Page 56 of The Biker and the Loner
I know. That was on purpose. To stick it to these dipshits who stalked me for days, “testing” me or whatever the fuck.
She holds down a button on the desk phone as she voices, "Joe, Mr. Michaelson is here for his meeting. Please come down to escort him to the conference room."
As we wait, I lean over the desk and ask, "Since there's been a lotta ‘talk’ about me, you got any idea what this meeting's about?"
She gives me a wink and an ‘I'm not telling’smile as she shrugs and replies, "How would I know? I'm just the receptionist."
A few minutes later, the elevator opens with a dude in a navy-blue security uniform complete with a gun, baton, taser and all. He's got a thick ass neck and a couple pounds of muscle on him, but he's still not a threat. I could take him in one go.
Familiar with the protocol from my last visit, I lift my arms for him to search me but still voice out loud, "I'm packing."
He waves me off. "I was given strict instructions not to search you. C'mon."
Dropping my arms, I stride to the elevator. "Well, that's stupid."
Thick Neck slides me a side-eye as he punches the number three. “You plan on using it?”
I shrug and fold my arms, watching the doors slide close. "Only if I have to."
He chuckles and shakes his head.
A few seconds later, we're out of the elevator and he’s escorting me through a work area filled with cubicles and heads peeking over them, down a long hall with doors on both sides, and straight to the end to a door with "Conference Room" embossed in chrome.
Thick Neck opens the door and gestures for me to walk in, then closes it behind me and leaves.
I stride into the spacious room with a large twelve-seater conference table, a wall of floor-to-ceiling glass windows, and dual flat-screens on the north wall. Seated around the table are the four Garza brothers—Trent, Truman, Tripp, and Torin.
In the corner on the right, a tall blonde stands beside a loaded coffee cart.
"Yo," I say to the room.
"Good morning to you, too," Torin deadpans.
He's the most serious of the four. The oldest. The one hardly ever seen. The one who joined the army at eighteen and served for eight years.
Tripp kicks the chair next to his, a shit-eating grin on his face. "Take a seat, Landon. We won't bite. Promise."
"Quit using my real name," I grouse as I move to the seat at the other end of the table, the seat opposite Torin who's at the helm. "It'sScratchfor you."
Flavio Garza—their father, also known as Flave—was a successful, infamous Italian championship-winning card player. Also, a notorious womanizer who was obsessed with black women and knocked them up just as easily as he won high-stakes poker games. None of his children have the same mother. Rumor has it that he's got at least three kids in each country. Somehow, these four half-brothers managed to stick together and built a solid enough relationship to run a professional business as one.
"You haven't been ‘Scratch’ since you decided to serve," Torin says. "Scratch is dead. You're Landon now. I know it as much as you do."
Our glares meet. Torin and I are army brothers, whether I like it or not. At some point in his journey, he’d no doubt faced the same identity crisis after war that I'm facing right now. He's right, I haven't been Scratch since before I left.
I clear my throat and lean back. "What's this meeting about? Why am I here?"
"You plan on going back?" Torin asks.
"If I get cleared, yeah."
"You won't." He taps the folder sitting in front of him. "Save for the fact that you're marked down for willfully disobeying orders twice, the screws in your leg, the missing trigger finger, and your PTSD episodes, I've been assured that you won't."
"You shouldn't have any of that information." Though I'm not surprised. There's no information that's unattainable to them.
"We shouldn't," he agrees. "But we do. Because we want you on our team."
Doing what?"Sorry, but investigating isn’t my thing. I thoroughly enjoy minding my own damn business, thank you very much."
