Page 18 of Tequila Damnation (The Voodoo Bastards MC #5)

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

A WEEK AND SOME CHANGE LATER…

V elina…

Going undercover was a lot like fishing. Hours and hours spent in bars and watering holes around the city, where they tended to frequent, waiting to be in the right place at the right time.

Mission accomplished on that front – then it was all about patiently waiting as bait in the water to be noticed and thought tasty enough by one of them to get hit on or find a way in.

At least, that was how I thought things were going to go for me.

What actually happened wasn’t that one of the guys saw me first. It was one of their ladies, or a small group of them that tended to hang around the guys to party, score free drugs, or to get laid, that picked up on my existence first.

“Hey!” she said, breasting boobily up to the bar next to me where I sat, chatting with the bartender.

“Hi!” I called back over the loud music.

“Didn’t I see you over at the Snapping Turtle the other night?” she asked.

Shit-fire, motherfucker, I thought to myself and thought fast.

“Aw, yeah! I think that was me!” I called out. “What a coincidence!”

If there was anything I had learned through the clandestine time I had been spending with the Voodoo Bastards and Saint between job hunting for a cleaning job at the city’s many hotels and looking for a cheap room or place to rent – it was that the women of a club were just as dangerous if not more dangerous than the men. Which… duh .

Women just went about things differently than men. Rather than overt violence, the danger with them lay in the covert violence of whispers and lies that they could and would talk about the other club girls or with throwing new meat to the fuckin’ hyenas on a particularly bad night to make some other woman a target to save their own ass.

“Yeah!” she called back, happy that she’d recognized me, I guess, and then introduced herself. “They call me Singer!” she called over the noise.

“Are you?” I asked with a smile.

“What?” she called, looking perplexed.

“A singer!” I called back. “Do you sing?”

“Oh!” She leaned back and her laugh was lost under the noise and din of the bar. “No! I sew real good, and all the boys bring me their patches to sew onto their cuts!” she hollered back.

I feigned stupidity and asked, “Cuts? You mean their leather vest things?”

She laughed again and called out, “You don’t normally hang around places like this, do you?”

“No!” I called back. “I just moved here, and I’m just going from place to place looking for a good time, I guess!”

“What’s your name?” she called.

“Louise!” I called back.

“Well, welcome to New Orleans, Louise! Why don’t you come hang with us?” she called.

And just like that, I’d found my in.

Singer was a pretty girl or had been before getting in with these guys. I mean, she probably still had hope – but I’d been rocked to my foundation when she’d said she was twenty-seven. I thought she was forty-two or somewhere around there, age-wise.

She took me over to a table of ladies near the pool tables in the bar, a knot of Bayou Brethren surrounding the billiards, leaning on cues, cracking jokes, and talking more than they were actually playing.

There, she introduced me to four other girls.

There was, of course, Singer herself, who was, again, twenty-seven and dressed like she was perpetually on spring break from Texas. She favored short shorts and cowgirl boots, with a sports bra peeking through her cropped and 1980s cut-and-tied stringed-out tee shirt. She was all pink and white, and Barbie sparkles and glitter. She kept her long blonde hair up in long pigtails with pink bows.

Singer was off and on with Basilisk, one of the men around the pool table who had his back to me, so I couldn’t really tell you what he looked like for now, anyway.

Also at the table was Candy. Candy was in her late teens and shouldn’t even be in this bar, but she was also heading the way of Singer in looking ancient for her actual age. She was rail thin, and her dyed black hair damaged. I was betting she was hooked on something by the glassiness of her eyes.

Sativa was a stripper, and she seemed the sharpest if not paranoid and angry. She was loud, from her voice to her looks. She wore an elaborate but cheap-looking wig, the purple and neon green vibrant and demanding your attention, fell down to her waist in these slick, shiny curls. It was as though she’d just pulled it fresh out of the packaging, and put it on, and left it – uninterested in making it look like anything, really, let alone real hair.

She wore a bodycon dress that was so tight, you could see her nipple piercings pressed to the thin material, and it clung so close to her skin in its gray-and-white snakeskin-printed pattern that you could see the ripples of cellulite on her over-pronounced ass. She was… a lot … her artificial eyelashes so thick I didn’t know how she held her eyelids up, her thick lips painted with a dark purple lipstick, her eyeshadow purple and green like her wig. She had a shiny fake diamond piercing where Marilyn Monroe had her famous beauty mark and wore gladiator sandals in a champagne gold that wound up her thick legs.

I mean, she had said she was a stripper like she was waiting for me to judge her so she could make a big deal out of me being just another judgy white lady Karen, but I’d dodged that landmine – evading it cleanly. If she was a stripper, which I didn’t doubt, it certainly wasn’t at any high-class joint. She was way too chunky for that, but absolutely good on her for getting that bag. I was neither built for nor coordinated enough to ride so much as a fucking fire pole down from a second floor without hurting myself.

After Sativa was one of her stripper friends who went by the name of Vixen. Where Sativa looked like she never missed a meal, Vixen looked like she missed too many. She was rail thin, and I mean, yikes . She had no chest to speak of and wore what I had to assume was her stripper outfit bold as brass out in public. It was a white set of lingerie, or maybe more like a bikini. The top was very much a bathing suit top, the bottoms a thong, and tight to her like a rubber band – not leaving much, if anything, to the imagination.

She had on over the white suit with its gold bead accents, a bright, and I do mean bright orange – I didn’t know what you would honestly call it. A dress? A swimsuit coverup? Which didn’t honestly cover anything. It was like nylons or pantyhose material, and in these, sort of, completely holey oval shapes that were intentional but made the whole effect seem… ratty.

Her wig was better than Sativa’s and a reddish brown, done to make it appear that she had conical fox ears pinned on top – the long silky rest of the wig falling straight to her flat ass. A fox’s tail was safety pinned to the back of her outfit, and I guess I should have been grateful it was safety pinned and that she wasn’t wearing one of those foxtail butt plug things you saw all over the internet.

She had bright orange ostrich feathers at the cuffs of her long sleeves, which were shedding all over the place, drifting down to where some of the other girls were having to fish bits of them out of their drinks before sipping. Ew.

Vixen wore contact lenses to make her brown eyes appear more bronze or gold, and she was quiet for the most part until Sativa got going. Then she was hyping up her friend, who would scream and yell across the bar to try and either start shit with one of the boys at the pool table in a friendly banter kind of way or to start shit with other patrons in a not-so-friendly type of way.

Sativa was one of those bitches who was constantly stirring the shit and looking to start some drama. I sincerely hoped that no one would take the fucking bait. If they did, I hoped they made her ass lick the fucking spoon.

Then there was the queen who reigned supreme at their table.

Midnight wasn’t just some club girl. She was an old lady. Rebel’s old lady, to be exact. He was the chapter president. But when Midnight got up from the table and went to the bathroom with Candy, Sativa jumped right on to talking shit.

“Girl, don’t let her fool you. She ain’t a queen except in her own imagination. Yeah, Rebel over there is the chapter president, but he ain’t the club president. That’s the man with the real power there.”

“Who’s that?” I asked innocently enough while I filed all of this new information away and sipped my beer in front of me. I was studiously staying away from the hard alcohol and trying to seem tipsy without letting on I was sharp.

“Lazarus,” Singer answered, and she looked spooked or nervous. “Tiva the Diva hasn’t even seen him,” she said, rolling her eyes.

“Not yet,” Sativa said, scoffing at Singer like she wasn’t shit. “My milkshake brings all the boys to the yard, though, and he won’t be able to resist.” She snapped her fingers, the long talons of her bejeweled square-tipped nails clattering together with the lull between songs. “That’s a fact!” she proclaimed as the bass hit for the next hard rock song that went right into it that came onto the jukebox.

“What the fuck you sayin’ over there?” one of the men at the pool table demanded, looking our way.

“Ain’t nothin’ you have to worry about, sugar!” Sativa called back, her tone dripping with artificial honey. “This is just girl talk over here!”

Vixen laughed, and Singer and I exchanged a look and grinned, Singer rolling her eyes behind Sativa and Vixen’s back.

“Who you got there with you?” another one of the men at the table demanded, looking right past the other women and directly at me.

He was no Saint, but he wasn’t bad to look at, either.

He was blond, with hair between chin and shoulder length, a goatee that was a little longer and unkempt than I tended to like, shot through with a few threads of silver starting to come in. He wore one of those sleeveless and close-fitting black athletic tees that hugged a strong body, but it was an all-natural one. One that bespoke work but not working out, if that makes sense. His gut was just barely starting to poke out over the waistband of his jeans, but all in all – yeah, he wasn’t ugly like some of these other ones. When he smiled, he had all of his teeth, and they were clean, white, and, for the most part, straight.

“Depends. Who’s asking?” I asked playfully, demurely hiding what I hoped came across as a flirtatious smile behind the rim of my glass as I made eyes at this guy over the rim.

He straightened up and set his pool cue across the table, seemingly abandoning his game now that I was in his sights.

“They call me Carver,” he said. “What’s your name?”

“Louise,” I lied. “But my friends call me Louie.”

His smile grew and he moved around the table to come over, dropping into the chair that Midnight had vacated next to mine.

“Well, I’m pleased to make your acquaintance, Louie. I think I might like to be your friend, too,” he said.

I laughed lightheartedly and thought to myself, I’ll just bet you do.