Authors: Penny McCall
Jack picked up a small pot filled with something that was pale yellow in color. He wasn’t sure what Aubrey used it for, but it smelled like oranges, which made his mouth water and his stomach growl. Or maybe it was the aroma wafting in from the hallway.
He stripped, piling his Glock and his ankle clutch piece on the counter next to the switchblade, pausing to take a mental snapshot. Aubrey had her hardware, he thought, grinning, he had his. He stepped into the shower, lathered up with something that smelled like coconut and felt like sandpaper, then stood there for a while, boiling like a lobster, thinking it was the nicest place he’d been in the last four days. His brain was waking up nicely; the rest of him following suit. In fact, the only thing that could’ve made that shower better would be a female companion with a bad case of butter fingers when it came to the soap.
It would have been a nice fantasy if it hadn’t come along with a face. Or if the face hadn’t been Aubrey’s. He jumped out of the bathtub so fast he lost his footing on the tile floor and sat down hard. But at least the mental picture was gone, and when he got right down to it, being bare-assed on cold tile was better than a lobotomy, which was probably the only other thing that could have driven that kind of urge back into hiding.
Being face-to-face with Aubrey helped keep it there. When he got downstairs he found her sitting on a couch that probably had more resident critters than the cave they’d slept in a couple of nights back. And then there were the guys on either side of her, both with wiry, graying beards that could have housed a small menagerie.
Two more bikers sat on a coffee table that looked like it had survived World War II but wasn’t up to the bulk of a couple of middle-aged Hells Angels. A leather-clad biker chick sat Indian-style on the floor. All of them were listening raptly as Aubrey talked a mile a minute. Just the sound of her voice had Jack’s eyes glazing over. The fact that she seemed to be talking gibberish made him want to run like hell in the other direction.
He shook it off and walked over to the little group. Not one head turned, no one acknowledged his presence. They all sat there, a couple of them openmouthed in awe.
Jack didn’t get it. Aubrey Sullivan was plain, opinionated, condescending, whiny, and she acted like she had PMS most of the time. And those were her good traits. But when she was in a group of people—people that weren’t him—she seemed to come alive. She was animated, laughing, no prim librarian purse to her mouth. Her eyes were all sparkly and bright, and her cheeks were flushed. She actually looked kind of pretty now that she was scrubbed clean and all tarted up . . .
Not that he cared. How she looked came under the heading of “territory best left unexplored,” and considering some of the places he’d walked into willingly that was saying something.
“We need to talk,” he said to her.
She looked up at him, her expression going halfway to librarian glare, with a smile he didn’t like. “You’ve spent the last three days trying to get me to shut up, Jack, and a few hours ago you told me to find—”
He curled his hand around her arm and hauled her off the couch. “You don’t want to say that out loud.”
Naturally she wasn’t grateful. “I’m busy,” she snapped, all the way back to librarian.
“Doing what?”
Aubrey looked around the little group, all of whom exhibited some variation of not-my-scene body language and took off.
“I was relaxing, having fun. You’ve heard about fun, right?”
“Yeah, you were the life of the party. What I don’t get is why.”
She huffed out a breath, dragging her arm out of his grip. “Just because you hate me doesn’t mean everyone else is that narrow-minded.”
Jack chose to overlook the insult, which was pretty easy. What surprised him was the instant denial that sprang to mind when she accused him of hating her. When he thought about it, though, he realized hate was too strong a word. So was dislike, but there were a lot of other words that worked, impatience, annoyance, and frustration on so many levels—
Shit, now she was turning him into a damn dictionary. “You have nothing in common with these people.”
“So?”
He just looked at her, refusing to be sucked into her world and use more words. It took a minute, but she finally caved.
“Okay, okay. I did a few party tricks for them.”
“What, you pulled a quarter from behind some guy’s ear? Hell, you were lucky all you found back there was a quarter.”
“Not magic—well, my kind of magic maybe. I did some memory stuff.”
Jack stopped dead, and then a whole bunch of new words ran through this brain, most of them four-lettered. A couple of them popped out of his mouth, forcefully enough to bring one or two of Aubrey’s former admirers to their feet. Jack closed his hand over her arm again and propelled her across the room, stuffing her through the door to the courtyard.
“Why are you so angry?” she demanded, covering her head against the drizzle.
Jack opened his mouth but nothing came out except a blast of air and heat—kind of like the snort a pissed-off bull made before it gored the matador.
Aubrey tried to scream but all the breath was gone from her lungs. So she did what she always did when danger threatened, she ran, scuttling to the overhang that housed the motorcycles. She’d been playing chicken with death for four days, but she was feeling her first real fear—okay, having a knife chucked at her by a biker Amazon had been scary, but the other stuff hadn’t seemed real, not to mention there’d been adrenaline and barely enough time to react let alone embrace the fear. She had all sorts of time now, and a bone-deep feeling that she’d pushed Jack too far. She wasn’t quite sure what had sent him over the edge, but she was sure he’d blame it on her.
“Does the phrase ‘death wish’ mean anything to you?” he demanded, stalking over to her, hands fisted.
“I knew you would blame this on me.” Aubrey threaded her way between the bikes, keeping at least one between her and Jack at all times. “You sent me in there alone.”
“Not so you could show off.”
“I wasn’t showing off, exactly . . . Okay, I was showing off.
So they wouldn’t kill me
.”
“Nobody’s going to kill you here. But any one of those people might reach out to someone who will.”
“I thought they were your friends.”
“Tiny’s my friend. The rest of the family changes more often than the roach population at your average fast-food restaurant, and they’re just as discriminating. There’s no telling what crack they crawled out of or what they’ve heard.”
“You think . . .”
“They might not recognize our names, but that freakish talent of yours is something that’s hard to forget.”
“No pun intended.”
“Huh?”
“Never mind. You don’t think anyone would trespass on Tiny’s hospitality, do you? Seems to me he runs this place with an iron fist.”
“Tiny only thinks he has control here. Some of your new friends would kill for cigarette money, and you’re worth a lot more than that. Enough to make Tiny’s anger worth risking.”
“So what do we do?”
“How about coming inside and having something to eat.”
They both turned and there was Tiny, standing at the door. He and Jack exchanged a long look, and some of the tension drained out of Jack’s shoulders. “We could use a meal and a good night’s sleep.”
“Even in a dangerous place like this?”
Jack tipped his head in Aubrey’s direction. “Every place with her is dangerous.”
Tiny laughed, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “I kept you safe ten years ago, Jack, I’ll keep you safe tonight.” He clasped Jack on the shoulder. “’Course you’ll have to watch your back when you leave here. Some of these guys would kill you for cigarette money.”
He stuck his head out the door, his cat’s eyes zeroing in on her. “You coming?”
“Do I have to?”
“Yes.”
She pushed away from the wall. She could tell it was going to get ugly if she kept Jack from the feed trough any longer, and she didn’t want to lose an arm.
Considering the way she’d been dragged out of there, she didn’t know what to expect when she got back inside. Jack was one of them, she wasn’t; they might use his treatment of her as a guide. At the very least she figured there’d be overt hostility, maybe a few veiled death glares. Mostly it was warm and bright in Tiny’s house, the aroma of food making her stomach knot. Everyone was focused on mealtime, except Harley. Harley lived up to expectations, sending her a pretty good death glare. Not so veiled, though, and there was no subtlety in the way she took off after Jack.
Tiny stepped up beside Aubrey and took her elbow. “The dining room is this way.”
“Harley didn’t cook, did she?” Aubrey asked him. Or get close enough to poison anything.
Tiny laughed, leading the way to a door on the far side of the room. “Dinner is served.” He said it like he had a white cloth draped over the arm of his tuxedo jacket.
Aubrey thought he was joking until he stepped aside. The place wasn’t exactly a four-star restaurant. It wasn’t even a dining room except in the literal definition of the phrase. It was a room, and people were dining, but in the off hours it looked a lot like a place to play pool. The walls were wood paneling, probably not too unattractive if she ignored the half-century’s worth of nicotine and tar buildup. Mirrored beer signs hung at regular intervals along with pool cue racks and point counters, and hunks of plywood had been laid over the pool tables, then covered with white butcher paper. Preemptive damage control.
What the room lacked in dining ambience, however, it made up where it really mattered. Food. Aubrey expected the kind of meal that clogged arteries, caused intestinal distress, and layered asses and guts with fat. Instead there were platters filled with chicken cordon bleu, redskin potatoes roasted with rosemary and garlic, steamed vegetables, and whole-grain bread. There were even a couple of bottles of wine open and breathing. Beer seemed to be the drink of choice, but hey, she had to give Tiny credit for trying.
He nudged her forward and shoehorned her in line behind a guy who needed to put his plate down and pull his pants up. Limiting his servings wouldn’t be a bad idea either.
“I’m not really hungry,” she said. “My stomach is all . . . icky.”
“That happens sometimes when you don’t eat regular.”
The scenery wasn’t helping either.
“Here, this should get rid of the icky.” Tiny put a wineglass in her hand.
She sipped it out of self-preservation. A bit of a buzz seemed right for the occasion. She chugged the rest of the wine because Tiny was right, it made her stomach all warm and loose and sent the nausea far away. And she almost forgot the urge to find a nice, deep closet and crawl into it. Tiny laughed, depositing her in a chair in the corner and handing her a plate heaped with enough food to make up for every missed meal from birth. More important, he refilled her wineglass, and before he could walk away, she appropriated the bottle.
Jack was across the room, hunched over his plate, completely focused on filling his stomach, which was fine, because Aubrey had her new friends, Ernest and Julio, for company.
“Anybody sitting there?”
A shadow fell over the chair next to her. Aubrey turned her head and came face-to-crotch with a pair of Levi’s housing a really excellent package. The jeans were topped by a white T-shirt painted over washboard abs. Above the abs were a pair of muscled arms with matching skull tattoos, crossed over a chest wide enough to block most of the room from sight. Still no face. She tried to find the face, but she was thwarted by his tallness and the fact that she’d tipped her head back as far as the wall behind her would allow.
Skulls solved the problem by dropping into the chair next to her. “You gonna eat that?”
“No.” But she was going to drink her wine. She handed him her plate and drained her glass, eyes glued to a face that lived up to the body.
“How ’bout I refill that for you?”
She stared stupidly at the hand he held out, not catching his drift until he reached for her wineglass. Somebody else’s hand got there first. She recognized the second hand, and she didn’t like the fact that it was getting between her and the new men in her life.
“She’s had enough to drink.”
The voice didn’t make her too happy either. Aubrey cut her eyes to Jack, but her head spun and it took her a minute to focus on him. Then she got a load of his expression and she was sorry she’d made the effort. “I’m fine.”
He took a piece of bread from the plate she’d turned over to tall, buff, and handsome, slapped some chicken on it and folded it in half. “Eat this.”
“I’m not hungry anymore.”
“You’re drunk.”
“Am not. I had two glasses of wine. That’s barely enough to make me tipsy.”
“That would be true for a normal person. Somebody as scrawny as you doesn’t have as much blood to water down the alcohol.”
“That’s not a nice thing to say.” Her new dinner partner stood up, facing off with Jack. Being a head taller, he had to look down to manage it. “I think you should apologize to the lady.”
“Yeah,” Aubrey chimed in. Finally, somebody who could put Jack in his place. This could be good. “I think you should apologize, Jack.” She lifted her wineglass, remembered her hand was empty, and hefted the bottle instead.
Jack took it away before she could drink from it. “Let’s go,” he said. “Time to sleep it off.”
The other guy took a step forward, but Tiny cut in, ruining all the fun. “She came with Jack,” he said.
“Don’t look like she wants to stay with him.”
“She doesn’t have a choice,” Jack said.
“Everybody has a choice.”
“Tell him you’re with me.”
Something in Jack’s voice penetrated the wine fog. Aubrey took a good look at his face. He was angry, nothing new there. But there was a dimension to the anger that looked almost like . . . Nope. No way, she wasn’t going there. Jack was only being his usual pigheaded and unreasonable self.
“Do you even know this guy’s name,” Jack said to her, “let alone where he comes from or what he wants from you? Aside from the obvious?”
Damn. He might be pigheaded and unreasonable but he had a point, and he knew how to make it. “I’m with Jack,” she said to Skulls.
That should have settled the matter, but Jack didn’t seem to want to let it go. His chest puffed out and he took a step forward.
Tiny interceded again. “I thought you wanted to keep the excitement level down,” he said to Jack.
Jack thought about that for a few seconds, looking around the room while he contemplated. Everyone was watching them, excitement simmering just below the surface. Throwing a punch would be like dropping a lit match on a pile of sawdust. “Time for bed,” he said, sounding bored.
Aubrey could tell he was anything but. He was spoiling for a fight, and since he wasn’t going to get one down here, he was going to pick one with her. And the last thing she wanted was him yelling at her and ruining her nice wine buzz.
“Let’s go,” Jack said.
Aubrey didn’t budge. Nobody in the room budged, watching to see what would happen. Aubrey wasn’t as anxious to find out. She didn’t figure she had a choice, but help came from the last place she’d have expected.
“She has to help with dishes,” Harley said from across the room. “You know the rules around here, Jack.”
He locked gazes with Harley.
“She’s new, she does KP or she does dishes. I don’t recall seeing her in the kitchen earlier.”
“I’ll see she gets upstairs when she’s done,” Tiny added. “Alone.”
Jack gave Tiny one of his almost nonexistent nods. “Get some food into her if you can.”
“Stop talking about me like I’m not here,” Aubrey said.
“Wishful thinking.” And Jack took himself off, heading upstairs.
His exit left the room feeling empty and a little sad, kind of like the street after a parade passes and all that was left was confetti banking against the curb. Those who were done eating schlepped their dishes into the kitchen and scattered to rooms with televisions or beds. The others finished off and did the same, pitching in to bus the tables and restore them to their original purpose.
Aubrey escaped to the kitchen before the pool cues came out and anybody felt a need to bend over. “Okay, you got me in here,” she said to Tiny, “what’s the game plan?”
“Cleaning the dishes and putting them away.”
“No ulterior motive?”
“No ulterior motive. Just dishes. And maybe some coffee.”
“That’s disappointing. And I don’t want coffee. I don’t drink coffee.”
He plucked an old enamelware teapot, already steaming, off the stove. When he turned around a minute later he’d transferred the contents of the pot to a white porcelain mug. He handed it to Aubrey.
She studied the murky surface, sniffed it dubiously.
“Hot chocolate,” Tiny said. “Drink up.”
She took a cautious sip. “I think it needs something. Peppermint schnapps, maybe.”
“How about some food instead?”
Aubrey couldn’t get all that thrilled about eating, but the warmth from the hot chocolate was already spreading outward from her stomach, unknotting muscles she hadn’t realized were tensed up and letting the hunger pains through again.
She tried some vegetables from the plate he held out. They stayed down, so she decided to risk some chicken. “This is good,” she said, taking the plate and leaning back against the counter while she ate. “You could do this for a living.”
“I did,” Tiny said, scraping dishes and piling them in the sink. “I was a cook in the army a million years ago, and when I got out I spent some time in restaurant kitchens. I was good at it, but I’m not what you’d call a model employee. I like to come and go on my schedule rather than somebody else’s.”
“So you decided to fix motorcycles?”
He shrugged. “Not right off. I went from job to job for a while. Spent some time as a pump jockey back when gas stations still had attendants, worked construction, drove a truck for a while. I even did a stint as a bouncer in New York City.”
“Let me guess. You tossed Jack out into the street one night and you’ve been fast friends ever since.”
He chuckled. But he didn’t elaborate.
“I went where my bike took me, just like a lot of those yahoos out there.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Got tired of it one day. Settled here because Harley was here, and opened my shop because I got tired of fixing everybody’s ride for free. I keep my door open because people took me in when I was on the road and it seemed like my turn to do the same.”
Biker with a heart of gold. She would have said something, but Tiny seemed like the kind of guy who expressed his emotions with punches to the arm and noogies. He definitely had a reputation to maintain. Calling him a nice guy would not only embarrass him, it might make him mad, and she really didn’t want to risk that—especially with an audience.
People kept wandering in and out of the kitchen, dropping off dishes, getting something to drink, sightseeing. She and Tiny worked in silence for a little while, Aubrey feeling like the newest exhibit at the zoo—especially when Skulls drifted in and leaned against the wall.
After a couple of minutes, Tiny tossed him a towel.
“What’s this for?” Skulls asked.
“If you’re going to hang around, you’re working.”
He blinked, seeming puzzled. “This is woman’s work.”
Tiny swung around, tucking his thumbs in the apron slung beneath his beer belly. “This ain’t your momma’s house. You’re still here tomorrow, you’re doing dishes.”
Skulls hesitated, looking like he wanted to say something but unable to locate a thought.
“I didn’t think I’d run across anybody more chauvinistic than Jack,” she said, “not this side of the fourteenth century anyway.”
That did it. Skulls took himself off.
“He’s not too bright, but at least he knows when he’s being insulted.”
“You might want to be more careful about that sort of thing here,” Tiny said. “Most of these guys are pretty easygoing, but you never know what’ll set one of them off.”
“I’ll keep it mind,” Aubrey said, although in truth she wasn’t all that worried. Pissing off a tattooed biker didn’t seem like such a big deal when her life expectancy could probably be measured in hours. “So what’s the deal with you and Jack?”