Rage (A Thunder Gypsies MC Outlaw Biker Romance)

by Wick, Christa

  Baldie dropped my backpack and the other items he’d picked up. Another bolt of fear shot through me like lightning. These men, DEA agents or not, were going to rape me.

  Surprising me, Baldie pulled his gun out, chambered a round and pointed it at the man behind me. “You really think Little Red is going to be happy to find out you had your dick in her?”

  I pressed my face to the mattress, a sob breaking from my chest as I saw my future ahead of me. Little Red, maybe the whole damn club, using my body and Callan beaten and probably dead before they finished with me.

  Baldie laughed. “That’s right, sugar. You might want to rest up on the ride back to Georgia. You’re about to become a very busy whore.”

  Not trusting me with his partner, Baldie tossed my bag at the man. “Bring the car up to the door.”

  When we were alone, he came around the bed to stand behind me. I felt the barrel of his gun push my panties to one side and then its cold tip pushed between my labia.

  “Look at me, bitch.”

  I did.

  Nothing lived in his dark gaze as he warned me. “I’m getting your pants on and gagging you. Do anything to attract attention and you’re gonna spend a long time dying. Understand?”

  I nodded. He returned the nod then brought the gun to his lips. My stomach lurched as his tongue darted out to lick my juices from the metal.

  “I sure hope Little Red leaves some for me, sugar.”

  **********

  Baldie hauled me out of the hotel room in a surreal version of a perp walk, handcuffed with my jacket over my head so anyone watching wouldn’t see the cloth he’d shoved into my mouth to prevent me from screaming. I was roughly shoved inside the car. The door slammed shut behind me then I heard the front passenger door shut. The vehicle accelerated, tires squealing as we left the hotel parking lot.

  Baldie reached into the back seat and pulled the jacket from my head. He had to pry my face in his direction to remove the gag as I searched for Callan. With the gag out, I jerked my head back and looked to my left.

  “He’s quite a fighter,” Baldie chuckled. “Usually you slam a gun into a man’s face, you just have to do it once and he’s out.”

  I could see by the blood and swelling that they had hit Callan several times. I worried over the fact he remained unconscious. Had the blows been too many? Too hard?

  “Hey, how many times did you hit the fucker,” Baldie asked as he lightly slapped his partner’s arm with the back of his hand. “I think it was three from me. He sure as hell didn’t expect it.”

  “Twice,” the driver answered, a nostalgic smile lifting the side of his face that I could see. “That’s when the desk clerk started screaming because I broke his nose and it got really bloody.”

  I eased a foot in Callan’s direction and brushed it lightly against his leg to see if there was any response. Nothing. He was out cold, only the clogged breathing and shallow lift of his chest letting me know he lived.

  Trying not to cry, I looked out the tinted windows of the car. Callan and I had traveled side roads into town and it looked like we were being returned to Thunder Valley the same way. Maybe if I got them talking, I could figure something out that didn’t end with Callan and me dead.

  “Are you really DEA?” I asked.

  “Five more years and I’ll be collecting a federal pension, sugar.” Baldie turned in his seat to look at me. He jabbed a thumb in the driver’s direction. “Sprankle, here, he’s got ten to go but I don’t think he’s gonna make it after I’m gone. Too sloppy.”

  “Don’t fucking use my name,” Sprankle growled. “Talk about motherfucking, sloppy assed...”

  Baldie pulled a face, his eyes rolling to one side as he opened his mouth wide. When he finished mocking his partner’s reaction, he jerked his head in my direction. “Sugar here is as good as dead. Except Little Red wants to fuck her first.”

  Sprankle snorted. “That dick better share. Bringing him back this bitch, over a hundred grand of his money and lover boy.”

  Next to me, Callan began to stir. Baldie spotted the movement and reached into the back seat to slap at Callan’s knee. “Speaking of lover boy, looks like he’s finally coming around.”

  Sprankle tensed and shot a glance in the rearview mirror. “We need to stop and shove his ass in the trunk. If we hadn’t blitzed him like we did--”

  “Don’t be a pussy. He’s cuffed and Big Red wants him alive,” Baldie said. “Old man is scared shitless the kid figured things out and has evidence to back it up.”

  He stopped talking long enough to crack his knuckles. “Going to be an interesting interrogation.”

  “We can put one of the seats down,” Sprankle argued. “Asshole won’t overheat or die from fumes, but he’ll be out of sight. Windows aren’t so dark they’ll keep someone from seeing his fucked up face.”

  Next to me, Callan started coughing. He leaned forward, spitting blood on the floor. His shoulder twitched and it took me a second to realize he was trying to hide his hands. I saw the knife he had used to pry the lightning bolts off his bike. The blade was closed. It would make an audible click when it opened and even more noise if he planned on trying to break the lock on his handcuffs.

  I leaned toward the center of the front seat, both shielding him from their view and trying to serve as a distraction.

  “Big Red is lying about why he wants Callan brought back alive.” It was a bluff, and I didn’t think it would work to get them to turn the car around, but if Callan was going to get his handcuffs off, I had to do something to divert their attention. “He wants the know where the rest of the cash is.”

  The car swerved as Sprankle stopped staring at the road long enough to shoot me a hard glance. “What cash?”

  I nodded at my backpack on the front passenger floor. “Nine more bricks, just like that.”

  “Bitch is bluffing.” Baldie twisted in his seat to grab me by the hair. “If Red was missing another nine-hundred-k, he would have had us sit outside the little shit’s hotel until he could claim him on his own.”

  He flung me back against the seat. “Like that stupid fuck would ever have that much cash anyway.”

  I risked a glance at Callan but he seemed to have collapsed into the corner. Neither man paid attention to him.

  Sprankle still wanted to talk about the money. “What if she’s telling the truth?”

  “Then we get a bigger cut, but, I’m telling you,” Baldie growled. “The bitch is lying.”

  “Listen,” Sprankle argued. “We need to pull over, shove his dumb ass in the trunk. Then we can work her over a little, find out if she’s trying to play us.”

  He lifted his hands from the steering wheel for a second before slamming them back down. “C’mon, we’re talking about a million fucking dollars!”

  I let out a shaky breath, my attention half on the argument taking place in the front seat and half on Callan. The way he was breathing scared me. Deep raspy sounds mixed with clogged, sputtering coughs came from him. His eyes had rolled up into his head. His shoulders shook.

  “Fuck me if he’s going to last that long,” Baldie said, staring at Callan. “There’s a turnout coming up, you better pull over.”

  A sound came out of Callan that made me think of a death rattle. A sob broke from me in response and Baldie screamed at Sprankle to pull into the turnout.

  “Not time for you to die, chief,” Baldie said, his hand on the door handle as the car rolled to a stop. “Not yet.”

  Intent on getting out of the car, he wasn’t looking at Callan. Neither was Sprankle. Callan lunged forward, each hand shooting in a different direction. He wrapped his left arm around the headrest and Sprankle’s throat as his right hand buried the blade of the knife in Baldie’s throat. He pulled it out, buried it a second time, arterial blood squirting from the first wound.

  The seatbelt restraining him, Sprankle tried to unholster his gun. Callan jabbed the knife in Sprankle’s right eye. Sprankle’s jaw went slack and he stopped
struggling, stopped moving at all.

  Bile erupted in my mouth, not from the dead or dying cops in the front seat but as I saw what Callan had done to get one hand uncuffed. He had cut along his thumb, down near his wrist. The blood had served as a lubricant and the severed tendons had made slipping out of the cuff easier.

  The weird breathing, the shoulder shaking -- it had all been part of mutilating his hand to give us a chance at escape.

  One handed, he stripped the guns from the men’s holsters, tossed one in the backseat and kept the other as he exited the car. I scooted across the bench seat, following him out of the vehicle.

  “Who cuffed you?” he barked.

  “The driver.”

  Callan rifled through the dead man’s pockets until he came up with the handcuff key. I turned my back to him, wincing in sympathy as he fumbled to unlock it. With my hands free, he directed me to the other side of the car as he wrapped his arms around Sprankle’s body.

  “We need to dump these...” Seeing how I hesitated, he stopped. “Baby? Are you with me?”

  I nodded and opened the passenger side door. We looked at each other over the dead men.

  “They would have let Big Red kill us--”

  “I know,” I interrupted. He didn’t have to justify killing them, not to me. “Let’s get them into the woods before someone else decides--”

  Half out of the car with Baldie’s body, I jerked my head up at a faint whirring sound that was growing louder.

  “Chopper.” I heard the air leave Callan for a second, then he shook off whatever feeling had gripped him. “Nothing to do with us. Just shove him back in and we’ll wait until they pass over.”

  He stuffed Sprankle’s body behind the wheel and shut the door. Staggering as he walked, he rounded the vehicle to help me with the heavier body I wrestled with. Looking at his hand, I didn’t know how Callan remained on his feet. I wanted to faint and it wasn’t my blood or severed tendons.

  The whirring turned into the swooping sound of a giant mechanical bird. We both looked up, any hope that the helicopter was just flying over vanishing as it came into view. Dark blue, it had ATF stamped in big block letters on its tail. The side door was open, two men in tactical gear each holding a rifle aimed in our direction.

  “Out of the frying pan,” Callan started. His right hand grabbed my elbow and I had a moment’s impression that he planned on our bolting into the woods behind us.

  “I need time to figure a way out of this--”

  I laughed, the sound bordering on hysterical. “You need a doctor.”

  Without the helicopter hovering over us and the rifles targeting our heads, we might have made it back on the road. But Callan couldn’t see out of one eye. The cuts on his face had reopened from the exertion and I knew his head had to feel like a cherry bomb had exploded inside his skull.

  The last chance to break for the woods was cut off as a van swept into the turnout, its tires screeching as it came to a stop. The side door flew open and bodies poured out, all of them screaming for us to put our hands on the car’s roof.

  They threw Callan to the ground. I heard his grunt of pain, but he didn’t say anything, not even when they wrenched his left hand behind his back.

  “What the fuck?”

  I stared at the ATF agent trying to cuff Callan.

  “I’m gonna need cable ties,” he shouted. “He’s about to lose his thumb.”

  Fresh bile coated my taste buds. The tears I’d been holding back started rolling down my cheeks. Through my blurred vision, I saw another vehicle pull to a stop behind the van. A woman, somewhere in her early fifties, exited from the front passenger seat. All the agents from the van stopped talking to watch her walk around Sprankle’s car.

  “Both dead?” she asked the agent who had opened Sprankle’s door.

  He nodded and showed her the blade Callan had used to kill the men.

  She smiled, the gesture sending a chill down my spine. This woman wasn’t someone’s grandmother who spent her Sundays baking cookies, even if she did. Seeing the quiet satisfaction on her face as she looked over the dead DEA agents, I wasn’t sure whether we had escaped one set of dirty cops just to get grabbed by a bigger group of them.

  The woman straightened and turned to us. Her gaze swept coldly over me before she looked at Callan. “Get him a doctor. No pain meds. I need him lucid when I talk to him.”

  She stepped over Callan, then gestured for the other agents to load us into the van.

  “We’ll use the local sheriff’s office,” she said, returning to her car like she was leaving last night’s garbage on the side of the road. “Have the doctor meet us there.”

  **********

  A little over two hours later, I was yanked from the jail cell the ATF had parked me in to a room some ten feet by ten feet. There was a cheap conference table in the middle and bolts on the floor with chains attached to them. The agent retrieving me shoved me into a plastic chair and secured one of the chains to my cuffs.

  By that time, I knew the lead agent’s name was Gloria McCready and she was as cold a bitch as they came. She had stood outside my cell telling me about the drug and accessory to murder charges she was having drawn up against me.

  I hadn’t yet invoked my right to an attorney, but I didn’t take the bait of her threats. She was too much like the useless counselors back in school, always trying to scold and threaten me into more regular attendance and completed homework when they didn’t have a fucking clue what the real facts were.

  Same gray hair, same polyester skirt suit in dark colors with their low-heel dress shoes. Same holier-than-thou attitude.

  I waited, chained in place, for about fifteen minutes before McCready entered. She carried a thick file and had some new guy in a suit trailing after her like a puppy. He waited for her to sit, but she slammed the file down and started pacing the floor.

  I watched the act, wondering what came next when the door opened and they brought Callan in. His face looked better -- marginally. About half the swelling had gone down and he had stitches above his left brow and along the cheek on the same side. His left hand was bandaged, both hands secured in front of him with cable ties.

  The guard placed Callan in the chair next to me with the same force he had used on me. Maybe the rough handling was because of the dead DEA agents or maybe the ATF just wanted us to know who was in charge. Like the cuffs didn’t tell us that already.

  McCready’s gaze moved from me to Callan. She smiled, her eyebrows lifting with the phony gesture. “I wanted your girlfriend to be here when you sell her out.”

  “You’re boring me,” Callan told her. “Get on with it.”

  A small thrill ran through me at his insolence. I remembered all the times I had wanted to talk back -- to my teachers, my father, the manager at the diner I waitressed at and Freya. I had always been afraid to rock the boat. I’d witnessed from an early age what my father did to my mother when she talked back.

  Callan didn’t know that kind of fear. I wasn’t sure he knew any kind of fear.

  McCready looked at me, her brows crawling higher. “I’m trying to discuss whether you’re even alive next week and I’m boring him. You should choose your lovers more carefully, my dear.”

  I shrugged, but my chest drew a little tighter. The dark glittering in McCready’s gaze told me she could read the tension running through my body.

  Callan said nothing, just drilled a hole through the woman with his hard stare.

  She blinked first. “You’re a lot like your brother, Mister Tilley. Lincoln wouldn’t listen to me either.”

  He brought his hands up and placed them on the table. Next to McCready, the man scooted his chair half a foot from the table. The gesture provoked a smile in Callan. A few hours ago, he had been handcuffed and bloodied in the back seat of a Crown Victoria, the only destination given an early grave. Now the men who had put him in that vehicle were dead. The man in the suit knew that and Callan scared the shit out of him.

/>   Not McCready. She didn’t flinch, but her gaze remained frozen on Callan’s hands even as he started talking.

  “That fuck driving the car testified at Lincoln’s trial.”

  McCready looked at the man next to her. He nodded. She flicked her hand at the revelation. “What’s your point?”

  “He’s on Big Red’s payroll. Both of them were.”

  McCready folded her arms across her chest, her expression dripping with an oily smugness that made me want to retch. “Tell me something I don’t know?”

  That stopped Callan for a second. He gave a short shake of his head then laughed. “That’s good enough to get Lincoln a retrial.”

  “How does that keep Miss Watkins alive when I drop her back in Thunder Valley to face charges for stealing her father’s truck?” Taking a piece of paper from the folder, McCready pushed it between us. “Or do you care more about your brother’s freedom than your own or Avery’s life?”

  I glanced at the paper. It was a photocopy of a complaint with the Thunder Valley police department. My father’s drunken scrawl cut through the signature line.

  She shoved more papers in front of us. First, she showed us a statement from one of the ATF agents on the scene reporting how the brick of money in my backpack had tested positive for trace narcotics, indicating that it had recently been used in the drug trade. The second was another agent report, this one detailing how he had seen me from his position in the helicopter trying to stuff Baldie’s body back into the car.

  “If the Gypsies let Avery live, we’ll indict her on federal drug charges and accessory to the murder of two federal agents.” McCready took the pages back before I could finish reading. “You might get off on the murders, but you either have to claim the drug money or admit to stealing it.”

  Callan’s right hand clenched into a fist. He forced it straight, breath leaving his body in a slow, long stream as he fought for control. Callan looked at the man, glaring until the guy started to wiggle uncomfortably.

  “Let me guess, you’re the prosecutor this bitch is keeping on a short chain?”