by A Parker
I’d said as much on our last call and he’d grinned at me the same way he did on Christmas mornings when we were kids and he opened the present from Santa under the tree. I’d told him I was proud of him, and he’d laughed, run his fingers through his sandy hair the same disheveled length mine used to be, and told me I was an oxymoron, whatever that meant, because the military was supposed to toughen people up, not spit them out softer than they were when they went in.
I called him a real moron, which only made him laugh harder.
He’d always been more academically gifted than me. Where William was good with numbers and words, I was good with my fists.
And guns.
Joining the SEALS had only improved those already honed skills. If William wanted an enforcer, I’d be happy to step into the role.
A low rumble pulled my attention to the bend in Victorian Ave, where a midnight blue old Chevelle came around the corner. The sun glinted off the hood and nearly blinded me when it turned into the bus loop and came to a slow rolling stop beside me. I moved out from under the shade of the bus stop and bent down to smile at William through the open window.
I frowned. “Took you long enough.”
The man behind the wheel was not my baby brother, but Mason Kennedy, the Vice President of the Devil’s Luck MC. His club name was High Roller.
Mason tipped his head toward the back of the car. “Toss your shit in the trunk.”
I did as he said. The trunk had a couple black duffel bags in it, as well as a spare tire, crowbar, and a small black toolbox. I tossed my bag in, closed the lid, and got in the passenger seat. My brother’s Chevelle was a slick old car that had been well taken care of. Its only flaw was that it didn’t have air-conditioning, so we kept the windows down as we pulled out of the loop and turned left.
“Where’s Will?” I asked.
Mason turned on the radio. The voices of old hosts whose names I couldn’t remember flooded the speakers as they spoke about Reno’s newest casino opening up last weekend.
“You’ve been gone a while,” Mason said as if he hadn’t heard me. “A lot has changed ‘round these parts. Does it look different to you?”
“Of course it does.”
Hell, everything looked different. The city seemed smaller and bigger all at once, with new shops popping up and old ones on either side of the street being boarded up. Bus stop benches, cinder block walls, and private property fences boasted offensive graffiti. Litter lined the sidewalks, chased by unfortunate souls in search of something to eat or something to stick in their veins.
“It looks rough,” I added before turning to Mason. “And so do you.”
It was true.
Mason looked like he’d aged fifteen years since I left five years ago. There were wrinkles in the corners of his eyes. He had a day or two’s growth of hair on his jaw and neck, and I recalled him not being able to grow more than a sad little soul patch when I left. His brown eyes seemed heavy, like he hadn’t slept in a while.
Mason gave me a lopsided smile. “And you look like a priss.”
“A priss, hey?” I arched an eyebrow and rested my forearm on the window, splaying my fingers in the hot wind as it blew into the car. “It’s the haircut, isn’t it?”
Mason’s gaze flicked to the buzzcut. He chuckled. “Yeah, I’d say that it’s a contributing factor.”
We left the downtown core of Reno behind us and traded it in for the suburbs and more residential areas. We passed elementary schools with brown grass and patches of dusty dirt in the middle of soccer fields. No children played outside. It was too hot today. Churches in need of power washing looked damn near abandoned, and old Ma and Pop shops appeared almost empty.
“What the hell happened here?” I asked.
Mason sighed and palmed the wheel as we took a righthand turn toward my place. “Reno ain’t what it used to be, brother.”
The houses seemed in better shape than the businesses. Bungalows lined the street with green, well-manicured lawns. The farther into the area we got, however, the rougher the homes started to look. That wasn’t new.
We passed an abandoned park running beside an old dried-up creek bed, and took one last turn before pulling into my driveway at the end of a cul de sac. Mason turned off the ignition and sat back in his seat. The leather creaked beneath him but he made no effort to get out despite the sweat beading at his temples.
A pit formed in my stomach.
“Something’s wrong,” I said flatly.
Mason nodded.
“Tell me.”
Mason wouldn’t look at me. He kept his eyes locked dead ahead on the garage doors of my house. My place, at least, was in decent shape. The house was clean, and the grass wasn’t too bad, and from the outside, it sure as shit didn’t look like the house of a Motorcycle Club President. An American flag waved in the air from a post attached to the edge of the roof over my porch. The blue front door was closed, but the metal screen one was ajar and resting against the side of the garage wall.
The car filled with silence and heat.
“Mason,” I said, “start fucking talking.”
He closed his eyes. “It’s bad, Jack.”
My jaw tightened and the pit in my stomach turned into something else as my gut rolled. I hadn’t eaten anything since the last meal on the flight about twelve hours ago and I was suddenly thankful for that.
“Just say it.” My voice lacked the conviction it held moments ago.
Mason opened his eyes, but he didn’t look over at me. In fact, he did everything in his power not to look at me. “I don’t know how to tell you. I’m sorry, man. Fuck.” He dragged his hand down over his eyes, his nose, and the stubble on his face. “William… William died last week.”
A bee buzzed outside my window, dipped lazily into the car, and flew back out as if detecting the heaviness of Mason’s words.
“Fuck off,” I said. I opened the car door and stepped out. Heat drew upward from the black asphalt driveway and reminded me of the heat in Syria—of the midday afternoons that cooked me alive. I leaned over while gripping the open door and rolled my eyes at Mason, who hadn’t even taken off his seatbelt. “Did he put you up to this? He thought it would be cute to have me walk through the door and then he’d surprise me? Immature little shit. I thought you said things had changed?”
When he finally looked at me, Mason’s eyes glistened. “I’m not fucking with you, Jackson. William was killed five days ago. I—I tried to reach you on base, but by the time I tracked you down and got through, you’d already left to catch your plane. Even if I had been able to contact you, I didn’t know what I’d say. It’s been—it’s a fucking mess, man. The guys—everything is falling to pieces. We need you back here.”
My head spun.
Mason sighed heavily. “But I wouldn’t blame you if you wanted to get back on that bus and never come back to this fucking shithole.”
The asphalt beneath my feet felt like it might fall away any second, but I fought to keep my composure. I’d seen terrible things during my time overseas. I’d done terrible things. My training taught me how to stay in control even in the face of the worst situations imaginable.
“How did he die?” My voice sounded like it came from the end of a long, narrow tunnel.
“Jackson, that’s not a question you need an answer to right now.”
I slammed my hand on the roof of the car. Mason jumped and gripped the steering wheel.
“How did he fucking die, Mason?” I yelled.
Mason met my eye. “There’s a new gang in town, Jackson. William wouldn’t step aside and give them what they wanted, so they made him move.”
“Give me a name.”
Mason hung his head. “Walter Bates.”
Chapter 3
Samantha
The sun had gone down nearly three hours ago but there were still customers at tables fifteen minutes before closing time and I’d never been the sort of owner who kicked people out to close down. My fath
er never kicked people out, either. Reno’s Well was the place to be—or the place to hide for some people who came for more than just wings. Women avoided drunken husbands here. Men avoided bossy wives and their own children. Just-legal kids drank cheap beer and pretended to know all there was to know about the world.
No, I wouldn’t kick them out.
I did however send most of my staff home and went about mopping the front of house floors myself. For some reason, I’d always found the closing duties of the restaurant therapeutic. Sweeping, mopping, and sanitizing everything always felt like the stamp of a job well done at the end of a long day, and I could rest easy up in my apartment upstairs once those tasks were finished.
The next day, I’d do it all over again. It was a gig I doubted I would ever get tired of. It certainly wasn’t for everyone, but it was everything for my father and for me.
Leroy Carrot, a seventy-something-year-old regular who’d been a friend of my father’s, kicked his heels up onto his table when I brought the mop around and threatened to mop his precious cowboy boots.
“Watch the Pine-Sol,” he said, reaching forward to make sure I hadn’t flung the soapy, lemon-scented water from the mop onto his boots.
“Don’t be such a baby, Leroy,” I teased. “You’ve had those boots since before I was born. The layer of grime on them could never be penetrated by a drop of acid, let alone floor cleaner.”
His wife, a short plump woman with an eighties perm named Janice, flashed me a smile. “Do you know how many times I’ve tried to throw the damn things out?”
“I can only imagine how long ago they started to smell,” I said. “Does he sleep with them on?”
Janice laughed. “If I’d let him, I’m sure he would.”
“Have your laughs, ladies.” Leroy tipped his head back, exposing a throat of coarse gray whiskers, and drained the remnants of his beer. “There’s nothing better than a well-broken-in pair of boots.”
Janice pushed his feet down from the table with an apologetic glance in my direction. “Tell me that once you’ve worn a torture device with underwire. You don’t know discomfort like we women do, you old fart.” She got to her feet and put a hand on his shoulder. “We should clear out of here and let Miss Lye close down. It’s getting late.”
I spotted Janice’s half-full glass of sweet tea on the table. “You can stay and finish. I have a couple more things to do before I fully shut down and your bill is paid. Don’t worry about it.”
She thanked me and sat back down, and she and her husband bickered and snickered the way my folks used to when they were still here. The sound of their voices brought me comfort while I finished mopping the floors and inched my way to the front doors to lock them up so no new customers could stroll in.
When I was just feet away from them, they swung open.
Warm night air poured in, carrying with it the backlit silhouette of a tall man in military fatigues.
For a moment, my brain couldn’t make sense of what my eyes were seeing.
The man swayed, reached out to grip the doorframe, steadied himself, and lurched inside, one step at a time.
Black Jack brushed past me with a grunt of a greeting. My nostrils flooded with the smell of beer and what I suspected might have been vodka. The heels of his boots, military style with tight laces, dragged on my freshly cleaned floors as he moved to the bar and dropped heavily onto a barstool.
I looked past the drunken club member to Janice and Leroy. Both locked eyes with me, gave half-hearted shrugs, and looked back to Jackson.
Shit.
Leroy got to his feet while Janice sipped hurriedly at her sweet tea. The old man’s boots clipped the hardwood instead of dragged like Jackson’s, and he approached the younger man tentatively and placed a hand on Jackson’s shoulder.
Jackson stiffened.
Leroy sighed and his mouth worked, but no words came out. What could he say? Jackson’s brother had been murdered five days ago and here we all were, drinking beers and cracking jokes because life goes on. But for Jack? Everything he thought he knew had just come crashing down around him. I knew what that felt like all too well and as I stood there like a fool with the mop in my hands and the bucket at my feet, I felt a rush of heat to my cheeks as my throat tightened.
When I found out my mother died, I’d been twenty-two and partying in Las Vegas for a best friend’s bachelorette. My mother, who’d never had a health issue in her life, had passed away in the middle of the night after a brain aneurysm.
My poor father was the one to wake the next morning and find her.
He died three years later, half the man he used to be, and I swore up and down it wasn’t angina that killed him but a broken heart.
Sometimes, the grief still caught up with me. It would swallow me whole and drag me to depths I feared one day I might never climb out of. But every time, I managed to fight my way back to the surface. It was because of the people I worked with and the people in this town who were still fighting the good fight that I had anything worth climbing back to.
Without them? I didn’t like to think too hard about what might have happened to me.
Jackson was living that nightmare right now. It was only beginning for him.
We didn’t know each other all that well. We’d never been close enough to call each other friends, but I knew his regular order from before he joined the SEALS, and I knew his brother well enough to throw in a free beer every now and then.
Leroy finally found his voice. “Welcome home, Jack.”
Jackson stared steadily at his own hands and traced the creases in his palms with his thumbs.
“You have our condolences.” Leroy sighed before patting Jackson’s shoulder and letting his hand fall away. “And our prayers.”
Jackson tipped his head low. “Thanks.”
With that, Leroy held out his hand to his wife, and the pair of them slipped past me and out into the night, leaving me entirely alone with the ex-President of the Devil’s Luck Motorcycle Club. The bar rang with stillness and quiet and I closed my eyes and took a steady breath.
There was something about Jackson’s presence that had always brought me clarity. Even though I knew what he was capable of and had seen the damage he could inflict with those hands of his with my own eyes, I felt strangely safe when he was around. I knew I wasn’t the only woman in town who felt that way.
I put the mop in the bucket, locked the bar doors, and pulled the bucket back behind the bar with me, where I went about pouring Jackson a beer. I slid it to him and watched him eye it.
“You probably don’t need more to drink,” I said, “but if that’s the play here, this is on the house.”
His dark brown eyes, damn near almost black, slid up to me. He tried to smile, but it came off as more of a crooked grimace. He picked up the beer and drank.
He looked so different from the last time I saw him.
His eyes were the same—dark and steady, calculating and cunning. His lips were the same, too, ever pressed in a firm line. His nose still had a scar across the bridge from an old fight, and there was another scar through his right eyebrow, but everything else looked new to me.
The buzzed haircut was a stark change from the shaggy, messy hair he used to have. His jaw seemed sharper, his shoulders broader, the muscles under his uniform fuller and more purposeful. His time overseas must have been physically challenging.
Obviously, I thought.
The silence ate away at me, so I filled it. “You don’t look like you belong here anymore.”
What a stupid thing to say. Why did that feel right? Why couldn’t I have said literally anything else? Like, hey Jackson, you look good. Or, you look like a cop with that buzzcut. Couldn’t I have tried to make him smile? To make him forget, even for a second or two, the weight of his sorrows?
Much to my surprise, he managed a small smile. “Yeah, I don’t feel like I belong here anymore, either.”
For a drunk man, he was surprisingly coherent.
Those dark eyes of his settled on me once more. “It’s good to see you too, Sam. You look…” He trailed off, looked me over, and drank more beer. “You look as good as always.”
This hardly seemed the appropriate time to blush, but heat rose to my cheeks. A compliment from Black Jack of the Devil’s Luck was not something a girl could brush off. “Thank you. Can I make you something to eat?”
Jackson said nothing.
I chewed the inside of my cheek. “Would you rather just keep drinking?”
In response, he finished his beer.
I took the glass, filled it up for him, and passed it back. “I get it,” I said. Self-punishment at its finest. I poured myself a beer, too. “Numb is better than full.”
Jackson rocked back on his stool, and for a moment, I thought he might fall off, but he gripped the bar and pulled himself back. “So I reckon you’ve heard about Will, too?”
Looking him in the eyes wasn’t easy, but I fought my instinct to look away. I hated when people couldn’t meet my eyes after my father died. “Everyone has heard, Jack.”
He nodded.
“I’m sorry,” I said softly. “I’m so sorry.”
He nodded again. “I know.”
Unsure why I did it, I reached out and put my hand on his wrist. He didn’t pull away. With William cold and in a morgue six miles away, I wondered what sort of comfort he’d had since finding out his brother was dead. Were the men in his MC drinking their sorrows away, too?
With my other hand, I tapped my beer glass against his. “For William, a kid brother, a shit darts player, and a good friend.”
Jackson cleared his throat, pulled his hand out from under mine, and drank in unison with me. He stared evenly at the bar wall where all the liquor was displayed. “He’ll pay for what he did, Sam.”
