“Or give me a medal.”
“I said he’s MINE,” Jack repeated.
“Alright. Good luck. You too, Fee.”
“Stay here,” Jack said to me.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” I asked as I pulled out my gun. “No way.”
“He’s not going to hold back, Fiona.”
“Neither am I,” I said fiercely. “He killed Ali – or at least pulled the strings. I’m going to make sure he pays for it.”
Jack shook his head. “Stubborn,” he whispered, then kissed me hard and fast.
“What was that for?” I asked when he pulled away.
“Might be the last time,” he said grimly.
“Don’t say that!”
He grinned. “Let’s go.”
“Alright,” I agreed apprehensively, and followed him into the rusting labyrinth.
171
We hadn’t gone fifty feet when I heard Lou’s voice in the darkness.
“Jaaa-aaaack,” he called out in a singsong voice. “Wasn’t very nice, interrupting my business deal like that. If you were that pissed off at me, we coulda just hammered something out on the side, man to man.”
Jack turned back, put a finger to his lips, and motioned me to go right. I stealthily headed to the other side of a rusting, silo-like tower.
Lou kept talking, his voice eerily disembodied as it carried through the gasworks. “Was that your idea or Sloane’s? Her making me think she was backing me up?”
Why the fuck is he still talking? I wondered. We can find him easier if he keeps doing that!
Then I found out why.
“Ohhh…” Lou said, as though he’d just realized the answer. “It was hers, of course. You’re too fuckin’ stupid to come up with a play like that. You’ve always been too fucking stupid.”
Now it made sense. He was trying to goad us into replying, so that he could find us.
“That’s why you lost the club… because you were too dumb to see the sucker punch coming. So you turned traitor, and took it up the ass from the DEA… because you were too stupid and weak to get the club back any other way. Fuckin’ pussy.”
My blood boiled on Jack’s account, but I didn’t say anything. I just kept moving as carefully and as quietly as I could, trying to home in on Lou’s voice.
But keeping quiet got a whole lot harder to do the angrier I got.
“And you know what I do to rats. If you don’t, ask Eddie Deacon… oh, wait, you can’t. But trust me, I took care of him reeeeaaal good, Jack. Just like I’m gonna take care of you.”
Jesus…
He was all but admitting to Eddie’s murder.
“Eddie didn’t give up your bitch, though. Not even at the very end. By the way, is your bitch here with you? And by that I mean Kade. I thought I saw Vince clip him in the gut the other day. Is he dead yet? Did he bleed out in your arms? Did the little faggot cry before he died? You know, I woulda shot you, too, but you cheated with that fuckin’ rocket launcher. Where’d you get that?”
Lou paused, as though he was just now realizing the answer.
“Jesus… Sloane, too? Can’t even wipe your own ass without her holding your hand, can you? You really fucked up on that one, Jackie boy. I don’t care how good Fiona gives head, Sloane’s ten times the woman.”
Jealousy burned in my stomach. I wanted to shout out, Oh yeah? She fucked YOU royally, scumbag, but I held my tongue.
Lou addressed it, though, with the next thing he said. “Or she was ten times the woman. Yeah, I know she double-crossed me. And she’s going to pay for it. The things I’m gonna do to her… I think I’m gonna leave her alive, though. I want her to wake up with nightmares for the next three years till she finally slits her wrists.”
My skin crawled listening to him – and it got even worse when his monologue turned to me.
“And you, Fiona… oh, I know you’re out there, too. You’re a troublesome little bitch, aren’t you? All… this… shit on your account. You learned a lot the last couple of days, but you didn’t find out everything. Your whore of a cousin? She looooved to suck my dick. You should have seen her on her knees, gagging on my cock. Then I found out she was a traitor – that’s when I got Benjy to shoot her.” He laughed evilly. “I guess you could say she took one final load, except it was in the back of her head instead of her mouth.”
I wanted to kill him. I wanted to bash his face in, to torture him, to break every bone in his body. I wanted to make him suffer for hours, for days, and only then would I kill him.
I heard Sid’s voice whispering in my earpiece: “He’s just tryin’ to get in your head, kid. Don’t listen to him.”
I know that, Sid, I thought, but I still had to clench my jaws to keep from screaming back at Lou.
“You should thank me, by the way, for putting Benjy down,” he continued. “You wouldn’t have had the balls to do it. But then, that’s obvious, ain’t it? You’re a woman. Weak… stupid… only good for one thing. Just like your cousin… she’d let anybody fuck her for a line of coke, did you know that? I can’t tell you how many times she sucked me off for drugs.”
He was closer now. All I wanted to do was find him and make him take my gun in his mouth so I could say Suck THIS before I pulled the trigger.
“A little blow for a blowjob. I’ll let you suck my cock, just like her, right before I put the gun to your head and – ”
Suddenly, he stopped talking.
I was furious. I wanted to find him so badly. I kept on stalking, searching, staring into the darkness –
Suddenly the cold muzzle of a gun pressed against the side of my head.
“Ah-ah-aaaaah,” Lou whispered.
172
I was so angry I could cry.
It was over – I was going to die right here, and the fucker who was behind Ali’s murder would walk away –
But then he surprised me: he grabbed my gun with his free hand, pocketed it, and moved behind me. With his pistol still jammed against my temple, he hooked his arm around my neck and dragged me behind one of the rusting towers.
“I’ve got a Colt .357 Magnum pointed at your bitch’s head,” he yelled into the darkness. He growled into my ear, “Tell him.”
“KILL HIM, JACK!” I screamed.
Lou choked off my breath with his forearm and laughed. Then he shouted, “Don’t try anything unless you want her to die, dumbass. Now, whoever the fuck is up on the towers, throw your gun down, too. NOW. Or I shoot her nose off her face.”
No reply. Only the steady thrum of motorcycles and helicopters in the background. Gunshots, too, but they sounded like distant firecrackers on a summer night.
“DO IT!” Lou thundered.
There was a loud clatter about two hundred feet away, the sound of wood and metal striking cement.
“Good. Now get down off that tower. And make it loud – I better hear you movin’, you son of a bitch, or Fiona here’s gonna get a fuck of a lot uglier in the next 10 seconds.”
There were hollow clanking noises – footsteps clattering down the rungs of a ladder.
“Goooood. Now I want you to run to the other side of the fuckin’ gasworks, and every ten feet, I want you to hit something metal with your sidearm. Oh, yeah, I know you’ve got another gun – so fuckin’ use it, asshole. Hit a railing or a pipe or whatever, but hit it hard so I can hear it. You better haul ass out of here, shithead, and I better hear you running, or I swear to God you won’t be able to identify her face in the morgue.”
Sid started running through the gasworks. Every three or four seconds we would hear a metallic clank – and as he got farther and farther away, the clanking sounds were more muted, quieter.
Meanwhile, Lou was forcing me up a narrow metal ramp with no rails. As we climbed higher, I felt slightly dizzy knowing that one false step could send us tumbling out into space.
As we stumbled up the ramp, Lou shouted, “And you, Jack – walk out into the middle of the gasworks. That big patch of grass. DO IT!”
/>
I could see the area Lou was talking about a hundred feet to our right. Jack edged out into it slowly, his gun pointed towards us. His worried face was dimly lit by the red and blue police lights still flashing a quarter mile away.
“Thaaaaat’s it,” Lou said. “Slowly… come out in the middle… now, drop the gun and – ”
“KILL HIM, JACK!” I screamed. “FORGET ABOUT ME – hrrk – ”
Lou choked me until I couldn’t breathe and pressed the gun harder into my temple. “You speak again without me telling you, bitch, and you’ll fuckin’ regret it. Now DROP THE FUCKIN’ GUN, JACK.”
I saw Jack’s face contort with pain and fear. Not for him, but for me. “If I do that, you’ll just shoot her.”
“I won’t. I give you my word, Jack.”
I wanted to say, Yeah, we all know what THAT’S worth, but I was afraid Lou would follow through on his earlier threat and shoot me.
Jack shook his head. “Let her go, and we’ll settle this between you and me, the way we should have from the beginning.”
“How ‘bout I kill her first, then we settle it?”
Jack looked in my eyes.
No, I pleaded silently. Don’t – DON’T –
“Take your gun away from her head first, and I’ll drop my gun,” Jack said.
Wait – what?
Was Jack trying to give me an opening? Some sort of an opportunity?
I knew Lou considered Jack – big, bad, manly biker Jack – as a far worse threat than me. And it was justified, up to a point. After all, Jack was armed, and I was a hostage with a gun to my head.
But did Lou think I was harmless now?
Apparently he did.
The cold pressure of the gun barrel lifted from my skin.
A second later Jack diverted his aim slightly, and very slowly started to hold his gun out towards the side. Jack was apparently matching Lou’s movement – inch by inch, second by second, his gun got farther and farther away from being pointed at me and Lou.
I strained to look at Lou’s gun from the corner of my eye. His pistol was at an angle now, though still only a few inches away from my head. If he fired the gun, the powder blast would surely blind me – but the bullet wouldn’t hit me.
That was enough leeway for me.
173
Everything that came next happened in less than three seconds.
I wrenched my head toward Lou’s body. Now his arm was pressed against my ear instead of being hooked under my chin.
At the same time, I bent my knees and dropped.
Ever try to hold an angry toddler and they go completely slack? It’s like holding twenty pounds of Jell-O in a plastic bag, right?
It probably felt something like that to Lou. He couldn’t hold on to me, and my head slipped out of his chokehold.
He swung his gun back to try to shoot me –
Too late.
As I dropped, I elbowed him right in the balls.
Krav Maga, bitch.
I heard Lou exhale in pain. “Oof!”
Then there was the BOOM! of a gunshot.
I flinched, expecting everything to end in a flash of light and pain –
But instead Lou’s body toppled off the ramp behind me, backwards into space.
174
Jack
I knew it was hopeless. I knew that if I threw away the gun, Lou would just shoot me first, then Fiona. Or vice versa.
Unless…
I thought back to the first time I’d seen her. She’d been a waitress in a diner, and she’d effortlessly slipped out of a sleazy trucker’s grip.
Two nights later, she’d kicked an idiot’s ass at the Seven Veils.
She was right there next to Lou; she was the only one who had a chance of getting him.
“Take the gun away from her head first, and I’ll drop my gun,” I called out.
Lou narrowed his eyes. I could see the calculations running in his head – what was I trying to pull? Was I going to try some sort of gunslinger shit on him?
Apparently he thought he could fuck me over before I could fuck him over, though, because he angled the gun barrel away from Fiona’s head – just far enough that if he pulled the trigger, the bullet wouldn’t go into her skull.
I kept my word, and aimed at a spot slightly to the right of Lou’s head.
He edged the gun farther and farther from Fiona, little by little – and I did the same, holding the gun farther and farther out to the side.
Fiona was looking at Lou’s gun out of the corner of her eye, trying to make sure she was safe.
If you’re going to do something, Fiona, do it now.
She didn’t disappoint.
She squirmed out of his grip and dropped into a squat. I think she hit him in the crotch, too, on the way down.
It threw Lou off balance. He was thinking about her now, not me, and he jerked the gun down towards her –
But my gun was already back in place.
Fiona was crouched down low, exposing Lou’s entire body above the waist.
I pulled the trigger –
BLAM!
– and Lou went toppling over the side of the ramp.
175
He hit the ground hard, flat on his back.
I ran towards him as fast as I could.
As I came up on him, I saw his eyes were open and scanning around him. He was definitely conscious.
And he was still holding his gun. His arm was flung out at his side, with the .357 clutched weakly in his hand.
I thought about putting a bullet in his head while he lay there defenseless –
But I couldn’t.
That was something he would do.
Instead I kicked his hand and sent his gun flying.
He looked up at me in surprise. His face was pale; I searched his black shirt for the gleam of moonlight on wet cloth, but couldn’t see anything.
Keeping my gun in his face, I leaned over and patted him down. I found Fiona’s gun and threw it away, then grabbed the top of his shirt and ripped it open, popping the buttons –
Motherfucker had a bulletproof vest on.
That explained a lot.
I wanted to curb stomp him – but I wouldn’t.
Suddenly he opened his mouth. The air rushed back into his lungs in a big, hissing breath.
I stuck my gun in the back of my jeans and held up my fists.
“GET UP!” I yelled. “GET UP AND FIGHT!”
“Jack, no!” Fiona screamed above me. “Just finish him!”
But I couldn’t.
Not like this.
I wanted to kill the bastard – but I wasn’t going to do it without giving him a fighting chance.
176
Lou
At first I didn’t know what had happened. It felt like I’d taken a sledgehammer to the chest, and then I was falling.
A half second later, every goddamn bit of air exploded out of my lungs as I hit the ground.
I thought I was dead for sure. I kept trying to catch my breath, but nothing fucking happened.
Suddenly my right hand felt like it got kicked, and my Colt – which I didn’t even realize I was still holding until that second – went flying out of my grasp.
Jack was standing above me, looking down at me over his gun.
The motherfucker SHOT me!
He leaned over and jammed his pistol in my face.
For a brief second, I was terrified.
This is it – this fucking piece of shit is going to –
Then he tossed Fiona’s gun and ripped my shirt open.
Apparently he saw my Kevlar vest, because he got a look like Ohhh, NOW I understand. He backed away, but still kept the gun pointed at me.
That was when the air roared back into my lungs.
As I lay there in agony, I knew he wanted to kill me – I could see it on his face – but he wasn’t doing anything about it.
Because he was a fuckin’ idiot. Thank God.
Instead, when he hea
rd me start breathing again, he tucked his gun in the back of his pants and put up his dukes like a boxer.
“GET UP!” he yelled. “GET UP AND FIGHT!”
I almost laughed.
I’d just had a motorcycle accident, got my balls punched (fucking BITCH), fallen ten feet onto the ground, got all the wind knocked out of me, not to mention that I just got fuckin’ SHOT. I was in a world of pain, and the dumbass wanted me to get up and fight.
Even funnier than that, he wanted it to be a fair fight. He didn’t just want to stomp my head into pieces. Noooo, he wanted to give me a chance.
The best thing of all?
Challenging me to a fight was about the stupidest move he could have pulled, short of giving me his gun.
Jack, Jack, you stupid sonuvabitch – haven’t you learned anything from me, ever?
“Jack, no!” Fiona screamed. “Just finish him!”
She’s ten times smarter than YOU, Jackie boy.
Knocked flat on my back… balls, back, and chest aching…
But I still had one massive advantage.
Jack would never, ever cheat.
And that’s all I do.
This was going to be fun.
177
Jack
Lou scrambled up to a kneeling position, one hand out beside him on the ground, propping him up.
“Okay, Boy Scout,” he sneered. “Let’s go.”
Suddenly he flung out the hand that had been on the ground. A cloud of sand and dirt showered my face, stinging my eyes.
Shit –
I was expecting him to tackle or punch me while I was blind, so I backed away as I wiped at my watering eyes – but I only heard him scrabbling up to a standing position.
I heard it before I saw it – the snick! of the switchblade as the blade flicked out.
“JACK, WATCH OUT!” Fiona screamed. “HE’S GOT A KNIFE!”
I saw the glint of steel just in time, and stepped back out of the way as it flashed past me.
Midnight Obsession: A Midnight Riders Motorcycle Club Romance Part 4 Page 39
