“I can—” I start to offer to help, and she screams so loud I jump out of my skin. It’s a horrible scream, and all my muscles leap to fight whatever it is that’s scared the ever-loving-shit out of this woman.
She drops the box and glass bottles shatter. She keeps screaming, and she drops to the floor and scrabbles under the bottom shelf, shoving herself in as far in as she can get. The shelf sways, bottles fall, and the screaming won’t stop.
I don’t know what to do. I’m frozen in place.
She jerks her knees to her chest to protect her belly, throwing her arms over head. Footsteps come charging down the hall. I raise my fists, prepare to defend myself. I’m about to get a beating, but I don’t blame ’em. If I heard this screaming, I would stomp the shit out of whatever was causin’ it just to make it stop.
“Crista—” I start to tell her to not be scared, but you can’t hear anything over her screams and my brothers’ shouts. A half dozen of them careen to a halt behind me. I’m expecting someone to slam me into a wall at any second.
Instead, Wall hollers, “It’s only Crista.”
“Fuck. Again?” Creech bitches.
“I was gettin’ my dick sucked.” I’m about to punch Bucky’s face flat when Annie elbows through the crowd and shoves past me.
“Back the fuck off, assholes. You know the drill.” She sweeps aside some glass with her foot as she goes to squat next to Crista. “Crista. Crista!”
All the brothers kind of wander off back to the main room. Wall claps me on the back.
The screams trail off.
I walk closer. Crista’s got herself wedged almost flush to the wall.
Annie waves a hand behind her for me to stop where I’m at. “You’re in the clubhouse storage room, Crista. Let’s get grounded.” She snorts. “I guess you already have that covered. Let’s breathe now. In and out. In and out.”
There’s silence, an unnerving, horrible silence, and then I hear Crista breathing. Something inside me loosens.
“Annie, is she okay?”
“What the fuck do you think?” Annie glares at me. “Why don’t you go back to heavy petting Angel at the bar.”
“I didn’t—I didn’t mean to scare her. I wasn’t tryin’ to sneak up or anything. Is—Is she okay?”
Annie sighs. “She’ll be fine. This happens sometimes. Not so much anymore, but…It wasn’t your fault. Will you fuck off now?”
“What can I do?” She’s curled up so tight under there, and there’s so much glass. Memories of the gas station flicker in my mind, but I tamp that shit down.
“You can fuck off.” Annie looks around, finds a piece of folded cardboard, and sets it in front of her so she can kneel. She reaches out to stroke Crista’s hair. “Step five, girlfriend. What do you smell?”
There’s a faint mumble from under the shelves that I can’t make out.
Annie huffs a laugh. “That’s right. Whiskey. Smells like whiskey up in here. What do you hear?”
“Do you want me to help her out of there?” I squat so I’m on level.
“No. I want you to fuck off. Crista wants you to fuck off.” Annie turns to face me. “Listen, I get that you care, but you need to go. She doesn’t want you here. Shit, she doesn’t want me here. Just go. She’ll be fine.”
I get it, and it kills me. Takes me back to that day at the SCI Wayne visiting room. The week before, when I’d gotten jumped by five lifers in the yard. The guard had been conveniently checking his watch. I spent seventy-two hours in the SHU off of that, and I wasn’t thinkin’ too clear when Crista came.
I remember bein’ scared as shit that another inmate would figure out who she was to me, but worse than that, I couldn’t stand her seeing my fucked-up face and knowing how weak I was. I didn’t want to see her face when she realized that what I done didn’t leave her safe. It left her alone.
When it came down to it, the shame was stronger than anything else. Took years for me to come to grips with that.
So I nod to Annie and back off. Make my way back to the main room where everyone is playin’ pool or shooting darts as if nothing happened. The big meeting must have broken up cause Harper’s hanging with Angel now at the bar. I go to retrieve my beer.
“She okay?” Angel asks.
I grunt.
Harper reaches over the bar and grabs herself a bottle of vodka. She sets to prying the liquor pourer from the top.
“I thought you were gonna come back and little Crista was gonna pull herself together.” Harper raises an eyebrow. She’s in her lawyer suit. Looks uncomfortable.
“You slumming it?” I change the subject. I’ve known Harper Ruth all my life. She’s a bitch; you can’t take it personal.
“Why? You think you’re not good enough for me?” Harper tips the bottle back, doesn’t even pause to swallow. Damn. “I’m not with Charge anymore. We could test it out. See where the chemistry between us leads.”
“There’s no chemistry.” I reach behind the bar, grab a glass, and set it in front of her. She ignores it and continues to chug from the bottle. She’s always been hard, but there’s an edge to her now. A bitterness. “Besides, I heard you’re with Des Wade, now.”
Harper laughs, but it don’t sound happy. “Yeah. He’s slumming it, too.”
“Why you so mad, Harper?” She broke things off with Charge a few months back, and he’s moved on to a sweet young thing with a kid. I don’t know what’s goin’ on—I’m nowhere near in the loop—but as I understand it, the split was her call.
“I’m fine, Scrap Allenbach. You worry about your dysfunctional girlfriend. This doesn’t seem to be working out the way everyone thought it would.”
“Yeah? And how did everyone think it’d go?” I fucking know better than to get pulled into her bullshit, but I’ve still got Crista’s screams ringing in my ears, and honestly, I’m at a loss.
“I don’t know. You’d come home and Crista would stop clinging so hard to being the victim. Maybe she’d throw the man who did a dime for her fat ass a bone. Look him in the eye and speak to him, maybe? Pull her head out of her ass.” Harper shrugs.
I clench my fists. I know better than to take her bait, but if she was a man, she’d be missin’ teeth.
“You’re a cold bitch, Harper.”
“I know.” She pats my hand as she takes another long swig. “And you’re barking up the wrong tree. There’s no happy ever after back there.” Harper nods toward the storage room. “Only an opportunity for you to make shit even worse. Steer clear, Scrap. Keep your nose clean. Don’t make all the time I spent getting your ass out early a waste of time.”
◆◆◆
I guess I’m the only man in The White Van who’d rather be anywhere else. It ain’t the place itself. It’s nice enough for a strip club, or dark enough so that the dirt don’t show.
The dancers are hot, especially Story, the blonde shakin’ her ass on stage right now to “Sweet Caroline.” Unusual choice for a song, but it’s a crowd pleaser. Nickel’s in a doorway staring at her like he wants to either eat her or cover her up, so maybe I ain’t totally alone in my misery.
Hell, I really shouldn’t be bitchin’ considering the women are all buyin’ me drinks. Still, it ain’t the place I want to be.
I want to hang with my brothers, though, and it’s either the clubhouse or here. And after the other night…I’m gonna need a minute to grow my balls back enough to see Crista again. And I hate to admit it, but Harper got in my head.
That picture I had in my head? Of Crista Holt in a pretty dress, snakin’ her arms around me while we ride off on the back of my bike? That first night, I knew it was unlikely, but every day since drives home that I been survivin’ on pure fantasy. The episode in the storage room put the last nail in the coffin.
What kept me goin’ for ten years ain’t nothin’ but a bullshit fairy tale I was tellin’ myself to get through the day.
That’s some sobering shit to come to terms with. Enough to turn you indifferent in a strip c
lub.
“Ready for another?” Cue pours me another shot before I can answer.
This round here’s gonna be on Heavy. He plopped his gargantuan ass next to mine about a few minutes ago, chasin’ off the pussy. The ladies want to fuss over me since I been gone so long. It’s some fuckin’ shit to have all these women want you, all except the one you want.
Heavy clinks his glass against mine. “Slainte.”
“If you say so, brother.” I take a sip.
Heavy chuckles. “It’s Irish. It means: good health.”
“My health ain’t my problem.”
“No. Guess it’s not.” Heavy swings so he’s facing the club, leans back with his elbows on the bar, and surveys the scene. He’s always on watch, this one. Even when we was young bucks together, he always sat back and took it all in. “You want me to talk to her?”
“What would you say?” I don’t like the idea. It ain’t his place, but he’s my president, and my brother besides. I’ll hear him out before I tell him to mind his own fuckin’ business.
He sighs. “I don’t know, man.” He keeps scanning the room, considering the naked chicks and the clientele the same. That’s Heavy. So above it all he’s hardly human. “I don’t want you to feel like you can’t hang at your own clubhouse.”
“That ain’t what this is.”
Heavy goes on like I didn’t speak. “I don’t want to take the bar from her.”
“Don’t want you to.” I wouldn’t let him. Crista’s safest there. I’d go nomad before I let them push her out.
“It’s on me, you know. What happened back then.” Heavy sniffs. It’s a habit he has.
“It’s was on Inch Johnson.” I spit the bastard’s name.
Maybe I should feel guilt for taking a man’s life, but I never have. For the parole hearing, Harper had to coach me. She wrote me a script to memorize about how sorry I am for the Johnson family’s loss. I could say that, I could even mean it, but there was no way I could have said I was sorry for what I done.
“Inch Johnson was getting revenge for Dutchy. Dutchy was on me.” Heavy has always owned that, but I was at church when we called chaos. It was a unanimous decision.
“Dutchy took a baseball bat to Hobs’ head.”
“And Dutchy did it ‘cause Pops got Stones and Knocker sent upstate.”
Shit. It all goes back to that fuck up, don’t it?
“Man, the blown job was almost twenty years ago. We were kids back then. You can’t take on the burden of shit that went down way before our time.”
“All I’m sayin’ is Crista paid for what I did. I know this. Even if she weren’t Pig Iron’s kid, she’d still be Steel Bones.”
It’s pissin’ me off, him talking about her like this. Like he can make decisions about her. Like she ain’t mine. I’m shit out of ideas at the moment for how I’m gonna turn this clusterfuck around, but it don’t change basic facts.
“I ain’t asked you to do nothin’.”
Heavy exhales, props the heel of his boot on the stool. “I know, I know. There’s just been a lot of shit talk. You don’t come around the clubhouse except to crash, brothers see it as Crista drove you off. Crista is family and all, but you did a dime for her. Your brothers love you. They wanna see you around. They wanna have your back.”
“They don’t need to.”
“Some of the women. They know she freaked out at you. Gave you the cold shoulder. They think it ain’t right, and they ain’t known for keepin’ their mouths shut. Or their hands to themselves.”
“Ain’t their business.”
“I could find her a job here. Or I could set her up with something she could do at home. Paperwork.”
“Fuck, no.” The blood’s rushed to my head at this point. I can feel the pulse points in my temple throb, the vein that pops when I’m getting reading to fight. “Crista ain’t workin’ around a bunch of dick-strokin’ pervs. And as I understand, she sure as shit don’t need to spend more time in her place.”
Heavy raises a hand like whoa, but I ain’t done. “And anyone who wants to talk shit can come and talk to my face. People wanna talk? I got some questions. You. Pig Iron. Nickel. Forty. Charge. Creech. Gus. Big George. Shit, even Boots came to visit me upstate. No one ever tells me Crista’s fucked up?”
“She ain’t fucked up.”
“Bullshit. I seen it, brother. She got startled, and she lost her shit. And the way Annie was on it, the way the brothers reacted? That wasn’t a one-off. That shit’s got to be happening all the fuckin’ time.”
Heavy at least has the decency to look away. “Way less now than before.”
“What the fuck was that?”
“Flashback. She had them a lot at first. Now she can go four, five months sometimes.”
“Four or five months?” There’s a stone in my gut. “What else? You need to tell me now, man.”
“What do you want to know?”
Everything. How does he not understand this? I thought I knew. I had this picture of her happy and healthy. Fuck, I was in love with that picture. It got me through. And to find out it was bullshit?
“I’ll tell you what. I’m gonna ask you the same thing I did every time you came up, and this time, you’re gonna tell me the whole fucking truth. How is Crista?”
Heavy gets real still. I’ll never know how a man so big and shaggy can go so motionless. He’s like a mountain, kind of looms over mortal men.
“At first, it was real bad. She was in a lot of pain. She got addicted to the pain meds. Pig Iron had to wean her off the hard way.”
“The hard way?”
“Cold turkey up at my cabin.”
My gut knots.
“There were a few surgeries. They’d think she was all better, and something would come up. Intestinal obstructions. Shit like that. She got real skinny.”
“She ain’t skinny now.”
Heavy raises an eyebrow.
“It ain’t a complaint.” It’s not. I love how she can’t hide her curves, even though she tries.
“She got agoraphobic for a while. She’d only leave the house with Deb or Pig Iron. Then, as Deb tells it, one day they stop for gas on the way back from a doctor’s appointment, she flips the fuck out, and then after that, she says she wants a gun.”
“What set her off?”
Heavy shrugs. “Who could say? Pig Iron took her up to Liberty Arms.”
I nod. Nice choice. “What he get her?”
“A Beretta.”
“An M9?”
“A Nano. Better for concealed carry.”
“Somebody taught her how to shoot?”
“Deb did. Out back of the clubhouse.”
“She a good shot?”
“Almost as good as Deb.”
“And you couldn’t tell me all this?”
Heavy sighs. “It was like one step forward, one step back. Pig Iron gets her moved into the apartment above his garage, and she don’t come out for a month. She starts workin’ the bar, she beats the shit out of a hang around. Pulls a knife on him. She was gonna do him, too. Right there on the floor. Wall had to haul her off his ass.”
“What’d the guy do?”
“He was drunk, and he bumped into her on the way to the john. Ran his mouth before he thought better of it. The whole club heard.”
“She beat the shit out of him?”
“Not like we weren’t gonna back her play. She’s Steel Bones. He was a fuckin’ hang around.” Heavy shrugs. “I guess we was thinkin’ it might help her work some shit out.”
“Did it?”
“I mean, not really, but it saved us the mistake of makin’ the guy a prospect. He had fifty pounds on her, and he couldn’t handle himself worth shit.”
“Why didn’t you tell me this shit?”
“We told you about her.”
I shake my head. “Big George, when he come up, he always told me about her car. First how she was tryin’ to decide between a Charger and a Mustang. You know we talked the whole t
ime during visiting hour about whether eight more horsepower makes a fuckin’ difference?”
“I would’ve gotten the Charger.”
“Me, too, but apparently George got a deal on a pre-owned GT that she liked.”
Heavy blinks, waitin’ for me to get to the point.
“Every time George visits, he’s tellin’ me about that Mustang, and all the things he’s tellin’ her to do with it, and how she don’t care about nothin’ except steering wheel covers and vanity tag holders.”
I shake my head, knock my glass on the bar for a refill.
“Ten years of talkin’ about cars, and not once did he mention that Crista’s too scared to drive anywhere but home and work.”
“No one wanted to make it harder on you.”
“How about Charge? That fucker was up there every week when he wasn’t locked up himself. He told me the color of every fuckin’ tile and countertop and wall and carpet in that fancy mansion Harper bought, but he couldn’t mention that Crista Holt’s apparently been wearin’ the same hoodie and jeans day after day?”
“I think she’s got a few pairs. Ain’t just the one.”
I want to be pissed. I want to get mad enough to fight, but it’s all so fucking sad.
“I don’t know what to do, man. I know it’s my own fault. I told her don’t come up. I was happy to let you all bullshit me. But what do I do now?”
“She ain’t the same, man. No one would be after what she went through.”
“She still mine. However she is now.”
Heavy lays his hand on my shoulder, and the pressure is love and regret. “I don’t think she can be, my brother.”
I can hear that he means his words. My stomach sours.
“We got to figure out a way to move forward. You belong at the clubhouse. So does she. And the shit talk ain’t gonna help the situation none. Deb’s gonna end up crackin’ a sweetbutt's skull.”
“That’s an easy solution. Someone says shit, send them my way.”
“You gonna take the sweetbutts out back to the fire ring and go twelve rounds?”
“Shit. I ain’t lastin’ no twelve rounds against no sweetbutt and you know it. Them bitches are brutal.”
Scrap: A Steel Bones Motorcycle Club Romance Page 8
