"Yeah, flying visit. Was hoping you might be able to spot me a double room for the night."
Alex gives me that look he always used to give me when I was a kid and he was gambling away my grandfather's money—for a brief time they ran a business together, competing in races all over the country, and my pops trusted him with his winnings. He knew Alex was losing his money, but he didn’t really care. Alex was his best friend—hence how he ended up with the Honda CX500 when my grandfather croaked—and it was never about the money for him anyway. All he cared about were the bikes.
"Uh, well, yeah, son. I got the same room you normally use. I keep it free for ya. Just in case." We skip the whole credit card deposit, paperwork bullshit regular guest have to go through, and Alex tosses me the keys. When I head back outside, he follows me to the doorway, squinting out into the darkness. "That a girl you got with you?" he asks. Nosey fucker never did know when to not ask questions. I refrain from telling him to mind his own damn business, though. Against all odds, I have a soft spot for the old bastard, just like my grandfather did.
"Last time I checked," I inform him.
He nods, rubbing his calloused fingers over his two-day-old scruff. "That's good, son. Harry would be pleased. About time you found someone nice to settle down with." He squints a little harder, trying to get a better look at Sophia. "She's a beaut, too. Dark-haired. That's good. I never could picture you with a blonde."
"She's just keeping me company. She's not with me."
Alex's twisted old mouth pulls up to one side, displaying his crooked, slightly blackened front teeth. "Then you're a mad man, son. She's made for you, I reckon. Better get on that before anyone else does."
I fight off the urge to laugh. If only he knew.
******
The room's warm, which is welcome. Sophia heads straight to the bathroom and the sound of running water whispers behind the wooden door. I sit on the edge of the bed closest to the door and get ready to make some phone calls. Cade is first on my list.
"S'up, man. You breaking for the night?"
"Yeah. I'll be arriving at Louis' place around three tomorrow. Can you call Leah and let her know we're on our way in?" Leah McPherson works for my father, the one single favor the bastard's ever done for me. She needed to get the hell out of New Mexico, permanently, and I needed to find someone who would take her on, fast. At the time, my dad was the only person I could think of to ask. He goes through housemaids quickly, too abrasive and plain fucking rude for anyone to stomach him for too long, but a sharp-tongued Southern bastard was nothing after what Leah had already been through. I figured she would cope, and she did. Has been coping for the past two years. Ever since, she's been a convenient go-between, passing on messages from my father to me and vice versa. Makes communicating with the old man a hell of a lot more pleasant.
Leah is also very good at passing on information that my father probably doesn’t want me to know.
"I'll call her right away," Cade says. And then, “Shay came in here asking who she was buying all those clothes for this morning. She was pissed, man."
"Yeah, well, Shay can be pissed all she wants."
"It's bad juju to have a woman slamming around the clubhouse."
"What do you want me to do about it? Marry the fucking girl?"
Cade snorts. I can hear him shuffling papers or something—must be in my office. He takes care of the paperwork for the Ink Bar and the general running of the compound while I'm gone. "The day you marry anyone is the day hell freezes over. But maybe you could just talk to her. Have a quiet word in her ear or something. Fuck, man, just tell her it wasn't meant to be or something. I don't know."
If he were anyone else, I'd tell him to go fuck himself good and hard. "I'll think about it."
"Great. Now, the Mexicans want more—" Cade cuts off. I think it's just because he was about to say guns, and you can't say the Mexicans want more guns on the fucking telephone. Especially with the attention our little community out in the desert attracts. But Cade makes a guttural growling sound that tells me this is something else. Something bad.
"What? Tell me."
"You in front of a TV, man?" he says. "You'd better turn it on."
Oh, boy. When Cade sounds worried like that, it can only mean trouble. I hit the power button on the TV in the room, waiting for the old piece of shit to blink into life. The same Jeopardy! show Alex was watching materializes slowly, pixel by pixel, onto the screen. "Which channel?" I ask.