Burn: Outlaw Romance (Hotter Than Hell Book 3) (4 page)

It takes a moment. Then, very slowly, one of the men who came into the clubhouse after the battle began removes his cut and tosses it to the floor. The ultimate disrespect to our colors. I step aside as he walks out.

“Anyone else?” I ask.

Curly Sue, one of the old-timers in the club, takes a step forward. Skull’s gun turns on him. He lifts his hands higher. “Like most of us, I don’t like the shit that’s been going down. I’d rather ride free than see this club go even further into the shit. I’d like to hear your plans before I make a decision.”

This is better than I expected. If all hell doesn’t break loose after what I have to say, we might have a chance. “Anyone else feel that way?” Three others agree with Curly, including Loki. “Call everyone into the table. If they come with guns blazing, they’re as dead as Fox and Clutch. Anyone who chooses to leave when I’m done speaking has a one-time pass.”

Curly Sue nods and takes out his phone.

“Put your gun away,” I tell Skull. He gives me a stern look before doing as I say. I glance over my shoulder and eye the three men behind me before giving them a nod. They holster their weapons too.

Everyone’s attention turns to Red as she walks toward us. She stops in front of Fox’s body and spits on him. She looks up at me and grins. “Had it comin’ for a long time. I’ll continue handling the girls if you don’t mind. That is, if I like what you have to say.”

Whores, or any woman for that matter, don’t attend church or as I just called it—the table. “This once. If you want to bring the whores in, do it. They’ll also have free passage to leave if they chose to.”

“Won’t be leaving. They need the white crunch too badly.”

This isn’t the time to tell her we are going out of the meth business. I want everyone here when I explain the cold, hard truth about the new leadership. I grab Fox’s cut and using my knife remove the president’s patch. I jam it in my pants’ pocket. The Desert Crows as it was under Fox, the illegal business dealings, and the skinhead mentality are at an end.

Sofia

DRIVING GIVES ME PLENTY
of time to think. You could say my life passes before my eyes. I’ve carried so much anger for so long that I don’t even know what to do to stop it other than kill Frank. What then? I keep asking myself as my car eats up the miles between me and revenge. I stay on the road for twelve hours before pulling into a cheap but clean hotel and calling it a night. Now I’m lying in bed and asking the same question.

My room is on the bottom floor and loud, stomping footsteps ring overhead every ten minutes or so and I can’t sleep. I should be exhausted. I’ll be in Peach City the day after tomorrow. I could have done the seventeen hundred miles in two days, but I want to be at my best when I confront the man who’s caused so much heartache in my life. I’ll stay the night in western New Mexico before I reach the border into Arizona. If tomorrow night goes anything like tonight, I should just drive straight through and get the job done. I roll over with the pillow over my head.

I toss and turn for hours, and sometime after two in the morning, I sleep. I wake up feeling groggy and decide to take a jog to try to shake the heaviness out of my body. I stay in good shape to fight and earn money. I plan to shoot Frank with my Smith and Wesson .38 Special. Five shots that pack a punch. The gun is small and easy to conceal. If I can’t kill Frank in five shots, it’s because I’m already dead. Really though, I want to beat him to death and listen to him beg while I break every bone in his body.

I take off out the front door of the hotel. It’s in an industrial area and most likely not the safest place for a woman to run early in the morning. It would be sweet if someone challenged me. The muscles in my legs ripple as I slide along the pavement. Unfortunately, no one bothers me. I guess I don’t look like an easy mark. If anything, I look like the Latina hood-girl I am.

I hit the shower after returning to the room. When I’m ready to go, I carry my bag out to the car and step inside the hotel lobby for the free continental breakfast. It’s decent and the coffee is hot and black, which is what I really need. I take an apple and banana to eat in the car and continue on my way.

I think about Frank again. What will he look like? Will I recognize him by some small tell I see in the mirror each day? My mother says I look nothing like him. I hope she’s right. We’ll see.

The miles tick by. I stop at a fast-food junk house, use the restroom, and order lunch. I place the bag in my lap and drive. I try to eat healthy when I have enough money for decent food, but the last thing I’m thinking about right now is the condition of my arteries in twenty years.

I hit New Mexico in the afternoon. It’s not what I would call a pretty state, at least not the part I’m driving through, which is close to the Mexico border. I slow down when I enter a small dustbowl town and creep through at twenty-five miles an hour as the speed sign dictates.

I’m sleepy, and a few hours ago, a sense of melancholy descended. It happens from time to time. It’s another reason I fight. When you’re someone like me, there’s nowhere to go for depression. Hell, I don’t need some fucking head shrink to call a spade a spade. My wiring is fucked up and fighting cures all my evils.

A burnt-orange, stuccoed Catholic church sits about twenty feet back from the road. The building is old and beside it is a field with large wooden crosses spaced about twenty feet apart. There are four crosses on two sides with two crosses at either end. It’s the name of the church that makes me turn around. Our Lady of Guadeloupe Mission is spelled out in script letters above the door. Guadalupe is my middle name, though spelled differently from the sign. For some strange reason, the church beckons me.

My mother was Catholic, and when she wasn’t high, she took comfort in the never-changing ceremony of her religion. As soon as I was old enough to make my opinions known, I refused to go. I think that was around the time I was seven or eight and the state awarded me back to my mom.

The mission is nothing like the Catholic churches in the Florida area where I’m from. This one is built in the Spanish style. The front arched entrance is also a bell tower. There are two arched stained-glass windows to either side of the entry. I park and step from my beat-up car that I can barely afford. My feet steer me on a course I never thought to travel.

The humidity of Florida is far behind me. It’s hot and dry as I walk through the arched entry and place my hand on the old metal door lever. I push it down with my thumb and pull back. The old wooden door opens with a loud groan.

The interior is cool and welcoming. A strange sense of serenity spreads through me. The door slowly shuts and the mission is quiet… peaceful. I stand quietly and look around. I see no one. There’s one center aisle with eight wooden pews to either side. I move forward past the holy water and stop when I’m standing in front of the Virgin Mary—her arms spread wide in welcome. Above is her son hanging from the cross. I notice a few lit candles on an altar to the side. Someone must be here, but they don’t make their presence known.

I look around again and inhale deeply. I remember this smell from my childhood—incense. My mother only took me to church when she wasn’t drugged out. Why couldn’t she beat her demons? Why did she love a horrible man who abused her? No one answers my questions—not the Virgin Mary or Jesus. I don’t fucking cry, and it makes me angry that pressure builds behind my eyes. I feel a presence and look around, ready to run out the door. I see no one. I scream and the sound echoes throughout the small building. No one comes running to see the crazy woman standing at the front of the church having a breakdown. “God,” I say aloud. It’s not blasphemy, it’s a request for help. I can’t take the anger, the loneliness, the pain any longer. I sink to my knees. Everything wrong with my life swells in a rush of emotion. When I was very young, I had dreams. I laughed. I played. My childhood was stolen. Anger, resentment, and revenge eat me alive.

I look up at the statue before me. Is it wrong to want more? Want someone to love who loves me in return? I remember having a rag doll when I was small. I cherished her. Is it normal to stop loving and allow hatred to fill you so you can make it through each day? Never enough food. Secondhand, threadbare clothing. No electricity or water at times. What is so wrong with me that as a child I was punished this way?

The tears finally come. Tears I’ve hidden away inside me for years. I cry for who I could have been. I cry for the babies, the siblings I never knew. I have no idea how long I stay on my knees. I finally wipe my eyes and rise. The candles, like the church, call me. I take one and light two more. They represent my unborn brother and sister. My fingers tremble as I light one more. It’s for my mother. I hope now she’s free of her demons. I should light one for myself and ask forgiveness for my sins.

I don’t. Standing here brings me to terms with my death.

I will kill Frank Tison and the Desert Crows will kill me. I turn and walk outside. The sun is beginning to set and tomorrow will be here soon enough.

My future sin is unforgivable.

Dax

INCLUDING SIX WOMEN AND
one prospect, there are twenty-two of us. Two members didn’t show. A side room off the main area has a table where the club officers usually meet. It won’t hold everyone we have here tonight, so we’re set up in the main room. The men are restless and the women appear their normal strung-out mess if you don’t count Red. The women start at around twenty years old. There have been younger ones, but it was bringing heat to the club, so Fox started sneaking the young ones in for gangbangs. They were anywhere from sixteen and up and he’d hand them drugs and send them on their way when the brothers were through with them. That’s never been my scene. I like fucking women, grown women. But, I stood by knowing it was happening and that makes me just as guilty.

Fuck, this needs to work. I can no longer travel the path of the man I was.

We’ve pulled the tables into a loose circle on the main floor of the clubhouse. The only cool air we have comes from an old evap-cooler, which barely handles the sweltering temperature. A creaking ceiling fan circulates the air and helps a little. Half the members are seated and half are standing. The women wait beside the pool table, which is as far away from the meeting area as they can get. I look at them. All but Red is skeletal thin with sores on their arms and faces.

I know some of the brothers use on occasion even though Fox discouraged it. As far as I’m concerned he never gave a shit about his brothers. For him it was a money issue. And using up the drugs before selling them hit Fox in the wallet. Total bullshit because members saw little if any of the money earned from drug sales. Fox was money-stingy with the men and drug-stingy with the whores. He kept all of us needy, not just the women.

What the hell am I doing? I ask myself for the hundredth time. Most of the current brothers were with me when we killed two members of a black street gang. They had killed one of our whores, or so we thought. We handed down retribution like we gave a fuck about the women, which wasn’t true. The men’s deaths were nasty and I still remember their screams. Hell their screams have woken me from sleep more times than I care to count. Skinning them alive is why Fox trusted me with Kiley. Metal and Clutch helped. Even so the deaths are on me. It earned me a reaper patch and nightmares. Fox later told me, while ranting drunkenly, that he killed the woman and let those two men take the blame. What did I do? Again, nothing. I kept my mouth shut and tried like hell to forget it happened. For years I stayed buried in my grief and anger without letting go. That shit is over and my actions from here forward will define who I want to be.