Vulnerable (Barons of Sodom)

by Blake, Abriella

  “What is it? Too much?”

  “Well, for one thing, you're foxy as hell,” her new friend whispered. “But for another—just please be careful around the boys tonight. They're going to want you, Bridie. And I don't know if you've ever been the apple of anyone's eyes before, but just remember, those men are men, and they don't play around.”

  Bridie plucked a light gray cardigan from the top of the treasure chest and slid its fabric over her shoulders. She took a long look at herself in the mirror, visibly pleased with the result. Then she turned to her caretaker. “I'm just as hard as they are, Athena.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  DET. RAMIREZ: Okay, okay, okay—here's where I begin to get confused. Even your earliest police reports indicate a kind of...well, okay, Ms. Calyer. Have you ever heard of Stockholm Syndrome?

  BRIDIE: Course I have, you patronizing horse's ass. When a kidnapped victim begins to fall in love with their captors.

  DET. RAMIREZ: I apologize for any assumption on my part. But, didn't you begin to worry, after your single day on the camp, that there was something strange about your captivity? Or, better phrased: did you feel like a victim?

  BRIDIE: Well, Detective—I won't pretend I was operating at some high, intelligent level. I woke up that morning frightened and alone, and then certain forces saw fit to send me a friend. I did a day's meaningful work, for the first time in my life—and it was difficult and interesting and that, I'll admit, I fell in love with. I really did like working with those engines. Something about 'em just made perfect sense to me. And I already told you, Athena was a peach—

  DET. RAMIREZ: But what about the other Barons? You weren't afraid of them?

  BRIDIE: I was her ward. She told me they wouldn't mess with me, and they didn't. Besides—something about the light of day, and suddenly all those greasers didn't seem so scary to me. A few of ‘em were regular old men. It was like Athena said: everyone had gone through some visible pain. I realized that day that I was no different, then, from these men—only I had the opportunity to make my toughness on the inside. Didn't need to run around intimidating people on a bike.

  DET. RAMIREZ: We'll come back to this, alright? Now I want to talk about Officer Cannon. What did you really make of him, when you first met?

  BRIDIE: Well since I'm under oath and all, my first giddy girl reaction was, “God Damn, this suit looks just like the man from the movies.” He was a stone cold fox, I'll give him that.

  DET. RAMIREZ: Ms. Calyer.

  BRIDIE: Can't apologize for hormones, officer. And I'm just being honest.

  DET. RAMIREZ: Ms. Calyer...

  BRIDIE: He didn't scare me. Seemed too goofy, somehow—too aware of himself. I didn't know whether to trust him or not, but the first thing I figured was: “here's a man who tries very hard to seem scary, and he doesn't scare me a bit.”

  DET. RAMIREZ: And what about later?

  BRIDIE: Later?

  DET. RAMIREZ: Later.

  BRIDIE: (Long pause) Well yes, Detective. He scared me later. He scared me a great deal, later.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Though he wasn't an epic drinker—nothing like Grizz, or various other Barons with reputations to protect—Tuck could typically hold his whiskey. Typically. But thanks to some combination of his own boredom (due to the lack of MC assignments) and his own lust (due to that infernal, miserable, horrible, BRIDIE), that evening seemed like a good night to get tanked. As soon as he'd slid his mustard-colored ride into the parking lot behind Dixie's, Tuck decided to settle in for a good long haul. He'd walked up to the bar and ordered two Evan Williams' neat, and knocked them both back before sitting down.

  There were some civilians lurking by the jukebox, as usual—high school girls with fake I.D.s, a few townie party animals moving into a second happy hour, all the predictable barflies—but tonight, none of them looked worth the hassle. None of them looked worth a second glance, in fact—even in the forgiving low light of the bar—or perhaps it was that no one looked beautiful to him while Bridie was out there, toiling over bike parts in the moonlight. For all his friggin luck, she and Athena were probably having some sort of sexy gal-pal pillow-fight sleepover at this very moment, while he twiddled his thumbs. The image of this sent Tuck's beleaguered-feeling member into another spasm. This, in turn, made his horny ass mad.

  “You look worn down, sugar,” drawled Penny, the bar's oldest tenant and best bartender. (Presumably, the original Dixie had never existed.) She slipped another finger of Evan Williams into Tuck's already thrice-drained glass. “Wanna tell mama where it hurts?” Penny had a whiff of the Old West about her, which made Tuck—and presumably, all her other clients—feel a bit like cowboys. She wore garter belts and fishnets and low, taffeta dresses. Her kinky hair was always wrapped up into dozens and dozens of microbraids, but these she situated on her head into elegant pompadours. She was certainly an older woman, but because she kept herself in such high spirits, one couldn't say easily just how old. Forty-five, perhaps? Sixty? The Barons had a pool going.

  “Girl trouble?” Penny winked.

  “Now what would make you say that, Ms. P?”

  “I can always tell,” the bartender said, sauntering down the bar towards a few new customers. Tuck watched her ass as she traveled, but again, any pleasing part of a woman only served to remind him of Bridie.

  “How do you know when—” Tuck started, but then he stopped himself. The question suddenly seemed too stupid to utter out loud. The club was reaching peak hours—which didn't say much, considering the dive-y quality of Dixie's—but he still couldn't risk the idea of someone overhearing him making sappy chit-chat with the bartender. What was he, some kind of suburban bank teller? Somebody's father, with a lawn to mow and taxes to pay?

  “I've been professionally unsatisfied for the past few weeks,” Tuck said instead, pondering the empty bottom of his glass once more. “Barons just haven't had much to do. Guess there's not much scandal in Waco.”

  Penny cocked an eyebrow down the bar. “Guess you haven't been reading the paper, hoss.” With a flick of her elegant wrist, the bartender tossed a daily onto the bar. The paper, dated today, had a headline that ran: Investigation into Trailer Park Murders Continues.

  “I already read about this. It's old news.”

  Penny raised her eyebrows. “Look further down.”

  “Local Police May Have Botched Murder Investigation, FBI Says,” Tuck read aloud. His whiskey-addled mind lurched slowly toward the words' meaning, but Penny's arch glance helped him along. “Luckily my district is under Barons' jurisdiction,” she said. “Can't trust a damned nobody anymore, seems like.”

  A bar back emerged from the kitchen with a question and whisked a tutting Penny away.

  Tuck gripped the sides of the newspaper for a moment, letting his eyes skim the pertinent details. There was a picture of the murder victims—a man with the chin of a matinee idol, and a tweaked-out older woman with crazy braids going every which way. The woman was no longer beautiful, but something about her sad smile suggested she once had been. In fact, something about her sad smile was eerily familiar...

  Stumbling further down the page, Tuck's gaze caught on certain phrases: “suspected drug ring”...“the deceased leaves behind a loving niece”...“young girl, aged eighteen”...“now reported missing.”

  Tuck folded the paper over and jammed its pages into the back pocket of his jeans. So what, he told himself. No big surprise that Bridie was connected to the recent murders, or that the Waco police were slightly crooked. The whole piece looked like speculation, anyway—likely some second-tier reporter scraping the barrel for secondhand news.

  And yet—there had been something fishy about God's connection to the police officer the night before, when Bridie had arrived at camp. In fact, the whole Bridie thing seemed like too much of a coincidence. But what did anyone have to gain, covering up a murder or botching an investigation? The Barons were relatively new to Waco, and Lord knew none of them were pokin
g their heads into any funny business; whatever enemies the club had made so far couldn't run deep. Tuck shook his head, once, twice—then he resolved to think about the whole mess later, when his head was clear.

  “Is this seat taken?” drawled a woman's voice behind him—her voice slightly familiar, riding just this side of a giggle. Tuck turned—slightly too fast—on his teetering stool, and drank in the strange sight of Athena Sark in her Sunday finery. She wore a black leather jacket (likely swiped from her friend's personal stash), a snug black skirt, and a low tube top patterned over in dark maroon shapes. While he usually elected to overlook his best friends' sex appeal, her magnificent breasts looked full in the tight fabric. He lurched toward them, instinctively.

  “Ho ho, cowboy,” Athena laughed. “Someone's drunk. Better look sharp before the rest of the Barons get here.” She righted him on his stool, and neatly pushed the whiskey glass out of his reach. “Oh, Penny? How about a water on aisle three?”

  But as Athena attended to his hydration needs, Tuck felt all his senses sharpen and hone in on a new figure: Bridie, Baby, looking every inch the woman of his jukebox dreams. She wore a light shimmer of red make-up on the apples of her cheeks and the full thrust of her lips. Her body was snug and sleek-looking in a black dress designed to kill. The cloth swished about her hips, fell smooth over her ass, and stopped just short of the knees. When she turned her head to look his way, Tuck saw the girl in slow motion: he watched first the swish of her raven hair, before his gaze moved across the contours of her sweet, smart face. The glinting fierceness in her eyes. The prominent arch of her collarbones, the elegant fan of her cleavage. Athena was lovely, but she wasn't beautiful like this. It seemed to Tuck that no woman was. And he'd never, ever wanted a woman so much.

  “Want me to wipe that drool off your chin, sugar?” teased Miss Penny. Snapping back to earth, Tuck realized he was staring—creepily, from the vantage of a barstool. Athena wore a look of burnt disappointment; he caught a glimpse of deep pain. Well, it wasn't as if he could help it. Didn't all the books and movies say that when you knew something was for real, you just knew?

  Bridie, impossible, gorgeous Bridie, sauntered toward the bar, already looking more like a woman than she had the day before. The girl plopped down on the vacant stool just beside Tuck—visibly surprising Athena, who had hovered over the seat moments before.

  “What's everyone drinking?” the girl asked, her voice impish. Though Penny wasn't one to abide by the state drinking law, she rolled her eyes slightly.

  “Let's start with sodas for all, and see where we go,” she murmured. But she winked at Tuck.

  Athena—bless her heart—got the clue. “Tuck, give me a quarter? I'll put on some music before the rest of the Slayer fan club arrives.”

  The jukebox. The jukebox just made him think of her nipple in his mouth, the miraculous content of his dreams. Yet here they were...Bridie and he, side by side on barstools. Tuck knew he was supposed to say something, but what?

  “Hey, doll,” he tried.

  Bridie just smirked. He studied the curve of her lips, in search of some sign of mutual attraction—that is, until his gaze ambled south. Her breasts looked firm and lovely in whatever dress Athena'd lent her. Her arms were thin, but muscular. Her long hair was swept away from her face, falling so far down her back it grazed the top of her ass.

  “Doll? Is that the best you got?”

  From behind the bar, Penny snorted. Wordlessly, she poured a tall amount of Jameson into a glass and nudged it toward the newbie. Something about this made Tuck furious—the insolence of it. While ten other townies vied for his attention, this one little tough bird thought she could play coy with a LaRouche? He reminded himself that he was too old to play games. But just as he framed some snippy retort, Athena's jukebox selection began to pour out of the speakers. It was the opening riff to Joe Walsh's Life's Been Good.

  “Oh, I love this one,” Bridie said then, and proceeded to close her eyes and sway to and fro. “My Maserati goes 185...”

  “This one seems a little before your time, kid,” Tuck laughed. Yet, she looked so earnest, dancing with her eyes closed. It made his heart ache.

  “I lost my license, and now I don't drive...I've got a radio, don't I?”

  “I don't know what the hell you've got.”

  This remark seemed to startle the girl back into reality. She gripped the edge of the bar firmly for support, and Tuck watched a flicker of something—pain? Fear?—dance across her vision. It was hard to remember for some reason: the circumstances of Bridie's arrival were shrouded in tragedy. She had, of course, lost everything she “got.” Maybe everything and everyone, and all so recently.

  “I'm sorry,” Tuck found himself saying sheepishly, though he regretted the words as soon they'd left his mouth. He summoned the Barons' Code to the front of his memory: to ride was to always demonstrate strength. To be on the wire was life. He recalled that he'd seen enough blood and pain of his own to know that no pussy was good enough to lead him from this path. And fuck her perfect breasts, her sweet little smile.

  Bridie looked at Tuck with a plaintive gaze, as if she were about to say something. By the jukebox, Athena swayed like a crooner. What if I kissed her now, Tuck thought, his tune changing again. He'd kiss her good and hard, he'd give her the kind of kiss a backwood barbie wouldn't have experienced yet. He loved the vision of this—startling that big, dumb look off her baby face. Bridie on her knees, begging for him. Yes, exactly. This wasn't love, what he was feeling—it was merely lust. It was hard to remember. He could still claim this girl, as he'd intended to only the day before. And he wouldn't be compromising any shred of dignity or power, were he to take her like a man was meant to take his reward...

  Just then, the swinging doors of Dixie's opened and a slew of Barons pushed their way into the bar. Grizz and Spivey led the charge, looking already three sheets to the wind. Yak—who grew especially sullen when he was drunk—slouched behind them. Hearing Joe Walsh on the tinny speakers, the gang began a mismatched a capella rendering of Bridie's favorite song.

  “Your boys sure know how to run a ruckus,” the girl said—and it was like a little window had shut. The slice of vulnerability that had appeared in her gaze was now utterly gone, replaced with that nascent mechanic's toughness. Smiling tightly, Bridie knocked back her double pour of Jame-o and stood to join Athena in the corner. Tuck put his head in his hands.

  The mood of Dixie's changed with the arrival of a mess of Barons. The townie girls grew more brazen, beginning to shout their conversations over the small space. Spivey and Buck each grabbed a woman as if from the ether, pulling them into a messy square dance. Penny seemed to retreat into Jaded Bartender mode, pausing less for conversations with her patrons. It was a rumpus, alright.

  Yak rolled toward the now-vacant spot at the bar and began to yammer away about some big plan for the club (Yak always seemed to have some big plan for the club...), and soon the promise of a solitary evening at the bar had faded away. Now this was just like any other night. Except for the new girl, the intermittent angel—changing the very feel of the air one minute, vanishing the next. Tuck contemplated the bottom of his glass while Penny raised an eyebrow in judgment over the bar.

  “T-Pain, dear. You seem distraught. Why don't you mosey on home?”

  No sooner had Penny confiscated Tuck's glass then there came a series of noises from the parking lot—so quickly in succession that it was hard to tell whether they indicated violence or joy. The slamming of a car door, the sound of screams, a loud bang...after a collective beat of confusion, the Barons rushed out into the stale Texas night. Tuck, wobbling, was the last to rush after them.

  “Oh my GOD!” Bridie screamed.

  The first thing he saw was the young ward, huddled over a fallen body. Athena stood over her, gripping her by the shoulders and squinting around the lot.

  “What happened? Who saw?” cried Spivey, his voice flinty and commanding as was typical. A few club-members thoug
ht quickly and began to case the perimeter of the parking lot, knives out. Tuck struggled for clarity behind his whiskey haze. He thought he saw the shadowy shape of a figure running into the dark field beyond the bar—but he couldn't be sure.

  “Jesus, Tuck. Don't just stand there. Take her inside, won't you?” called Athena, from where she still huddled over Bridie. The little one seemed rooted to her spot over the victim, who Tuck saw now was either dead already or mortally wounded. A lone ambulance cry rang out in the distance, puncturing the night. He lurched toward the person on the ground, toward Bridie.

  “I don't recognize him,” Athena murmured for his benefit, still rubbing Bridie's back with comforting strokes. “Bridie? Who is this man?”

  It was hard to tell. A neat gunshot—looked like a sniper's shot, in fact—had landed squarely in the center of the victim's forehead. His eyes were open, stunned, blue but lightless. Sandy hair, freckles. A young man. But skinny, practically gaunt. Bending low, Tuck noted a plodding path of track-marks up and down his right arm.

  “Bridie?” Athena asked again. “Who was he?”

  “Looks like a no-good dope fiend to me,” piped Spivey, who had appeared at the little gathering. “Probably owed someone money.”

  “But he doesn't look tortured or nothing.”

  The ambulance was getting closer. Tuck understood then that time was of the essence. He bent low, and with fumbling hands rooted through the dead man's pockets.

  “What the fuck are you doing, Lieutenant? You want us all to go to jail?!”

  Finding a cardboard wallet, Tuck nimbly moved his fingers through a crumpled folio of photobooth pictures—a baby, a Husky puppy, a woman with braids in her hair and crooked teeth. He slid the picture gently from its slot, then proceeded to wipe down the folio with the back of his handkerchief.