A Leap in the Dark (Assassins of Youth MC Book 2) (3 page)

“Deloy told me he’s going to Avalanche with you. It’s a free country, but I’m telling you you’re making a giant fucking mistake.”

“Mistake for who? Your bank account?”

“That’s not it at all.” He had a smooth yet gravelly voice that just dripped with either syrup or venom, depending what he was trying to manipulate someone to do. “I sincerely want what’s best for my men. I just want to know what makes you think Deloy is damned here. We bravely venture forth into this life, as I’m sure they’ve taught you in your church.”

“I don’t attend. But yes, I know what you mean.”

“And undergoing sin and mistakes, we learn to stay close to the noble and divine. Sin is an important aspect of the learning curve of life that God will forgive. It’s not an eternal hatred or grudge on our part that pisses God off. Sin and pain is the best teacher.”

“Only if it teaches you to elevate yourself above it.”

He pointed at the ground. “And we
have
, Miss Warrior. We have. You might see us as a house full of deviant perverts.”

“Not at all. I see a house run by
one
deviant pervert who is taking advantage of all the others. Their innocence, their desperation, their naivety.”

“They know
exactly
what they’re doing, Miss. They may look like sorry little boys to your jaded older woman’s eyes. But no one is handcuffing them to a chair here.” He chuckled. “Unless it’s one of the clients.”

Jaded older woman,
my butt! I was hardly a year older than Levon himself! Snapping my bag shut with a grand flourish, I walked stiffly to the door. “This is my sister’s charity, Mr. Rockwell. As such, I’ll offer my pro bono services any time she calls me. But I sincerely hope we’ve come to the end of this pointless chat.”

Another citizen of Liberty Temple was heading into the study as I headed out.

“Levon, your timer just went off,” the young man said.

Timer? For what? As much as I hated the proprietor of the establishment, I was curious about him. I would grant him that. He raised my ire and my curiosity and he was certainly easy on the eyes.

Mahalia was out back on the patio chatting with Dingo and another young man, so I meandered around. My nose led me to the kitchen, where I peeked around a corner. Levon had on two of those big kitchen mitts and was taking an enormous roasting pan from the oven while a couple of other men stood around with hungry, shining eyes.

My stomach actually growled as little tendrils of sweet and savory meat wafted into my nostrils. When Levon lifted the lid, I nearly fainted at the heavenly aroma.

“Can we put the potatoes in now?” asked one guy.

“Yeah,” said Levon. “You got ’em peeled?”

I must have swooned or something, but somehow I caught Levon’s eye. His look was smug, superior, having seen me drooling over his roast. “You’re welcome to join us,” he called over to me.

I was mortified. “Oh! No, thank you,” I tried to say graciously. As if I didn’t want to dive face first into his roasting pan. I forced myself away from the kitchen and went to find Mahalia. Maybe I could convince her to stop at a decent place for dinner on our way back to Avalanche.

So that was how I met Levon.

I continued loathing him for a while to come. He represented everything wicked and destructive that the nurse in me despised.

LEVON

T
he day I
met that nurse Oaklyn Warrior is etched forever in my memory banks.

Normally, I let criticism roll off me like water off a duck’s back. It’s part and parcel of the wheelhouse I move in, basically running a whorehouse.
Oh, you’re contributing to the delinquency of adults. Oh, you take kids from the streets and put them back on the streets. Oh, you’re a scumsucking assmuncher.

None of it bothered me because I knew at my core I was doing more good than harm. To gain this insight, I had to let go of the old framework of beliefs that was holding me prisoner. I rolled in the mud for a couple of years after being booted from Cornucopia. Knowing I was a tool of the devil like they told me, I acted the part. I had a gun and robbed people. I squatted in a crumbling house with other thieves and drug addicts. I sold my body in filthy alleys. My quest to find a shred of faith became all about the quest, with very little faith. The knowledge of the secrets of the kingdom of heaven was not given to me.

The day I realized I, and only I, could take the reins of my existence, I shattered into a million pieces. My soul was suddenly crystal clear. God wasn’t going to help me. I needed to help myself. I felt no self-pity. There were many Lost Boys who had it way worse than me.

I’m still putting the pieces back together again, but I have no guilt in my soul.

I took some of my money and bought a modest house down in the flats. I put my gun into a gun safe and became a legitimate businessman. I never robbed anyone after that. I didn’t allow drugs into my house. If a client brought in drugs, he was booted out by my doorman. I set aside a room for lifting weights. Putting together some of the books I’d collected in my back alley travels, I added to the collection. I was the literary kingpin of the male hustling world. Some of my men even borrowed books from me. It made me feel good that they might be learning a thing or two.

Eventually I bought this house in Stone Ridge. I never heard one complaint from anyone on my team. We lived, fucked, showered, ate, and played together. Once in a while an outsider would come in, some plumber or whatever. You could always see the judgment in their faces. Sometimes we’re judged more harshly because someone thinks we’re homosexual than because we sell sex. The fact is, we’re almost all straight. We just stopped protesting it too harshly. We give women what they want, but it doesn’t happen that often. We stripped at bachelorette parties and that was about it. But in the heart of Mormon land, there wasn’t much call for that, either. Bottom line, women will rarely pay for a man’s body. Men, however, are greedy, horny, vulgar pigs.

“Oh, yeah. That’s right. That’s good. Give it to me, boy. Give me your big, fat schlong. I can taste your meat already. Oh God, I can barely get my fist around it. Give it to me, slave. I am your master and I command you to give it to me.”

Whatever
. I’d learned to filter out the monologues of my clients. Tonight, though, I knew that nurse had gotten to me. It was all I could think of, and I didn’t know why. Nurse Warrior didn’t say anything so unusual, nothing that hadn’t been flung my way before. She was a priggish, pompous, superior bitch. In other words, no different than any other woman who’d looked down her nose at me.

“Oh, God. Oh, Jesus.” The hardcore religious guys always liked to invoke God and Jesus when performing carnal sins. This guy was no different. He’d wanted me to come to his cheap motel room, which I did because he was paying me a bundle. I kept raising the price hoping he’d go away, but he kept meeting my price. I was hoping to get this over with in a hurry so I could go home, drink some bourbon, and mull over the events of the day—namely, Oaklyn Warrior and her self-righteous denunciations. “Oh, God, what a fat tool you’ve got. My mouth is watering. I can’t wait to taste your pecker.”

So I gave it to this fundamentalist idiot—I could tell he was a fundy by his buttoned-up, starched shirt and his haircut like a bowl—while images of the shapely nurse drifted in and out of my head like insistent rainclouds.

She
was
shapely. Well, maybe not so much in the rack department, but that didn’t bother me. She had finely molded legs, made even finer by her two-inch, sensible heels. She resembled a Persian princess with her cappuccino skin, her Roman nose sculpted so precisely, the better for her to flare her nostrils at me. If I didn’t know any better, I’d think she was flirting with me.

But I knew she was just another one of the critics whose voices I’d given up silencing.

I hated her scientific, practical mode of thought. She looked at me through a smokescreen of archaic beliefs. I wasn’t going to back down and lose my pride over who I was. My existence was interwoven with my shitty past, my lousy childhood, my father who went along with the men who drove me out of town like a common head of cattle. My reality was intertwined with my memories, my passion for martial arts and birds of prey, my hatred of CGI fantasy movies. My past made me who I am.

Nurse Warrior’s science could inform humanity a great deal. But it didn’t tell us why we should give a shit about the flight of a peregrine falcon, the fluorescent glow of a jellyfish, why a certain child lives when another perishes under the weight of nasty, twisted parents. Nurse Warrior made the mistake of thinking science was the most rational guidebook to the shining truth. Science was all right for some. But it shouldn’t be the crowning tyranny through which all reality was viewed. There was much more to it than that.

“Oh, God. Oh, Jesus. Oh, God, that was good.”

I went into the bathroom to wash up, thinking some more about the nurse. Was she really going to steal Deloy Pingree away from me? She’d do it just to spite me. I wouldn’t put it past her. Deloy Pingree was a star performer for those who liked the boyish innocent type. In honest truth? Deloy
was
a boyish, innocent type, a guy who liked to arrange flowers, to bake cakes, to coordinate Toys for Tots drives. To put up Ariana Grande posters on his bedroom walls. Yeah, he really did that, though he was nearing twenty years old. I thought he’d make a splendid dentist, and I wasn’t going to stand in his way if he wanted to go.

Avalanche
. All I knew about the place was, it was right outside the gates of that whacked fundy stronghold where I’d grown up. It sounded like Mahalia’s boyfriend Gideon, a biker type, was rejuvenating the town, I guess painting it with his special biker flair. Well. Good for them. All I could remember from the few times I’d ever gone outside the gates was basically a ghost town. Houses had been built, but developers had backed out, probably when they heard whacked polygamists were moving in and buying up land.

So there was this weird scenario with these suburban skeleton houses in neighborhoods as empty as the Dust Bowl, backed with the gorgeous flaming spires of Zion National Park. It always struck me as a weird juxtaposition, because those houses would’ve been nice to live in, with those views. Maybe I always wished I could live there, instead of the colonial style project where I’d grown up. Room after room built one upon the other like a train to accommodate all the children. And of course none of us had a room of our own. God forbid.

When I took the money from the client, he handed me a business card. Guys did that all the time—as if pretending we’d just had a simple business transaction. But then he said something weird as I was exiting.

“I bid thee farewell.”

It struck me as weird, but I was halfway out the door. I took a second look at him, wondering briefly if maybe he knew me from somewhere, if he was a repeat client. Nope. Just your average middle-aged polygamist hypocrite who wanted a long fat cock down his throat on the side.

I was a couple exits down the highway on my custom Sportster, still thinking about the sultry nurse, when it struck me. Literally, an image from my way-distant past hit me like a lightning bolt. It was such a strong jolt, I was lucky I didn’t jerk the handlebars and park my scoot horizontally. I had the presence of mind to pull off at the next exit, stopping on the dark side of a fluorescent gas station.

I bid thee farewell
. That’s what that whackamole goon, Allred Lee Chiles, had said to me before shoving me into the bed of a pickup and watching me drive off to my fate.

I’d been dating the daughter of an elder. I was always very careful with Zelpha Pratt, having been taught that girls were snakes, ready to strike at any moment. Real sex, of course, anything to do with penetration of any kind, was reserved for marriage, and even then, only for procreation. The most we’d done was make out, but man, I was a hot to trot teenager, with testosterone zooming through my system, making me crazy. I was sixteen, and on my way to a priesthood myself. Or so I thought.

I swear that’s all we did, kiss, but one night when I went to her house to pick her up, her father got all over me. He came storming down the front walkway like a giant fierce gale. He swarmed me before I had a chance to defend myself, punching me in the face and stomach, kicking me when I was down on the lawn.

Worse, his friends joined in. They must’ve been waiting in the bushes or something. It took two or three other men to break my rib and arm, kicking me with their fucking elder boots. Mr. Pratt shrieked that I was a liar who made a covenant to abide by God’s laws, and I had turned traitor to the priesthood and my own existence. I was led by my master, who was, of course, Lucifer.

Zelpha and some of her siblings came out and started yelling at Mr. Pratt, so they finally let up. I was gasping for breath, afraid to hold onto my ribs, afraid some inner organs had been ruptured. The men just stood around me looking down triumphantly like they’d just completed a satisfactory circle jerk.

Zelpha dared to hit her father with her little inoffensive fists.
What is wrong with you, Father? Levon hasn’t done anything wrong
.