Bad Boy Criminal: The Novel (13 page)

I
straddled
the bike and revved its engine as Izzy swung on behind me, as naturally as if she’d been doing this her entire life. I cracked a smile over my shoulder at her, in spite of the unconscious federal agent in the men’s room less than a hundred yards from us. “I’m not gonna lie, I like the way you handled that gun,” I told her, tearing off onto the highway before she had a chance to respond.

We pushed our way through the Las Cruces traffic, searching for some place discreet to hole up. With my famous face, any eateries, hotels, parks, public or private institutions were all out. But Hell’s Ransom had taught me long ago that, even when it seems like there’s no place for you—you just haven’t found it yet. Don’t give up searching.

Nestled in the scrub and sunset of the Las Cruces skyline was a two-story home with no car in the drive…and no glass in the windows. Though the paint was only just beginning to peel, and the roof only slightly sunken—it moaned of abandonment.

I pulled the bike around to the back, so it wasn’t visible from the street. “The Hyatt, it ain’t,” I conceded after pulling off my helmet and swinging one leg over the leather seat. “But at least it’s somewhere.”

Izzy’s eyes roamed thoughtfully over the building with mine. The backyard was narrow and overgrown with flora, giving the place a romantic feel, in spite of the obvious disrepair it’d fallen into. Good thing it was early summer—and fucking New Mexico. We were in no danger of a chill, though the likelihood of sweating was high.

“It must’ve been beautiful in its day,” Isabelle commented, ascending the sunken back porch to peer inside. “These doors used to be double glass doors…probably gazing out onto a garden.” She sighed. “I hope I can be in a place like this someday.”

I smiled behind her back. “You’re in a place exactly like this right now,” I reminded her.

Izzy turned and measured me with thoughtful eyes. “You know what I mean,” she said. And unfortunately, I did. Of course. Isabelle Turner was a good girl, and good girls wanted simple, secure lives: summer vacations, and fenced back yards, and decent credit scores. Things ex-cons couldn’t give them.

Isabelle moved through the crooked framework of the double doors, entering the building. Its floors were wooden, and its wallpaper, faded and floral, remained intact, though the furnishings were understandably sparse. A random chair. A china cabinet filled with shards of broken glass. I figured we wouldn’t be able to sleep indoors like regular people; I realized this with another pang of self-awareness. How pathetic. My entire life, I’d striven to become a man, and here he was; this was me. Couldn’t even provide a bed for the woman I—well—cared about. Even if she enjoyed sleeping outside, that wasn’t the point. I’d shredded her blanket so I could hog-tie and gag a federal agent, for Christ’s sake. She’d helped me do it…and, when he woke up, he probably wouldn’t have forgotten that part.

Meaning I had forced her to incriminate herself. Meaning that the defense that she was an unwilling hostage had been lost.

“I think I’m going to go ahead and explore this old place,” she said, beginning to creep up a narrow and shaky stairwell.

“Be…careful,” I reminded her, thinking about how we couldn’t go to any hospitals right now. “I’m going to step outside and make a quick call to Jade, and my brothers.”

Isabelle turned to look at me from over her shoulder, still lingering at the foot of the stairs. Her hair spilled thick down her back and almost shadowed her face from view, but I could see the eyes well enough. There was an almost bitchy sparkle to them. “So Jade gets top billing, huh?” she asked, attempting to be casual but failing. She was jealous.

“Jade is one of my best and oldest friends, I can’t lie,” I told her. “We’ve got a lot in common. Both pretty embedded in biker culture…and we’d do almost anything for family…and we used to like to rock out on the regular together…” I watched Izzy’s eyes got colder and colder as I went on—when I felt I had teased her enough, I grinned and slipped the punchline into the joke. “And we have very similar taste in women.”

Isabelle’s eyes went blank as she struggled to assimilate that she’d been jealous of a lesbian.

“She’s going to love you,” I went on, still watching her with a smirk.

Izzy broke eye contact, and her cheeks darkened with blush. “You could’ve told me that sooner,” she mentioned under her breath.

I grinned. “I just did,” I said. “Now…if you’ll excuse me…I’m going to make a call, and just let her know where we are. Hey, real quick—what’s Jade’s phone number?”

Izz screwed her face into a thoughtful frown. “Erm…011…52…656…227…”

I sighed. “5555,” I inserted for her. “All 5s.”

“Well!” she pouted. “It’s harder to remember all those numbers!”

“Maybe it would help if you wrote them down. Anyway, I’m going to be right back.”

I slipped out onto the back porch again, and dialed Jade’s number. As usual, it was snatched up on the second ring. Jade was so much more reliable than my own damn brothers. “Hey, kid,” she piped, her tone light and exhilarated. “How’s it going? Heard about you on the news, bro. Stand-off on Main Street in Moab. Hell’s Ransom vs. The Valiant, unidentified perpetrators, but, naturally,
Ashton Carter
was suspected to be a player in the drama. Pretty sex-ay.”

“Yeah…about that,” I commented, my voice hardening. “Who did you tell I was in Moab? One minute, I’ve just avoided the feds, and the next, Alex fucking Cantrell is pointing a loaded gun at Izzy’s forehead.”

“Still haven’t ditched the girl,” Jade noted. Although my tone had grown harsh, hers remained bright. Typical Jade. “I’m impressed! She must be—wait a minute—Are you blaming me for The Valiant?”

“Girl, I’m just trying to find the leak,” I back-tracked, hoping to not piss her off too much. It would be just like me to alienate the last of my only remaining friends, wouldn’t it? “Can you tell me who you talked to after I called you in Moab?”

“Dude…” Jade sighed with dramatic exasperation. “I don’t know; I didn’t really tell
anyone
except the people who would have cared where you were. I told your fucking brothers, and I told Arlo, since he was holding all that shit for you. I didn’t tell anyone else, but then, you know, who knows what happened after that. Your brothers apparently told the entire Moab chapter of Hell’s Ransom…and Arlo, man, he’s a fucking cokehead. Who
knows.
”

I rolled my eyes, but then, what had I expected? A definitive answer? Life wasn’t that simple. Life was never that simple. “All right, babe,” I said, trying to hide the disappointment from my voice. It wasn’t her fault. She’d just done what anyone else would have. “Sorry—just trying to figure things out. Thanks for everything. I’m just an hour outside of border patrol right now, maybe less, so…I’ll see you soon. Had a run-in with my fed. Laying low until he moves on. Gonna call my brothers next. Next time I call you, it’ll be from a new number. Later, girl.”

“Bye, babe.”

After I’d hung up the line and tread deeper into the overgrown gardens of this abandoned home, I found a fountain—crawling with gray and green mosses, filled with water so oily with algae, it was as deep a green as engine fluid—and gave my first burner phone a toss into its depths.

Plunk.

The phone disappeared immediately, and it’d probably be years before anyone found it again
.

I wondered where I would be when someone finally cleaned out this fountain and discovered the cruddy, functionless old phone. A free man, or trapped in Florence ADX? Would Isabelle be happy, wherever she was…or would she be in prison, too?

I
wrote
out Jade’s stupid number and practiced it, pacing up and down the stairs, around the bottom floor, around the top floor; I bumped into shabby furniture and the corners of doorways, I was focusing so hard. I wrote out Dom and Xander’s numbers, too.

Numbers have never been my strong suit, though—they’re so…intangible. I need to touch things. I need to practice them myself. What would help would be to use my own burner phone to dial their numbers, and then, after a few times, I’d have the muscle memory.

Hm. That was actually a good idea.

I’d been roaming the upstairs quarters—the floor was more firm than Ash realized, with only one gaping hole where I imagined a tub once was in the now ruined master bath—and then turned to descend the albeit unstable staircase to go find Ash in the backyard. He had my burner phone on him. If I could just use it for a second, I could probably memorize those numbers once and for all. I held a piece of paper in my hand, where I’d dutifully scrawled Jade’s number for practice.

I stepped right through the crooked and empty frame to the back porch and surveyed the yard, choked in weeds and frequented by insects. “Hey, Ash?” I called. Hadn’t he come out this way? “Ash?”

I marched across the porch and down into the yard, scanning, but still saw nothing. I turned in a futile circle, searching the house I knew he had not entered since walking outside—to “call Jade,” supposedly.

“Ash!” Two birds took flight from the brush encroaching on a fountain which was so damaged and mottled with gunk, I couldn’t be sure if it was supposed to be a little girl, a little boy, a woman, or a man. “Ash! Ash! God damn it!”

Stranded again. No phone. No cash. In Las Cruces, New Mexico.

I
t was
past dark when the groan and clatter of an opening door roused me from my smolder in the den, where I’d been furiously gnawing on one of the two granola bars in my backpack, fuming at the prospect of starving to death. When Ash strolled into the room, inexplicably aglow, I attacked. “Where the hell have you been?” I howled.

Ash cocked his head to the side quizzically, but I was too angry to heed the supposedly innocent expression. I stalked up to him and stuck my hands into either side of his motorcycle jacket, groping for the burner phone he had gotten from Arlo for me, but never given me.

“I wanted to try entering Jade’s number into the phone, instead of repeating the numbers; that’s how I learn,” I informed him stiffly. “But
someone
disappeared with my—”

My fingers grazed the butts of two guns lining the inside of his jacket, and I withdrew slightly, my eyes widening as I beheld him in total confusion.

“I was getting you something,” he explained, fishing into his leather jacket and extracting a thick black handgun. “I think she looks like a Beyonce. What do you think?”

“You just left, without saying anything, and went to buy MORE… Isn’t there supposed to be a waiting period on those? And a background check?” I shrilled.

At this, Ash beamed. “First, beautiful, here’s your precious burner phone.” He fished that from another of the many pockets in his jacket and handed it over to me. It looked like it was made in 2005. I pocketed it and looked at him shrewdly again, refusing to be thrown off the track like some dumber girl may have been. “And secondly,” he resumed, “as you already noticed, I’m well-traveled,” he said. “I know my way around the retail outlet, at this point. Now, Beyonce here is a Glock 42, which only holds six rounds of ammunition. So, use her wisely.”

“Don’t go around trying to
run this town tonight
?” I asked, quirking one eyebrow with evident pleasure in my own pun. (To be honest, now that he had returned, my anger waned significantly.)

Ash rolled his eyes. “That would Rihanna, not Beyonce, first of all,” he said. “And second of all, come over here for a minute, funny lady.”

I smirked and my cheeks went pink. “What do you want from me?” I asked him, sauntering closer knowingly. “You want to congratulate me on my brilliant knowledge of modern hip-hop?”

“Yeah, I do,” he growled, his hands slithering over my hips and tucking themselves into my snug back pockets. “And I’ve got your trophy right here.”

As he tugged me closer to him, my breath caught with anticipation at the rigid erection straining against the denim of his jeans.
Fuck yes.
Our sex at the Rio Grande had satisfied me to the tips of my fingers and toes, satisfied me until I’d lapsed off into a deep and comfortable slumber, and yet, it had failed to satiate me. In truth, in spite of all the complicated drama in between Albuquerque and Las Cruces, with Agent Harrison and the guns and the looming border, Jade and the phone numbers and Ash’s tendency toward disappearance…some of my desires remained painfully basic and simple. One, in particular, burned through me now.

Our lips met in a wet tangle, his fingers clutching deep into the flesh of my buttocks. As much as had been on his mind the past twenty-four hours, our sex had clearly been one of those thoughts. I could almost feel his cock throbbing through his pants—but, then again, maybe that was my own throb I was feeling. The friction of our denim provided little in the way of relief, and I scrambled to unsheath his manhood.

He hiked me into the air with surprising ease, considering his wound; I wondered if he entered some superhuman arena of pain resistance whenever he was particularly motivated.

“I was mad at you, you know,” I panted as he tore his lips from my own, migrating along my throat with powerful bites and suction. He was going to give me a hickey like some kind of teenager.

“You can’t stay mad at me,” he rasped, plunging a hand into my panties and mercilessly twisting his fingers across my clitoris. I emitted a whimper of pleasure, unable to maintain the frustration I had felt before. “Jesus Christ, you get wet,” he murmured, pulling his fingers out of my pants and sucking the juice off one. “Mm. I’ve got to get in there. Haven’t had anything to eat since breakfast.”

Lowering us both to the ground, I stretched my legs straight for him to pull my pants away, and extended my hands up over my head, searching for something on which to hold. The sensation of his tongue tangling over my clitoris, then suckling feverishly, caused my fingernails to scrabble blindly and secure themselves to a loose floorboard. I arched my back and called out encouragement as his tongue lapped harder and harder between my legs.

“Ah, come here,” he groaned, pulling me up and laying himself down, positioning his head beneath my spread knees. “I’m going to blow all over you if you don’t help me out down here.”

As I leaned over his turgid manhood and took him into my mouth, which was quite a task before I even began pumping, he gripped my hips and forced them back down over his face, pinning my open lower lips against him. He ground his jaw greedily there, and I felt his unit trembling with imminent orgasm…which was good, because I was about to come all over him. I almost pitied how starved for oxygen he must’ve been, but couldn’t stop my hips from keeping rhythm, thrusting with the lashes of his tongue. My knees sank lower as the quivering storm unleashed, and I moaned loudly against Ash’s member. The vibration—or maybe just the erotic charge of causing someone else to orgasm—brought his own head to fullness, and he came into my mouth with a strained groan of pleasure.

I slumped off him, bedraggled and satisfied.

“God, that was good,” I sighed.

Ash licked his lips and twisted to collapse alongside me. “Tell me about it,” he purred. “And I thought I was starving before.” He nestled into my sweaty throat.

“Do you want me to go get you something?” I asked. “It’s pretty much my entire purpose on this trip. To be the one whose face isn’t all over TV.”

“That’s not your entire purpose on this trip,” Ash disagreed. He didn’t say anything else on the matter, and I decided to not press him about it. Discussing the future and what we meant to each other—what this was supposed to be—was a kind of touchy subject between us. “That having been said…” He slid a hand into the jeans he hadn’t had the opportunity to fully remove, and out came an unruly wad of green cash. “Would you mind terribly? There’s a corner store just a couple blocks from here. You don’t even have to turn anywhere, it’s a straight shot on the right. Okay?”

I unraveled one crumpled twenty from the ball of the things. “No problem.” My jeans were still on, too, for the most part. I tugged them up my thighs and fastened them again. “What do you want, babe?”

“Jesus Christ, all the burritos,” he groaned, licking his lips again. “All the burritos you can find. Beef and bean. With cheese, if they have it.”

“You got it.” I dared lean down to give him a light peck on the cheek. Somehow, the small kisses we exchanged in mere gratitude and appreciation of each other were much more intimate than the screaming orgasms we gave each other.

“Hey…take Beyonce,” he added.

I slanted him a critical glare as I stood and righted my wrinkled clothing. “Really? To go to the corner store?”

“Really. Just for my mental health.”

Sighing, I went to where his coat had been dropped and pulled the Glock from an interior strap. I tucked her into my hip and untucked my shirt, allowing that to act as a veil over the firearm. I may have been a crack shot, but that didn’t mean I had a permit for open carry, or that I was even really familiar with New Mexico’s laws on the matter. “Okay, babe. I’d better not get picked up for this. Then we’re both fucked. Well…more fucked.” I winked. “Be back in fifteen.”

But, as I stepped out onto the front porch and galloped down the walk, toward the road, turning right and strolling toward the luminescent sign I could already see from where I was, relishing the cool breeze brought on by that bottomless Las Cruces night sky, I had no idea just how wrong I was.