Chapter 12

King/Dante

As I got out of the truck, the stiffness in my back made me feel every single one of my forty-seven years. I stretched, then rolled my neck, trying to get rid of the kinks that had developed during the last few hours on the road.

"Damn, that drive sucked. Zero out of ten, would not recommend," Trick groused as he pulled his bag out of the backseat of the extended cab, then grabbed my bag and the backpack containing the cash.

"I don't know what the hell you're complaining about. You fell asleep just past the Illinois state line, and I've had to listen to you snore for the past three fucking hours." I went around to the passenger side, then retrieved the unregistered gun and the box of ammo that I'd stored in the hidden space behind the glove compartment. Slipping them into the pocket on my cut, I slammed the truck door behind me and headed for the clubhouse entrance. Trick followed me as we walked inside and immediately walked down the hallway to my office.

"Sorry, Prez, but that stretch of I-70 is so damned boring. Nothing but fields and flat interstate for two hundred miles. You should have woken my ass up and I could have done some of the driving," he said as I unlocked my office door, opened it, and flipped on the light. I tossed my bags on the floor in the corner, and Trick did the same.

"Well, at least with you asleep, I didn't have to listen to you singing along with the radio again. You sound like a herd of drunken cats being baptized."

"It's a clowder, " Bull said from my open doorway.

Trick and I both looked at him in confusion. "What?" I asked, not having a clue what the fuck he was talking about.

"A group of cats. It's called a clowder," he explained matter-of-factly.

I rolled my eyes. "Well, thank you, Professor. I'm sure that info will come in handy someday when I'm watching Jeopardy in a damned nursing home."

"Who's in a nursing home?" Irish asked as he crowded in behind Bull.

I dropped my head to my chest in defeat as Trick laughed. "Jesus Christ, it's like running a fucking three-ring flea circus around here."

I raised my head and pinned Bull and Irish with a stare, wanting to get shit squared away. "Irish, what's left of the cash we took is in the backpack," I pointed to one of the bags in the corner. "Take it and put it back in the safe."

I pulled the burner phone I'd been using out of my pocket, and Trick did the same. We handed them over to Bull, who took them and slipped them into his own pocket. "As soon as we're done with the briefing, destroy those along with the one you were using here." He nodded, expecting my instruction since it was our usual practice after a run like this.

"I brought your phones here this morning," he told us. "They're locked up in my desk, along with your keys. Your truck is parked around back, Prez, gassed up and ready for you."

"Good. I'll get my shit from you after we get done with the briefing. I'll meet you all in the chapel in ten minutes."

They took the hint and got the hell out of my office. I closed and locked the door, then pushed my desk aside to access the floor safe so I could stash the gun and ammo again. Since we hadn't needed to use it this trip, I didn't have to worry about getting rid of it. Once I got my desk back in place, I stopped in the men's room to take a much-needed piss, then got a cup of coffee before heading to the chapel. After being on the road for over seven hours, I needed caffeine and a long, hot shower to make me feel alert and revived. I didn't have time for the shower yet, so the coffee would have to do.

I took my seat at the head of the table, joining Bull, Trick, and Irish who were already there. Cowboy ambled in a few minutes later, clapping my on the shoulder as he settled into his seat next to me.

"Good to have you two back," he greeted.

"It's good to be back. I think, anyway. Now, I'd like to make this as quick as possible, because I have shit to do. As you know, we made contact with Cyn, but couldn't locate Pic." I ignored the grumbling that accompanied my statement. We'd tried to keep contact to a minimum while we were gone, so I needed to fill them in on the rest of the details now.

"Trick and I followed Cyn to some shitstained motel after her show Tuesday night. We rented a room right across the parking lot from hers and took turns watching the place all night. There was no sign of Pic. I followed her when she ran a few errands late Wednesday morning, while Trick stayed behind to watch over things. He managed to get into the room while she was out, and there was no sign that Pic was staying there at all. So, we made contact with her shortly after she got back to the hotel."

I shook my head as I remembered what we'd found. Cyn had just gotten out of the shower when we got into her room using the old-fashioned master key that Trick had liberated from one of the housekeepers while she'd been getting high out behind the motel. Without her makeup on, we could see the bruises around Cyn's eye and circling her neck and wrists.

"Once we saw her up close, we could see she'd been beaten. She broke down. Said that Pic had really started going off the fuckin' rails a few weeks back, and his meth pipe is his new best friend. It sounds like he's a full-blown tweaker now, staying awake for days on end, getting aggressive, and paranoid as hell."

"He's fucked up, brothers, and it's bad," Trick said somberly. His mom had been abused by his piece-of-shit dad before the man had split town when Trick was thirteen. I knew how much it had bothered him to see Cyn like that, even though she was a stupid bitch who'd cheated with Pic knowing he was married, then ran off with him after he stole from us.

It had bothered me, too, even though I had to admit that when I'd thought she had taken advantage of Rome when he'd been too drunk to know better, I'd hated the bitch. The only thing that had kept me from firing her from Fallen Angels was that she'd been drunk too and didn't realize how out of it Rome had been that night. I'd settled for banning her from the clubhouse, mainly so that Rome and Abby never had to lay eyes on her again. Still, seeing her beaten like that hadn't set well with me.

"She said they ended up in Kansas City two weeks ago, but he was too strung out to find work. He was so fucked up that when she got hired at a strip joint there last week, he tried to get her to turn tricks with the customers after work. He beat the shit out of her when she refused. Kept her tied up in their motel room last Friday night, and she only got away when he went out to score some meth the next morning. Luckily, she'd managed to hide most of her tips before he'd attacked her that night, so she was able to get a bus ticket as far as St. Louis. She took the gig there to earn enough money to get back home to upstate New York and give herself a fresh start."

I sighed as I looked at four men sitting around the table with me. "You all know I'm not Cyn's biggest fan, for a number of reasons, but dammit, she didn't deserve that. So, Trick and I gave her five grand and put her on a bus home. Before she left, she told us everything she knew about Pic. He had definitely started dealing out of Guardian Ink but stopped when Rome got suspicious. He was also responsible for some of the shit flowing in and out of Fallen Angels. Remember when we caught Velvet and her boyfriend dealing there last fall?"

When they nodded, I told them, "Pic was supplying the boyfriend. When Cyn started there, he convinced her to deal a little on the side, too."

Bull, and Irish looked as pissed off as I'd ever seen them, and Cowboy, one of the most laid-back men I knew, stood up and kicked his chair across the room.

"So that motherfuckin' traitorous rat-bastard not only fucked us in the ass when he stole from us, he also could have had the cops crawlin' up our asses for dealin' out of our businesses?" Cowboy snarled, thrusting his hands through his dirty blond hair as he paced back and forth beside the table.

We were all quiet for a moment as we contemplated the shitstorm Pic had caused, and how much worse it could have been. Then, wanting to get this briefing done and over with, I continued.

"That's not all, brothers. She confirmed that Pic does have help here on the inside. She's not sure who, or if it's more than one person, but Pic let something slip about it during her beatdown. He was paranoid as fuck that night, ranting about how the club had turned on him. He told her he needed to make a call to ‘ get the latest intel ' and make sure we hadn't tracked them to Kansas City."

"Sonofabitch!" Irish roared, as Bull slammed his fists on the tabletop so hard it shook. Trick and I had the same reaction when we'd talked to Cyn, and I'd already shared that tidbit with Cowboy, so he wasn't surprised. Irish and Bull were hearing it for the first time though, so I gave them a few minutes to calm down.

"Based on the information from Cyn, Trick and I rolled into Kansas City late Wednesday afternoon and found the roadside motel they'd stayed at, but according to the old guy who owned the place, Pic had skipped out sometime over the weekend. He trashed the room before he left, even smashed the TV and slashed up the mattress. We gave the owner ten grand, too, to help cover the damages and to keep his mouth shut about us being there. We stayed around there, scouting out all the tat shops and no-tell motels we could find. We also got the lowdown on where to score and cruised those areas but didn't see anything aside from junkies and whores."

Trick snorted and shook his head. "The junkies we tried to talk to didn't even know their own fuckin' names, let alone Pic's, and the whores weren't much better. One of ‘em dropped to her knees and offered to suck me off right there on the damned corner for five bucks. I think I needed a shot of penicillin just from breathing the same air as her."

"Jesus," Irish screwed his face up at that little detail. "I don't even want to imagine how nasty a five-buck blowie is."

"Well, you wouldn't need to worry about her teeth, because she didn't have any," Trick told him.

"No, but I'll bet your dick would turn a pretty shade of green right before it fell off."

I shuddered at the mental image Irish painted for us, and Trick looked a little sick at the idea.

"So where does this fuckin' leave us?" Bull asked, glaring at Irish and Trick both for getting the briefing off-track.

I shrugged. "I wish to hell I knew. I asked Cyn to contact me if the fucker makes any attempt to contact her. She ditched the pay-as-you-go phone she'd been using with him, and she said they'd never talked about where she's from, so he shouldn't be able to find her. At this point, just keep those alerts out for his name, and we'll have to hope something pops up."

"Does anybody else think it's strange that they left Colorado, and headed back east to Kansas City instead of continuing west? I mean, it would be easy for a stripper and a tattoo artist to hide in plain sight if they went to Las Vegas or Reno, or even kept on going until they got to Los Angeles."

I nodded at Cowboy, because Trick and I had already wondered about that.

"We asked Cyn why they picked Kansas City, thinking maybe they were making their way back here. She said she didn't know why he picked it, but she didn't think he planned to come back. She said Pic talked about seeing his kids, but that he was too scared of us and Lola's family to come anywhere near Indy. He also told her that Vegas would be too obvious for them to go there."

"With him tweakin' that hard, who the hell knows what's going through his mind? His thought process probably makes as much sense as sticking Viking in a thong and making him work the pole at Fallen Angels."

"Fuckin' hell, Irish. I just about managed to put the green dicks out of my mind, but now I've got that fuckin' horror show burned into my brain. What the fuck's wrong with you, man?"

I laughed at Bull's look of outraged disgust, then called an end to the briefing before heading upstairs to shower off the aches and pains of the road.

Cowboy waved me over to the bar when I came back downstairs forty-five minutes later, feeling much better after taking a long shower. I'd let the hot water pound against my back to ease my stiff muscles. It made a nice change from lukewarm trickle of water that passed for a shower in those cheap-ass motels we'd been stuck in. I'd taken a little extra time trimming the scruff of my beard, which had gotten a little out of hand in the last four days. I planned to swing by Ella's house when she finished work, and hoped I could take her to dinner. I'd missed the hell out of her – another reason why I'd enjoyed my shower so much. I hadn't really been able to take matters into my own hands while I'd been sharing a room with Trick, so it was a relief to be able to rub one out in the privacy of my own damned shower. It hadn't taken long, especially since I thought about all the things I might get to do with her luscious body later tonight.

I sat on the stool next to him and glanced around. The common room had a few more people hanging around in it, and I realized it might be later than I thought. I'd forgotten to grab my phone from Bull before I went upstairs, and I wasn't sure what time it was without it.

"Shit, I need to grab my phone from Bull," I told him, then started to stand up again. He stopped me and slid my phone across the bar top.

"He left it with me before he went out to get some dinner. He said you have a shit-ton of voicemails and texts," he warned. "Oh, and Jagger's trying to get hold of you. He's called twice in the last twenty minutes, so I answered the second time in case something was wrong. He said it's not an emergency, but he needs to talk to you ASAP."

Thanking him, I glanced at the time on the screen, surprised to find that it was already five- fifteen.

"Shit, I didn't realize it was so late," I muttered. I sat down on one of the stools at the end of the bar, then hit the button to call Jag back.

"Hey, Prez," he greeted. "Cowboy said you're back in action. Everything OK?"

"Yeah, everything's fine. Everything OK on your end?"

"Well, that's why I called. Uh, I'm not sure if this is gonna be a problem for you, but I thought you might want to know that Ella's here at the bar, and she's with Ryan Simpson."

"What the fuck do you mean, she's with Simpson? Like they're on a fuckin' date, or she just ran into him there?" She'd damned well better not be on a fucking date.

"They came in together, and it sure as hell looks like a date to me. Carla just dropped off the drinks they ordered."

"Sonofabitch! Keep an eye on them. I'll be there in ten minutes." I jumped up from the stool and pocketed my phone. Cowboy grabbed my arm before I could take a step.

"Is there trouble at the bar? I'll round up Trick and some of the boys, and we can meet you there."

"No, nothing like that. It's Ella, and she's there on a goddamned date."

Cowboy released my arm and sat back down with a low whistle. "Well, I'll let you handle that on your own, brother. Good luck," he called, but I was already hallway out the door.