiness. Gasping, I lifted my hands as though about to hug the guy. Then, realizing I still didn’t know him from Adam, I clenched my hands in front of me. “You’re—Roman? You’re a member of The Bare Bones MC?”

  He smiled lazily. “Right. Newly fully patched. You were my first op for the club. So don’t fuck it up for me.” His voice sounded as though he’d had his nose broken at least once, and from its bent stature, I believed it.

  “Don’t worry. I won’t run. Thanks so much for, ah, saving me? I’m sure I was quite a sight when you found me.”

  “No worries. Do you feel okay? I see lots of bruises, and more will be evident tomorrow. No broken bones?”

  I shook my arms. “Just the usual pain from my car accident two years ago.” That reminded me of something. Why had Slushy—my dad who I currently blamed for all my woes—sent this stranger to find me? I was ashamed of the condition and place I’d been discovered in, so I really needed to know who Roman was, what sort of blowback I could expect from my embarrassing foray into the seedy underbelly of Tucson. “Alcatraz is…dead?”

  “Right. I took care of that. My associate Wolf took care of the other three. So you don’t need to worry about them hurting you anymore.”

  “Yes, but…” I searched my memory bank. In my modeling days, had any sort of violent molester ever been, well, killed? No. Not one. Not one had ever been killed. Kicked in the nuts, maybe. Not killed. What sort of brutal, savage guy was Roman? “You seriously had to kill a whole trap house full of dope boys just to get us out of there? And where’s Shannon?”

  Hand on hip, Roman frowned down at me. “Have to kill them? We could’ve held them at gunpoint while we abducted you, sure. But actually, Alcatraz was holding a forty cal piece to my Prospect’s head at the moment, so I believe even your beloved cops would categorize that as self-defense.”

  I didn’t want to get on Roman’s bad side. I held up my hands in protest and the jeans started to crinkle around my knees. “Easy, easy. I’m not questioning your methods, man. And the cops aren’t my beloved. I don’t know where you got that from.”

  “Here, sit down. Wait, take off my pants first. Those look ridiculous on you.”

  I clutched the jeans to my thighs. “And put what else on? I can’t seem to find my leggings, and I have to assume you carried me completely naked out of that fucking trap house. I don’t even know who you are.”

  Roman laughed now, relaxed and at ease. “Oh, Jesus Criminy. I’m the last guy you need to be worried about. Seriously, take those off. I’ll find you some sweetbutt clothes when I go back out there.”

  I wouldn’t let go of the jeans, although I sat on the bed. “And why are you the last person I’d need to worry about? You carried my naked body—”

  Roman sat too, his eyes limpid and full of life. “Because I’m your stepbrother, Gudrun. I’m your celibate stepbrother, if that helps any. My mother married Slushy McGill—”

  “Roman Serpico,” I breathed.

  “—and he’s now back on the scene after abandoning her for a while—”

  “Something he loves doing.”

  “—and part of his effort to win my mother back is to help me become sponsored with The Bare Bones. And now asking me to find you.”

  “Roman Serpico. You had a recording contract for a while, didn’t you? You played guitar in that band, Little Accident.” I had actually followed the band for a while, once I heard my stepbrother played guitar. I just hadn’t put two and two together—this rough biker wearing a patched vest, a handgun jammed into the waistband of his jeans, and the artsy, tattooed, lean and mean guitarist who had ripped through solo after solo with such grace. In video, his hair had been gelled to stand up on end or dyed blond, like some newfangled Adam Levine. Like Adam, I now saw what I had only viewed on video—an entire sleeve of biomech artistry inked on one arm. Roman was lean but muscled, I imagined from all the athleticism onstage. Give all that up for the life of an outlaw biker? Little Accident hadn’t been as big as Maroon 5 but they certainly had a hefty following. Roman had given up a lot.

  “Right, that was me. Was me, I should say. When my father was murdered two years ago by his own fucking cartel, I vowed to get revenge. Being in an MC was the best way I could think to do that.”

  I sighed. I hadn’t heard about Mr. Serpico being murdered. I imagined he’d been off the picture before my dad had started wooing Roman’s mother. Or maybe not. Slushy’s romantic life was an ever-widening maelstrom of confusion, fuckups, and deceptions. “Our families, right? Yours sounds just as messed up as mine. You should’ve seen the parade of fucked-up, dubious ‘stepfathers’ I’ve had since Dad vanished out of our lives. The current one just tried to feel me up before I blazed out of there the other night for that rave.”

  Roman nodded, deadly serious now. “And you wound up getting much worse. Listen, Gudrun. You’ll stay here with us at the clubhouse until we sort this whole mess out. I’m not naïve enough to think there won’t be blowback for the bloodbath we just created at that trap house. I don’t even know which cartel Alcatraz is affiliated with, but we’re ready to take on whoever it is. Meantime, we got your purse and phone, you can call your mom, let her know you’re safe. Just do us a favor? Don’t tell her where you are.”

  “That’ll work. Valentina rarely gives a shit where I am, as long as I’m able to make it to work, pay her rent. And I’m off work the next two days.”

  Roman frowned. “Your mother makes you pay her rent?”

  I shrugged. “Hey. I’m twenty-five. No free rides around here. She cut me some slack during the year I was bedridden but now that I’m back to work, all bets are off.”

  “Harsh. I don’t know about going to work either, Gudrun. Did you mention to anyone at the trap house where you work?”

  “Not at all. Roman, those guys were so out of it, I doubt they remembered our names much less where we worked, even if I did mention all three of us are nurse’s assistants. All Alcatraz wanted to know was whether we had families. I realize now he was feeling us out to see if anyone would miss us.”

  “Exactly. Some of the sleazier cartels we’re familiar with deal in human trafficking. We’re trying to narrow it down to which one. And Alcatraz seemed to be familiar with The Bare Bones, right before I buried him. We’re trying to get to the bottom of that now. Any help you could be would be appreciated.”

  An efficient knock sounded on the door. “Cumon—we’re going to call Ford Illuminati right now on speakerphone,” said the guy on the other side.

  “All right,” bellowed Roman. “Uh, a little help, Wolf? A woman’s skirt or dress?”

  “I’m on it,” declared Wolf, clomping off in his engineer’s boots. He was the one who had taken out the three cartel baby gangsters. All that while still a Prospect.

  “Is that all right? That you come out there? Ar
e you ready? Oh, and fair warning. Slushy’s out there.”

  I sighed deeply. “That’s to be expected. He left when I was nine, then I didn’t see him again until he popped up recently with your mom. I know he’s trying. He did manage to funnel money to my mother all those years, so he didn’t duck out on his responsibilities. But I really barely know the guy.”

  As I waited for the sweetbutt clothes to arrive, I wondered about what Roman had said about celibacy. In today’s day and age, what would be the reasons for that? And what about the woman in the five by seven? They were obviously lovers, not relatives or friends. Was she some woman from the past, before he’d become celibate? Maybe to ignore all the horrifying things that had happened to me lately, suddenly this was my new obsession. Why was Roman Serpico, late of Little Accident and heart-throb to hundreds of thousands, suddenly giving up sex?

  The last image of him leaving through the doorway stuck in my head as I waited for my clothes. The guy was still sex on a stick, even wrapped in greasy leather with stupid childish patches emblazoned, telling the world he had to belong to a dumb biker club in order to feel like someone. Then I guessed it wasn’t much different than belonging to a rock band. That was equally as childish, but damn, it sure did amp up the sex appeal.

  The brisk knock came again on the door. Wolf opened it enough to stick an arm through and hand me some items. He said, serious, “We’re going to need your expertise to ID this guy, Miss McGill. Come out when you’re ready. We won’t bite.”

  “Thanks,” I said dubiously, and shut the door so I could dress.

  I was dreading seeing my dad. He had only come by a couple times in the past several years since resurfacing, apologizing profusely, wanting to hand us money that my mother was too proud to take, stupidly. “Slushy,” as he was now called because he cooked the books for cartels, had come by my hospital room when I was recovering from the accident. I was drenched in so much morphine I barely remember it, but it seemed that he had a kind, unlined face, that he sat patiently at my bedside unlike so many of my mother’s men, and I’ll never forget the giant stuffed blue bunny he left for me. That was definitely not something any of Valentina’s men had ever done—give me any gift. That was for fucking sure.