She carefully took her little shrine down and packed it away in a box. When she was done sealing it, she stacked it with the other boxes that would arrive at her new home next week. In the meantime, she would have to get new pictures of Romeo Barrigan. She placed her camera bag beside her travel case and took one last look around her now bare apartment. Bair, Nebraska, waited for her. And so did Romeo.
He just didn’t know it yet.
Chapter Three
Two weeks later…
“Final tally is good, Doctor Pinder,” Chloe said from behind her mask. Even though it wasn’t an open procedure, she still needed to verify that all the surgical items were accounted for. Laparoscopic surgeries were her favorite simply because she didn’t have to worry too much about lost instruments or sponges within the body cavity.
“Excellent,” the doctor replied. “I think we’ve now removed every gall bladder in Bair and the surrounding communities.”
“I still have mine,” she said teasingly.
“Hang out in enough restaurants around here and all the greasy food will certainly put you on my operating table.”
Chloe chuckled. “No thanks. I like my gall bladder right where it is.”
He handed her the trocar devices that punctured the abdomen for the surgery, and she placed them on the back table. The patient’s belly was slowly deflating since the carbon dioxide wasn’t being pumped in any longer.
“Will you glue the holes shut and add bandages?” the doctor asked her.
“Of course.”
“Perfect. In that case, I’m out of here.” The doctor stepped back from the OR table where the unconscious patient slept. The anesthesiologist waved him off while Chloe stepped up to use bonding glue to seal the puncture wounds. Minutes later, she was pulling off her surgical gown and loading up the surgical cart to haul the used instruments back to sterile processing.
“Done for the day?” Susan, the OR nurse, asked.
There was something about Susan that Chloe didn’t like. Maybe it was the woman’s narrow eyes where a deep divot between them gave her a perpetual frown. Maybe it was the highbrow tone she always used whenever she was talking to anyone she felt was inferior to her status as a nurse—like a surgical technician, for example. Chloe had dealt with her share of uptight nurses, and Susan seemed to be the type of woman who always judged on aesthetics. Chloe detested self-righteous cunts.
“Yes,” she answered succinctly. Her brain was telling her to ignore the woman and move on. She couldn’t do anything to jeopardize her position.
“Since tomorrow’s Saturday, why don’t we head out for some drinks together?” Susan suggested. She looked Chloe up and down, a pretentious smirk lifting the corners of her mouth. “You should head to my neck of the woods since there’s no decent place in this town.”
Chloe cocked her head. “I thought Bair was a town full of bars.”
Susan sniffed. “Bars that have the lowest life forms on earth inside them. Puh-leaze. I mean, granted, those lowlifes give us work, but people like us don’t need to associate at their level.”
“People like us?”
“Educated people,” Susan replied. “I live an hour north of here.” She lifted her hand to her mouth to talk behind it, as if to keep a monumental secret. “It has a country club and I’m a member.”
“You drive two hours a day just for work? I thought people only did that in areas like LA, to make the traffic even more horrendous.”
Susan shrugged. “They pay more money here in Bair because they’re desperate for an excellent-trained staff. The drug dealers and the nasty motorcycle club have kept this hospital in turnover hell.”
Chloe’s protective instincts came roaring to the surface. Romeo was president of the motorcycle club and hearing this bitch talk down about him had her fighting her natural instinct to walk over and slap the smirk off her face. To get her surgical certification, Chloe had taken an oath not to harm patients, but that didn’t include knocking sharp-tongued shrews down a peg or two. She breathed through the beat-down inclination, but in the back of her mind, she’d already decided Susan had a target on her back.
“I’ve already got plans tonight,” Chloe murmured.
“Oh,” Susan replied. Her chin went up a notch, pushing her nose somewhere into orbit. “Well, maybe some other time.”
“Maybe.” Chloe would rather shove a red-hot poker in her eye than go out for drinks with Susan.
She walked away quickly, before her anger got the better of her, and wheeled the used cart to sterile processing. Then she headed to the locker room, where she showered and donned black jeans and a black shirt. She parted her straight obsidian hair down the middle and made two Scary Spice hair horns on her head.
Surprised looks followed her out of the hospital. For the past week, she’d gone home looking like she’d come to work, drab and professional. But Friday nights were different. On Friday nights, Romeo drove to the Whiskey Lick Her Bar, and tonight she planned to get plenty of pictures to hang on her wall. She hadn’t seen him in a week, although she’d driven by the MC compound more times than she wanted to admit. She desperately needed her sexual fix. Masturbation simply wasn’t the same without seeing his face as she fucked herself with a vibrating pink cock. Soon, she hoped to replace the fake cock with the real thing once he realized he needed her as much as she needed him.
A little voice of reason tried to break in through her focus. This was crazy, stalking such a man. Stalking
any
man, for that matter. True, she’d had problems in the past separating simple desire for love, but this was different. Her shrink would tell her she was obsessing once more, using that word she hated. He’d try to put her on pills again. And perhaps she
was
going a little crazy, but the goddamn shrink didn’t know what she’d lived through. No one did except for her grandfather and Kaiya. Motorcycle gangs hadn’t even been on her radar until her cousin had been rescued by one, then she suddenly knew where she belonged. Away from Los Angeles and the reminders. Away from her grandfather’s business.
This
was where she needed to be.
Psychiatrists might call it obsessive. The world would certainly call her insane, but her life had never been normal and it never would be. Nothing was normal for a girl who had to kill her mother when she was only thirteen years old.
* * * *
There’s that car again.
Right away, Dax had spotted it across the street as he, Romeo and two others drove up to the Whiskey Lick Her Bar, the hangout they came to every Friday night. They owned it and needed to collect the profits. It was the only source of income the club had right now, so it behove them to sit, drink and pretend to be merry.
Over the past several days, he’d seen the car outside the compound. It wasn’t hard to miss because there weren’t many Mercedes in Bair. The tinted windows prevented him from seeing the driver, but Dax suspected it was the Shanks spying on them. The gang operated all over the Midwest, from Arkansas up through Iowa. They’d slowly been infiltrating their drugs into the MOH territory, but they were small and poorly managed. The Mercedes, however, worried him.
He tensed as the sensation of being watched stole over him. He might not be able to see the person who stared at him, but he felt the inspection nonetheless.
“Coming, Dax?” Romeo called.
He glanced behind him and nodded to his club president. As always, a measure of guilt washed over him. He’d let his duties as an enforcer slide with Shepard, and the man had turned out to be a fucking psychopath with delusions of grandeur. He wouldn’t slip again. When he looked back, he watched the car drive away, nothing but tail lights in the night.
“Yeah,” he said. He turned and followed Romeo into the dark bar. Posh it wasn’t. The sticky floor kept sucking at his shoes. The low lighting forced him to squint, the band sucked, and the drinks were barely chilled. But the girls were smoking hot. The Whiskey Lick Her was located right off the interstate and the flashing neon sign that read
A Lot of Girls
was a magnet for truckers. The Men of Hell made a nice little profit, and, in return, they provided muscle and protection for the whores.
The manager, Creole Jack, greeted them with a nod toward the back room. He and Romeo headed there immediately while the other Brothers, Babyface and Hawg, took up position outside the door. A minute later, Creole Jack entered with a towel draped over his shoulder.
“Let me open this safe and I got your money here waitin’,” he said. His accent was thicker than his mud-like coffee. “You know, I had two men come in here the other day, askin’ about y’all.”
“Shanks?” Romeo asked.
Creole Jack shook his head. He’d moved to Bair back in the seventies, leaving his home state of Louisiana behind. The darkness of his skin made the whites of his eyes stand out in stark relief. He pulled out a red money bag and handed it over. Romeo unzipped it, thumbed through the stack of twenties and nodded in satisfaction.
“No, weren’t no cops neither,” Creole Jack said. “They weren’t wearing cuts but they smelled like leather and they looked like bikers.”
“What questions did they ask?” Dax asked.
“Askin’ about the town. About you. They were real curious about the feud between you and the Shanks.”
Romeo folded his arms across his chest. “What’d you say?”
“I told ’em I was just a manager.” Creole Jack shrugged. “Told ’em I didn’t know nothin’ about the Men of Hell.”
“All right,” Romeo said. “If you see them again, call me.”
“Of course,” Creole Jack said.
“Would you give us a minute, Jack?” Romeo asked. Creole Jack nodded and left the room, closing the office door behind him with a soft click. “What’s up?”
“There’s been a Mercedes following us,” Dax remarked.
“Then that leaves the Shanks out. No one in their organization drives one of those cars. So who the fuck is tailing us?”
“I don’t know.” Dax held out his hand. “I don’t like it. Give me the money bag and I’ll take it straight to the club.”
“But I’m the one that takes it—”
“We need to change up your routine,” Dax told him. “You’ve become a little predictable.”
“You think that’s necessary?”
“I do. So let me run it back to the club and you go find a way to let off a little of that restlessness you’ve had for a while. I’ll be gone twenty or thirty minutes, tops.”
“We should go together.”
“I’ll be fine,” Dax insisted. “Change up your Friday night, okay?”
Romeo frowned, but he handed over the red money bag. Dax shoved it into his cut’s inner pocket and held up his fist. Romeo bumped it with his own.
“See you in a bit,” he said.
“I’ll probably be in the back.”
Translation—he’d be with the whores.
Dax left the office and made his way from the bar. As he stepped outside, away from the hazy atmosphere of the bar, he took a deep breath. Smoking was one thing he’d never really gotten into, although he did enjoy a joint every now and then. In his youth, he and Romeo had spent many a night getting high in the club’s basement, but when he’d become the enforcer, he’d tried not to indulge too much.
He strapped on his helmet and turned on his bike. Almost immediately, he spotted the Mercedes cruising by and all types of warning hackles rose to the surface. Without another thought, he took off after the car.
Romeo watched Dax leave the bar then glanced over at the two prospects waiting for his orders. Although Babyface looked like he was twelve, he was in his early twenties.
“Catch up with him, make sure he makes it to the compound okay.”
Babyface nodded and headed after Dax.
Romeo slapped Hawg on the shoulder and grinned. “Ready for some pussy?”
“Oh yeah, boss,” Hawg replied.
The two men made their way into the back where the whorehouse operated. Two of his men, Hook and Wrench, stood guard, making sure no one messed with the girls. Candy Box, the madam, smiled widely when she laid eyes on Romeo. The woman was in her mid-forties with bubblegum-pink hair, blue eyes, and breasts that entered a room a whole minute before the rest of her did.
“Well, hello, you two handsome men,” she gushed as she moved from behind her booking station to give each man a hug.
“Hi, Candy,” Romeo replied with a wide smile.
Nothing quite like having huge tits pressed against my chest.
As he mused about them, he realized his mood had already improved.
“How may I help you, dears?” Candy asked, winking.
“Oh, Candy, if only you were still passing out your favors,” Romeo teased back.
“You, sweetheart, could tempt a nun out of her knickers.” Candy giggled, ad moved back to her station then glanced down at her book. “What tickles your fancy this evening? I have five girls ready to play.”
Romeo glanced at Hawg questioningly. Hawg shrugged.
“Whoever’s available,” Romeo replied.
“Very well,” she said and texted something on her phone. “Hawg, I think Tightania is perfect for you. And, Romeo, I’ve got a new girl named Shantel whose mouth, I’ve heard, certainly knows how to make a man come.”
Two girls arrived at the entrance. The brunette wore a black teddy and boasted an impressive rack. Not as big as Candy’s, but a man could certainly fuck between them. She smiled and took Hawg’s hand, leading him into the sinful delights of the back rooms.
“Hello,” the other woman said. Romeo assumed she was Shantel. Her caramel skin gleamed in the low light, and his dick rose in anticipation of just how good her mouth had been advertised. She held out her hand, and he took it willingly, ready to lose himself for a few minutes in an orgasmic high.
Shantel led him to a room minimally decorated with only a bed, a table and a chair. But he supposed nothing more was needed. On the table lay an assortment of sex toys, a couple of bottles of lube and a plethora of condoms.
Nothing like being prepared.
Although she was certainly beautiful, the wear and tear of Shantel’s profession had begun to wreak havoc on her face and body. She looked tired. Emotionless. A calculating glimmer was the only thing in her dark eyes before she quickly lowered her gaze. Candy had promised a woman who knew how to get his rocks off with a very talented mouth, and he hoped she could deliver on that promise. Shantel fell to her knees, undoing his pants to pull them down far enough for his cock to emerge. Not even looking at him, she slurped his pre-cum up, one long, slow slide of her tongue from under the base to the slit. Her warm little tongue dipped into the hole, as if seeking more moisture, and he threaded his fingers in her hair to guide the blow job.