Page 6 of Roses Are Dead
Old Carl didn’t know it, but he’d signed his death sentence. It would be fun to watch it all unfold. Which reminded me. I had a meeting to attend. If I wanted a front row seat, all I had to do was volunteer.
I dumped my muddy shoes on the patio outside my living room. There was a barrel that caught rainwater next to the edge of the concrete pad. I splashed that over my legs and feet to clean them off before walking inside.
“Where the fuck were you?” Jackson, our regional president, took in my shorts, the soaked thermal shirt, and my general state of disorder, and then asked, “And what the fuck are you wearing?”
I looked down at my hairy, tattooed legs. “Shorts. I was running.”
“From who?”
That was Jackson for you. He was a biker through and through. Born into the life, raised in a whorehouse, and never once ran from a fight. He was pushing fifty, with a brand-new wife and a smart-ass teenager, and still had the body and shape of a twenty-eight-year-old, and the mind of a fucking fifteen-year-old.
He was also my neighbor and the guy I was supposed to protect. Hence, why I needed to stay in shape. Because with his smart-ass mouth and graying hair, he was guaranteed to piss someone off at least once a day. Apparently, that person was me today.
“From the scale.” I tore off my shirt and dumped it onto the tile in my kitchen. Better there than the wood laminate in my great room.
“You ain’t fat.”
“Thanks.”
“Slow, maybe…”
My hands fisted. “Watch it…”
He chuckled. “Lay off the expensive whiskey and get laid more often. And forget about that fucking scale, will ya?”
“Can’t.”
He cocked his head to the side to study me. “Are you still pissed off because I took Bandit on the last tour?”
Tour. That was a hell of a word. He’d nabbed the regional top spot and went on “tour” to visit each and every club in his kingdom. He wanted it all done by Christmas. His reasoning? He needed the boots on the ground view of his troops. He wasn’t about to sit back and let news come to him, he wanted it in his greedy hands, yesterday. And that meant getting up close and personal with every club east of the Appalachians from the Canadian border to Florida. I was supposed to be the one he took with him.
Instead, he had me on kiddie detail. And because of that, I remained quiet. Because, damn straight I was pissed. I pulled a towel off the handle of my kitchen stove and tried to dry off.
“Bear.” I’d heard that tone long enough I knew he was trying to appeal to my good nature.
“He doesn’t know you.”
“And he needs to. Pittsburgh hates my shit right now. This is politics, not me slighting you. I need his approval to get their approval so they can forget my woman shot his president.”
His wife didn’t shoot Shock.
I knew that because I figured out who did.
Kiddie detail included sleeping over at the house next door when Jackson was four states away. And Kate, biker First Lady she was, went with him, knowing full well if she didn’t, he’d get some whore pushed on him. That meant Zoe, their sixteen-year-old daughter, stayed home… alone. Not truly. I was there as her bodyguard and hormonal punching bag. And sure, I knew I was protecting the one thing Jackson valued most, but it still rankled. And her being left behind was kind of crappy because that poor kid still had nightmares about the murder of her mom’s husband. Not Jackson… the first one.
What a fucked-up mess.
Shock, Pittsburgh’s dead president and Kate’s first husband, was lucky he was dead. Because if he’d have lived, I’d have stripped him of his skin from scalp to toenails. Then cut his back open and splayed his lungs out across the bloody breathing carcass. He’d stolen and raped Kate when she was barely seventeen. Jackson helped her get free of his child-creeping ass. But this year that bastard found her again, and she and Zoe made the right decision. They came home, to Jackson, and this club, to let us sort it out.
Which meant Pittsburgh thought Jackson killed Shock to take his wife since he’d already gone there biblically, leaving her with a kid for evidence. Zoe was the spitting image of Jackson, but cuter. With that sin on his hands, it was an easy leap to think he’d done more.
Murdering a brother was against the rules. Didn’t mean it didn’t happen. I knew damn well that it did. My former role as Sergeant at Arms here in Skilletsville prepared me for the inevitable fuck up of someone pressured to squeal on us. Luckily, I never had to eliminate a brother.
“How’s Kate holding up?” I asked. Getting him talking about her was a great way to divert the conversation.
Jackson smiled. Even though it was a happy one, he still looked like the diabolical devil he was. “She’s perfect. Tired of the bullshit, though. She wants to stay home next trip.”
“You’re going to need me with you, then.” I said that because Kate trusted me. She knew I’d tell her if Jackson had some whore forced on him. So far, he’d given up all his womanizing ways. But pressure and distance can fuck with a man’s head, even if his heart was solid.
