Probably because I didn’t exactly know.
“Seems that way,” Bear said, rifling through a duffle bag on the floor and putting on a fresh pair of black socks. He shoved his feet into a pair of thick black boots. He turned to me. “What’s the address of the farm?”
“It doesn’t have a number. Just Andrews Farm on Andrews Farm Road.” Like a lot of the groves in Jessep that had been there for as long as ours, the roads came second and were usually named after the farms they connected. “It’s the only grove on the street. Mailbox at the end. Little white house. Blood,” I said, still hoping this was all a nightmare and that I wasn’t giving a biker my address to clean up the body of my mother.
“How long ago?” King asked and Bear again turned to me for the answer.
“I’m not sure,” I said because I didn’t know how long I was at the MC or when it was I came here. “Ummm… it was Friday after my shift at work. Around six pm, maybe seven?” I scrunched my nose, trying to remember exactly. “I think?” I added as I tried to recall when my life had forever changed.
“Is she inside or outside?” Bear asked again, and instantly I recalled the way her body looked slumped over the side of the house, my throat tightened.
“Outside,” I choked out remembering the moment when I convinced my mother to switch guns with me.
“I need to get out there before the smell…” Bear started and my stomach rolled again.
King nodded. “I got what you need in the garage. How many?” he asked and this time Bear didn’t turn to me for the answer.
“One.”
“No,” I said, tears pricking the back of my eyes. They both looked at me with confused expressions. “No.” I repeated, shaking my head vigorously. “Two. There are two,” I said, holding up two fingers while staring blankly at the ceiling.
“I’ll get started,” King said, disappearing from the doorway. “Meet you out in the garage.”
Bear knelt down in front of me, hot tears dropped down the side of my face as my gaze darted from the ceiling into the angry eyes of the person who I was stupid enough to think could have somehow been my savior in all this. “This is your only warning, Darlin’. If I find out that you’re in any way working for the MC. If you’re on their payroll…” His eyes turned dark and I tried to look away again, but he grabbed me by the back of the neck and leaned in so close the tip of his nose touched mine. His breath flitted against my lips in angry bursts as he spoke between his snarl. “If this is some sort of fucked up trap, you better fucking believe that whatever my old man did to you at the club is going to feel like you skinned your fucking knee compared to what I’m going to do to you.”
CHAPTER TEN
Bear
King and I loaded the bread truck with the plastic tarps, different types of saws, both electric and manual, drills, and enough cleaning supplies to start our own maid service.
“You think Gus went back to the MC?” King asked.
“Yeah that’s probably exactly where he went. If he disappeared too long now they’d figure out really quickly that he was the one who took the girl. Chop has always been paranoid about rats in our midst.” I laughed. “Fucker’s probably having himself a heart attack right now trying to figure out what the fuck happened.”
“He didn’t do it quietly. Fucker said he set off a pipe bomb as a distraction to get to the girl,” King said.
“The crazy thing is that motherfucker had a pipe bomb handy. Probably has a stack of them to the ceiling in his room. He’s always been a little off his rocker. One time I was in the shower at the club and when I pulled back the curtain he was just standing there, staring. Scared the fucking shit out of me.”
“Creepy fucker,” King said.
“Yeah, but he has his uses. And he’s loyal, obviously, which is more than I can say for most people these days.” King and I each grabbed a door on the back of the truck and slammed it shut.
“What did you do for him that earned that kind of loyalty, cause that’s big shit, man.”
“I saved his life. Fucker was about to catch a bullet in the head,” I said.
“From who?”
“Me. Gus almost didn’t turn prospect because Gus almost didn’t live past his sixteenth birthday. I’d caught him peering in through a warehouse window where he’d been watching me ‘question’ one of our rivals for information. The kid was as good as dead. Except when I was about to pull the trigger to put him down, the fucker didn’t flinch. Then he asked me if it felt good to gut a man and then he criticized my choice of knife I’d used on the guy before him. I decided he was more useful as a Bastard than dead. He turned prospect the very next day.” The little fuck became the best ‘questioner’ the club ever had. I bought him an entire butcher knife set when he was patched in. He looked down at the knives and I didn’t know if he was about to cry or come.
Probably both.