Page 15 of Asking for Trouble
The window to the kitchen was held open by a wooden chopstick. The screen behind it had been warped with time and punctured in a few places. Voices drifted out of the gaps like smoke.
“They’re fuckin’ scary, man,” a weak, warbling voice whined. “I mean it. You guys’ve been good to me, and I know Z’s a shit crazy motherfucker when he wants to be, but these guys…”There was a sharp inhalation of breath and then a little whimper. “Man showed up and made me shit my pants.”
“He threatened to take away your drug stash?” Aaron asked dryly.
His voice deepening to cruel, dark tones shouldn’t have sent a vibration of energy zipping like an electrical current to my sex, but it did. I shivered in the warm spring air and carefully moved closer.
“My b-brother Davey, he’s in Ford Correctional Prison. Roo-Rooster threatened to have him killed. I know the guy from when I lived in Calgary. He ain’t someone you fuck with!”
The air disappeared from my lungs as if they were vacuum sealed. I struggled to drag new oxygen into my chest but choked. Black spots reeled across my vision, and I had to catch myself with a hand on the trailer.
I hadn’t heard that name in years.
A part of me had honestly started to believe I never would again.
“What was that?” the strange voice asked nervously.
A hushing sound from Aaron.
I moved to the door, knocking as I pushed it open and stepped into the rank interior.
A man sat at a small yellow table. His skin hung off his bones like an old T-shirt, and what little hair he had was greased back from his forehead. Blood caked around his misshapen nose and pooled beneath the skin of his left cheek, but it was the red pool of blood on the tabletop dripping over the edge with a faintsplatto the floor that was most compelling. In the lake of red, fingernails floated like macabre boats.
And standing beside it all was Aaron with a gun in his bloody hands trained at my chest.
I arched a brow at him. “You’re the second man today to level a gun at me. If you think it’ll turn me on, you’re wrong.”
Only, he wasn’t really.
The sight of him so tall, dark, and dangerous was mouth-watering in the extreme.
But it was impossible to ignore the fact that he’d been pulling off this man’s fingernails.
I winced in sympathy. “What did he ever do to you?”
“He fucked with my family,” Aaron said, more serious than I’d seen him. “You gotta problem with violence, Blue?”
“I was raised in the thick of it,” I quipped. “But this isn’t the time for ghost stories. Otto and his crew are at the base of the hill trying to decide how best to take you out.”
Aaron blinked at me, then swore viciously, dropping the gun to his side and dragging a tattooed hand through his mess of hair. “A tracker in the bags.”
“That’s what I assumed,” I agreed as if none of this had fazed me. As if I wasn’t reeling from the sound of Rooster’s name and the knowledge that he was involved somehow in British Columbia.
Aaron spun to face the cowering man at the table, who whimpered when Aaron grabbed him by the stained tank. “The next time Rooster makes contact, what do you do?”
“C-C-Call you,” he promised, eyes wide and blown black with fear.
“The second,” Aaron insisted. “You remember, they might threaten your brother, Beaker. But I’ll threaten your entire goddamn family and every person you’ve ever known if you fuck with my family, you hear me?”
Before the man named Beaker could answer, Aaron was twirling around, tagging my hand and the duffels on the ground by his feet, and dragging me to the back of the trailer to the tiny bedroom that smelled like mold. The bed was so stained with mysterious colours that I couldn’t look at it without wanting togag. There was a window over it facing the back of the mountain that Aaron popped out with one fierce hit from his elbow.
“I don’t think you can fit through that,” I mused as the sound of voices drifted up the mountain to our ears.
“I better,” he said, totally unfazed as he moved me into position and helped push me through.
I was almost out the other side when his hand landed on my ass, and despite myself, I snorted. Only Aaron would cop a feel while we were running from outlaws.
My landing was hard against the packed, cracked earth, but I rolled to absorb the brunt of the impact. The thud of the two duffels sounded in quick succession behind me. By the time I righted myself, Boner was squeezing his big body out the window with surprising grace, landing on booted feet.