A Leap in the Dark (Assassins of Youth MC Book 2) (14 page)

“Makes me sick just
seeing
that guy,” said Oaklyn. “And is that guy you fought with the building inspector who won’t give you a license?”

“Never interrupt your enemy while he’s making a mistake,” I said. I didn’t want to tell her that shortly, Shumway would be puking his guts out. That was my favorite Napoleon quote.

Oaklyn squeezed my thigh higher up this time. Her fingertips feathered a fraction of an inch from my ballsac. Not to sound like an asshat, but after the clit torture event of yesterday, I’d made sure there was a rubber in my wallet. It was a habit I’d only recently gotten out of after years working in the sex trade. I didn’t figure I’d need one for a long, long-ass time. I was shocked down to the ground to find myself so attracted to that self-absorbed, priggish, boho chic nurse. Now I just saw her fine ass, cappuccino skin, her delicacy and elegance. She’d proven to me she had a heart with her caring for my Nana, for Lazarus. For the unwanted widows of Cornucopia.

“Did you see anything in the silent auction you’d like?”

She rolled her eyes and said in a mocking tone, “Oh, sure. The cruise to Puerto Vallarta. And I’ve always wanted to cruise to Alaska.”

“Which one do you prefer?”

“
Levon
! I don’t know how much money you think a nurse makes—oh, an
unemployed
nurse—but I’m not about to go on a cruise to Salt Lake, much less
Puerto Vallarta
.”

I was implying that
I
would bid on anything she wanted, but now I felt foolish. Expecting her to go with me on a week-long cruise was absurd, especially with us both starting new jobs. Determined to get her one of those spa treatments, I stood and started squeezing my way to the stairs that would lead to the bidding room. I tried to avoid that fucking roly-poly clown in the bowtie with his red plastic cup of booze, but Pratt squished his way toward me.

By then the shouting in the room had reached a fever pitch. People were banging on the long tables, shouting “Crab! Crab! Crab!” You had to yell to the person you were squashed up against, and that person was the fucking creeper mayor.

He even shouted in my ear, as though having his belly pressed into my groin wasn’t bad enough. I mean, his stomach was literally rubbing against my dick. I tried turning so at least my penis was up against some eighty-year-old Elk, but the mayor turned with me, like we were on a carnival ride together.

Pratt bellowed, “Given any thought to my proposal? Come to my office tomorrow morning and I won’t post the video of your protégé to YouTube.”

“Not a chance in hell, you creeper pedo.”

“I’ll make it worth your while. I’ll get your business reclassified as a gym.”

Now, I paused for
that
. Fucking with Shumway might just piss him off worse, although that would be well worth it. But I still might not get my business license. For a moment, I actually mulled over Pratt’s offer. Pratt must’ve known what he was doing when he rotated his belly side to side, massaging my dick. Could I do it? One tiny blowjob and he’d give me my business license? Hell, before I started Liberty Temple, I used to mouth fuck upstanding religious men for way less than that. For the price of a meal.

Then I realized
no way
. He’d have cameras hidden so well I could never find them. And he’d edit the video to cut himself out, naturally. The sex tape of the new occult arts teacher would be famous throughout Utah before sunset. And I didn’t want to give Oaklyn any more reasons to accuse me of being a degenerate. So far, I was turning my life around, getting a personality transplant as an upstanding citizen. I couldn’t fuck with that.

“In your fucking dreams, shit-for-brains” I yelled at him.

And maybe again it was an automatic reaction, but I kneed
him
in the testicles.

It got him away from me, and when I took both his crouching shoulders in my hands, I shoved him hard. There were several guys standing behind him who caught him, and I don’t think anyone saw the altercation, so I made my getaway up the stairs. I put what I thought was a pretty high bid on some kind of spa treatment for Oaklyn and made my way back into the banquet hall.

The room was clearer now. Servers had started bringing giant plastic buckets of cooked crab, placing them in the center of each group of about eight people. I grinned like a jackass as I approached our table. I’d just gotten the best of my two biggest rivals in town, and now Dust Bunny was standing in the aisle with Dingo’s help unfurling a giant banner that said
MAXIMUS FOR
GENERAL
MAYOR
. It was a brilliant way to announce his candidacy, and a witty expression from the Russell Crowe movie, too. Then I started thinking how my story was kind of like Maximus’ in
Gladiator
. With Ladell Pratt as the twisted, sadistic Commodus.

Our Maximus sat at the end of the table, the better to greet his supporters who had been crowding him for an explanation. I approached from the other, less crowded side, squeezing past inked bikers who already had butter dripping down their chins. Some ate with wild abandon, but a couple of the more OCD ones withdrew their tasty morsels with a pick or another claw and made little piles to be savored later.

I was one of the crazed sorts, so I plunked down next to Oaklyn and grabbed the last good claw. People never grabbed the bodies where the meat was most abundant, so I took several of those.

“Here, let me show you how.” I took my claw and showed her how to get the meat out in one big chunk. Then, inspired by my recent successes, I dipped it in butter and fed it to her from my little crab fork.

Her eyes closed in ecstasy. “Mm. I’m glad this is bottomless crab, because for once I’m hungry enough to eat all you can eat.”

I grinned. I liked seeing her like this. “I’ll keep feeding you the good claw meat. Hey, Yosemite Sam! Trade you a body for your claw.”

Yosemite Sam sneered. He was a permanently surly sort of guy. “Hell nah. Why would I do that?”

I gestured at Oaklyn with a crab shell and replied, “Because the lady here wants you to.”

A rare smile grew on his face. “All right,” he drawled, and tossed his claw into my paper plate. “Iffin your old lady wants you to.”

Old lady
! I glanced at Oaklyn to see if she’d heard him. She had, all right. Color flushed her burnished copper face and she looked shyly at her hands. I had to lean in close to her to be heard over the hubbub. It was like being at King Henry’s banquet table or something, what with all the bellowing, cramming of food and drink, and general debauchery.

“Would you like to? Be my old lady, that is.”

She finally looked up. She was like a scared puppy who only dared to her move eyes. “I think I’d like that.”

Well, fuck me dry
. “Lambikins,” I said, before even more emotion could sweep over me. I kissed her, my hand cradling the back of her neck, massaging her scalp with my fingertips.

My old lady
. Here I was, a freshly minted Prospect, and already I had an old lady. I broke the kiss with dozens of little nibbles to her lush lips. Her eyes looked moist, and I hoped mine weren’t. Not in a million years, when I first saw this Nurse Ratched enter my abode with her crisp clipboard and medical bag, would I have believed I’d be in danger of falling in love with this woman. Sure, she had a superior attitude. I would too, if I was as awesome as her. She was just being a good nurse.

“Mahalia,” I shouted across the table. “Meet my new old lady, Oaklyn.”

Mahalia squealed. “Is that true, Oak?”

“Sure is,” Oaklyn finally admitted.

Mahalia had to tell Gideon, who had to tell Sledgehammer, who had to tell Dingo, who had to tell Deloy, who leaped to his feet, clapping his hands. He came over, kissed us both on both cheeks and gushed, “That is
amazing
news. I love the two of you together. Does this mean there will be a spare bedroom when Levon moves into the master with you?”

I looked to Oaklyn for guidance. She said, “Well, let’s not get too excited here. One step at a time.”

“Yes,” said Deloy, “like Levon giving you a
PROPERTY OF
patch.”

She looked at Mahalia. “My sister doesn’t wear one.”

Deloy said, “Well, that’s because she was someone else’s property for so long. It left a bad taste in her mouth to be called
PROPERTY
. But I don’t suppose you have the same stigma.”

I hadn’t even thought of that. Mahalia had been the fortieth wife of the prophet himself, Allred Lee Chiles, who had died in a shootout with some feds. She’d escaped his clutches before that, however. “It’s up to you,” I told Oaklyn.

She smiled seductively. “I think I’d like that. To go on my new leather jacket.”

Deloy was frowning at something in the distance. “Why’s that ambulance here?”

The crowd now sort of surged away from Maximus and toward the front bar area. A certain feeling came over me, and I stood to fight my way toward the side door where the biggest concentration of people seemed to be. I found myself crowded next to Maximus anyway. He was an inch or so taller than I, so I asked,

“Do you know what happened?”

“Someone said the mayor was sick. But that’s not the mayor they’re carrying out on that stretcher.”

I jumped to see over or in between heads.

“Here,” said Maximus, “let me give you a boost.”

He threaded his hands together and I put my dirty boot in them as a stirrup so I could jump up and see what the fuck.
What the fuck, indeed
. Shumway was on his back on the stretcher flailing around blindly, as if he couldn’t see. It looked like he was puking, but had nothing left in his stomach, so he was dry heaving. His face was bloated and red and he looked like the miseries of a hundred plagues had been visited upon him. It was my crowning glory in a night full of victories, but there was more to come.

Maximus let me down, and suddenly Deloy was next to me. He asked, “Someone said something about the mayor being sick?”

“Yeah,” said Maximus. “A couple of guys came from the men’s room. Said he was giving the ol’ technicolor yawn into the toilet, then he’d sit on it because it was coming out the other way too. Well, that’s one way to win the election, right? If only we could keep him shitting through his other mouth the rest of the year.”

Something dawned on me. “Deloy. What did you do?”

The boy shrugged innocently, but he’d never been a good liar, and I saw right through it.

“Come clean. You’ve never lied to me before.”

He sank his hands deep in the pockets of his cargo pants. “Well, ah, I may have put some…”

“Some what?”

“Some, ah,
mannitol
into the mayor’s glass of white wine.”

Maximus and I looked at each other blankly. Then we burst into a hearty round of laughter. Mannitol was a common cutting agent for coke or meth. I recalled from the old days you could always tell when someone had cut your stuff with that, because immediately you had to run to the bathroom.

The words flowed freely now as Deloy raced to explain. “I was so hurt by that fucking nasty article in the paper! I knew it came straight from the pen of Ladell Pratt. He was in on it the day they kicked me to the curb, too, and I fucking hate the guy. Please don’t tell anyone what I did. I just don’t want to be his patsy anymore. I wish I could let him know it was me.”

I had to bro hug it out with Deloy. Pratt wound up going off in the ambulance with his buddy Shumway, probably mystified by his extreme reaction to a small amount of salad and crab. Rumors abounded in the room and the debauch was never the same, because some people believed the crab was bad and wouldn’t touch it. It left all the more for us, and we were full to bursting when we finally tapered off. We had giant Ziploc bags of crab to take home.

Nothing could stop us from going upstairs and dancing the night away to a DJ. The MC had already attracted its share of hang-arounds, lambs who were passed from brother to brother. These gals alternated their dances with the bachelors, everyone other than me and Gideon. I stayed with Oaklyn, even during the chicken dance, and once I took Mahalia as my partner.

But I stayed with Oaklyn the entire night, escorting her drunk ass back home, and even being cavalier and giving her privacy in her own room and bath. There would be plenty of time for all that. I didn’t want to push her.

OAKLYN

I
t was eight
in the morning, and I was wearing my nurse’s uniform.

I sat in a flimsy plastic chair out back in my house’s sandy yard. I watched as Lazarus slowly chugged around the large enclosure, sniffing, doing his business. We were so nervous about his poisoning we wouldn’t let him go out to pee alone. I’d barely known him before he got sick, and he was an older dog age eight, so I didn’t know if his slow plodding was normal for him. He was a very sweet and gentle dog and Levon loved him with a passion. Any man who loved a dog that much couldn’t be all bad.

And I was his old lady. The thought made me smile as I sat in the chair. The spires and cliffs of Zion to the east blocked out the sunrise, and the dramatic crimson and amethyst clouds were lit from below. I was in nature’s chapel, not the Assassins of Youth’s chapel, and I was a fucking old lady.