“What the fuck?” I asked.
Turning, he went back to the scene and began barking orders.
I let out a low growl as I made my way back to my car. It didn’t matter how old I’d gotten, my father still knew how to press all the right buttons. He’d dealt with so many agencies and cases at this point that he knew how to get what he wanted. And what he’d just gotten was a sound and truthful theory of possible events, that he could quietly tell Denny King as they worked the case. Politics.
I both hated and admired him right now.
My admiration stemmed from his ability to manipulate and sail through the constant mass of political bullshit. My dislike came from knowing he was better at it than I was.
Picking up my phone, I called Mason.
“Hey, bro,” he answered. “It’s past midnight. Are you actually awake?”
“Dad pulled me in for a consult on a case. Pisser in an alley with three holes.”
He chuckled. “So, did you consult or tell the old man to fuck off like you did last week?”
“Asshole told me he was having chest pains and you weren’t answering your phone. When I got here, his team was like ants to shit. Then he threw out some idiot theory and I gave him my take on it.”
Loud music blared over the phone as he let out a thunderous laugh. “I told you he was smarter than both of us. Holy Christ. I wish I would have been there. Out-smarted by the old man.”
“Fuck off, Mason, I’m headed home. Just thought you should know because he’ll probably pull you in next.”
“Nah, I’m done with the force. He hasn’t brought it up once. Come up here. I’m at Erebus Club. Stop being a fucking hermit and come have a drink.”
Sliding into my car, I grimaced. Ever since I’d gotten home I’d stayed out of the way and out of the public. I shared my dad’s old house with my brother for now, which worked out for both of us most of the time. He was working on and off. I was trying to forget my life and everything to do with my old job.
My head still wasn’t right even after moving back, and I knew it. Too much time on the job and seeing too many things that would have worn a normal man down in a week. Moving back here had been convenient, but it hadn’t helped to wipe any of my memories away.
“Yeah, okay,” I mumbled. “I’m out of whiskey at the house anyway.”
“Noticed that when I got in last night. I’ll buy.”
“Whatever. Be there in ten.”
Looking down at my phone as I hung up, I noticed three new voice messages. I knew who it was. I just wasn’t ready to talk to him yet. Wayne had been a great teacher and a close friend, but I couldn’t bring myself to return his calls.
It wasn’t my life anymore.
Arriving at the club a few minutes later, I noted that the parking lot was packed. The deck on the second floor was full of people milling around, drinking and smoking.
It was a local place that had been in the city for longer than people could remember and although it’d changed ownership many times, the atmosphere never changed.
The sign that hung on the building gave off a red neon glare and blinked from time to time like one of the bulbs needed a replacement. The stone exterior was deceiving. Painted over by a thousand coats, that had since peeled and faded, it looked like a non-descript place in the middle of Kingston. It wasn’t on the main strip, wasn’t even close to polite civilization. It was seedy, dark, a place where you could hide in a corner, drink yourself into oblivion and exactly the type of place I’d been avoiding.
Named after the Greek god of darkness and shadows, the neon lettering that said, Erebus, blinked and beckoned me to enter. It was so fitting with my mood lately that every time my brother brought it up, I wondered if I hadn’t become the same darkness.
Fuck it.
I was dressed in a pair of jeans, running shoes and a grey Henley. Not exactly club attire, but no one gave a shit in this place. They were all there to get drunk, hide in the booths, dance and get laid.
The line to get into the place was twenty deep. I bypassed it, nodded at the bouncer, who happened to be one of Mason’s old co-workers, and entered the bar.
Yeah, same place. The air was filled with alcohol, perfume and sweat. The lights were turned so low it was probably a building code violation. The neon lighting on the dance floor, was flashing bright enough to the beat of the music, that I could make my way through the crowd to my destination.
Leaning over the bar top near the entrance, I swept my eyes across the gigantic room. Mason was in the back, sitting at an open booth with a table, and laughing with the guy who sat next to him.
“What can I get you?” the bartender asked, drawing my attention back to the lit bottles of alcohol along the wall, and the man pouring drinks beyond the counter.
“A Four Horseman. Then whiskey, neat, and none of that trashy shit.”
“Haven’t had anyone request that shot in a long time,” the bartender chuckled as he gave me an assessing glance.
“Yeah, I’m old. Just hook me up.”
“You got it,” he said as he started gathering what he needed. “You new?”
“Nope,” I replied, distracted by the dancefloor and the parade of people on it. “Just moved back.”
“Where from?”
I glanced at him as he filled my shot, and when he was done I slammed it back. The burn of Jim, Johnny, Jack and Jose slid down my throat like fire from hell.
“Another.”
“Thought you might say that,” he said as he slid the other one toward me then placed my whiskey beside it.
I slammed the second one, handed him some money and waived off the change. The club was filled with people laughing and joking as I stalked across the room toward Mason. My height alone made me stand out among the crowd. Add my muscled build and I was a beast among lambs in this environment. If they only knew.
The compact mass of bodies made it nearly impossible not to touch people. Tight dresses, cleavage to tease, women giving me interested glances as I passed. I felt a hand or two reach for things they wanted, and I had to smirk at the boldness. If I was in a better mood, I might have enjoyed it for a moment.
Mason greeted me with a smug smile and handshake. “Hey, man, take a seat. I wondered if you were shitting me or not.”
“Yeah, wasn’t convinced until I got here,” I grumbled, looking my brother over. He’d grown a beard and bulked up quite a bit in my absence. He’d always been clean-shaven and even after three months of living with him I still wasn’t used to it. He was like a walking arsenal of muscle with a cynical attitude. I'd started working out again in his small home gym, but he’d taken his fitness to another level.
He threw a thumb at his buddy sitting beside him. “This is Jack. He used to work with the vice squad in the department.”
I gave him a nod that he returned. Jack had some interesting tattoos that were everywhere. Arms, neck and if I was guessing correctly, underneath the dress shirt he was wearing. Shapes, words and symbols that blended together. It all screamed “trouble” and I wondered if he was. He had a detached, glazed over look on his face, as if his surroundings meant little to him other than to observe. I could almost relate.
I took a drink of my whiskey and scanned the crowd. “How long have you been here?”
Mason glanced at me for a moment before responding. “For a while. There’s always some interesting action here. BG’s, GG’s and GGT’s.”
“I can guess which ones you’ve been picking up from the sounds at night.”
He shrugged. “It’s all good. They know the score.”
Jack frowned at us. “BG’s? New term for something?”
I chuckled. “Code for bad girls, BG. Good girls, GG. And good girls trying to be bad girls, GGT.”
He laughed. “What the fuck?”
Mason shook his head. “It’s all Mick, man. When he was up at Notre Dame he had to label them to keep up with all the honeys. Frat parties were more GGT’s, though.”
“It wasn’t like that,” I smirked.
Mason slapped his hand on my back. “Fuck that. You know it was. Youngest wide receiver on the team and all that to choose from? I wasn’t complaining when I came to visit.”
I laughed and relaxed back in my seat, where the darkest spot in the booth was. It enveloped me and kept me out of the light as I stared at the dance floor. “It was an interesting time.”
“What made you join the FBI?” Jack asked.
Obviously, Mason had filled him in. I wasn’t surprised. Not much was sacred to him.
“Just found my talents in the classroom were being rattled around too much by fuckers built like Mason on the field. Knew it wasn’t a lifelong thing. Went a different direction.”
“No NFL dreams?”
“Not me. Means to an end. The scholarship didn’t mean shit if I ended up with a concussion, and I wasn’t about to make the draft.”
Mason grunted. “Right. You were a god out there. Could be making millions.”
I shrugged noncommittally. I wasn’t the only wide receiver on the team. Wasn’t even the most talented. But my dad and brother thought I walked on water back then. Mason eventually got why I quit the team, but I wondered some days if my dad had ever gotten over it. He’d gone on a tirade the day I told him I’d decided not to play anymore.
Four girls landed at a table in front of us. Mason’s eyes went everywhere.
“You should get laid, bro.”
“Eh. You’ve probably done half of them. I’m not sure double dipping into the Galloway family is their thing.”
He smiled mischievously. “You never know with chicks. They get their rocks off with some kinky shit sometimes.”
A tall brunette walked by and did a double glance at Mason.
“BG,” he mumbled. “Hey, Neta.”
She smiled in a practiced way and swept her eyes over Jack and me. I was leaning back with my arms over my chest wondering if this was one of the multiple female screamers I’d heard from Mason’s part of the house in the middle of the night.
“Mason, it’s been a while. You busy?”
“Always, how about I call you later?” he suggested with a smile.
She giggled and looked at me again. My face remained impassive but somewhat amused with my brother’s choice of women. Tall, short, brunette, blonde. It didn’t matter to him as long as they had a pulse and a killer set of tits.
“This is my brother, Mick. Mick, Neta,” Mason gestured to me.
“Hey there,” she smiled at me as she leaned in, giving me a healthy view of her chest.
“Not a chance, Neta,” I replied.
She gave a slight pout that I doubted Mason even caught. He was too busy hunting something else. It was the tightening of her bottom lip and a small gleam in her eye. I could have taken her home and he wouldn’t have given a damn either way. That was Mason. Love 'em and leave 'em. I’d rarely seen a repeat on his arm unless he hadn’t gotten in her pants yet. And they all gave it up eventually.
Neta gave Mason a quick glance, smiled and waved as she departed. He looked her over with as much interest as he would a blank wall. Nothing there.
Mason looked back at me and shook his head. “You could have had that.”
“Sloppy Galloway seconds. No thanks.”
The ladies in front of us were having a good time. Going from my labelling system, since Mason had brought it up, I pegged three of the girls as BGs, and the blonde as a GGT. She looked way too uncomfortable in her own skin to be anything else.
A man wearing a polo shirt and designer jeans stopped by their table, chatting with them. They seemed to know who he was from the expressions on their faces. His eyes landed on the blonde more than the rest and after a few minutes he leaned in and spoke in her ear. His hand circled her wrist as she shook her head. She jerked back suddenly, whether out of surprise or intent, I couldn’t guess.
My hands involuntarily fisted for some reason, wanting to punch the guy for whatever caused her reaction. After she twisted her arm away, he moved on and slinked his way through the club. I watched him as he took a seat on the other side of the room, then slid into the shadows much like I’d chosen to do.
One of the women giggled, while throwing a suggestive look at Jack. The redhead eyed Mason with curiosity and he gave her a wolfish grin.
He was a complete man-whore. He should have had it tattooed to his face. But the girls just couldn’t resist.
It affected me when women flirted, I couldn’t deny that. I was a healthy man with a lot of interest in a wide variety of women. I just wasn’t right for any of them and had the tendency of scaring the shit out of most of them. As my therapist liked to say, I’d seen too much cruelty to ever have it leave me. They all sensed it eventually.
The four of them came weaving over to our table. The blonde, reluctantly I noticed, but the other three were more than interested.
Mason turned on the charm and immediately got handsy with two of them. The girls giggled hysterically at whatever he was saying as I sat in my dark corner observing.
It was going to be a loud night if he dragged them home.
Jack was already all over one of the other brunettes, or she was all over him, regardless, there was more than a little touching going on.
My gaze landed on the beautiful blonde standing behind Mason’s groupies. Her eyes darted everywhere in nervousness. She wasn’t like these three at all. The tight skirt she wore was an obvious attempt to fit in, if the way she kept tugging at it was any indication. It probably wasn’t even hers. One of these women must have gotten the bright idea to dress her the way they wanted, and she wasn’t used to it at all.
Bad girls were fun for a night, but the blonde trying to find something funny about the situation and panicking, was completely fascinating to me. She was leggy, with just the right amount of curve to her hips and ample chest. Blue eyes landed on my figure nervously several times and I wondered what she thought of my open stare, or if she could even see it.
She wasn’t completely innocent if I had to guess, but she was so out of place in the seedy environment. It felt like she’d wandered in here unexpectedly and didn’t know what else to do. Something inside me made me want to shove her out the door and tell her not to come back.
I sat up out of the shadows and her eyes went to me with curiosity before she put a smirk on her face. It wasn’t a natural smile and was probably something the other three had taught her. She couldn’t have been older than twenty-four, while the others were clearly older. I felt like an old man at thirty-two, watching her face and delicate features as she tried not to fidget.
Crooking my finger at her, I motioned her forward. She came hesitantly, weighing the situation. I liked that she’d resisted briefly before surrendering to my non-verbal command. She was trying so hard to be like the others, but the goodness in her made her wary. I wondered what it would be like to have her underneath me following different commands.
“Let’s go get a drink.”
“Uhm,” she replied, as she glanced at her friends. “I don’t think…”
“Don’t think, just go with it. We’re going ten feet over there to get a drink while they get to know each other, okay?”
She swallowed and gave me another fake smirk. “Of course, sure.”
I nearly laughed. She was way too beautiful to be here. Especially with me.
Chapter Two
Alisa
I wasn’t quite sure what I was doing here with my cousin and her best friends. A night out sounded like a lot of fun initially, but it was clear since the moment we stepped in the club that I was way out of my element.
They called it a welcome home get together for me, but it was more like a bar crawl than anything else. And they were clearly bent on partying a lot more than I wanted to. When I came home from college, my cousin Monica, had been so excited to hear the news, she’d spent nearly every day at my parent’s house filling me in on what was happening in Kingston. What places had
closed, what had opened, and all the conquests she’d made in the last three years.
She thought I was way too conservative, which I was. She thought I was too naïve, which I was, and wasn’t, at the same time. She thought my lack of experience or focus on men was laughable. And so did her friends.
We travelled in separate realms now that we’d grown up from the girls that we used to be. Different lives and experiences that led us to different outcomes. Monica had attended a local college, whereas my parents had sent me to a small, private school in Connecticut. We had plenty of so called “fun” there, with nights of drinking and partying. Despite that, the focus had always been on studies in such an elite women’s college with so many competitors vying for grades and then careers beyond school.
I thought I knew what I wanted to do when I went to college. I had the best intentions of becoming a doctor, but had switched my major to social work after the first year. My parents had other ideas though, and wanted me to fall into the family business. Law wasn’t exactly my thing no matter how much they pressured me.
I graduated in May and was suddenly thrust back into the family fold with some disapproval to deal with. Hanging with Monica and her friends seemed like one of the only ways to let loose a little bit. But they were really loose and not exactly what I was used to.
And now, after two hours of welcoming me back, I was pretty tipsy, unsure if I should drink anymore given that one of us would have to drive. I wasn’t getting in the car with any of them behind the wheel. I felt like the odd person out, in my borrowed dress from Monica’s extensive closet, that was two sizes too small and way too short for me.
Then he was there, the man in the shadows that stared a hole through me as I tried to play along. When he sat up and into better lighting I thought parts of me were going to melt on the spot. Tall, athletic build, with a broad chest. Short, dark hair and the start of a beard on his face. He looked at me like I was something he owned in a way. The intent in his eyes very clear, despite the friendly smirk on his face. He looked a lot like the man that sat a little further away from him and was currently flirting with Monica and her friend. Both of whom were playfully laughing at whatever he was saying to them.
Mick_Kingston Corruption Book One Page 2
