Page 11

11. WORLD OF HURT

BIGFOOT

As soon as we pulled up outside the tiny cabin Sammy called home, I turned a sharp glare on Sheriff Estes. We all knew that fucker was corrupt as they come, and I didn’t like the fact that he was at Sammy’s place, especially since her uncle called us for help.

“Is there a problem here?” I asked as Jester got out of the van and Baffle, Grease, and Dime all got off their motorcycles. They came with me to help Sammy, but also as backup in case anyone else was lurking around. Not only did we need a show of force, for Sammy’s sake, but we needed to be cautious about moving around without backup too, considering what happened to me.

“Could ask you the same,” Estes drawled slowly. “Thought she wasn’t affiliated with your gang?” It was a question, not a statement and one that was liable to land the asshole in the dirt.

“Just got released from the hospital earlier today. Saw my kid, now I came to make sure I properly thanked the woman who saved my damn life.”

“And you had to bring all of them with you?”

“Safety in numbers,” I explained while I wore what I knew to a be an evil fucking grin. “Never know when an eighteen-wheeler might throw a tire up and take a person out.” I stared Estes down hard and dared him to say a word.

“Well, be that as it may, you’ll have to pay your respects another day. I was just about to re-interview Samantha about your accident.”

“No, you weren’t.” Sammy told him as she crossed her arms over her chest in defiance. Fuck, I needed to get her riled up more often and in private. The way her arms were positioned worked to push her tits up and out further. A smack to the back of my head let me know I’d been caught drooling over her rack. Truthfully, I don’t think anyone could blame me, though. She was wearing a tight little ribbed tank and her nipples begged for attention.

“Sammy, you might want to go grab a sweater,” I told her as it became obvious that Sheriff Estes also noticed what I’d been looking at. His eyeballs were glued to her tits the same way mine had been before Baffle smacked some sense into me.

“I’m not cold, I’m pissed.”

I didn’t get to argue with her as Brady Morton walked out of her cabin like he didn’t have a care in the world and handed her a sweatshirt. Just my fuckin’ luck it was the one Jester put on her at the hospital. The fucker chuckled under his breath, and I turned my glare on him.

“You can’t do a damn thing about it in your condition,” he taunted under his breath.

“What are you doing here?” Estes asked Brady.

“On my property?” Brady asked and threw his arms across his chest in much the same way his niece had, only no one stared at his tits.

“You know damn well what I mean. This is Ms. Morton’s residence. What are you doing here, if she was supposedly just about to go to sleep.”

“Came by to fix her water heater.” Brady tipped his head toward Sammy. “She was going to take a shower before bed but couldn’t get the damn thing to heat up.” He shrugged. “Now, I’m wondering why the fuck you’re here.” His question was pointed at the sheriff, but then he turned in my direction. “That goes for you guys, too.”

“Just here to say our thanks to your niece for doing a stranger a kindness that probably saved my life.”

“You’re welcome to come in for a few minutes, but my niece has had a tough couple of days studying after taking time off, so you need to make this visit short.”

I nodded my agreement as the men started to shuffle into the cabin. Estes tried to go in and I put a hand on his shoulder to hold him back. “Don’t think that invite extended to you.”

“Get your fucking hand off me!” he spat then turned on Sammy. “We will get another statement from you,” he told her.

“No need. My statement hasn’t changed. If you feel the need to press the issue further, I will involve my lawyer.”

I heard him hiss, “Fuck,” under his breath before turned and walked back to his car. The boys made sure not to block the fucker in. I stood and watched as he left and continued to watch as he tried to idle just around the bend. I stood and pointedly stared at the man until he finally got the hint and took off. We watched him go all the way to the end of the private road owned by the Morton family. I stuck my head in the front door. “Prospect, get out here and keep a lookout. Make sure the sheriff doesn’t double back around and keep an eye out for anyone else who might be lurking around.”

“Yes, Prez.”

The little shit was only 18, but he’d do his job because he wanted to impress his dad who was one of the old-timers with the club. The kid was the result of Mickey fucking around on his ol’ lady one too many times and a club whore who was determined to earn a patch from a brother. It did not go the way she wanted. Mickey’s ol’ lady tried to kill him when she found out he had a kid with a club whore. She ended up in prison and Mickey threatened to put the whore in the grave if she came around him. It was only recently that Mickey started to have anything to do with the son who was in the middle of all the chaos, and the minute he showed interest, the kid latched on to the club like we were the glue that would hold his pieces together. It was yet to be seen if he’d make it as a brother or if his desperate need to be accepted would make it impossible to bring him on as a member.

After he was in a spot where he could see the road from both sides, I made my way into the cabin and locked the door behind me. Sammy stood there in front of the body with her head cocked to the side and then heaved out a giant sigh. “He completely ruined this floor.”

That was not what I expected. I wasn’t alone in that assessment. Jester groaned and then turned toward me. “Please, tell me you changed your mind.” I shook my head immediately.

“Not on your life, fucker.”

Sammy turned and smiled at the dead man who used to be my friend. Not the corpse, the other soon-to-be dead man, Jester. “I hope you brought the murder van!” I laughed because her voice had a cheery quality to it that should have seemed out of place, all things considered. Apparently, death and murder didn’t affect my woman the way it did most people.

“You’re not all there, are you?” Baffle asked her.

She pointed down at the guy she had shot. “Do you want me to feel bad for him? That asshole put three bullets into the bed I’d been in a few seconds before. If I hadn’t heard him breaking in the front door, I would be the corpse getting cleaned up. Fuck that. In a game of him or me… I chose me, and it makes me happy that it worked out the way I wanted it to.”

I glanced from Sammy to her uncle who stared at his niece like he wasn’t sure they had ever met before. “I’m beginning to wonder if you lied about what you did in the Army.”

She cocked her head to the side and rolled her eyes at him, as if he was nothing more than a nuisance. “Really?” She turned to me then. “Sorry about the mess. I’d have taken care of it myself, but honestly, I have no clue what to do with a dead body. Besides,” She pointed down to his cut. “I think that piece of leather means him being here was tied to you somehow.”

“Maybe, but my guess is they got your name off the accident report and figured since I was incapacitated, it had to be you who offed their Road Captain.”

“Did they find his body?” She asked.

“Hell no. There’s nothing to find. It just makes sense if he never came back that it was because someone took him out first.”

“Now there’s a second man who will be missed, and he was associated with my niece,” Brady said. Then he shook off whatever thought he must have had and looked me in the eye. “There’s more to this, Trav.”

“You two know each other?” Sammy asked.

“Went to school together,” her uncle explained as I watched to see if it bothered her that I was the same age as one of her uncles. He was the youngest of the three Morton boys, but still there was at least a decade between Sammy and me, maybe more. I wasn’t sure how old Sammy was because it really didn’t matter to me. I knew she was an Army vet, so she had to be over the age of eighteen, and the way she carried herself told me she was probably closer to mid-twenties. Then again, there was the comment about her studying for an exam earlier. Fuck, I didn’t know shit. It made me angry with Melissa all over again for interrupting shit when I had a file on Sammy in my hands earlier that would have answered all my fucking questions.

“What did you mean when you said there’s more to this?” I finally asked.

“I checked the security cameras while Sammy was talking to Sheriff Estes. We have them up near both garages, the campground, and inside and outside the camp store.”

“Was there someone else here?”

Brady shook his head, not this time. “The Sheriff showed up at a rather convenient time, considering how quickly that happened after the attempt on Sammy’s life. While shady as fuck, that wasn’t what bothered me the most.”

“What did?” Baffle asked him.

“Patrick,” Brady acknowledged my VP by his government name. “My sister-in-law had to take over at the camp store while Sammy was gone. I also had her stay on in the days since Sammy returned, because I gave my niece a couple of extra days off to get herself straight and get some studying in. Colleen was reluctant to do the job, and that’s putting shit mildly.”

“You think she pulled some shit out of resentment?”

Brady shook his head, and the grave look he lobbed on his niece made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. “What the fuck did she do?”

Instead of telling us about it, Brady pulled out his phone and queued up video footage from earlier in the day. It was the same man who was dead on the floor. The way he spoke with Colleen, and she with him, seemed very familiar. As in, they had not just met. That point was proven further when she told him exactly where to find Sammy and that they might need to move up their timetable if he offs the girl.

My phone buzzed as we watched Colleen flirt and drive a proverbial bus over her own stepdaughter. She pointed to the cabin where Sammy lived as I picked up my phone.

“Bigfoot.” Everyone turned to me and Brady paused the video.

“Hey Prez, I had some news that couldn’t wait. Ran a deeper dive on Colleen. Seems she might have an uncle in the Mojave Devils. There’s a discrepancy with their names that threw me off a bit, and I’m looking into that, but she has him listed as her next of kin at a hospital in Arizona.”

“How in the hell did you get that information?” I asked.

“It’s better if you don’t ask. If the body your girl dropped happens to be another Devil, I wanted you to know sooner rather than later that there might be a fox in the henhouse over there.”

I ignored Glitch’s need to make everything about predator-prey animal relations, thanked him, and hung up. “Looks like Glitch just figured out why stepmom was so fucking comfortable with a Mojave Devil.”

“What’s going on?” Sammy asked.

“She has an uncle in their MC. Glitch said something about her name being different and it threw him. He’s checking into everything, but her next of kin contact is a member of the fucking MDMC.”

Baffle was far too quiet about everything as he stood there staring at his own phone. Eventually, he glanced up at us, and I knew the minute our eyes connected that the shit we stumbled into with the Mojave Devils was about to get deeper.

“Fucking Devils hit our West Texas Chapter.”

“Who?” I barked the one-word question.

“Rio’s girl.”

“Didn’t know Rio had a girl,” Jester said.

“His friend, Issy was taken.”

“What more do we know?” I asked Baffle.

He shook his head. “Not much. Promised to get Glitch on it ASAP. Need to get Dime back to the clubhouse with me.”

“Go! I’m staying until the mess is cleaned up here.”

“I’m staying to help Jester. This is going to take more than one person,” Grease inclined his head down to the dead body that still littered the floor.

“I can help with the cleanup,” Sammy offered. “It’s my mess anyway.”

Jester moved closer to my girl and patted her shoulder. “No, we don’t want you getting too close to him. If, on the off chance, his body is discovered before we can work our magic on it, we don’t want any more evidence transferring to it that will point someone in your direction. Have a good feeling the sheriff was here earlier because he knew what was going down tonight. He wanted verification that either you were dead or the reason why you weren’t. They’ll be looking for him.”

“I agree with Jester. We need to keep you as far from the body as possible.”

“He’s in my house. I think being concerned about trace evidence leading him back to me is a moot point.” Sammy rolled her eyes, but I reached over and pulled her back into my arms and held her there. To my surprise, she didn’t try to pull away.

“Be a good girl and stay back while my men clean this shit stain off your floor, yeah?”

Sammy shivered in my arms but gave a quick nod and turned her head to the left so she could see me.

“Be a good boy and help them then, so they can get out of here quicker.” I grinned down at her and leaned in like I might kiss her, but the minute I saw panic flare in her eyes, I reached up and bopped her nose with my finger instead.

“Park your ass out of the way.” I glanced up at Brady then. “You too, Uncle Brady.”

“Don’t fucking call me that, asshole.”

I laughed and moved to help my men get the mess cleaned up. Sammy was right about the floor. There was no helping it. “Gonna need a rug or something to cover this up for now.”

By the time everything was cleaned up, Brady decided to go with Jester and Grease to dispose of the body. It wasn’t something we’d normally allow. Seeing as how it was his niece’s kill, he wanted to be damn sure that it was done properly, and I couldn’t see keeping that shit from him. He had enough skin in the game we didn’t have to worry about him possibly giving us up.

“How are you going to get back?” Sammy asked me when the van took off without me.

“I’ll call for another ride if I need one. Right now, I don’t think you should be left alone, especially not while you’re sleeping.”

“I heard the last guy.”

“You did, but you weren’t coming down off an adrenaline high then. It changes things. You crash out harder and pick up on less external shit while your body dives into recovery mode.” I took hold of Sammy’s hand and pulled her toward the bedroom. When we got to where the body had been, I bent down and braced my good arm under her ass and hauled her over the stain on the floor.

“No! Stop. You can’t.” I groaned as she slipped out of my hold and took a step back.

“Fuck, I shouldn’t have done that.”

“No shit! Did your parents drop you on your damn head as a kid?”

“It’s possible,” I admitted sheepishly as I tried to remember how to breathe with my ribs screaming at me.

“Maybe I should talk to your mom about how much damage she did. I hope she feels bad that her son is an idiot now. Did you pop a stitch or a bone or maybe a lung?”

I started to laugh until that shit hurt, too. “No laughing,” I wheezed.

“Sorry, do I need to call someone? Your doctor, the club doc guy, or maybe your mom?” she asked sincerely, then she chuckled. “Maybe not your mom since she probably caused this with all the traumatic brain injuries from your childhood.”

“Stop!” I choked out as I held tight to my ribs. Fuck, this woman could make me laugh with my whole chest as the damn thing rattled apart.

“Let me see,” Sammy insisted as she kneeled in front of me and tugged my cut open and shirt up. After a minute of just staring at my chest, she glanced up at me from a position that made my cock weep. “I don’t know why I did this because I have no clue what I’m looking at.” She slowly rose in front of me and my hands immediately wrapped around both sides of her face as I pulled her toward me for a kiss.

At the last second, just as our breaths danced together and lips were about to touch, she yanked back from my hold. “No! You have an ol’ lady at home waiting for you and a kid with her. I might be a killer, but I’m not a cheater.”

“You’re neither. Both those kills were self-defense.” Sam stood there staring at me like I’d lost my mind. “You’re not a killer just because you protected yourself. That makes you a survivor. Period.” She turned her back to me and walked over to the bed where she started to strip the sheets. “Listen up, Sammy.” It was an order, and I didn’t care that she continued her task and threw the fucked-up sheets away only to examine the bullet holes in her mattress. “I do not have an ol’ lady. I haven’t even been with Melissa since she got pregnant with Hawk. She made that shit up. I don’t fucking know why. She claims she did it to protect me but trust me when I tell you it has already been made very clear to her that I don’t need her form of protection.”

Sammy got on her knees again, though not in front of me. She scurried under the bed with her ass in the air for a moment, and I groaned in frustration as that biteable little peach of hers was thrust up. Her little sleep shorts left nothing to the imagination as they pulled tight.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Her ass dropped down as she flattened herself onto her belly and crawled forward under the bed a little further.

“All three bullets are embedded into the floor. Looks like I’ll have to replace the whole room, not just the stained section.”

“I’ll take care of the cost. This shit happened because you stopped to help me. Now, I need to know that you heard me and believed what I just told you.”

As Sam shimmied back out from under bed, she turned and looked at me for a solid minute before she nodded her head. “I believe you. She seemed like the type who might pull something like that. Still, you need to get something straight, just because I think you’re fuck-hot doesn’t mean anything is going to happen between us.”

“Why the fuck not?”

“You’re Uncle Brady’s age, for one. He’s ten years older than me.”

“That’s nothing.”

She sighed and then stuck two fingers in the air. “You have a kid, and I’m pretty sure he’s the same age as my little brother.”

“You don’t like kids?”

“I don’t know the first thing to do with kids, except to corrupt the shit out of them and send them home to their parents. I can’t do that if I’m the one at home with Daddy.”

I groaned again as she called me “Daddy” and I couldn’t even articulate if it was because I liked it or thought it was creepy. Considering she was a full-grown adult, I went with liking it. Maybe a little Dom/sub play would work for us.

“I have a lot to think about, and maybe you do, too. How will your son like having another woman around? He didn’t seem too impressed with me at the hospital.”

“He just didn’t know who you were yet.”

“Still, I have a lot going on. Adding an aggressive biker man who has a whole club out to murder him - and me - only adds to it. I’m trying to get my MBA, and I work like seven days a week.” She plopped down on her butt at the end of her bed. “And I don’t even have a bed to sleep in that doesn’t have holes in it. Can you just go? I need time to think about my life and where the hell I’m supposed to go from here.”

“Sammy, I don’t want…”

“Please, not tonight. I just want to be able to fall apart in private. That,” She pointed to the blood stain on her floor, “was the second man I killed in a week. He was actually trying to kill me. The other one was after you. I need to just wallow in my hole-riddled bed with some ice cream and hope like hell that tomorrow turns out way better.”

“I’m not comfortable leaving you here alone. What if they send someone else or the sheriff comes back with a trumped-up warrant?”

“I’ll handle it. I’m sure Brady is on the lookout and will be all night.”

“Fine, but this conversation is only on hold. We will talk about the future, and what it looks like for us together, the next time I see you.” I turned to leave and as I walked away from her room, I heard her mumble, “Fuck me, he’s hot and bossy, and I kinda like it.”

I grinned the whole way out her door. When I got out there, Brady was waiting for me. “Your boys said you might need a ride back to the clubhouse.” He dangled a set of keys in front of me. I shook my head.

“Not leaving. She wants space, and I’m giving her that, but I’ll be right here all night.”

“Not necessary. I’ll look out for her.”

“She’s in this shit because she helped me. It’s my responsibility.”

“Why the fuck are you in this shit?”

“Your guess is as good as mine at this point. Mojave Devils were never even on our radar until they tried to take me out.”

“And they targeted another chapter of your club too?”

“That they did. We have men on it. They’ll figure out what the fuck is going on, but until we do and shit is safe for her again, she’s going to have eyes on her - ones that I trust. Tonight, that means I’m up for guard duty.”

Brady kicked back against the side-by-side he offered me to use to get back to the clubhouse. He tossed the keys to me, and stupidly, I reached up to pluck them out of the air. My ribs tugged and burned in my chest again. “Dammit.”

“Yeah, that’s what I thought. Looks like we’re both sitting guard duty.” He patted the side of the tricked-out Polaris and grinned at me. “Take a load off for a minute. It has heat. Gonna be a chilly fucking night. Might as well get comfortable while we can. I have a laptop in there with a security feed pulled up.”

“Sounds good.”

“It would sound even better if you had one of your prospects run out here with a hot fucking pizza and some drinks. I skipped dinner and I’m hungry as fuck.”

“I see you haven’t changed much since high school.”

“You knew I didn’t.”

I would have shrugged him off, but it hurt too much to move like that. Instead, I turned and told him the same thing I always did when we had the opportunity to talk. “Still have an open invite to join the club.”

“Still thinking on it.” It was always his go-to answer. I hoped one day he would take me up on the offer.