Black Jack

by A Parker

  My breath hitched.

  “Bates killed my baby brother,” Jackson growled. “He has no idea who he’s fucking with.”

  Fear flooded my veins and rivaled against the hope in my heart. If there was anyone who could put an end to the vise grip Walter Bates had on this town and the people who lived here, it was Black Jack and the Devil’s Luck.

  Chapter 4

  Jackson

  “You’re so drunk,” Sam muttered, shouldering my weight as we lumbered out of the bar’s front doors and onto the wraparound porch.

  I had so many memories of sitting at the picnic tables Ritch Lye used to have out here. His daughter had traded them out for nicer tables with matching chairs, but all the chairs were turned up and the tables were pushed to one side. The dead of summer in Reno was often too hot for people to want to sit outside anyway.

  The two lamps mounted on the porch steps cast a soft glow on the parking lot where my bike was parked in the front row. The matte-black paint job didn’t glitter, but the chrome mirrors shined in greeting. The quick ride from my place to the bar hadn’t been nearly enough time in the seat after five years away.

  Sam stopped walking but didn’t let me go as I swayed with an arm draped over her shoulder.

  “Well,” she said sternly, “there’s no way you’re riding that thing home. Sit down.”

  We lowered ourselves to the top step of the porch.

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  “You’re drunker than a skunk, Jack. You can’t ride home. I kept serving you liquor. Do you know how shitty it would be for me if you wrapped yourself around a tree?”

  I grunted. “So you’re guilting me?”

  She smiled and pulled her phone out of the back pocket of her jeans. They fit her well, the jeans. They were faded and well worn with frayed edges around her ankles, but they hugged her ass and her strong thighs. Sam used to be a competitive swimmer before her father died. As far as I knew, he’d never missed a swim meet or a race, and he’d sit in the stands at the competitive pool with an air horn and drive all the other parents batshit crazy.

  Sam loved it.

  “Do you still swim?” I asked.

  She cocked her head to the side as she held her phone to her ear. “Yes, a few times a week. Nothing competitive anymore though, I just like to swim laps. Helps keep my head straight when the world is spinning.”

  I understood. Riding did that for me.

  I eyed my Indian Scout longingly as it sat lonely in the parking lot. It was a seven-year-old bike with chrome accents like the mirrors, exhaust, and suspension, all of which stood out against the matte-black gas tank and engine components. The brown leather seat was still in damn near perfect condition. I’d offered to let William ride it while I was gone, but he’d poked fun at my bike and opted to stick with his Harley.

  Sam’s voice shifted to a warmer tone when the operator on the other end answered. “Hi, I need a taxi to Reno’s Well.” She paused to listen and nodded. “Ten minutes? Okay, thank you.”

  She hung up the phone and stretched her long legs out in front of her. They reached three steps down, where she crossed her ankles. I noticed a dainty silver chain on her left ankle between the frayed denim and the top of her used-to-be-white converse sneakers.

  Sam caught me looking at it. “It’s my mother’s. My dad bought it for her for their silver wedding anniversary.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A silver wedding anniversary?”

  I nodded.

  Sam leaned back on her hands. “It’s a twenty-fifth wedding anniversary present. It’s tradition to give a certain type of material to your spouse for anniversaries—if you’re the sort who likes to follow tradition, of course. The first year is paper, the fifth year is wood, and the tenth is tin or aluminum.”

  “There’s something for every year?” The porch tipped like the deck of a ship beneath me, so I leaned back on my hands too and looked up at the stars. “That seems obnoxious.”

  She laughed. “It is. My parents never really followed it. In fact, they weren’t big on exchanging gifts at all. Not even on birthdays or at Christmas time. But they had a hard year leading up to their twenty-fifth anniversary, and my dad wanted to do something special. In the three years before my mom died, she wore it every day. I don’t think she ever took it off.”

  “Have you ever taken it off?”

  Her smile faltered. “Only once to have it fixed when the clasp broke.”

  “Doesn’t count.”

  “No?”

  I shrugged. “No, not in my books.”

  We sat there quietly. Sam didn’t say anything about how blasted I was, and I didn’t say anything about how good she smelled, and we just sat there looking at the stars listening to our own thoughts.

  I had a lot of them.

  After Mason told me about William, he’d followed me into the house and stood stoically by the kitchen table while I rummaged through cupboards in search of alcohol or something to stifle the pain. He hadn’t helped. He’d just watched. Hell, maybe that was the most help he could offer.

  Mason had been William’s best friend, after all.

  I hadn’t even asked him how he was handling things.

  Fuck.

  “Jackson?”

  I turned to Sam. She had her bottom lip pinched between her teeth and a far-off look in her eyes, and she drew her knees up to wrap her arms around them before looking at me. “What are you going to do?”

  Kill him.

  “I don’t know yet,” I said.

  Her emerald eyes narrowed skeptically, but she held her tongue. She sighed and nodded down the road. “I think that’s your ride.”

  I didn’t look. Instead, I studied her. Maybe it was all the liquor in my system, but as I looked upon her, I found so many new things I didn’t remember. Her hair was inky black, pin straight, and chopped blunt just above her shoulders. Her complexion was tanned from days out in Reno’s sun, and I noticed a tattoo on her inner wrist that I couldn’t make out. She looked fuller and stronger than I remembered, with muscles in her shoulders and arms that stood at attention when she rose and offered me a helping hand.

  Trying to look tougher and more sober than I felt, I stood on my own.

  The porch steps nearly heaved me off of them.

  Sam chuckled, caught my upper arm, and steadied me as she helped me down to the gravel lot. “You’re going to feel like hell tomorrow morning.”

  If tomorrow morning comes, I thought grimly.

  The yellow taxi pulled into the lot. Its headlights flashed over us and Sam shielded her eyes as we approached. She tugged open the back door, said hello to the driver, and apologized on my behalf for how drunk I was.

  She stepped back for me to get in the back seat. “You’re still near Westfield Avenue?”

  “Yes.”

  Sam moved up to the passenger window and told the driver the approximate area of my house. She spoke quietly and I could barely make out her words, but it was safe to assume she was most likely asking him to make sure I got in the house.

  Her directions and requests were useless. I had no intention of going home.

  She didn’t need to know that, though.

  Finally, she stepped back from the car with a small wave. “Take it easy tonight, Jackson. I’ll see you around.”

  “Thanks for the beer.”

  The taxi driver didn’t seem to give a damn about immediately disregarding Sam’s directions. At my drunken request, he drove toward the north part of Reno, where my buddy Grant lived and ran an under-the-table chop shop in his backyard. Grant, also known as Toke, wouldn’t likely want to let me in around all the bikes considering I could hardly walk straight, and he certainly wouldn’t want me riding one.

  Which was why, after the driver dropped me off, I snuck around the back, hopped the fence, and broke into the detached shop. I knew there’d be a time I’d need the lockpicking tricks I’d learned from another SEAL with a shady past that never managed to
make it onto his record.

  I shouldered the door open and blinked in the darkness of the shop. It smelled like sanded fibreglass, exhaust, and oil.

  It smelled like home.

  Unwilling to risk Grant catching me out here, I left the lights out and used my cell-phone’s flashlight to see my way around. My intention was to steal something that looked like it ran quiet, but none of the bikes on the floor fit that bill. Everything was a chopper, a low rider with a custom exhaust that would probably rumble and roar all the way down the damn block.

  I paused when my light fell upon a maroon Harley parked near the doors.

  William’s bike.

  At first, I didn’t dare go near it. My stomach lurched and my fingers went so numb I almost dropped my phone. But after staring at it for what might have been anywhere from five minutes to twenty, I forced myself forward and walked a slow circle around the machine while holding my light up to it.

  I found two bullet holes. One in the headlight and another in the side of the black leather seat. There might have been more, but my drunk ass could hardly spot the first two, and finding them made it feel like all my insides had fallen out of me.

  Still, I needed a bike, and if I was going to get myself killed tonight, it seemed fitting to do it on the same bike my baby brother was on when he was murdered.

  It took work to get the bike out of the shop. I had to pull the bay doors up slowly and thank Grant and his infinite wisdom for never replacing the old hand-pull doors with automatic ones. I rolled the bike out onto the concrete pad, closed the doors, and locked up behind me. After that, it took a good fifteen or so minutes to open the gate and roll the bike out onto the street. I didn’t turn it on until I was half a block away.

  The rumble of the engine sounded like William pulling into my driveway for MC meets or backyard BBQs. The exhaust smelled like a time I would never get back, and the vibration in the seat and the handgrips were as close to my little brother as I would ever be again.

  I gritted my teeth against the rage that rumbled to life inside me.

  Walter Bates was somewhere in this town this very minute, and all I needed was a bit of luck on my side to find him. I could think of a few places where he and his crew might have settled or where they might go for a fun night on the town, and I had hours of darkness ahead of me to search.

  If I survived tonight, I had more than just hours of darkness ahead of me.

  I revved the engine, lifted my foot from the asphalt, and opened the throttle.

  Chapter 5

  Samantha

  Alone in the bar’s kitchen, I washed my and Jackson’s beer glasses by hand. The water was so hot it burned, but I hardly noticed. My mind was too busy. I breathed in the steam and the citrus-scented dish soap while I thought about the man who’d just left.

  Who was Jackson Black now?

  Where would he go from here?

  How hard would he fight to put an end to Walter Bates?

  They were all questions I didn’t have answers to.

  I turned off the sink and braced myself against it. I shouldn’t have let him leave. He was in a bad state. All I had to do was offer him my sofa to sleep off the liquor. He’d have turned me down, knowing him and his pride, but I could have insisted and dragged him up the stairs with me. As quickly as his head hit the pillow, he’d have been out like a light.

  Waking up to him sleeping on my sofa in the morning wouldn’t have been such a bad thing, either.

  “Shit,” I hissed.

  Letting him leave had been a mistake. Jackson was either going to keep drinking himself into a pit of despair tonight, or he was going to do something stupid. I could feel the truth of it in my bones as I pulled my phone out of my back pocket and googled the phone number for Tahoe Pacific Hospital. He didn’t have a little brother looking out for him anymore, and even though it hardly seemed my place to keep tabs on him, I decided he needed someone in his corner.

  An automated system held me up for a good two minutes before I was able to talk to a real human on the other end.

  Her name was Melissa. “How can I help you tonight?”

  “I’m looking for Dr. Daniels. Is he on shift tonight?”

  Melissa heaved a dramatic sigh that implied she had better things to do than talk to a woman tracking down Dr. Daniels. Part of me wanted to reach through the phone and shake her silly, but another part understood that I probably wasn’t the only woman calling about the hottie doctor.

  “I’m calling about one of his friends,” I clarified. I did not want to get lumped into that group of women fawning over him. “Jackson Black. Could you page him or something? Let him know who it’s about? He can decide if he wants to take my call or not.”

  “Page him? Honey, you watch too much Grey’s Anatomy. Let me put you on hold and see if I can track him down.”

  “Thank you so much,” I said, but she’d already gone, and I was speaking to elevator music.

  While I waited, I drummed my fingers on the stainless-steel sink, chewed the inside of my cheek, and paced the tile floors of the kitchen. How long did it take to track down a doctor? Weren’t they supposed to be easy to find in case of emergencies?

  Was this an emergency?

  I stopped pacing. What if I was calling Brody Daniels for absolutely no reason, and Jackson was back at home passed out face first in his bed?

  My stomach rolled over.

  How humiliating.

  I hardened my resolve. The right thing to do was to err on the side of caution. I had a gut instinct that Jackson had it in his head to do something about William’s death tonight, and if I did nothing and read a headline in the paper tomorrow morning that he too had been shot up in the middle of the street, I would never forgive myself, and Reno would be worse off for it.

  A masculine voice filled the line. “Who is this?”

  I sputtered in surprise. “Oh, um, yes, hi. Dr. Daniels? My name is Samantha Lye. I’m Ritch’s daughter. I own Reno’s Well.”

  “Right,” Dr. Daniels said. “I know who you are. Why are you calling me at work? What’s this I hear about Jackson?”

  “He’s back,” I said lamely.

  “No shit.”

  Talk sense, Sam.

  I took a deep and steadying breath. I knew I was talking to a man who operated outside the law, and unlike Jackson, the other MC members didn’t necessarily put me at ease. “Jackson came into my bar tonight looking like hell. He’s had a lot to drink and he was talking about vengeance on Walter Bates. I put him in a cab but I have a bad feeling that he’s going to try something tonight. I didn’t know what to do, and you’re the only person from the—you’re the only friend of his I knew how to get in touch with.”

  For some reason, saying you’re the only person from the Devil’s Luck that I know scared me, so I kept the club name out of my mouth.

  Dr. Daniels sighed the same way Melissa had. “Fuck me. How long ago did he leave?”

  “I don’t know, twenty minutes or so?”

  “And he was heading home?”

  “So he said.”

  Dr. Daniels clicked his tongue. “Thanks for the heads-up, Samantha. I’ll look into it. You have yourself a good night, okay?”

  “I will,” I said.

  He hung up.

  I stared at the phone in my hand and swallowed. That was harder than I thought it would be. Sometimes, I got a flutter of nerves just calling to make a dentist appointment, but this? This was a whole other level of intimidating.

  Rumor in town had it that Brody, along with several other members like William’s best friend Mason, had been there when William was shot and killed. A mere five days later and Brody was already back at work even though I’d heard through the friend of a friend that he was the one who’d done CPR on William for eight minutes until the ambulance arrived. I wasn’t sure how true all the whispers in Reno were, but things like that didn’t usually get blown out of proportion because they were already pretty wild stories to begin with. />
  Unfortunately, this wasn’t a story at all.

  Out in the restaurant, I heard the front door swing open on creaky hinges and fall closed.

  I froze.

  I must have forgotten to lock up behind me after I put Jackson in his cab. No customers would be coming in at a time like this, especially with all the house lights off, so I could only make two conclusions as to who it might be: Jackson returning for more beer or an unwelcome guest here to take something that wasn’t theirs.

  High heels clicked on the wood floors of the restaurant.

  The sound spurred me into action. I yanked a butcher’s knife out of the knife block on the counter and hurried out of the kitchen to stand behind the bar with the knife held up and an expression on my face that I hoped looked menacing.

  A woman dressed all in black stood in the middle of my bar with her arms crossed over her chest. The lights were all down except for the emergency-exit lights that cast a red glow over her icy-blonde hair slicked back in a ponytail. The lights almost made her hair look pink, but I knew for a fact it was as white as a sheet of paper. I also knew without being able to see her pale blue eyes that she was staring back at me.

  “Good evening, Miss Lye,” Caroline Bates practically purred. She took three long strides toward me, hips swaying with every purposeful step, ponytail swishing across her back. “You really should make sure you lock up for the night when you’re in this place all alone.”

  “Get out.”

  Caroline’s chuckle sounded wolflike to me. “Darling, please. Remember who you’re speaking to. You should offer me a drink, not point me toward the door. And for heaven’s sake, put the knife down before you cut that pretty skin of yours. My daddy would be so disappointed if you put a scar on that body.”

  My skin itched.

  Unbothered by the knife I still held high in one hand, Caroline strode to the nearest barstool and perched on the edge of it. She clasped her hands together and rested them on the bar while she watched me from beneath white brows, dyed the same shade as her hair.