by Reid, Ruby
“Mmmm,” was all she said. She slid over to him and threw an arm over his chest. Her voice thick with sleep, she added, “Sorry. That sounded shitty of me.”
“No, it’s okay. I’m sorry it woke you.”
“Mmm hmm,” she said.
She was asleep a few moments later, and he felt the rise and fall of her chest against his side. Just as he was also on the verge of sleep, his phone started vibrating again.
Damn, he thought. How can this get any worse?
Beside him, Amanda stirred. “Maybe just give a two weeks’ notice,” she joked. “That works for everyone else.”
Hearing her joking in such a way as she was half asleep made him feel very guilty about keeping what he knew about Stephen from her. In fact, as he reached out for his phone again, he started to feel real hatred towards himself for the first time.
That hatred was replaced by fear when he saw the display on his phone.
Jameson.
His first reaction was to simply ignore the call. But he knew that would do no good. Jameson would keep calling and only get angrier each time he ignored the call. Might as well just rip the band-aid off and get it over with as quickly as possible.
He again went into the bathroom, faster this time, and didn’t bother with the ruse of the exhaust fan.
“Hello?” he asked, trying to sound tired rather than afraid.
“Alex,” Jameson said. “How are you, kid?”
“Good, I guess. Listen, Jameson, I—”
“No,” Jameson said. “You listen Alex, and you listen good. I’m in town. I’m parked in front of a restaurant that I think you might know well. It’s where you met the woman I’m assuming you’re with.”
Holy shit, Alex thought. This is bad. This is—
“I don’t know where you are,” Jameson said. “And I don’t care. But you bring your ass here right now. You have thirty minutes. If thirty-one pass, and I haven’t seen you, I will find you. And before I beat you to a bloody mess, I’m going to rape that lady friend of yours and make you watch. You hear me?”
Fear quickly churned into an acidic anger, but Alex knew better than to let it surface.
“Answer me!”
“Yes,” Alex said. “I hear you. But Jameson, you have to—”
But the line had gone dead already.
Alex sat on the edge of the toilet, his stomach churning and his mind working in a million directions at once.
There was no way out of this, and he knew it. And Christ, had he been so stupid as to think he’d make this decision and not have to pay some sort of consequence? He found himself wanting to weep for the first time in nearly fifteen years, but kept it away. For now, he had to focus.
He had to pay attention to every detail and hope it was enough to make sure this was not the last night of his life.
***
He walked back out into the bedroom, hoping that Amanda would have fallen back asleep. That way, he could sneak out and handle this nasty business without her knowing anything at all about it. His hopes were dashed, though, when he walked back into the room and he saw her sitting halfway up, propped up on an elbow. The sheets had slid down just enough to reveal her left breast and he suddenly found the prospect of leaving her more than he could handle.
“More club stuff?” she asked.
“Yeah. But this call was… well, this one sucks.”
“Why? Is something wrong?”
Alex sat on the side of the bed, sliding his boots over to him. He also grabbed up his clothes form the floor and started to sort them on the bed.
“I don’t know for sure. But I do have to go.”
“Now? Alex, it’s two thirty in the morning.”
“I know,” he said, wanting very badly to explain what was happening. But he didn’t want to cause her any worry, and he sure as hell didn’t want to start an argument. This was something he had to do, and he didn’t want her trying to talk him out of his responsibilities. This was the bed he made, and now he had to lie in it.
“Is it bad?”
“It could be,” he said, slipping his shirt on. “I promise you, I’m not trying to be vague or rude about this, but the less you know, the better.”
“Okay,” she said hesitantly. “At the risk of sounding like an obsessive little girl, can I ask when you’ll be back?”
“If it goes well, I could be back in about an hour, I guess.”
“Someone from the club is here? In town?”
“Yeah. They found out where I was somehow.” His thoughts instantly turned to Slim, but he didn’t want to assume that his friend would just hand him over like that. On the other hand, Alex didn’t doubt that Jameson would get extreme on his own club members in an effort to get any information he wanted.
“And that’s why I can’t tell you much,” he went on, slipping his pants on. “If they’re in town, I have to go to them. If I don’t, they’ll look for me. And I can’t let you get into this.”
“But if these are members of your club, would they actually hurt you?” She was sitting up now, hugging the sheets to her. It hurt Alex to see her looking so beautiful and yet so worried all at the same time.
“It’s hard to say,” he said. He stood up from the bed and leaned over to her. He kissed her softly but deeply. She cradled his face in her hands, and when they parted, she looked him directly in the eyes.
“Be straight with me,” she said. “Are you about to go into a dangerous situation?”
“I don’t know for sure,” he said. “It’s really weird. Very hard to explain.” And the hell of it was he really didn’t know how this would all go down.
“Okay,” she said. “If for some reason it goes bad, and you get a chance, can you at least call me?”
“Absolutely,” he said, and then kissed her one more time. “But I have to go.”
She nodded and he hated to see her looking so sad. He gave her one final look and then headed for the bedroom door. “I’ll be back,” he said without much emotion.
“Okay,” she said.
He stood at the door for a moment, looking in at her. He had to tear himself away, pulled by the reality of what was waiting for him on the other side of town. His heart thumped with dread as he finally turned away and headed for the front of the house.
When he stepped out into the night, the silence of the city seemed foreboding. Even when he cranked his bike to life and started down the street, everything seemed too quiet for his liking.
It felt like even the city was waiting for this to unfold, its silence an indicator that it knew trouble was on the way.
CHAPTER TEN
Jameson flicked his used up cigarette to the pavement and watched the orange embers die out. He sat astride his bike, looking out across the empty restaurant parking lot and tried his best to figure out how he was going to handle this situation. He thought the world of Alex, but he also felt that he needed to make an example of him. No one abandoned the Unknowns without his say so. It was more than just a stupid, stubborn pride thing. It was the fact that Alex knew lots of information about the club and, beyond that, was on the fast track to taking up an important position within the club.
If anything, Jameson felt betrayed. His feelings weren’t hurt, and, truth be told, he wasn’t even that pissed off anymore. The anger he had felt — the same anger that had been behind his attack on Slim — had waned on his drive out here. Hell, he didn’t blame Alex. He was a young guy that had a whole future ahead of him. If he wanted something other than the lawlessness and constant movement that the Unknowns required, there was no fault in that.
They’d just have to have a talk to sort things out. And if Alex really did want out of the club…w ell, maybe they could come to some sort of an arrangement. He hated to see the kid go, but he wasn’t a monster that was going to make people stay in the club. He’d allowed people an easy out before, and there was no reason this situation with Alex couldn’t turn out nice and clean like those instances.
Then w
hy in the hell am I so furious? Is it just because he failed to finish the job on Marco?
He wasn’t sure. Maybe it was just the stress of moving the club. There were a lot of working cogs, and it was next to impossible for him and Karla to keep up with them all.
The darkness of the early morning hours sat heavy on the parking lot as he sat there and waited. He knew that he had put a lot of anger into the phone call he’d had with Alex, but it had been necessary. While he didn’t fault Alex for his decisions (well, maybe a little bit), he still thought it might do the kid some good to squirm. He glanced at his watch and saw that Alex had seven minutes before the deadline Jameson had given him.
Just as he looked up from his watch, he saw headlights approaching from the street adjacent to him. It was a small car that blended in well with the night. It came across the intersection, its lights pointed directly for the parking lot. Has the kid even given up his bike? Jameson wondered.
Something in his guts started to churn. Something was going on here… something unexpected and likely not good. He’d been in enough of these situations to know when his ass was on the line. It was almost like a sixth sense.
And right now, as the little car pulled into the parking lot and came towards him, that sixth sense was telling him to get his Glock out of the small pack on the back of his bike. Slowly, he started reaching for it. He unlatched the pack and slipped his hand inside, searching for the smooth surface of the gun.
The people in the car apparently saw this because it was then that the car put on speed and barreled directly towards him. There was a moment when Jameson was convinced that the car was simply going to plow into his bike. But at the last moment, the car took a hard right turn, slicing into a U-turn.
As it did, Jameson got a good look at the driver’s side window. It was rolled down, revealing a face that had clearly seen a beating recently. It was a familiar face, and when Jameson saw it, his hand finally found the gun in his pack.
Marco, he thought. How the hell did he know I was here?
Jameson gripped his gun and pulled it out, but Marco’s gun was already up. Three shots were fired, filling the parking lot like lighting blasts. The shots came in rapid succession, the first taking Jameson in the arm, the second taking him in the shoulder. The shoulder-shot spun him like a top from his bike and likely saved his life. The third bullet whizzed by the area where his head had been less than a second ago. He heard it blaze by as he fell from his bike, a split second before his freshly wounded arm slammed into the pavement.
He screamed out in pain as he rolled over with his gun in hand. The car had already made its turn, and all Jameson could see was the back of the car. He fired two shots anyway, out of anger more than anything, aiming for the tires. He had no idea if he hit one, though. There was too much pain in his arm, and his shoulder felt like it had been torn from his body.
He rolled over onto his back, trying to summon the energy to get to his feet. He sat up, and the pain made him sick to the stomach. He thought he had been hit in the left shoulder, but it was more like the upper chest. Every breath he took was agonizing.
As he tried to get to his feet, he heard the sound of an approaching engine. Right away, he knew it for what it was: a motorcycle engine.
He managed to get to his knees, but that was it. He rested against his bike, feeling its reassuring weight beside him. The motorcycle engine drew closer and within seconds, its headlight illuminated the area in front of Jameson’s bike. It quickly drew up by Jameson’s bike and within seconds, Alex was there, kneeling beside him. To Jameson, it all happened in weird jerking movements. He realized then that his shirt was soaked with blood, the shot in his chest perhaps more damaging than he had originally assumed. He saw Alex’s face, but it was blurry and nearly translucent, as if he were seeing a ghost.
“What the hell happened?” Alex asked.
“Marco,” Jameson said. He wasn’t sure, but he thought he tasted blood in the back of his mouth.
“Here?”
“Yeah.”
“We need to call a doctor,” Alex said. “There’s blood everywhere.”
“No. Go after him. He can’t be but thirty seconds ahead of you. He took a left out of the lot. Black car.” Each word was like hot iron in his shoulder. The pain wound through him and seemed to plummet through every inch of his body.
“Jameson, I—”
“Now!” And with that, he was sure there was blood in his throat. He felt it thick and gummy on his tongue now.
Jameson watched something happen in Alex’s eyes then, some deep thinking that made him look like a truly haunted individual.
“Okay,” he said. He then pulled out his cellphone, and Jameson watched as he pushed in 9-1-1. “Get to a hospital before you bleed to death. I’ll get Marco. And after that… well, after that, I need to have you gone.”
Jameson chuckled, and it sent a flare of pain through his body. “We’ll see,” he said as he put the phone to his ear.
Alex waited until someone on the other end picked up before turning his back on Jameson. As he mounted his bike, he heard a sharp whistling noise. He turned and saw Jameson with a gun. He lobbed it at Alex and he caught it deftly.
Listening to Jameson tell the dispatcher where he was and what had happened, Alex kicked his bike to life and headed left to deal Marco O’Brien a beating for the second time in less than a week.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
It had been about eight months since Alex had given chase to anyone on his bike with the intentions of hurting them. Every time he had done it during his time with the Unknowns, it had been on those vast and seemingly endless roads out in the Nevada desert. But now, in the darkness of a city that he was unfamiliar with, it was a completely different scenario.
He picked up the headlights of the black car easily enough, coming up on them in less than a minute. He sped up, running a red light in the process, grateful that the streets were empty. Jameson’s Glock was tucked away in the interior pocket of his jacket, and as he neared the car, Alex fought the urge to pull it out. The last thing he wanted was to fire several shorts that would do no good. There was no sense in giving people reasons to call the cops. Adding the police to this situation would only makes things so much worse.
Not wanting Marco — or Marco and his companions (that was another thing; Alex had no idea how many people were in the car) — to discover that he was tailing them, Alex slowed his speed a bit, hanging back, and waiting for an opportune time.
The car seemed to be in no real hurry to get anywhere. It broke the speed limit by only a slightest amount and stopped at the appropriate lights. By the time Alex had managed to get to within two hundred feet of them, he was able to faintly see the interior of the car with the aide of the dim streetlights. There were two people inside…one at the wheel and the other in the passenger seat.
Only two of them, Alex said. I can handle that. The gun in his jacket seemed to bulge at this thought, agreeing.
Alex followed the car for ten minutes, only passing two other cars during that time. They were heading to the industrial side of town, where there were factories, warehouses, and rundown apartment complexes. As he realized this, Alex wondered if this wasn’t deliberate. He knew that there was an exit to the interstate further down this way, but if the men in the car were looking for a quick escape from the crime they had committed, this was not the way to go.
As the twelfth minute of the eventless chase passed, Alex saw his window of opportunity. He was still two hundred yards behind the car and they had now started to catch the same sequence in the traffic lights: when Marco caught a green, so did Alex. They had caught three in a row, but now a red one shone bright in the dark like an evil dragon’s eye.
Alex swerved over into the second lane, making as if he were going to take a right turn rather than drive straight ahead. He pulled slowly to a stop, sidling up beside the small black car. Before he came side to side with it, he reached into his jacket and removed the Glock.
<
br /> He pulled to a complete stop, his wheel coming to rest perfectly aligned with the front of the black car. Right away, he looked to his left and saw the man that was sitting in the passenger seat. It was indeed Marco O’Brien. Marco was looking directly at him, perhaps a bit alarmed at the sound of a motorcycle’s engine so soon after having shot the leader of a feared motorcycle club.
Marco’s eyes grew wide and he fumbled with something in his lap—his gun, Alex assumed. Alex didn’t give him the chance. He pulled off two shots, causing the passenger window to explode. He could hear Marco screaming inside, yelling at the driver.
“Go!”
