8. Thunder

THUNDER

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing, eat your cupcakes.”

“What, nothing? Why do you look like that? Are you in trouble with the sheriff again?”

“That hump is the last thing on my mind.” Come on, Geoffrey, get your shit together. How long does it take to run a check on that overpriced shit I got you?

She opened the bags and clapped her hands like she was ten while I stood there in misery. How is she here? How the fuck is she here? I paced the room to my little sister’s annoyance, but for once, I wasn’t worried about her shit.

I gotta get the fuck outta town. I can’t stay here if she’s here. But isn’t this a sign or some shit? I mean, what are the odds that she shows up here? I still dream about her at night. Not every night, but there was a time there in the last year or so when she haunted my sleep to the point that I was tempted to go look for her.

I wasn’t going to approach her or anything, just watch her from afar to see why my dreams were so full of her. But then I thought better of it. She’s a married woman; no matter what I see in my dreams, that’s as far as that shit should go. My code of ethics does not allow for me to go after another man’s woman.

My phone rang, and I almost broke every finger in my damn hand, wrestling it out of my pocket. My pain in the ass sister was looking at me askance with cream all over her damn face. Then she rolled her eyes and shook her head while walking out of the room with a whole ass box of cupcakes under her arm.

It wasn’t Geoffrey on the phone but one of my other guys. The disappointment almost had me tossing the phone into the wall. “Yeah!”

“Hey, boss, we’ve got him.”

“Fuck, fine, I’m on my way.” I hung up the phone and called my sister back into the room.

“You lock up, turn on the security cameras and keep your ass inside. No swimming without me or one of the others there to watch you. If you need anything, your team is in the guesthouse. If I get any phone calls about your asshole friends trying to sneak over the walls, I’m gonna give the order to shoot the fucks.”

“Ooh, big bad Thunder, threatening teenagers.”

“You’re a teenager, and I threaten you every day.” I walked out the door and alerted her team to keep an eye out because there was no way in hell she was going to listen to me. Her delinquent friends are going to be here the second I pull out the driveway.

I chose the bike this time because I needed the fresh air to clear my head. The whole ride to my destination, I wasn’t focused on the fact that the hump I’d been hunting for months had been caught. Nope, my mind was full of those dark brown eyes and that cute little button nose of hers.

I guess some people might wonder at my reaction to this one woman in particular. She wasn’t a raving beauty, though she’s fucking gorgeous, but it can be argued that I’ve been with some of the best this world has to offer. She’s on a level all her own.

I can’t tell you what it is. It can’t be her eyes because I didn’t get a good enough look at them the last time. It could be her body; she’s got a nice one, but my gut tells me it’s something else. I’ve never lost my shit over a woman before or after her.

For someone who walks through life looking neither left nor right, for me to even notice her at all that first day is a minor miracle. So, a body ain’t gonna do shit for me. So, what is it? What does she have that the others who are always trying to get their hooks into me don’t? And why is my dick still hard? What the fuck is this really about anyway?

* * *

I was alreadyout for this hump’s blood, but now that he was interrupting me at this pivotal time, his ass was gonna get it even worst. My men were standing around outside when I showed up. I waved a hand in their direction, and they grunted. See, they already sensed my mood and knew that conversation was not needed.

The prey was sitting in the middle of the room, tied to a chair. “Who are you?”

“Who me? I’m the embodiment of fuck around and find out.” I pulled another chair closer to him and straddled it facing him.

“Five years ago, you and your friends snatched a little schoolgirl on her way to school. I see you know what I’m talking about.” He was already looking for an escape where there was none.

“That little girl was my sister. Now, the rest of your friends…. Where are you going? That chair is nailed to the floor, you fuck.”

“Now, as I was saying, I know you know how your friends died, and you know that you’re the last.” He wet himself, but I expected no less. Across from him on the wall in plain view was every sword, mace, and medieval torture device known to man. I think what scared him most, though, was the brazen bull with the fire already lit.

“I wanna know everything that happened that day from beginning to end. I want to know why she was targeted; who sent you?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Fair enough!”

I left my chair and headed over to the wall and the table in front of it that held even more toys to choose from. I never know what I’m in the mood for from one day to the next. If I’m busy, I just slice and dice and let them bleed out at my feet. But sometimes I break all the rules and play with my food.

“Wait, what’re you doing?” I walked over and freed one of his hands, pulled the fingers through the Turandot, and started twisting. Like I have all day with this fuck. Whether he talks or not, he’s going to die. He knows it, and I know it.

But I need to know what happened to my sister that day. I need to know who sent men after her and if it was retaliation against me. That one question has haunted me since that day, and the guilt is sometimes more than I can bear.

My sister is my closest living relative. At least one that I acknowledge; everyone else with my blood can pretty much get fucked. They were not there when my father was beating the hell out of us or when my mother was so strung out she forgot to feed us.

I’m twenty-three years older than my sister, so we endured our personal hell at different times in life, but I have no doubt it was all the same. I didn’t even know I had a sister for the first eleven years of her life because I left home as soon as I could and didn’t look back.

I cut all ties and moved as far across the country as geographically possible to make sure I never even smelt the stench on one of them. I was born to teenage parents. Nothing wrong with that; it happens. But these two fucks should never have been allowed to procreate a fucking ant further, more living, breathing humans.

The old man was on track to go to college on a football scholarship but had to give it up when he got his fourteen-year-old girlfriend pregnant and had to drop out to work at the local gas station. I guess he figured his life was over right then and there and said fuck humanity because for as long as I’ve known him, he’s been a piece of shit.

I covered up the scars from his beatings with ink starting at the age of sixteen. Mom, on the other hand, tried her best for a while. I seem to remember a few moments, but by the time I was eight or nine, she got hooked on some shit, and shit went south.

At sixteen, I started selling weed. I’d drive out of town and buy it by the ounce at first. No, I didn’t sell to my friends or other kids, and neither did I sell to the poor and weak like my parents; those people should be feeding their damn kids. I wouldn’t give them even a leaf.

No, my targets were the men and women working in the high-rise office buildings in the cities surrounding my little town. You’d be surprised to find out where I got the idea from TV. I used to watch a lot of badass movies, but I took notes, and believe me, that shit works.

I stole the first money I needed from my father’s stash. By that point, he was into gambling, but he wasn’t so far gone that he would sell his own mother to raise a pot that came later. I knew he had this money because he could never keep his mouth shut when he was drunk off his ass.

He’d won big at the casino. A couple grand. Now, here’s the thing: by then, I had a little pizza delivery job. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to allow me to buy my clothes for the school year with a little extra to fuck around with my friends, that’s if mom didn’t get into my stash and use all of it to get high.

She’d tried talking me into opening a bank account with her as the controller, but I just laughed in her face and went on my merry way. Now, before I started selling, I did my homework. While delivering pizza, I knew who was smoking from the smell when they opened the door.

That’s the first time I realized that rich people get high as fuck too. I tested the waters with this one family I delivered to a lot by accidentally dropping a bag while delivering their ten pizzas that Friday night. That was their standing order: ten pizzas every Friday.

I’d overheard the wife bitching once, so I knew that it was the dude’s poker night with friends, and he always made her fuck off somewhere else while he was doing his thing. “Oh, sorry about that.”

“No worries, young’un.” He grinned at me like we were in on the same secret. When he smelled the bag, I knew I had him.

“Whoa, where did you get this?”

“It’s my personal grow.” It wasn’t then, of course, I didn’t start growing my own shit for years to come, but that’s a different story for another time. But I knew enough to know that good weed is hard to come by, and if you can have that shit delivered with no risk to yourself from the asshole cops, then even better.

He was my first customer. I took a beating because Dad just knew that I was the one who took his money, but that first grand turned into five, and there was no looking back for me. I was door-dashing weed before it was a thing.

My clientele grew from that first poker party dude to his friends and their friends, and before you knew it, I was delivering weed to those offices under the pretense of making lunch deliveries. Then I’d go back to class like nothing happened.

I didn’t change anything about myself and never sold to anyone in my area. No one knew what the hell I was up to. If I had a new pair of shoes, I had a pizza delivery job so that’s how I could afford it. I bought the cheap shit, same as always. Meanwhile, I had stacks of cash buried in the backyard in the spot where I did my target shooting practice.

Neither of my parents paid too much mind to me at that point; they were just happy to have me out of their hair and I was happy to be left alone to do my own thing. That’s how I was able to start a grow back there without anyone knowing.

The area back there was government-owned land that nobody ever checked for whatever reason, and it was perfect. I know, these days I have a whole operation with nurseries and shit, but back then, I just let that shit grow in the wild.

I learned everything I needed to know about harvesting and curing weed because while those people I was delivering to in their cushy offices were making two grand a week, which was a lot back then, I was making that shit in a day.

By the time I started doing my own shit, I no longer needed my dealer, which he was not too pleased about, but I convinced him that I almost got caught and was scared, so he didn’t make too much fuss after that.

My folks thought I was doing woodwork back there in the little shed I’d bought and erected on the edge of the property, and since they were never in my shit, that worked out well. No one knew, no one. Not even my closest friends who all thought it was a hoot that I was spending every free moment delivering pizzas.

I claimed I was doing it to prepare for college; you need money for that shit. In two years, I don’t want to mention how much money I made, but it was enough to buy my parents a decent place in town. If I was so inclined, I was not.

The day after graduation, I headed out and never looked back. I went to college alright, but not for the reasons you might think. Back then, the internet wasn’t what it is today, but things were happening.

If you think businessmen smoke weed, then you haven’t met college kids fresh off the farm with daddy’s money burning a hole in their pocket. That shit was selling itself. I still went to class, though, just in case my luck ran out.

I’d never had any issues with the law or rival dealers because I kept my shit low level. The off-campus house I rented wasn’t anything to look at, but it suited my purposes. It was a little two-bedroom starter home with woods and shit in the back, and most importantly, it wasn’t close to the other homes on that street.

I never had company over because I wasn’t there to make friends. I wanted money. I wanted as far away from the poverty I’d grown up in as I could get, and to do that, I couldn’t be stupid. I never shit where I eat either, so I never partied with my buyers and never shared anything about myself.

Everyone thought I had a dealer and was just a low man on the totem pole. No one knew that I was growing, harvesting, and dealing all on my own. I didn’t get greedy and try to do too much; I was biding my time. For what? I have no clue, but I kept myself out of shit and kept my nose clean.

A few years after college, they made that shit legal in the Pacific Northwest and Colorado; I had to choose which one of those I wanted to live in, and Colorado won. I hate too much rain, but I love the fuck outta snow. There wasn’t much of that in the southeastern town I’d grown up in, so that’s where I headed.

I had a shit ton of money since I never really spent my money on anything more than clothes and food, so I had a good chunk of change to sink into my new operation. That shit took off in ways I couldn’t have predicted. Instead of making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, I was making millions; it almost seemed too good to be true.

I got into the biker scene out there as well. I obviously couldn’t handle that level of business on my own, so I needed reputable men and women to work for me, and once I found my tribe, most of them runaways that had never gone back to the fucked-up homes they’d fled, it just sort of happened.

Up until that point, I knew that home life could be hard since I’d endured it myself, but my life was a damn day at the carnival compared to some of the stories they told. The shit these people endured on the streets was damn near inhumane.

I fielded them out in the first year or so and played to their strengths. I had bunkhouses built where the nurseries were, so they had a place to live and space to move around when they weren’t working.

Since we were in the mountains, bikes were easier to navigate than cars and trucks, so that’s pretty much how we got into that shit, and then it became a thing. The next thing I knew, we were rescuing kids and getting involved in shit that didn’t concern me. But our reputation was solid, and that’s how we became the crew that people reached out to for help.

The way I found out I had a sister, though, was through one of my friends from back home. He’s about one of the only people I kept in contact with from back then, and by this point, it had been sixteen years since I’d been back. Our calls were down to holidays and birthdays, but I knew he was there and vice versa.

I’ll never forget that call. “Yo, dude, how are you out there saving other people’s kids, and your sister is missing?”

“What? What sister? I don’t have a sister.”

“What do you mean you don’t have a sister? Are you telling me you didn’t know about Joy?”

“Who the fuck is joy?”

“You’re not serious.”

He proceeded to tell me the story about my little sister, who was all of eleven years old at this point. I think I lost all the blood flow to my brain that day. Those two fucking ingrates had another kid? A girl at that? What the fuck have they been doing to her?

I couldn’t be mad at my friend for not realizing that I didn’t know about her all these years. Our conversations, as I said, were far and in between, and I had warned him since the beginning never to bring my family up to me so I could see how he wouldn’t know.

“What do you mean she’s missing?”

“She never came home from school. We’ve been looking for her for days. It’s been all over the local news.” I don’t remember what else I said to him before hanging up.

At this point, the Internet was in full swing, so it was no hardship pulling up the information. The first thing I saw was this adorable little kid with my mother’s face, and my heart did some kind of weird shit in my chest.

I read the story, but there wasn’t much there to go on. I called in my four closest assistants and told them what was going on, had the Cessna made ready, and lit out in less than an hour after the phone call.

It was hell getting any information from local law enforcement, so I hit the ground running. My guys and I spread out and got as much CCTV footage from the buildings in the area where she’d been taken along with home security from people who were willing to help.

Questions were asked, and threats were made until the third night we were there, when someone called in a tip. I ran to the shack. They said she was being held because my head wasn’t on straight just then.

My boys drove the rental and followed me, and I still beat them there. I still remember all the backroads through the woods. She was asleep, curled into herself with tear stains on her face. “Joy?” I didn’t know if I should touch her or what to do really.

The others waited outside the door, and I stood there looking down at her, not knowing what to do next. With the other kids I’d rescued, it was always a no-brainer, but this was my little sister, and I was already dreading what might’ve happened to her here.

She rolled over and opened her eyes, “Thunder?”

“You know me?” She sat up and wiped sleep from her eyes with a nod.

“Mama showed me pictures.”

“Are you hurt anywhere?” I almost choked on that question.

She shook her head and held out her arms for me to lift her. For all that she was eleven, she weighed about as much as a four-year-old would. I lifted that little girl off that filthy cot and right into my heart.

To make a long story short, I pretty much bought her from my parents. I gave them a hundred grand, and they signed over their rights. I would’ve given more, but they didn’t know I had more, so they didn’t ask.

I was back home in less than two weeks after the whole ordeal had started, but the cops had still yet to find the men who had taken her. I never stopped hunting those fucks down. This one was the last to survive since I’d ended the other two. They only knew about taking her, but this one was the one who had spent the most time with her in that shack, and I wanted to know what went down there because she wasn’t talking.

Not to me, not to her therapist, no one. But she’s still bearing the scars from that time. I listened to him scream as I broke all the fingers in his left hand. “You ready to talk now?”