Fury’s Promise_A Motorcycle Club Romance_The Devil’s Kin MC Page 8

  “What’s the matter with you!” she snarls, wiping her crying eyes. “We can’t do this with our son missing!”

  She marches into my bedroom and slams the door behind her. I go to the door and place my ear against it, hear her crying softly, and then go into the kitchen and get the dustpan and brush that are still in their packaging, take them out, and clean up the mess from the whisky bottle.

  Chapter Eleven

  Gloria

  Seconds become minutes and minutes become hours and still there’s no word about Jimmy. I sit on the bed, conjuring twisted images in my drunken mind. I see Jimmy in a thousand different scenarios, none of them good. I see him on a table with tough, ugly, mean men standing around him, doing tough, ugly, mean things to him. He’s crying out for his mother; that’s undeniable. Sometimes he cries when I leave the room like I’ll never come back, and now that’s a real possibility: I might never come back to him.

  As the sky turns orange and then purplish, my cell phone rings.

  “Hey!” Alexis chirps. “How did it go?”

  Her upbeat mood is so out of place, I can’t but laugh. A savage, choking laugh that goes on for far too long and contains zero humor.

  “Gloria?” Alexis asks quietly. “Are you okay? What’s wrong? Are you drunk?”

  I laugh even harder, because she really has no idea. Drunk, drunk … imagine if being drunk was my only problem. “I had a couple,” I mutter. “A whisky. A few beers.”

  “Whisky and beer? Since when do you drink whisky and beer?”

  “Since now, okay! I don’t have to tell you everything, do I?”

  “Gloria. Please tell me what’s going on. Did things not go well with Jack? Where are you?”

  “I’m at Jack’s place,” I murmur.

  “So what happened?”

  I tell her, stopping several times when the tears shake me.

  Alexis is silent for a time. Then she exclaims: “You have to call the police!”

  “I can’t,” I whisper. “If I do, they’ll kill him.”

  “But—Gloria! You can’t leave this up to a few bikers! That’s madness!”

  “I agree with you!” I snap. “I want to call the police, but this is their world and everybody’s told me that if I call the police, the other gang will kill Jimmy, I guess because they won’t want to be found with him, or—or they’ll see it as some kind of an insult. I can’t risk his life like that.”

  “Think about this,” Alexis says. “Of course they’re going to tell you not to call the police. They’re criminals, right? Criminals don’t want you to call the police, just in case they get in trouble. But that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t. When your child goes missing, you call the police. It’s that simple. I’ll call them for you, if you want, though it might be strange, me calling instead of you.”

  “Sure,” I say. “We wouldn’t want to be strange.”

  I’m torn, though. Maybe she’s right. “He said he’d call the police himself if he thought it’d help Jimmy.”

  “And you believed him? I don’t mean that as an accusation.”

  “Yes, I believed him.”

  “What if he’s lying?”

  “I didn’t think he was.”

  “But he could be, right? How well do you know him, anyway? What if he’s lying to you to protect his club, that boss you told me about, that old man?”

  “That could be possible,” I agree, remembering the sinewy man who cared more about dollars than my baby. “Yeah, I could see that.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “He left about an hour ago. He said he had to meet with Butcher. That’s his friend in the club. They’re following a lead, speaking to some ex-Marine who’s good at finding people, apparently.”

  “Butcher.” I can hear her shaking her head. “If he’s out, this is your chance. Just call them now! Tell them to meet you at the Fun Factory and start going over everything with them! You don’t want to waste any time!”

  “But—” I really did believe him when he told me. And I still half-believe him now, despite my drunkenness. “What if they really do kill Jimmy? Then it’ll be all my fault.”

  “But you can’t know that he’s telling the truth, can you? What if you don’t call the police and it turns out that the only way you could’ve saved him was by calling the police?”

  “Then it’s all my fault too!” I cry, and then lie back on the bed with my feet tucked under my ass. “I don’t want to gamble on my son’s life, Alexis. I don’t want to roll the fucking dice!”

  She makes a flinching sound when I swear so bluntly. She’s not used to it. “I’ll admit it’s a tricky situation,” she says.

  “A tricky situation,” I repeat. “A tricky situation. Not really. Not being able to put your bra on because the clasp is broken is a tricky situation. Figuring out how you can leave your groceries in the basket while you run back to get something from the rear of the store is a tricky situation. This is a disaster.”

  “Okay. I’m sorry. I picked the wrong word. But I understand.”

  “How do you understand?” I shoot my words at her. “They didn’t take your son!”

  “No,” she says, annoyingly calm, just like the sinewy man. “I get that. But I care about Jimmy. You know I care about him. I was there at the birth. I love him, Gloria. And all I’m trying to do is work out the best way to get him back. I can’t even believe that he’s actually missing. It’s—it’s heartbreaking.”

  “It is,” I agree. “And now I’m confused. I thought it was best to let Jack handle this and now … I don’t know.”

  “Couldn’t you ask him again, just make sure he’s telling the truth? Emotionally blackmail him, guilt-trip him, whatever it takes. Just find out if the police will really mean disaster.”

  “I suppose I could,” I mutter. “That’s if he ever comes back. Maybe he’ll just stay out there forever, pretend to be looking for him while he’s screwing some other girl.”

  “Is that a possibility?” she asks, stunned.

  “No,” I hurry to say, surprising myself by my desire to defend him. “I’m just venting.”

  “Oh. Okay. Good.”

  The door opens and closes from outside the bedroom and his footsteps pound across the floorboards.

  “I have to go,” I say. “He’s back.”

  “Good luck.”

  I hang up the phone and sit up on the bed, watching the door as Jack walks into the bedroom. He’s wearing his jacket and he has a stern expression on his face, the expression of a man who has something horrible to tell. I start to cry—that face is so grim—and then he tilts his head at me and I realize that I was seeing more than was there. I wipe the tears from my eyes.

  “What news?” I ask.

  “He almost has their location,” he says, kneeling down under the bed and taking out a locked metal container. He reaches into his pocket for the key. “I’m just back to get my shotgun.”

  “I talked with my friend Alexis,” I tell him.

  “Oh?”

  “She thinks I should call the police anyway, because you could easily be lying about it not being the best thing for me.”

  He clenches his jaw. I see it, like a marble jutting out of his skin. “That’s not true,” he says tightly.

  I slide to the floor, lean toward him, and place my hand on his shoulders. “Look at me.”

  He looks me directly in the face with Jimmy’s blue eyes.

  “Are you just telling me not to call the police because it would put your club in danger, or is that really the best thing for Jimmy?”

  “Gloria …” He sighs heavily, touching my hand. “I wouldn’t let anything stand in the way of finding our son. I promised you, didn’t I?”

  “What about that mean old man? Jackson?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You let him stand in the way.”

  “That’s not the same,” he mutters, taking out pieces of the shotgun and laying them on the floor, ready for assembly.
“Jackson isn’t getting in the way. He just ain’t offering me as much help as I’d hoped.”

  “That sounds like the same thing to me. Maybe she’s right. Maybe I should just call the police—”

  He slams down the lid of the container. I lurch back at the noise. “That’s a surefire way to get Jimmy killed. Don’t do that. Look at me.” His face is dead serious. “Big Loco doesn’t fuck around. The one thing he hates more’n Devil’s Kin is the police. And plus, he owns half of ’em, even the half we used to own. You don’t wanna call the police.”

  “Because he’ll slit Jimmy’s throat.”

  “Yeah.” He lays his hand on my knees and gives it a squeeze. “But that won’t happen. I won’t let it happen.”

  “I’d just feel safer if I was sitting in a room with twenty-five police officers and there was some trained counselor there or something telling me that everything was going to be okay. I’d feel like things were happening, then. Instead I’m sitting in an empty room all by myself with no clue what’s happening to my baby.”

  “If anybody else had taken him, you’d have that. But the way things stand, you can’t.” He snaps one piece of the gun into the other. His phone is on the floor next to the pieces and he glances at it every couple of seconds, checking if Butcher has contacted him. “But this isn’t anybody else. So you’ve gotta just sit tight and wait for me to handle it.”

  “What if you go there and this Big Loco kills you and I’m left here not knowing what happened? Then what do I do?”

  He swallows. “Let’s not think on that.”

  I slap a small piece of metal out of his hand. “I have to think about it! It’s all I can think about! If I’m here, just sitting here—doing nothing, being useless—and you go out there and get killed, what then? If you’re telling the truth and they’ll kill Jimmy if I call the police—”

  “They will, Gloria. I ain’t lying about that.”

  “Fine, fine. Then what? I can’t call the police. I won’t even know that you’re dead.” I pause, thinking. “I have to come with you. It’s the only way.”

  He picks up the piece I slapped away and clicks it into the weapon, snaps a few more pieces on, and then methodically loads it with shells, glancing at his phone all the while. “No,” he says. “That’s not an option. We don’t take ladies into warzones.”

  “I’m not just some lady though, am I? I’m his mother!”

  “No,” he repeats, voice steady. “I can’t allow that, Gloria.”

  “Allow that?” I want to slap him across the mouth, but somehow I repress the urge. “It’s not your decision to allow or disallow me to do anything. He’s my son and if I want to be there, I’ll be there! You don’t get to decide for me!”

  “You ever been in a gunfight?” he asks, looking at me like he knows the answer.

  “Yes,” I lie.

  He represses a smile, but I see it at the corner of his mouth. “Oh yeah? When?”

  “It doesn’t matter. I’m not saying I want to be in the fight. I’m just saying I want to be there with you so that if something goes wrong, at least I’ll know about it. And I won’t have to sit here, feeling useless, being useless. I know what you’re going to say. You’ll say that I won’t be of much use with you, either! But at least I’ll be there to hold our baby when you bring him back to me! He’ll want his mom, Jack. I can’t bear to think of him surrounded by criminals.”

  His phone flashes. I read the text: Ready.

  He places the shotgun in a duffle bag and throws the strap over his shoulder. He makes for the door. I follow him, pulling my sneakers on.

  He turns on me. “You can’t come,” he says. “And I need to go right now. You’re delaying me.”

  “You’re delaying yourself. I’m coming. End of conversation.”

  His phone goes off again. He rolls his head on his shoulders and lets out a shuddering sigh. “Fuck,” he mutters. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.” He reaches into his jacket and takes out a small pistol. “Take this.” He presses it into my hand. “Stay behind me if shit goes south.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Fury

  We take her car since I don’t want to risk sliding off my bike with only one helmet between us. Plus, she’s not dressed for riding at all. I speed through town, weaving between traffic, arriving at the train tracks in less than ten minutes. Gloria sits across from me the whole time with the pistol between her legs—with the safety on, I made sure—staring down at it and then out the window and then across at me. The sound of her breathing fills the car, on the verge of being frantic. It’s like she’s not even here, a ghost, a ghost just waiting for her baby so she can become real again. Maybe it’d break my heart if I didn’t turn that off when there was work to be done.

  “Wait in the car,” I tell her, hoping she won’t argue.

  “Is this where he is?” she asks, half sitting up.

  “No.” I nod to Butcher and the Kid, standing near the hood. “Just need to talk to these fellas quickly.”

  “Okay.” She sits back, stroking the barrel. “Fine.”

  Butcher narrows his eyes at me as I approach. I know that look well. It’s his what-the-fuck look. “Since when are we bringin’ ladies to war?”

  “Don’t fuckin’ ask.” I massage my forehead. “So what’s the deal?”

  “The deal is we kill these fuckers!” the Kid breaks out, but he’s sweating and his teeth are chattering. He looks like a trapped rat, the way he’s moving around. I think again about young Grayson being the mole, if it wasn’t a disastrous mistake bringing him in on the job. But then, it could easily be a disastrous mistake not bringing him. In a gunfight, every body counts. “Right, Butcher?” he says, seeing me looking at him.

  “Just relax one second, Kid. Listen, Fury, the Marine’s got ’em in an old building in the middle of town. You know the place between the electronics store and the supermarket?”

  I nod, bringing up my mental map of New Oak. He’s talking about what appears from the outside to be an old office block, a squat building surrounded by an old rusting fence. There’ve been whispers for years that it is going to be transformed into this or that, that it will “revitalize” the community, but nothing ever comes of it.

  “All right. So what’s the plan?”

  “The Marine’s careful,” Butcher says. “So we ought to have the element of surprise.”

  I glance at the Kid, feeling sick far down in my belly. “Yeah,” I mutter. “We ought to.”

  “But since this is a rescue mission, we’ve gotta be damn careful, way more careful than we’d usually be. I was thinkin’ we’d hit them from two sides, the front and the back, but you’d take point, Fury. You go in with precision and try’n keep it as clean as possible, and I hide near the rear of the building.” He unfolds a map from his pocket and points to the place he means. “There’s a closet here that they’ll have to pass if they mean to escape out the rear exit. I can catch any stragglers that way.”

  “Precision.” I nod. “Then we ought to switch weapons. She’s got my .380 and I’ve only got my pump-action.”

  “Take my Glock.” He reaches into his jacket and takes out the pistol, as well as five clips of ammo. “You can keep the pump-action. Maybe it’ll do you some good. I’ve got a rifle.”

  “What about you, Kid?” I ask, turning on him suddenly. “What’ve you got?”

  He takes a step back as though I’ve struck him, looks to Butcher, and then looks back to me when he sees that Butcher is busy studying the map of the abandoned building.

  “Uh, I’ve got a pistol.” He holds it up to prove it to me.

  “You nervous, Kid?” I take a step forward, standing over him.

  “No, Fury,” he says, trying to sound tough. He makes his voice artificially deep. “I ain’t nervous.”

  “I’d be nervous if I was you,” I say. “There ain’t no shame in it.”

  “I’m not nervous,” he says firmly.

  “Well, that’s good, then. Why’nt you go and
stand by Butcher’s jeep over there where I can see you? I wanna talk with Butcher alone for a second.”

  The Kid looks at Butcher, Butcher nods, and then he goes and stands near the hood of the jeep. I keep my eyes on him as I talk with Butcher.

  “Don’t let him out of your sight on the way to the job,” I say. “I reckon we’ve got a mole in the club and right now the Kid seems like the most likely candidate.”