Bad to the Bones

by Layla Wolfe

  Knoxie chuckled. “Don’t panic. I’m getting out of the biz. It was always just a temporary thing, to earn extra benjamins to send to Nicole.”

  Adrian paused in his dusting. “Well. Don’t you still need the extra green?”

  “I do. But I’m going to start working for The Bare Bones.”

  Knoxie tensed again, waiting for the inevitable explosion. The force of Adrian’s eruption was always in proportion to how long the pause. One Mississippi. Two Mississippi. Three Mississippi.

  Fuck. This is going to be a big one.

  Adrian had to take a few steps toward Knoxie, the better for his partner to feel his wrath. His brow was furrowed, his voice steely. “Mr. Hammett. Am I to understand what you just tried to tell me? That outlaw motorcycle gang is going to pay you to do illegal, dangerous jobs for them? In what way is that better than flaunting your Kentucky telescope in front of every single pervert who wants to cuddle his kielbasa?”

  Knoxie had been prepared for this. Adrian might have many clients who operated on the fringes of society, but he was a strictly by-the-books guy. Despite his facial piercings, he was actually a square, conservative man. He came from a staunch Christian home and that learning was often reflected in his nonstop criticisms of—well, nearly everything. Spearing his pencil into the cup, Knoxie folded his arms in front of his chest and leaned back in his chair.

  “It’s the logical next step, Adrian. If I want to protect this girl Bellamy, and maybe others like her who are being victimized up there in that loony bin, other girls who are too destitute and think it’s the best alternative to prostitution—well, I’ve got to have muscle behind me. I don’t want to hear any static about how I’m throwing in my lot with criminals. The Bare Bones are a big part of this community, like it or not. They’re businessmen just like us, first and foremost.”

  Adrian could barely contain his rage. His pupils were little dots, like the hypnotist in the backs of comic books. His nostrils trembled with anger. “Businessmen who deal in illegal arms and drugs.”

  Knoxie shot to a stand, nearly knocking over his chair. He pointed at the ground with a stiff arm. “Listen, they have legitimate business concerns in P&E just like we do. And everyone benefits if we succeed in putting those out of Arizona.”

  Adrian was fearless when it came to physical confrontation. He often said he’d been beaten a lot in school as a nerdy kid, purple nurples and swirlies and all of that, but it sure hadn’t made him any more timid. Right now he took an additional step toward Knoxie, who easily hefted about twice the muscle mass on his weightlifting person. “Yes, but what good are you going to be for Sage and Cameron if you’re in jail?”

  “Who said anything about going to jail?”

  “Don’t all criminals think they’re going to get away with it? Don’t they all protest and act surprised when they’re caught? They’re not sorry for breaking the law! They’re sorry for being caught! Listen, I know those Catholic priests in your childhood did irreparable damage to you. They broke huge, sinful laws of nature—”

  Knoxie couldn’t believe Adrian would bring that up. “Those priests are the most warped law-breakers in the universe!”

  “—but don’t you agree that doesn’t ruin some of their tenets, such as ‘though shalt not steal’?”

  Knoxie shoved on past his partner, headed for the door. Adrian could have the fucking unfinished sketch. “I’m done with this fucking conversation, you feeble nitwit. We need a spore test on that autoclave! And you need to order more surgical soap and alcohol. I’ve got fucking work to do.”

  He banged the hell out the door, but could still hear Adrian whining. “Oh, that’s right! Storm out when you know you’re losing the argument! Just see how far those Boners’ type of outlaw justice gets you when you’re the one who needs help! I’m not cleaning up their blood splatters from my antiseptic walls.”

  “In your dreams, dotard!” Knoxie yelled back, before he realized he was being juvenile. Still, it pissed him off royally that Adrian had brought up such a sore subject. Who the fuck said anything about stealing, anyway? What did that have to do with anything? He wasn’t going on a run today. It was strictly for intel, to find out what the fuck was so damned mysterious and important about “granola.” He didn’t want to start a war with the Fruit Loops until he had a substantial amount of evidence and intel under his belt. If Lytton and Turk had other ideas in mind for jacking that shipment, it was strictly up to them.

  So far. He hadn’t even agreed to prospect for them yet. He was an independent contractor.

  I’m a fucking independent contractor and—

  Oomph. His breath was sharply knocked from his lungs when he rounded the corner into the alley where his ride was parked. Automatically, he gripped the person by the shoulders. Around here, one never knew if a person one literally bumped into was friend or foe. Especially not in the past few days.

  Misty looked up at him with her impish, mischievous eyes. She encircled Knoxie’s wrists in her hands and giggled. “What a great coincidence, Knoxie! I was just coming to see you. A friend of mine was talking about wanting to get inked and I wondered if I could sort of practice on her. I mean, not ‘practice,’ of course, that sounds unprofessional, but I wondered if I could use your—”

  In a flash and without forethought, Knoxie had Misty backed up against the brick wall of the alley. He gripped her dainty chin in his hand, her tiny bird’s bones making him feel like a giant. Pinning her to the wall with the strength of his hips, he murmured against her mouth, “I’ve been wanting to get up on your for a long time.” Clamping his mouth down over hers, he felt her submit instantly, weakening and becoming boneless in his hands. Wow. This wasn’t a very difficult battle.

  Knoxie was flooded with the adrenaline of virility. His prick instantly plumped like a balloon, and he rubbed it deliciously against Misty’s pubic bone. For someone he’d seen stark naked a hundred times, his body was sure responding to hers, always a good sign. After fifteen years of Nicole, he’d still been attracted to her, a necessity for a real relationship.

  What was he thinking? A real relationship? Frustrated now by the ceremonies and rituals of courtship, Knoxie practically lifted Misty’s toes off the ground as he swiveled his hips against hers. They kissed sloppily, passionately, like two people in a grimy alley who had literally just bumped into each other by chance. His other hand snaked around the curve of her butt, helping to lift her up the gritty wall. With a little hop, she locked her ankles around the backs of his thighs so that only the thickness of his jeans and hers prevented them from “bonding.”

  Bonding? Why the fuck am I thinking of Bellamy’s asinine fucking word for fucking? Putting his all into it, Knoxie licked Misty’s lips and muttered, “I’ve got a job to do…got to go…” Over and over he pressed sucking kisses to her pouty little Botox-enhanced mouth. “We’ll finish this later, tomorrow.”

  She sighed into his mouth, little ladylike sounds she had probably perfected after hours in front of the camera. Shivers ran down his spine, erecting his nipples, when she scrabbled her fingers through his hair, massaging his skull. “Sure, Knoxie. Anything for you. You know that.”

  Detaching with a loud kiss, Knoxie tried to clear his head. He forced himself to laugh, turning her so he could slap her ass. She giggled with delight. “You’re a fine piece of ass, Misty. I’ll catch you later.”

  He had to call Lytton, to confirm the rendezvous point at the BLM sign for Agua Fria Monument. But he didn’t want Misty, who was lingering by lovingly as he straddled his bike, to overhear any details of the job. He was forced to ride down Bargain Boulevard a few blocks, then pull over to call Lytton.

  This time he risked random strangers overhearing his plan. This outlaw business sure is cloak and dagger. But it would be worth it if he could even save one girl from the clutches of that cult maniac.

  That one girl being Bellamy Jager.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  BELLAMY

  I started trying to gain
more insight into myself. I really did.

  Maddy hooked me up with her P&E shrink, and I saw Dr. Petrie the very next day. I was hesitant at first, wary of any outsider’s attempts to make me conform to society. But because Maddy vouched for him a hundred percent, saying he’d helped her through some crisis, and because I was attempting to wrap my head around the strange happenings lately, I agreed to see him once.

  I would not talk about my master with this stranger. I already knew how everyone on the outside thought we were weird. Even though we dealt with therapies on a set schedule every day at the ashram, even the mainstream world of experimental psychology had light years to go to catch up with our methods. I wasn’t about to set any of that out for discussion. I really just wanted to maybe gain the “insight” people always said I lacked so badly.

  So I confessed to Dr. Petrie that as a tween I had been diagnosed with “borderline personality disorder,” whatever the fuck that is. He told me that BPD sufferers feel emotions too strongly, too deeply. He said I may have started out sensitive and emotional, but had covered it up with the hard shell, the veneer we see today. If I had been affected by my father’s “abandonment” of me, I had determined to shut down these horrifying feelings of failure and shame. I had actually swung full circle in the other direction, burying all of my terrifying emotions under a chokehold of uncaring.

  He called this dissociating. I had dissociated around the time of my parents’ divorce to avoid feeling anything. He could tell this by my “flat” voice and lack of facial expression. I agreed with him—I had suspected as much.

  Dr. Petrie asked if I had ever self-harmed. That amazed me, that he’d figured that out. I used to carve crosses or stars of David into my arms with pins or Swiss army knives. And that was before my father had left. Petrie said this is because people with BPD feel emotions to such an extent, our methods of distracting ourselves from these terrifying feelings may be to self-injure or even become suicidal.

  He said it might be better if I actually got back to being the BPD sufferer I had been as a tween. With his guidance, I could see that my father had not intended to abandon me. A person who could feel emotions fully was a person totally alive, and we should attempt to get back to that more intuitive, natural, feeling state. He said my black-and-white thinking would lead to me acting impulsively the rest of my life—running from relationships, indulging in substance abuse, self-harming—unless I put a stop to the cycle. Without access to these other healthy emotions to guide my decision-making in life, I’d keep blowing it, over and over.

  I panicked when I heard that. Did I want all of those emotions to come rushing back to me? So I lashed out, told Petrie it sounded like he planned on a long-ass relationship with me when I was just going home soon anyway. When he asked where “home” was, of course I clammed up, and by then our fifty minutes were up anyway.

  But of course everything he’d said stuck in the back of my mind.

  Madison must’ve known better than to ask me detailed questions about the session. She just asked how it went, I said fine, and that was it. Her little angelic daughter Fidelia was with her in the waiting room, wreaking havoc, and we needed to get lunch in her stomach or she’d go ballistic. So that was a good excuse not to bring up the session again.

  Of course I really wanted to get back up to Bihari, to ask Shakti why I’d been corralled in the bus with those winos. I was going to have Bulsara’s head on a platter when Shakti discovered what he’d done. But Maddy did a good job of distracting me. The cell phone she’d given me, for instance. I didn’t know Shakti’s number, of course, but she hooked me up with a few of our teenaged buddies, and I spent hours catching up with them. Not mentioning my Bihari experience, of course. When they asked what I’d been doing, I just said bike mechanics over in Munds Park, one town over.

  Then there were movies on Maddy’s giant flat screen TV. There were computer games, games to strengthen Fidelia’s intelligence and perception. I wasn’t too childproof and it made me vaguely uncomfortable to be around children. I had always hoped I’d never be chosen for daycare duty over at the ashram’s child center—but knowing Shakti, he’d stick me there just to provoke me.

  Maddy showed me around The Citadel, the old airplane hangar that now housed Illuminati Trucking. Half of it was also their “clubhouse” where bikers lounged playing darts and frying meat. These were the same activities and basically the same men as the ones at The Bum Steer, but of course no members of the public were allowed.

  Lytton, apparently the lookalike half-brother of Ford Illuminati, was in the game room playing pool. He shook my hand in a gentlemanly way and said,

  “I was one of the men who picked you up on that mesa. Me, Knoxie, and Wild Man.” He gestured with his stick at a smiling pool player whose main wildness seemed to be his hair. But sure enough, he wore the black leather “cut” with patches that denoted he was a tough outlaw, so he must have more than one side.

  “Then maybe you know,” I told Lytton. “Has anyone gotten ahold of anyone up at Bihari? I want to know why I was included in that group of alkies. I’m a chosen one.” I lowered my voice and looked around. It was a sad day in hell when a group of grizzled, worldly bikers looked at you as though you were peeing behind a tree. I was wearing some of Maddy’s clothes, an orange T-shirt with a jean skirt, but she hadn’t convinced me to remove my Shakti locket. The whole Citadel probably knew my pathetic story by now, anyway. I didn’t know much about biker clubs but I knew they were close-knit and probably enjoyed juicy gossip as much as anyone. “That means I’m particularly close to the leader, Shakti.”

  I had started feeling the longer I stayed away, the more Shakti would miss me. He’d figure out what Bulsara had done. He’d personally crucify the daimyo and would send soldiers into P&E to search for me.

  Predictably, Maddy rolled her eyes and folded her arms. “She’s a groupie.”

  I slapped her upper arm. “Shut up, Maddy! You promised you’d keep your judgments to yourself.”

  “Sorry.” She was trying to stifle a giggle, and it wasn’t working. “Just slipped out. But yes, Lytton. We’re all curious. Ford’s been gone on a border run. Have you heard anything from Merry-go-round Canyon?”

  Lytton leaned on his pool cue. His exotic almond-shaped eyes looked as though they were lined with soot, and his lips were impossibly shapely. I wasn’t very familiar with true sexual urges, but I mentally wagered a bet this guy could bring one out in me without trying. I had never spent this much time fixating on anyone’s shoulder tattoo, for instance. Lytton’s looked like a totem pole figure, a tribal eagle draped like whisper-thin silk across his luscious chestnut skin. “Nothing, but we’ll know a lot more later tonight. We’ve got feelers out.” He looked me up and down assessingly. “You’ve got a phone now. I promise I’ll call you around eight with a report. Or maybe I’ll have Knoxie call you, how does that sound?”

  Maddy, Lytton, and Wild Man all seemed to be looking at each other knowingly. I exaggerated the fact that I didn’t care by shrugging wildly. “Sure, why not? Anyone. I don’t care!”

  Maddy nodded. “She doesn’t care.”

  “I can see that,” Lytton said sarcastically.

  Some dude who looked like a seedy Al Pacino had taken Lytton’s place at the pool table. He snorted skeptically. “She doesn’t care,” he mocked before hitting his ball.

  I felt anger rise in my gut, and I didn’t like the feeling. I knew “whites” would make fun of my beliefs, but these folks were like my own family—hell, better than my own family! As fellow outcasts, didn’t they know how it felt to be ridiculed and laughed at? It pissed me off that scummy, oily bikers I hadn’t even been introduced to were mocking me solely based on word of mouth.

  “Come on.” I seethed. “Let’s go, Maddy.”

  But just as I spun about to leave the game room, a strange interruption took place.

  “Asanga!”

  I hadn’t been called that name in days, and I gasped so loudly I could
hear Al Pacino scratch against the felt of the table and swear.

  Standing in the doorway was Brian, my fellow outcast from the bus. He was the one who hadn’t bothered changing his name. He’d been unapologetic about not conforming, and he had seemed particularly to blame Shakti for everything.

  Now he pointed at me as though he’d seen a hairdresser. “You! You’re that Asanga, lover and supporter of that sleazy, twisted guru! I’ve seen you riding around in his Hummer drinking his hash milkshakes, wearing silk while everyone else wears cotton!”

  Mortification swept over me. Every biker in the game room had frozen silently, some with open mouths. They all looked as though anticipating a particularly juicy story. I protested instantly, “I never wore silk. You saw the clothes I wore on the bus with you. Cotton.” But wait a minute. Why was I denying Shakti? Was I embarrassed?

  “Yeah. Because you’d been fixing bikes. But I’ve seen you plenty of times driving with him to the daily meetings with speakers blasting that chutney music, massaging his shoulders while he talks on his phone to his banker! Ha! Look where you are now. This is how he repays his most loyal, cowering subjects! Look what the fucking dirtbags did to you, too.”

  I couldn’t even breathe, I was so horrified. I felt like my brain was bleeding, my mind closing down in on itself, like a box folding flat. Maddy must have noticed, because she took my arm in support. I was wheezing like an asthmatic, probably in the throes of a panic attack, but I managed to say, “He’s looking for me, Brian. I just haven’t gone back yet. I’m having too good of a time with my friends.”

  “Ha!” Brian barked again. “You think he’s looking for you? Then you’re just as delusional as those other zombies who follow him around like some Walking Dead corpses. I just talked to my buddy Rick up there. He said there’s already some new mechanic working on bikes in your shop.”