Page 4

CHAPTER FOUR

S aint…

“Where she at?” Cypress asked, looking up from the club’s shop bench and dumping a socket wrench into a random tool bag he’d scrounged up from somewhere.

“Takin’ a minute at the bar,” I grated.

Hex looked up from his phone, head still bowed, givin’ me a Kubrick stare. I rolled my eyes at him.

“Ain’t nothin’ compromising on the property. Relax.”

“Not what I’m worried about,” he said, and he glanced back down at the face of his phone.

“Looks like LaCroix’s got the part her car needs. Should be at the ol’ boat scrapyard within the hour. I reckon you ought to give the lady a ride on out that way.”

I arched an eyebrow. “Doesn’t sound like a suggestion,” I said.

“It ain’t,” Hex declared, pushing off the pillar back here in the wide-open garage, looking up as he slid his phone into his back pocket.

“Well,” Hex said. “I don’t know about you two fools, but I can see Louie all over her from here. Those two certainly were written in the same font, as my girl likes to say.”

“And what turn of phrase would you use?” she called from the doorway leading back here into the garage from the front of the clubhouse.

“Where I come from, we’d say you was both picked right out your daddy’s ass.”

She barked a laugh and it sounded bitter.

“From what I understand, Garnett wasn’t anything like our father – gonna have to trust me on that one. I actually knew the man.”

“Gone then?” Hex asked, holding out his hand.

“Pancreatic cancer, a year or so ago,” she said, taking it to shake.

“Shame,” Hex said. “I’m Hex, you’ve met Cypress an’ Saint.”

She nodded. “Mixed feelings on that,” she said.

“On what?” Cypress asked, hefting his tool bag.

“Whether it’s a shame my daddy’s gone. Some days it’s a relief. Other days it’s a curse.” She shrugged.

Hex laughed. “Yeah, that was ol’ Louie, too.”

“He said you called him that because he saw a Loup Garu… although he also said you guys corrected him mercilessly.”

“Roux Garu.” Cypress gave a nod.

“Yeah, that was it,” she said, capturing her bottom lip between her teeth.

“Cypress is gonna take that problem starter out of your car, and Saint here is gonna run you out to a place to pick up a replacement.”

She smiled faintly. “And just how much is this going to run me?” she asked.

“Nothin’,” Hex declared. He gave me a hard look, which told me all I needed to know. I was the hook for the part and possibly to grease Cy’s palm for taking it out and putting it back on.

“If only it was so easy to fix my AC,” she said with a wry grin.

“What’s wrong with it?” Hex asked.

“Dunno. Just quit on me halfway across the Texas panhandle on my way here.”

“Where you come from?” he asked.

“California,” she answered.

“Hollywood?” he asked with a grin.

She laughed. “’Fraid not. Riverside.”

“Riverside…” Hex sounded thoughtful.

“Suburb of LA,” she said with a shrug. “So I guess close enough to Hollywood.”

“I reckon,” he said.

Cypress had left our presence already to see to yanking her starter.

“Have Cy look at her AC. See if it needs recharging or a new compressor.”

I gave a reluctant nod.

“Nice meeting you…” he trailed off.

“Velina,” she said, and she was eyeing Hex curiously.

“Velina.” He repeated her name.

“Pretty name.”

“Thanks,” she said. “Mom wanted Valencia like the orange, but Dad talked her out of it. No such luck for my little sister, though.”

“Ouch,” Hex said with a good-natured laugh.

Velina shrugged.

“Come on, I’ll take you out to the junkyard,” I muttered. “Can I borrow your truck?” I asked Hex.

He gave me a shit-eating grin and said, “No can do, my friend. You’re just gonna have to take your bike.”

Shit, I thought to myself and turned to look at Valina, her eyes wide and showing a little too much white. I got the impression she was thinking the same thing.

“C’mon,” I muttered and went back out the way we’d come to get the busted part off Cy and to relay the message about the compressor.

Velina fell into step beside me and muttered under her breath, “Shit’s totally bizarre, little brother.”

“What is?” I asked, curious.

“How the fuck we went from you being a total cock goblin to giving me a ride to pick up a part to fix my broken car for free in the span of,” she checked her watch, “less than an hour.”

“Welcome to the life,” I said sarcastically.

“Garnett’s life,” she said. “Mine’s back in California, I guess.”

“You guess?” I asked as we crossed out the gate and headed for Cy, who was balls-deep under the hood of her car and already cursing.

She didn’t respond.

“Surprised you made it all the way here in that piece of shit without anything breaking before now.”

“I take good care of her for the most part,” she said defensively.

I eyed the peeling clear coat off her paint critically and said, “Uh-huh.”

“From the look of things under the hood down here, I’d say she ain’t lyin’ bro,” Cypress declared and came up with a crusty dusty part in a greasy shop rag.

“Hex said to check her A/C. See if it needs a new compressor or just a recharge,” I said.

“Hard to do that when I can’t start the damn thing,” Cy said, spitting tobacco juice off to the side.

I heard a faint “ugh” from just off to the right and behind me, where Velina stood.

I felt my lips twitch with a smirk that I barely suppressed. Cy didn’t seem to hear her, which was no surprise. With how much time he spent on the airboats, even with ear protection during gator season, he was damn near as deaf as a post.

Judgy little thing, I thought to myself. I guess I shouldn’t fault her for it. She grew up citizen, clearly, and didn’t know the life. Still, I did fault her. We were out here bailing her ass out for nothing, other than for the fact that she seemed to be who she said she was – Louie’s older half-sister.

My phone vibrated in my pocket, Hex’s pattern and a snippet of Tennessee Whiskey blaring out of the speaker.

I pulled it out and checked the text.

Part is officially on its way to LaCroix – find out how much she knows.

Just how the fuck was I supposed to do that from the back of my bike? Fucker. He just loved making shit complicated.

“We gotta go,” I said. “Figure it out and text me,” I told Cy absently.

“Yeah,” he muttered. “I got you.” It was more work and a pain in the fucking ass, but there were some basic things you could do to diagnose the compressor was fucked without the car running. They weren’t super reliable, but a couple of ‘em were pretty tried and true. For instance, if it was seized? It wouldn’t turn, and that was an official “the compressor is fucked.”

I was betting she just needed more refrigerant, but the only way to test that out for sure was with the motor running and a set of gauges. Couldn’t get that going without the starter, so off we fucked to see the wizard … and by wizard, I meant the big cheese, the president, and head honcho. When it came to Miss Velina, it could go either fuckin’ way.

She had an attitude and a mouth on her – was brazen in a way that Louie hadn’t even begun to reach until he’d been with us a while.

Seemed he’d been talking pretty freely about us. Hex and LaCroix were right – I mean, Hex was just about always right. We needed to know just how much Louie’d been flapping his gums. He was a loyal one, but he had a lot of moments where he wasn’t particularly bright. Kid had been knocked around so fuckin’ much, there was a real possibility there was some permanent brain damage or some shit like that to it.

Right now, the car trouble she was having was a whole by-the-grace-of-God thing. Time to exploit it.

Exercise a little goodwill, fix her car, answer some questions about her brother, and while I was at it, covertly do a little fishing to see if Louie had spoken out of turn any. See whether or not that could or would be a detriment to us.

“Ever ride?” I asked Velina, stuffing my phone into my pocket.

“No,” she said.

“No time like the present to learn, I guess.”

“You don’t have a car?” she asked.

I made a face like it was offensive she’d even suggest such a thing because, well, it was.

“I got a work truck, but it ain’t anywhere near here. Here’s what you need to know…”

I ran her through just about everything a first-timer should know. Granted, I probably forgot some shit, but that was easy enough to instruct on the fly at a stoplight or whatever.

“You sure I can’t just wait here?” she asked, her eyebrow arched and dismay written all over her face.

“No,” I answered curtly. “LaCroix wants to see you.”

She looked like she paled a bit under her California tan, and I didn’t know if I liked that.

“Guess you’ve heard of him,” I said.

She swallowed and put on a face like she was tougher than she felt and said, “Garnett mentioned him a time or two. He’s the president of…” she stopped and chose her words carefully. So, she wasn’t as dumb as Louie could be. “Your club,” she finished tamely.

“Guess you’re getting sort of a crash course,” I said.

“I mean, my guide into all of this is sitting in an urn in your bar… so uh, sorry if I’m not as up to date as I could be.”

“I’m sure he left a lot of things out,” I said casually.

“Not really,” she said.

Shit.

“At least, I don’t think so.”

“Stick a pin in that. We’ll come back to it later.” I clambered aboard my bike and dropped into the seat.

“You ain’t got a jacket or nothing in your car, do you?” I called out over the bass rumble.

“In this heat? No!” she called back.

“Should always dress for the slide and not for the ride, but you can’t be more than ninety-eight pounds soaking wet. We shouldn’t have any problems, but next time you ever get on a bike, you make sure you got on leather. At the very least, a denim jacket.”

She blinked at me in surprise and blurted out, “Why do you care?”

“Good point,” I said bluntly. “I don’t.”

She rolled her eyes and got on behind me, settling onto the back seat. I checked to make sure her feet were on the proper pegs and that she hadn’t rested the soles of her hiking boots on the rapidly heating pipes.

Had a bitch melt the soles of her sneakers to my shit once. Dumb cunt did it and had the intestinal fortitude to get mad at me for it. I’d left her ass at the bar in the Quarter and hadn’t thought twice about her until now.

She’d been blonde with big fake titties… not like Velina, though. When she wrapped her arms around me and scooted forward against my back, what pressed into it was all natural.

I tried not to think too hard about it, dismissing it as I pulled us out onto the street. The borrowed helmet was a little loose on her head, and her fucked-up starter was stowed safely in one of my saddlebags.

Low-key, I was surprised Hex hadn’t sent one of the other guys with us. We weren’t riding alone anywhere these days, especially into the swamps and shit.

The Voodoo Bastards and the Bayou Brethren were slowly circling one another like fighting dogs, looking for a good drop in the other’s defense to lunge and sink teeth.

The heat was pretty high right now, and as soon as the pigs stopped looking? It would be back on like Donkey Kong, but for right now, we were in a bit of a stalemate ceasefire while the authorities were circling and sniffing.

Not that they were doing much when it came to running down who’d been out there and shot Louie.

They didn’t care that much. Just enough to keep us minding our p’s and q’s so some precious citizen didn’t get caught up in our crossfire. Fuck us biker pieces of shit – they just didn’t want us accidentally dropping a kid or somebody’s grandma.

Anyway, Velina held on, and she was pretty strong for such a little thing. When we took our first turn, she was a natural, leaning with it, with a strong core. She was as stiff as a board behind me, both trying to hold on and not press too tight at the same time. Made me chuckle. As soon as we were off the surface city streets and making for the highway, I caned it. Twisting down on the throttle, the engine's power kicked like a mule underneath us as we lurched forward at breakneck speed.

I could swear that she squeaked behind me, this cute little sudden noise of fear that was quickly swallowed and drowned by the kiss of the Harley’s low growl of satisfaction at the beast being turned loose.

Her arms crushed around my ribs with a near-brutal cracking force, and her thighs pinched around my hips as she pressed to my back, molding up against me like she was almost meant to be there.

She shouted over the deafening rush of the hot wind around us and I was pretty sure it was to call me a name. I laughed at that, and she squeezed around me tighter, a quick jerk of her arms almost like she was trying to give me the Heimlich. The message of her scolding was as clear and as loud as the brap of the pipes as we rocketed past the people in cages all around us.

It was a good ride, and I was glad I hadn’t been but part way into my first glass of tequila and was good to make it.

I would always take a good ride over a drink, but I just didn’t have someplace to go and wasn’t quite in the frame of mind to want to ride without a destination.

This was honestly just what the doctor ordered.

We rode the hour and some change outside the city into bayou country and right past Jessie-Lou’s place, where Collier fell in beside me.

Leave it to Hex. I wasn’t riding alone – not out here.

I threw Collier a salute, and he threw one back. Where Velina had just started to relax behind me, I felt her muscles tighten up again as she went very still at my back.

I checked my side view and took in her face. It was unreadable between her aviator sunglasses and the hard line of her mouth, the stubborn set to her chin.

She wanted to seem tough, but she honestly just reminded me of one of those fucking little adorable terrier purse dogs that looked more like a fluffy rat than a dog.

We pulled up at the old boatyard on the edge of the swamp and its gray-weathered front end with its rusty-ass old tin-roof awning over the plain six-by-six posts holding it up.

Around the door to the place, old license plates and taxidermy gator snouts were the main décor, along with old posters faded by the sun advertising different types of motor oils and fluids for maritime use.

On the posts, old pistons and random gears, rusting and sun-scorched, practically floated on the silvery wood that was so dry it held that wind-worn satin finish.

I pulled up carefully across the wash of gravel that comprised the lot and killed my engine. She jumped off almost as soon as we’d rolled to a stop. I turned on her quick to make sure she’d done it carefully enough to avoid touching even her denim-clad leg to the pipe.

“Watch how you do that,” I said. “Always get off from this side.” I indicated the side opposite where she’d gotten off.

“Got it,” she said, unhooking the trident clasp under her chin by pressing the two prongs together.

It popped, and she took it off, her hair windblown but still stylish. She kept it in a layered cut just above her shoulders, and it looked good on her.

She held the helmet out to me and I took it, putting it upside down in my lap.

“Collier,” Collier said by way of greeting, sticking out his hand to her. She shook it.

“Velina,” she said, eyeing him carefully.

“Louie’s sister, huh?” Col asked.

“Yeah,” she said, and her voice dropped an octave, a heaviness dripping from it, thick like honey and unmistakable for what it was – sorrow.

Her shoulders drooped with disappointment, and Collier said, “Sorry for your loss.”

“Not sure if it counts when you never got to meet in person and you’d only been talking less than a year,” she said.

“Aw,” he said. “It counts. I reckon that makes it even worse in some ways.”

She eyed him and nodded, and he smiled.

I took my own helmet off and hung both hers and mine from my handlebar before getting off the bike myself to get into the saddlebag for her busted-ass starter.

“Have a smoke,” I told him. He gave a nod, leaned against one of the pillars under the shade of the awning, and lit up the cigarette he was going to have anyway.

I held open the door for Velina with one hand and had her fucked-up starter in the other.

“Thanks,” she muttered and went into the junkyard’s front office.

I followed her in, letting my eyes adjust to the dimly lit interior, putting my sunglasses on top of my head, mimicking Velina just in front of me, who did the same.

“Saint,” ol’ Frank behind the counter muttered as he clicked his mouse on its filthy mousepad beside his old computer screen, likely playing solitaire. That’s all his fat ass did all day on the junkyard’s antiquated computer system. Just answered phones, played solitaire, and two-finger pecked out invoices to print up on the old dot-matrix printers he had set up behind him.

He'd tack the yellow copies to the board for the boys out back to pull the parts and stuffed the white ones in a file folder for the yard’s records. The pink went to the customer when they picked up their shit and paid for it, and the yellows went on to fuck knows where. I wasn’t all that intimate with their simplistic system. Shit, more than half of those invoices were fake, anyhow.

The yard here was just one of many ways the club laundered their cash.

“LaCroix out back?” I asked, setting the dead starter on the counter.

Frank looked over and raised his eyebrow.

“Yeah.”

I thrust my chin at the open doorway behind Frank and told Velina, “Go on through there. You can’t miss him,” I said.

“Just look for the big, bald, tattooed fucker,” Frank agreed.

She looked from Frank to me dubiously and floated around the counter in such a way that said she didn’t really want to find out what was on the other side of the door but was forcing her feet to take her there anyway.

I smirked at her back, and once she was out of sight, asked Frank, “You got one of these in yet? LaCroix said he was having one delivered.”

He eyed the starter and nodded, thrusting his double chin at the shelf off to one side and behind me.

“On there somewhere,” he said.

“Thanks,” I said flatly.

Frank didn’t answer, just kept clicking away, his beady eyes darting back and forth behind his glasses, which were outdated and looked like Dahmer’s.

Seriously, that’s all I could ever think when looking at glasses like that anymore. I knew they were aviators without the dark lenses of sunglasses, but when the lenses were clear like that, or just barely tinted – all I could see was that evil, sick fucker’s face behind them splashed all over the headlines.

My momma liked true crime, and I was an impressionable kid when she’d deep-dove everything about him like she was his greatest fuckin’ fangirl – wasn’t the only thing she’d done accidentally to fuck me up. Lord knew she’d done plenty.

I probably needed therapy. Granted, unlike Louie’s mom, mine hadn’t meant to fuck me up. She, for the most part, had tried her best, but there had definitely been a few things that, looking back on ‘em, made me realize my mother wasn’t as smart as I’d given her credit for when I was a kid.

That was the thing, though. When we were kids, we always seemed to think our parents were some kind of a paragon of virtue, the best, the brightest, the ones we aspired to be when we grew up.

Looking back on a lot of shit as adults, it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that they were basically just fucked-up kids themselves, barely outta their own parents' house and trying to make the best of a bad situation, which was having us kids when they probably really shouldn’t have.

Louie’s mom had definitely been one of those. Knocked up at something like sixteen by a dude way too fucking old for her, by the sounds of it. Her parents pitched her out on her ass like the good, upstanding Christians they were – for a while anyway.

Just long enough for Louie’s mom to get hooked. It was a lot of downhill for them after that.

Louie’d felt pretty alone when it came to some of the things his mom let happen to him when he was a kid. It’d fucked him up. He wasn’t alone, though.

I’d been an altar boy when it’d happened to me.

That’s where things went off the rails with me and my mom. I’d told her. She slapped the shit out of me – lost her damn mind on me, calling me a liar.

That’s when I first figured out that I was on my own. I’d stayed that way until the club. Kept my secret until I was old enough, big enough, and strong enough to get myself out of that kind of trouble by just not going back.

I was such a disappointment to my mother, but I didn’t care about that much anymore. I’d found my freedom, and I held onto that shit.

The club had just given me direction. Power. The power to never be a victim again.

It’d given Louie that same power, and he’d used it. That’d made the kid stronger than me in some ways.

I didn’t know how many times I sat outside my old childhood church with a gun up in the back of my waistband, too chickenshit to do what Louie had done to his primary abuser.

The kid had balls. Still managed to be kinder, softer, than the rest of us. I didn’t know how, but he did.

I couldn’t say the same about myself.

Made me think about some things.

“Need one?” Collier asked me when I got out front.

“Yeah,” I muttered, and he held out his pack. I pulled out a cigarette and leaned over as he flicked his Bic to life to light it for me.

I took a long, thoughtful drag.

“Got the wheels turning in there,” he said.

I nodded.

“You think she’s who she says she is?” he asked.

I nodded at that, too.

“I’ll be a monkey’s uncle,” he muttered, and I huffed a laugh.

“The fuck you say?” I asked.

“You heard me,” he said, grinning.

“Just shut up and smoke your cigarette,” I grated, but he had me laughing. Sometimes the shit that flew out Col’s mouth was just so fuckin’ weird.

It made me miss Louie even more. He used to be the club’s comedic relief.

Damn.