Taming Crow (Hells Saints Motorcycle Club)

by Marinaro, Paula

  “A ratchet.” Crow answered and felt his shoulder’s tense. “What kind of things do Tony and your mom do together?”

  If the kid says wrestle on the couch I’m gonna fucking lose it.

  “I don’t know.” Jett was twisting the ratchet so it made a noise. “They do regular friend stuff, I guess. I do it with them sometimes, too.”

  “So this guy hanging out with you and your mom. You like him okay?” Crow’s mind raced through the cars he had seen parked in the driveway. There hadn’t been very many of them and he sure as shit would have noticed if anyone parked there for the night…

  “Jett? Melissa’s voice sounded out from the backyard. “Jett! Where are you?”

  “Uh-oh, I gotta go. Mom’s gonna be mad. I’m supposed to stay in the back when she’s got a customer. I’m gonna go in the house and tell her I had to pee. Don’t tell her I was out here, okay?”

  “I got your back, little warrior.” Crow lifted his chin to Jett. A muscle clenched in his jaw as he watched the boy disappear into the front door of the cottage.

  Tony.

  ***

  Melissa was just rounding the corner when she saw Jett slip inside the front door.

  “Jett! There you are! You know that you’re not supposed to…”

  “Had to pee, Mom! And the back door was stuck again.” Jett shot out the explanation, threw Crow a conspiratorial glance and ran inside.

  Yeah, sure. And Crow Mathison just happened to be out here working on his bike… Melissa did not believe her son for a minute. When she felt a hard push from behind, she rolled her eyes. She had just spent the last hour fielding questions from Toni about her new landlord. And now Melissa knew there was no way that she was going to be able slip past Crow without introducing him. Seeing as their last conversation had ended with Melissa flipping Crow off she was thinking that it might not go too well.

  “Crow?” Melissa called out as they approached the side yard.

  “Yeah.” Crow stood up quickly, wiped his hands off on a small rag, and glared at her.

  Uh-oh.

  “This is my friend, Antonia Dumont.” Melissa stammered out the formal introduction. “Antonia, this is my landlord, Crow Mathison.”

  Crow gave her a quick glance and went back to scowling at Melissa.

  “Everyone calls me Toni.” She stepped forward and gave him a flirty smile. “And it’s nice to meet you.”

  Crow grunted and kept his eyes on Melissa.

  Awkward.

  Melissa cleared her throat. “Toni’s husband is the one…”

  Crow’s brow furrowed.

  “What did you say?” Crow abruptly turned and narrowed his eyes at Toni.

  “Sorry?” Toni looked confused.

  “Name”.

  “Oh, it’s Toni Dumont.” Toni flashed a dimple.

  “Tony?” Crow frowned the question.

  “Yes. Her husband buil--” Melissa continued to explain.

  “This is your friend Tony?”

  “Yes, Crow. This is To-Ni,” Melissa said with exaggerated patience while she and Toni exchanged a questioning look.

  “So Tony’s short for …what did you say it was?”

  “Antonia,” Melissa repeated a little louder now.

  “T-o-n-i,” Toni offered. “It’s you know…like a nickname.”

  Unexpectedly Crow flashed a huge grin. And what that did to his face took Melissa’s breath away.

  “Nice to fucking meet you, Toni.” Crow kept that shit-eating grin.

  “Nice to fucking meet you too, Crow.” Toni stopped just short of a giggle.

  Melissa watched them both and had no idea what had just happened.

  “Is that a feather?” Toni looked boldly at the tattoo inked over Crow’s heart.

  “Yeah. Eagle feather,” Crow answered. His expression relaxed and his tone turned congenial now.

  Humph.

  “What does Brave Enough mean?” Toni was looking at Crow like she wanted to reach out and lick that feather right off.

  Melissa fought the sudden confusing urge to jump between them.

  “Brave Enough to get it, Brave Enough to keep it.” Crow ran a calloused finger over the ink.

  “But what?” Toni asked breathlessly. “Brave Enough to get what? To keep what?”

  Crow looked straight at Melissa then.

  “Whatever I want.”

  Chapter 9

  Crow smirked when he thought of the conversation with Toni and Melissa, but really it was the conversation with Jett that stuck in Crow’s mind. If possible, it had made him even more curious than ever before about Melissa Raymoor. He wanted to know why she had sold all her stuff, packed up her kid and headed miles and miles away to a place that she had only seen in pictures.

  And Crow knew just the guy to ask.

  Jules Bonny was Prosper’s Sergeant-at-Arms and the club go-to-guy. Back in the day, Jules and Crow had been prospects in the MC together. Because Crow was practically raised in the club, he knew the ins and outs of the year-long initiation and helped Jules navigate those dangerous waters. Jules, being the kind of guy he was, had never forgotten that help, and Crow, being the kind of guy he was, had never taken advantage of Jules feeling that.

  So when Crow asked his best friend to put out a looksee on Melissa Raymoor, Jules was more than happy to oblige.

  My mom sold almost all our stuff and then we moved.

  Sounded a lot like Melissa had felt a need to travel light and run fast. And Crow knew all about that.

  Lots of kids in school don’t have dads.

  Crow knew all about that too.

  He lit a joint, grabbed a beer and braced himself as the memories came flooding back.

  ***

  Twelve-year-old Crow was roused from an uneasy sleep at the sound of the familiar hard bang on the door of the ramshackle trailer home. His eyes immediately flew open and he felt the fast beating of his heart. From the thin mattress on the floor, Crow looked up and out of the grime encrusted window. The Tamarisk tree that grew just on the other side of the dirt yard stood in eerie illumination against the night sky. He used to love that tree. Before the suicide, he used to climb that tree and hunt for the nests of mourning doves.

  “Don’t look at it. Don’t climb it,” Shiwóyé had warned him gently after the local teenage girl hanged herself from one of the sturdy twisted branches.

  Shiwóyé always looked out for him that way. Without her guiding influence, life would have been so much worse for the young Apache boy. But as fate would have it, Crow’s beloved grandmother, his Shiwóyé, died the spring he turned ten, taking with her the only steady, loving force in his young life.

  Her daughter, Nalin, Crow's mother, did not even come close to having the skills that it took to raise a child solo. What she did have was the exotic beauty of an Apache woman and a severe alcohol and crack cocaine addiction. By the time Crow was eleven years old, Nalin had given up even trying to be a mother, and by the time he was twelve, Crow had given up trying to make her be one. But he never gave up on trying to keep her alive. And it had just gotten harder and harder.

  Thank God that the school on the reservation had breakfast and lunch programs. Those meals kept Crow and his mother fed. Crow always volunteered to help with cafeteria cleanup. If the lunch ladies or custodian saw him slip an uneaten piece of fruit, cereal bar or cheese stick from the lunch trays into his backpack, they never said anything.

  The pickings from the lost and found bin kept them clothed. Full into the throes of addiction his mother was skinny enough to wear the clothes of middle school girls. But no one at the reservation school was much better off than they were, so there wasn’t much lost to choose from.

  Fully awake, Crow could hear the low voices and the groans of the squeaky mattress springs filter through the paper-thin walls. Over the years since his Shiwóyé died the young boy had heard other things too, but he had learned to block those out. However, in the still of the hot night, the sounds that came from his
mother's room seemed louder and more frightening than ever before.

  When the string of profanities was interrupted by the sound of a hard slap, Crow scrambled quickly to a dark corner. The young boy brought his knees up to his chest and made himself as small as he could. It was just a few short seconds after that that Crow saw a pair of legs covered with dirty jeans darken his doorway.

  “Fuck. What we got here?” The drunken man stumbled hard and unsteadily towards Crow. “Squaw's got herself a little brave, has she? Damn. I thought we'd killed all of you off. Well, your whore mama just passed out before I could squirt my load. Open your mouth there, Tonto, and take a suck out of the Great White Hope.” The drunk’s filthy hands fished for the limp dick inside of his pants.

  Crow sat crouched and tensed on his haunches. He had known it would be only a matter of time before one of his mother's johns came knocking at his door. The young boy felt a moment of panic when he realized the small sharp paring knife that he kept under his pillow was gone. Searching frantically Crow reached for the only thing he could find—the ballpoint pen that he kept by his bed for doing his homework.

  Through his alcohol-induced haze, the intruder had somehow managed to jerk himself into an erection. Now the staggering drunk jangled his loose, pink balls in Crow's face.

  When the man made a move to shove his balls into Crow's hand, Crow let out a warrior cry and with the desperate strength of a hunted animal he stabbed the pen right through the wrinkled, soft sac. When the man fell forward with a howl, Crow was on him. All the hate and resentment and fear that had built up in the twelve-year-old boy's heart broke wide open.

  Crow rained kicks on the guy’s nuts long after he had passed out from the booze and the pain, until there was nothing left between his legs but a mass of purple bleeding pulp.

  Then Crow grabbed the unconscious guy's legs and dragged him out of the trailer and across the dirt road. Under the star-filled sky, the boy rolled the body into the deep ditch that lay just beyond the Tamarisk tree. Crow checked to see if the guy was breathing before he left and found that he was. Good. One less thing on his conscience.

  Crow knew then that he was going to have to leave. He was going to have to set out on his own before the addiction and the sadness and the desperation that had destroyed his mother seeped into his bones. He knew he had to leave before it killed him the way it was killing her.

  So he went back into the trailer and by the light of the full moon packed his few meager belongings. Crow left three apples, four sticks of cheese and six breakfast bars on the dirty kitchen table. He knew it wasn't much, but it was all he had. Then he went into his mother's room and covered her half naked body with the thin blanket. He placed a kiss on her hair as she lay snoring and whispered goodbye. Then he closed the door on the life that had been no life at all and moved on.

  Chapter 10

  Crow spat out the nail that he had placed in the corner of his mouth and jumped off the aluminum folding ladder. He grabbed the ringing cell off the floor.

  “Hey man,” he said into the phone. Then Crow reached for the pack of smokes he had placed on the saw horse.

  “Got that information for you,” Jules responded. .

  “Yeah?” Crow lit up the smoke and drew deep. “Let’s hear it.”

  “Chick is straight up, Brother. Melissa Pignatelli Raymoor. Married at twenty, widowed at twenty-six. Had a kid somewhere in between there. Not running from anything that I could dig up. Couldn't find anything on that massage gig you say she's got going on, but she's probably keeping that under the radar. I'm guessing tax-free money or some bullshit. Her license to practice is legit. Got it when she was still living in Mass. So yeah, everything you got on her checks out.”

  “Got anything I don’t?”

  “Not much. Like I said, bitch is clean,” Jules responded.

  “Her old man?”

  “Captain Jesse Raymoor. Air Force Academy graduate. Fighter pilot killed when his F-16 hit a goddamn mountain in Afghanistan after coming back from a recon mission. The body was recovered.”

  “She been with anyone since?”

  “No. Nobody. Raymoor and her were high school sweethearts. First love kind of shit. Didn’t come up with anyone else. Except for this one guy.”

  “You gonna make me ask?” Crow shot out.

  “Relax man. Just trying to remember the name. Shit. I got to lay off the weed. Anyway, there was this guy used to come around when her man was out of town. He was Air Force too. I got the take that the three of them were tight from way back. Nothing there but a friendly check-in once in a while. Probably at the request of her old man.”

  “Family?” Crow prodded.

  “Raised by her father and grandfather. Grandpa was a pretty big deal bookie at one time, well-known on the horse racing circuit. Daddy and Gramps both did a little time, but who the fuck hasn’t? No problems out of the ordinary there. They're still running the books, but it's been scaled back a lot and more small time now. From what I can tell, the business is clean and the payouts are all good. They have some muscle working for them, but rarely use it. I checked in with Gianni, he's heard of them. You know those goddamn wops all know each other one way or another, but they ain’t connected in a way that matters.”

  Then Jules paused. “I pulled up her DMV pic too. The bitch is hot.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about?” Crow growled into the phone.

  “What the fuck are you talking about? You told me she's got this uptight vibe going on. Really, Brother? If that's true, then you got a hell of a surprise waiting for you when you unwrap that package. That wild hair, that gorgeous smile, eyes lit up like a goddamn Christmas tree in the photo and that's just the crappy registry pic. Everyone looks bad in those.”

  “You're looking at the wrong chick, man. The woman's wound tight.” Crow knew Jules was screwing with him.

  “Melissa Raymoor right? Ninety-five Primrose?”

  Crow stomped out the smoke on the unfinished floor.

  “Yeah, that’s her,” he answered.

  “Well, I’m looking at her picture right now. And I’m telling you the bitch is smoking. I ain’t messing with you,” Jules shouted into the room. “Riker, get the fuck over here.”

  Another minute brought Riker to the phone to give an enthusiastic description of what he’d like to do to the woman in the photo.

  “When was the picture taken?” Crow scowled into the cell.

  “Hold on. The writing is so fucking sm…there it is. Almost three years ago now,” Jules said.

  “When did you say her man died?” Crow asked.

  “Let me switch screens again.” Silence and when Jules came back on none of the smug mirth was left in his voice. “Damn, it was taken just a couple of weeks before her man bought it.”

  “Forward me that pic, Brother?” Crow asked quietly.

  “Done,” Jules said. “How’s everything else going? The house and shit? You want me to send a few of the boys down to help with?”

  “No, man. I got this. Hey, that marker you took out for the info on the woman? That’s on me.”

  “No worries. Just take care of your shit and get your ass back to the damn fold, Brother. I got this and anything else you need.”

  “Christmas come early this year?” Crow snorted.

  “Yeah. Ho-Ho-Ho motherfucker.”

  Crow could hear the smile in Jules’s voice as he hung up and went back to work. But he found himself watching the phone every few minutes waiting for that picture of a smoking hot, smiling Melissa to come through.

  The chiming sound signaling a message split the air and had Crow flying off the ladder to retrieve it. He accessed the file and knew that he was right. Jules was a moron.

  Wrong woman.

  Definitely the wrong woman.

  He went to shut off his phone, but the little Marilyn Monroe beauty mark she had going on at the side of her cheek made his eyes hit the photo again.

  Jesus.

  That was her.


  That pretty girl with loads of tumbling ringlets cascading wildly around a pixie face. Golden flecks danced in amber eyes as they smiled at him from behind long, thick lashes. Two dimples made deep grooves in her cheeks while soft full lips were curved upward and covered in peachy gloss. Her neck was long and graceful and showed no sign of the thin gold chain that her fingers were automatically drawn to. Long delicate gold swirls dangled prettily from her ears and a soft pink sweater hung slightly off her shoulders.

  And there she was.

  The woman who was hiding under all that sad shit.

  There was absolutely no sign of the beaten down look Crow had gotten used to seeing on Melissa’s face. This chick looked like she was ready to take on the world.

  The Melissa he knew looked like she was lost in it.

  And, for a reason he didn’t care to explore, that pissed Crow off.

  Jesse Raymoor. Lucky sonofabitch. Dead and gone before he reached his thirtieth birthday, but still leaving behind more than Crow could ever hope to have.

  He wondered what kind of man Jesse had been to make that light shine out from Melissa's eyes.

  Then Crow found himself wondering what kind of man it would take to put it back in.

  Chapter 11

  Melissa had just finished checking the dinner in the oven when she glanced out the window. Her smile of satisfaction turned to a frown when she saw Crow seated next to Jett on the picnic table. Both of their heads were bent over in concentration. She craned her neck further to see Crow’s strong fingers hold a large nail while her son pounded away at it with a heavy hammer.. Melissa watched on as Crow muttered and righted the nail when Jett missed the mark. He pointed and spoke quietly to Jett, sometimes taking the hammer from him or placing his big hands over her son’s small ones. Jett’s brow was knit in concentration.

  Oh boy.

  Watching Jett’s interest in all things Crow Mathison had really begun to worry her.

  Last week Jett had dressed for school wearing one of Melissa’s bandanas tied across his forehead.