He thought for a moment. “If you need something to keep them off-balance, you could tell them to check out that old abandoned mine on the west side of Frenchman Mountain. Some idiot thought there was gold in that hunk of rock back in the day and started a small tunnel. It doesn’t go very far in, and the entrance is pretty well concealed, but there just might be two cases of Zastava M70's hidden at the very back.”
Christie looked at him with a questioning look on her face.
“We can’t get them out anyway. A ‘competitor’ knows they are there and has a couple of men camping up in the hills waiting for us to try to move them. Shipment losses are expected in this business. A couple of cases of AK47 knockoffs aren’t worth dying for.”
He looked over at her and shrugged, “Use it if you have to. Now let’s get the hell out of here.”
“But will the club let me leave?” she asked.
Zed laughed and then in a mock Chinese accent replied, “Confucius say: ‘Sometimes it is better to beg forgiveness than to obtain permission.’” He laughed again and said, “You know, he did actually say something very much like that. And that is exactly what we have to do. I take you back and then I square it with the club afterwards. There’s only one person I have to convince for us to leave.”
With that, Zed yelled loudly, “Leroy, get in here.”
There were two loud clicks of locks opening and the gentle giant was suddenly standing in the doorway... only now he didn’t look very gentle. He was standing in a wrestler’s pose as if he were about to attack, and his face was contorted almost as if in anger.
“It’s okay, Leroy,” Zed shouted quickly. “It’s okay. I’m okay. Everything’s okay. Everything’s fine. I just need to talk to you.”
“Okay boss,” he responded, and suddenly the gentle giant was standing there, listening patiently.
“Leroy,” Zed began. “I love Christie and she loves me. We have loved each other for a long time. She has agreed to be a mole for us in her office. She will tell us everything we need to know. But in order for her to do that, I have to take her back to her bike before morning. I don’t have time to explain this to the whole club and get their permission, but if you say it is okay, I’ll do it.”
“I don’t know, boss,” Leroy answered slowly. “Some of the guys wanted to do her last night… I mean kill her... well, both, but it was ‘cause she’s a Fed. She’s a cop. They won’t like me letting her go.”
“That’s why I’m asking your permission first,” said Zed softly.
“I’ll be your drone, flying over the ATF,” Christie said. “They use drones to watch you, and now you’ll have one to watch them.”
Leroy’s smile was all the answer Christie needed.
“I’ll leave the doors unlocked,” he said. “If anyone says anything, I’ll explain it to them.”
I’ll bet you will, thought Christie.
As Leroy left the room, Zed said quickly, “Get dressed. We don’ t have much time.”
Christie suddenly realized that she had been lying there naked and uncovered the whole time. She reddened with embarrassment. When she realized that if Leroy had been just outside the door, he would have heard everything, her blush deepened even further.
***
Soon she and Zed were hurrying up the stairs and out into the back parking lot of the club. “Get on,” he said. Then he gave a slight laugh and added, “On back.” Christie’s old Zed was back.
The sky was just beginning to turn from black to purple when they reached the split in the rocks where she had first been captured. Her weapon and phone were still sitting on the large rock. The battery and bullets were still on the sandy ground beneath it.
Zed stopped a hundred yards or so away and said, “You can walk from here. That way, if you change your mind, I’ll be gone before you can get your gun put back together.”
Christie got off the back of the bike. She turned to give Zed a kiss, but he gunned the bike and, spinning gravel into the air, rapidly left. She gave a deep sigh and walked over to where this all had started—was that just hours ago?
The first thing she did was to wrap her pistol belt around her waist and place her Glock back in the holster. She did not risk putting the now sand-contaminated clip back into the weapon. That, and the loose cartridge, she put in her pocket, along with the battery from the body finder. She screwed the two pieces of the beacon back together and it went into a different pocket. The last thing she did was to pick up her cell phone and replace the battery in the case. As she walked back to the motorcycle which she had concealed a short distance away, her phone beeped and chirped several times as it rebooted.
As she was rolling her bike out of its hiding place, her phone message alert chimed indicating that she had just received a text. She unlocked the screen and tapped the message icon. A text appeared on the screen. It was from Zed and said simply, “Promise me, Christie...”
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Drink Deep, Ride Hard
Emily Stone
Sarah’s Place was a white adobe building on the highway halfway between Reno and nowhere..., and there is a lot of nowhere in Nevada. The bar wasn’t one of those fake stucco buildings built as a tourist trap back in the 1960's. Its thick walls were real old-fashioned adobe brick.
No one was quite sure when the structure was first built. The white-painted exterior walls showed a heavy influence from 1920's architecture with a double row of cap bricks that formed a rounded top in front and four massive square pillars built into the face of the building. But Sarah knew that pillars and front facade were not original. They were part of a remodeling that was done in the 20's when the place had been a speakeasy known as “Judy’s Joint.”
There were only three things about the building about which the locals were very sure: It had originally been built as a bar, it had always been a “rough place,” and it had always been owned by a woman.
Sarah didn’t know who ran it before Judy, but the stack of post-prohibition liquor licenses in a corner of the office showed that Judy sold it to Debbie and it became “Debbie’s Bar and Grill.” Debbie eventually sold to Sue and Sue to Connie, and so on through the years. It was “Rose’s Tap” when Sarah Atheron bought it eight years ago and renamed it “Sarah’s Place.”
Rose was one of those women who seemed to have stopped aging somewhere just north of 50. She had a winning smile, but was built as solidly as the building itself. She also could out-swear any truck driver on the road and cook better than their mommas. She had hired Sarah as a bartender when she was just barely old enough to legally serve drinks in the state of Nevada.
“You be nice,” Rose had instructed her on her first day behind the bar, “but don’t you take no shit from any of these sons of bitches.”
There were two baseball bats hanging behind the bar and a pump shotgun in a wooden gun rack on the back wall. “The short bat is for when you're behind the bar and somebody gets out of hand. Tap it once on the bar to get their attention." Rose tapped the bar. "Then their shoulder..." Tap. "Then their head.” Tap.
The long bat was for if you had to come out from behind the bar to break up a fight. “Use it like a spear,” Rose showed. “Swing it and you’re liable to kill somebody by accident. Plus, it’s too easy for somebody to take that sucker away from you with your arms out like that. Pop ‘em in the back or the gut with the tip of the bat and they’ll generally come to their senses. If not, get your ass back behind that bar and rack that twelve-gauge.”
The pump shotgun held five shells. The first was salt; the second was bird shot; the third was full double-ought buckshot; and the last two were deer slugs. For some reason, several portions of the ceiling near the bar had large circles that had a crystalline sparkle to them when the light was right.
There was also an old colt 45 automatic held upright under the bar just below the cash register. T
he clip was full and there was a cartridge in the chamber. “Money ain’t worth killin’ for,” Rose repeatedly told Sarah. “But it damn well ain’t worth dying for neither. If they’re armed, give ‘em the damn money and let ‘em go. But if it looks like those bastards are going do something, fire twice through the bar and at anybody who doesn’t run their ass out the door.”
Located as it was out in the middle of nowhere, the bar had been robbed on several occasions in the time that Rose had owned it. She had never resisted the gunmen... except once. For some reason the robber stopped just as he was leaving and turned to point his revolver at Rose standing by the cash register. She dropped him in the doorway with two to the chest. “Dumb son of a bitch could have had the money and been gone,” was all that she would ever say about it.
Rose taught Sarah everything she knew about running a bar and “keeping order,” as she used to call it. Then one day Rose asked Sarah if she was interested in buying the place. A year later, Rose moved out of her apartment above the bar and drove east “to see family in Chicago.”
Sarah never heard from her again, but four years later someone mailed her an obituary from a Chicago newspaper. The picture was Rose’s, and the obituary said that she had died at the age of 81 after running businesses in Nevada for many years.
Now Sarah ran the bar and lived above it. She hired a cook because her skills were more along the lines of people and liquor than burgers and eggs. Most of her clientele didn’t order the fancy mixed drinks that were normally served in Reno, but when some tourist stopped by and asked for one of those city drinks, she knew what was in it even if she didn’t necessarily have all the ingredients on hand.
Most of her orders were for beer or shots. Neither took a lot of skill. What did require skill and talent was “keeping order.” Sarah’s Place wasn’t exactly a biker bar, but the “No Colors” sign posted next to the front door was a good indication that many of her customers arrived on two wheels.
Sarah herself wasn’t affiliated, so the bar was considered neutral territory, but once or twice Sarah had been forced to add new decorations to the ceiling to encourage rival groups in the bar to back off from each other. Once, a particularly disgruntled man in the middle of a brawl turned to her and said, “I ain’t afraid of no fuckin’ salt, bitch.”
His opponents that backed away from the fight tapped him on the shoulder and said to him, “Read the damn sign above her head.”
Many years ago, Rose, or perhaps the owner before her had put up a large sign which ran the length of the wall above the mirror behind the bar. It showed five large shotgun shells with words painted on each of them in a very square, dark print. The shells said, “Salt, Bird Shot, Double-Ought, Deer Slug, Deer Slug.”
The man softened rapidly and said, “Sorry Sarah, we’ll take it outside.”
“Nah,” said one of the others. “Ain’t worth fightin’ out in the hot sun. I came here to drink anyway. We’ll settle it some other time. ... Agreed?”
Everyone who had been fighting nodded their heads in agreement and returned to their tables.
“In that case,” Sarah had said, “What can I get ya?”
Sarah hadn’t changed much other than the name when she took over the bar, but that phrase was original to her and had become her signature. Since her first day behind the bar, she greeted every customer who came through the door with a bright smile and the words, “What can I get ya?”
Over the years, it had gotten to the point where many of her regulars would pause just inside the door and wait for that smile and those words before continuing on over to a table or up to the bar itself. The top of the short-order menus even carried the words “What Can I Get You?” in fancy script at the top of the page.
***
It had been a rather slow day. It was way past midnight and rapidly approaching closing time when she heard the bike coming up the highway. For some reason the sound of his engine caught her attention even while it was a long ways away.
Lone rider. Loud pipes. Late at night... She glanced over at the shotgun and then at the .45. Maybe he was just passing by. And even if he wasn’t, a lot of people rode this highway late at night on two wheels, four wheels, or, in many cases, eighteen wheels. She heard them drive by all night from her bedroom above the bar.
Yet the sound of this engine caught--no, demanded--her attention.
Sarah caught a glimpse of herself in the bar mirror. The anxious reflection stared back at her with hair slightly out of place. She reached up with her hands to straighten it and smooth it down. Normally, the long dark hair was worn in a pony tail but tonight, for some reason, it hung loose around the shoulders. That was enough out of ordinary to make one of her more astute regulars to tease her with “You expecting somebody special tonight?”
She had laughed and answered, “Just couldn’t find my rubber bands, Dwayne, that’s all.” Actually, she had no idea why she had not secured her hair tonight.
But now...
The loud motor was slowing down, stopping.
Silence. Then came the crunch of boots on gravel. Whoever it was, he was coming in.
She looked around. The kitchen closed at midnight, so the cook was long gone. The only people in the place were herself and two of her late-night regulars who were already getting ready to leave. As they stepped out through the front door, he entered.
Though he had never before been in her bar, Sarah recognized him immediately. She had seen his picture numerous times on the evening news. The news anchors always identified him as Garrison Sloane, “president of the reckless and ruthless Red Skulls motorcycle club.”
Sarah didn’t know how reckless they were, but from conversation among other clubs who stopped at the bar, she knew he was ruthless. There had been something of a “war” several years back and things had gotten really nasty. No one, not even the news media, would talk about everything which had actually happened, but everyone agreed that the heads of the other four groups, now all deceased, had badly underestimated Garrison Sloane.
Regardless of who or what he was, when he walked through that door, he was a customer, and Sarah greeted him with her usual smile and those often spoken words, “What can I get ya?”
Garrison was surprisingly young, perhaps only a year or two older than Sarah herself from the looks of it. He wore a leather club vest over a black T-shirt and his muscular, heavily-tattooed arms were clearly visible. Unlike many of the heavily-inked men–or women who came into Sarah’s Place, his tattoos were almost mainstream. No Swastikas, lightning bolts, or any of the other awful things that Sarah could never understand why anyone would be proud of. He had the almost compulsory Harley Davidson wings on his right shoulder along with a thick snake that came from somewhere on his back and curled down his arm to just above his wrist. His left arm was entirely consumed in flames which intertwined with skulls and the faces of beautiful women of all races.
Sarah had no ink whatsoever on her body and normally was put off by body decorations of any sort, but something about Garrison’s artwork intrigued her and seemed to call to something deep within her soul.
He slowly covered the distance between the door and the bar and placed his hands on that well-worn mahogany surface. He stood smiling at her for several minutes, staring intently at her with huge brown eyes that seemed amazingly warm.
Sarah coughed slightly and then returned his smile and asked once again, “So, what can I get ya?”
His voice was also surprisingly soft and gentle, although he spoke only one word, “You.”
“I’m not on the menu, Garrison,” she answered. She had wanted her voice to sound stern and in control, but somehow it came out almost as a giggle. Sarah hadn’t giggled since she was in high school.
“Sometimes I order off the menu, Sarah,” he replied. “And my friends call me Gary.”
“You don’t seem to have any friends with you, Garrison,” Sarah, replied, picking up a rag to wipe the surface of the bar.
“Oh, I do,�
� he continued in his deep, smooth voice, “but she doesn’t know it yet.”
Sarah bristled slightly and put some heat in her voice, “Don’t you come in here thinking you can force me to be your friend.” Then, after tapping the bar with the small bat, she added, “and the sign says no colors.”
He shrugged out of the leather vest, carefully folded it to conceal the flaming red skull on the back and laid it down. “I didn’t think it’d make any difference if no one else was here.
"Besides." He continued. “I didn’t come here to force anything. That’s why I left all my regular friends back at the clubhouse. It’s just you and me. If you tell me to walk out that door, I’ll leave and fade off into the night.” He paused to let his words sink in and then added, “Your choice.”
She stood silently watching him for a long time. Finally he sighed, picked up his vest from the bar and turned to leave. He was half-way to the door when Sarah said, “Gary, wait. I’m sorry if I was a little short with you. Time of night... where we are... who you are... “
Runaway Ride: Alpha Bad Boy Biker and MC Romance Box Set Page 6
