Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
HOUSE OF PAINE
More By Kylie Walker
Subscribe & Stalk Kylie!
ASA
Black Skulls MC
By:
KYLIE WALKER
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Copyright © 2017 By: Kylie Walker
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance of characters to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. Kylie Walker holds exclusive rights to this work. Unauthorized duplication is prohibited.
Chapter One
“What the hell do you mean you aren’t at the construction site?” Harry Walsh, the Editor-in-Chief of the Las Vegas Post, barked in her ear, his gruff and highly irritated tone coming sharply through her iPhone.
“Why do you think I sent you down to Death Falls, for fuck’s sake?”
Samantha knew exactly why he had sent her thirty miles south of Sin City to a rural desert town where vultures and buzzards outnumbered humans. It had nothing to do with waiting patiently to ask questions at the end of a press conference — that’s not how a real reporter got real answers. Harry wanted a story. He wanted her to dig until she found the truth. Or rather he wanted his top crime journalist on this one.
Samantha wasn’t his first choice, not by a long shot. But after years of slogging through drafting fluff articles for the Arts & Entertainment section, or worse, Health & Beauty, or even worse, Dating & Relationships, she had finally marched into Harry Walsh’s oak furnished corner office, slammed the door, held her head high, and asserted, demanded, no insisted that enough was enough. Her time was now. She wanted the Johnny Fox story and she wasn’t prepared to leave his office without it.
Bemused, Harry had snorted his gulp of coffee back into his mug, blotted his mustache, and after studying her determined expression for an uncomfortable moment asked her who she thought she was. “Samantha Wilde!” she had yelled with a little frustrated stomp. “And I didn’t claw my way up from the mailroom to write two hundred words a week about blemish concealer or why Goldie Hawn has aged well!”
When Harry told her to calm down, she immediately launched into a surprisingly well-worded diatribe about Johnny Fox. She knew his entire back story as well as that of the Black Skulls motorcycle gang of which he had been an integral member. She knew that his sudden and mysterious disappearance ten years ago had never added up to the rumors the club had put out about him taking off because he wanted a new life. Now that the body had been found underneath the construction site someone finally had a place to start getting some answers, and that someone was going to be her. “Fox obviously betrayed the Black Skulls and they took care of him!”
It was an argument that had both intrigued Harry and won him over, and as she now stood in front of her Prius in the desert heat and watched tumbleweeds bounce lazily between Boone & Boone Garage and a bar called Poison, Samantha dared to make the exact same argument, restating her case. “The only way to get to the bottom of this story and find out who killed Johnny Fox ten years ago is to charge headlong and guns blazing into the Black Skull’s clubhouse!”
“Guns blazing?” he questioned.
Samantha glanced down the tight and perky length of herself and was immediately confronted with a milky plume of cleavage where her black leather, lace-up bodice was squeezing her to sultry perfection. Not guns exactly…
“Something like that,” she allowed before returning her eyes to Boone & Boone Garage where dirty rock music was billowing out into the hot afternoon. The auto shop was dark but she had seen movement in the shadows within. She was just preparing herself to venture inside when Harry called and interrupted her. “I’ll let you know as soon as I have anything,” she assured him.
“You need to get your ass over to Conway Contractors now,” he corrected without even pretending to be polite. “I want you covering every inch of that construction site, God damn it. I want you so close to the God damn body that you’re able to bang out two hundred words on the stench alone, do you hear me? Every other reporter within five hundred miles is probably already there, sucking it up.”
“The remains of Johnny Fox are skeletal. There won’t be a stench,” she smartly corrected. The only reason they even suspected the remains were Johnny’s was a cell phone that had been found with the body. That fact Samantha knew was thanks to her contact at the police department. They hadn’t released it to the public. As far as the ‘body’ went, watching them extract the bones wasn’t going to help her get any kind of story. She needed flesh and blood for that and she was looking at a shop full of it.
“Samantha!”
“I get it,” she grumbled beneath her breath.
“What was that?”
“Harry, you’re going to have to trust me!”
“If I wanted to trust you, I would have kept you writing about the risks of penile implants! I don’t trust you for-”
“Hanging up now!” she sang cheerfully before slipping her iPhone into the barely-breathing back pocket of her insanely snug leather pants.
Samantha wasn’t a plump girl by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, she was fit as a fiddle and boasted only modest curves in all the right places on her lanky 5’6” frame—a shy B cup, toned stomach, and bubble butt that she rarely dressed to accentuate. As thin as she was, however, earlier that morning she hadn’t so much put her pants on one leg at a time but rather pour herself into them, twisting and writhing and sweating until she’d wrestled the stubborn zipper up. The bodice was no better, and the heels hurt like hell—black stiletto-heeled boots—but she looked like walking sex and that’s what she was going for.
She made a damn stunning biker chick even if she said so herself.
Samantha knew that there would be no better way to coax the Black Skulls into divulging what had really happened to Johnny Fox ten years ago than to walk their walk and talk their talk and dangle the elusive possibility of a feisty romp just out of reach all the while... That is if she could corner the right biker, someone high up on the food chain, someone who would know fact from fiction.
It was hotter than hell out, that was for damn sure, but as slick as the back of her neck felt, she fought the urge to sweep her shoulder length, strawberry blonde hair up into a bun. Wild, sweaty strands were sexy. A librarian bun certainly would not be. Reminding herself that she had left Journalist Samantha back in Las Vegas and while in Death Falls, she would be Ms. Wilde, she urged herself to quit stalling and get this done. She took in a deep breath of the thick, sweltering air and told herself, “One foot in front of the other.” That was actually easier said than done in those ridiculously high heels, but she forced herself onward. Swaying her hips and tossing her long blonde hair she neared the expansive auto shop, trying hard to control her breathing as she did. She had to step through and around lines of cars and trucks with their hoods propped up and mechanics working above and beneath them.
If Samantha was intimidated it wasn’t because entering a testosterone den looking like a twenty-buck h
ooker gave her pause. She wasn’t the biggest fan of being leered at and ogled, but she could handle it. Her heart was punching up her throat as she stepped out of the scalding, desert sun and into the gasoline-scented shadows, and it had everything to do with the company she was now joining. This wasn’t just a garage full of mechanics. This was a garage full of men that belonged to one of the most dangerous MC clubs in history. It was also not a club that you wanted to fuck with, for any reason. Samantha knew she was taking her life in her hands but she was young enough and perhaps naïve enough to believe the success she would achieve if she could pull this off and it would be worth it.
Once in the doorway she cleared her throat and transformed the nervous grimace she knew decorated her face, into a smile that she had used in the past to charm some of the nastiest snakes. She hoped it would work on the skulls as well. She jutted her hip out and locked eyes with a greasy-looking, forty-year-old, balding biker whose beer belly hung over his waistband. She focused on him on purpose. There were at least five other men in the garage…all hot, sweaty, tattoo and muscle. She wasn’t sure her cool and easy demeanor would hold up against one of them. The middle-aged man was safe. “Hi there.”
The fat guy narrowed his steely gaze on her as he polished some kind of tool on his stained undershirt. Out of her peripheral vision, she could see another mechanic, with piercing blue eyes begin to stalk toward her. The other men closed in as well and she thought she may have even heard a whistle.
“Are you lost?” one of the big men asked. Samantha looked at him with her big green eyes that she hoped looked innocent and as someone stopped the loud music she said, “An oil change would be real nice, thanks so much. I’m Samantha. And you are?” She was still addressing the old fat guy. At her introduction, he grunted and turned away. She was insulted enough that it distracted her from the fact that the big guy with the blue eyes was now hovering over her. She felt his cool breath cut across her shoulders and flinched. She turned slightly to angle her body away from him when she was suddenly face to face with another muscled up biker. She smiled again but she was sure they could hear the tremor in her voice as she held out her keys and said, “Here are the keys.”
The big biker indulged her by taking them. He tossed them to a younger looking mechanic who caught them with ease and started out in the hot sun toward the Prius.
“Just an oil change?” the man in front of her asked. She turned her timid attention back on him just as he said, “Are you sure there’s nothing else we can do for you?” The offer sounded distinctly suggestive.
He was so close that she instinctively wanted to step back and get him out of her personal space, but she sensed more than felt the wall of men behind her. Her thoughts were racing and when she didn’t respond one of the men behind her cooed in her ear, “Samantha, Samantha, you ain’t from around here, are ya?”
“I’m from Vegas,” she admitted. She turned to face him cautiously just as someone else flicked a lock of her strawberry blonde hair off her damp shoulder.
“You came all this way just for a little tune up?”
“Nah, she didn’t,” another one answered for her. He had a crew cut and rugged good looks, chest as firm as a brick wall, forearms, and biceps like iron bars. Samantha pegged him for late thirties, 6’4”, and according to her extensive research, she would guess him to be Jared Hurst. Jared was a formidable member of the Black Skulls but one who wasn’t high enough on the totem pole to make executive decisions. If he had known the late Johnny Fox at all while he was the Vice President and a heavy hitter within the club, his knowledge likely wouldn’t include Fox’s presumed secrets and lies and which of those deep-running flaws of his had ultimately gotten him killed and dumped in a shallow grave in the middle of the desert. It’s amazing how things out here in the middle of nowhere were growing by leaps and bounds. Who would have guessed ten years ago that a Ralph’s Supermarket would be put in that spot? A spot formerly in the center of nowhere. Obviously not whoever killed Johnny Fox and dumped his body.
“I doubt she cares about her car,” Jared said as he smirked down at her. His gaze darted from her plump lips to her perky tits in a way that was impossible to misread. “I think I know a skull fucker when I see one.”
“A skull fucker?” she questioned, keeping her voice even in its flirtatious tone but feeling more than slightly unnerved at his forward-barking. The context alone was unmistakable.
“Come on, sweetheart,” he growled, stepping in a bit closer. “If you’re shy, we can lower the garage door. Make it nice and dark for you. Although most of our skull-fuckers are anything but shy. It almost takes balls to come all the way out here and just waltz in here like you did. I don’t think you have any balls hidden in those pants, though, do you, babe?”
Samantha laughed. It was a nervous laugh but she had done her best to make it sound as confident as possible. She wondered if she should meet them halfway. Confessing to being a skull-fucker might get her a quicker ‘in’ than just a regular old customer needing an oil change might. She made a snap decision and then said, “Okay it’s true. I am a hardcore fan of the club. How could I not be? Look at you guys.” She got arrogant smirks and confident grins all the way around. “I finally got the time and the courage to come all the way out here and meet you. But, I also have to admit that I came out here with a particular skull in mind. No offense to the rest of you, but I really have a thing for Mr. Boone.”
The fat one snorted a mean laugh from the side of the garage in complete anticipation of her point then called out, “You ain’t got a shot in hell of getting Rodney Boone to give two shits about you, I don’t care how great your ass looks.”
“He’s a little old for you,” Jared agreed as a crooked smile came over his mouth. “But his son’s not. Is that who you’re talking about? You out here looking for Asa?”
Asa Boone, she thought, the man with no photos online. In all her research, Asa amounted to strictly a name with an important affiliation. He was the son of the Black Skulls president and chairman, Rodney Boone, which meant that Samantha would definitely like to talk to him. “Is he as sexy as his daddy?”
Jared looked like he wasn’t sure whether to smile or vomit at her suggestion that Rodney Boone was sexy. He may have been so in his youth, but the hard-partying, rough living life he had led into his fifties had not left him well-preserved. Some women liked them old and tore up, though, who were they to say she wasn’t one of them. “Rodney don’t have time for skull fuckers, but Asa might want a shot,” Jared said. “Yo’ Strike!” The young biker who had driven Samantha’s Prius up to the edge of the garage and was now poking around under the hood angled his head out. “Why don’t you show our good friend, Sam, on into Poison and see if Asa ain’t around?”
Someone cupped Samantha’s ass and she slapped their thick fingers off without glancing over her shoulder to see who was responsible. She squeezed out of the circle of bikers that seemed in no rush to step aside and walked, slow and steady, hips swaying and stilettos clicking over concrete, towards the twenty-something, brown-haired biker they called Strike.
When she reached him, she looked back at the men and shot Jared Hurst an easy smile for good measure. He didn’t smile back. He was looking at her with a thoughtful look as if still trying to believe she was here to simply fuck one of the skulls or not. She turned back to Strike. She had noticed that all the bikers were wearing black leather vests that were open down the front. The vests were called kuttes, and Strike didn’t have one. She turned back toward Jared and caught sight of the back of his kutte. It depicted a black skull laid over a white circle. The name Black Skulls arched over the top of the decal and Jared’s last name curved up around the bottom. Samantha had thought the design was badass the first time she saw it. She wasn’t usually impressed with the bad boy thing, but something about being amped up on the adrenaline that had followed her out from Las Vegas had her on the edge and all of this muscle and testosterone was getting to her a little bit.
“Too hot for leather?” she asked as they crossed the dusty apex.
He screwed his face up, squinting through the merciless glare, then touched eyes with her. “I’m not in yet.”
“Not in the Black Skulls?”
“Still paying my dues, proving myself.”
“Ah,” she said, as they came to the heavy, wooden door of the bar. There was something very wild west about this remote location—an old-timey saloon pitched at a quasi-angle across from an automotive garage, not another business insight, a world owned and operated by the Black Skulls—but that’s what Samantha liked about it.
And best of all, she was the only reporter here. She was in the throes of out-scooping every last one of them. She could feel it.
“That’s why they call me Strike,” he went on, holding the door open for her to step inside the dark, quiet, and empty bar. “The second I showed up and told them I wanted in, Asa said, three strikes and you're out, that’s how it works.”
The kid let out a nervous and breathy laugh that brought out his gleaming innocence which was remarkably attractive. If she wasn’t in her late twenties...
“How many strikes do you have left?” she asked, while in the back of her mind realizing how brutally stagnant the air was in the room. No AC. There wasn’t even a damn fan.
Strike shot her a sideways glance, smiling as he told her, “Enough. I have enough strikes left to do alright.”
They stood in the middle of a wide, oblong room with wooden floors that appeared to have taken a beating or two. The bar was as weathered as the town of Death Falls itself. On the wall behind the bar was a thick, metal sign that read, Black Skulls MC, Las Vegas Chapter and the rest of the walls were covered in polished hubcaps and posters of bikini babes from the 80’s, though framing the latter was admittedly a nice touch.
ASA: BLACK SKULLS MC Page 1
