Hard Roads (4 page)

The car came to a screeching halt and I was thrown from the seat to the floorboard.

“Fuck.” It was the only word uttered by JD after his not so gentle stop.

I couldn’t see what was going on, but I heard when the driver’s side door opened and slammed shut. The car hadn’t even stopped rocking from the door closing when the first gunshots rang in the air.

My heart was in my throat within seconds and the only thing I could figure was that maybe someone noticed when I was ganked from Jeremy’s parking lot. Maybe Jeremy himself had come out of that pathetic excuse for an apartment and called into the club with what he saw. My fear turned to fucking elation. I didn’t think it was my daddy out there rescuing my ass, but it had to be the brothers. There was no other explanation.

The car door swung open again and someone climbed inside, groaning as his weight rocked the car. The door slammed, the ignition fired and I felt the car peel off, swerve twice and the tires screech from the exertion. My car wasn’t meant for racing. The damn thing could fall apart.

I started mumbling into the dirty ass bandana tied around my head and a large hand reached back to rip it off my face.

I spit out the taste of dirty biker sweat and smiled brighter than a wolf in a hen house. “Fuck, Jeremy, it’s about fucking time you showed up. I thought those fuckers were going to kill me. Did you follow us or something? What the fuck took you so long?”

There was no response and I was able to look up enough to see the side of his abdomen. The black shirt appeared ripped and wet. When a drop finally fell, I realized I was looking at blood.

“Oh my god, pull over! You’ve been shot!” Wiggling in place, I attempted to look up at Jeremy, but there was no fucking way I was going to be able to do that tied. “Pull over you son of a bitch and untie me!”

“Not a damn chance, Munch. Not until we get to a hotel. And stop calling me Jeremy.”

My heart sank into my feet. “Fuck.” I rested my head against the carpet on the ground and prayed to God that Jeremy wasn’t lying on the road dead. “Did you kill them?”

“Who?”

“Whoever stopped you, attempting to rescue me.”

He groaned again and I looked up to see him shifting in his seat. The blood was pouring out faster from his side and I got nervous about the fact that he was driving the car. What if he passed out and wrecked? What if I was thrown from the car while still tied? What the fuck would I do then?

“You need to pull over. You’re bleeding out.” I didn’t give a shit if the fucker died, I just didn’t want to be tied up, injured and thrown out into the Arizona sun. The only thing I could hope for was that I died on impact.

“You need to worry about yourself, little girl. Not me. A fucking bullet to the side isn’t going to take me out.”

I shut up. But then I remembered Jeremy.

“So are they dead? Who’d you kill?”

“Why do you care?” He growled out the words, not so much from frustration or annoyance, but from pain. “And fuck no. Your man ain’t out there. Nobody came for you.”

Whereas he’d once been somewhat jovial since he’d taken me, his mood had taken a dark turn. He seemed angry, but I guess pain will do that to a person, so I shut up again.

Another hour or so and we were pulling over. I tried to look up and see if I could recognize our surroundings but moving hurt my body from the cramped position I’d held on the floor. Another low growl and JD was out of the car, the door slamming shut and the sound of retreating boots against the ground. The car was hot as a bitch and my arms had gone numb from being tied. Pins and needles shot all over my body and after ten minutes without JD’s return, I started to panic. Was the fucker leaving me in this car? It felt like a fucking oven and I was gasping for the oxygen that couldn’t be found. It was like being back in the trunk.

I didn’t want to die like this. Being shot, stabbed, whatever. It couldn’t be worse than the slow loss of the ability to breathe. Every time my lungs pulled in, I was left light-headed and nauseous from the effort. My vision was getting hazy and sweat stopped seeping over my skin. How fucking long was he going to leave me here? When the door finally opened again, a swift gust of wind moved across my skin sending chills across a distressed body. The car rocked with his weight and without speaking, he fired the engine, peeling out and throwing me around in the back. I groaned from the pain, but was too close to passing out to voice my complaint.

Another wordless hour passed and we stopped again. I’d finally cooled down enough to squeak out a desperate request. “Pl … please don’t leave me in the heat again. I can’t breathe, I can’t think, my mouth feels like a fucking desert…”

“Shut the fuck up.” He turned in his seat and had me by the hair in seconds. Pulling me up until our noses met, the rage behind his eyes almost paralyzed me with fright. He was hurt, he was angry and he was fucking tired of my shit.

“If I want to leave you in this fucking car until you cook, I’ll do so. You get me? I’m not in the fucking mood to deal with a little sniveling bitch whose mouth is larger than her common sense. I may have been nice to you at first, but all fucking bets are off at this point. Learn your fucking place, bitch.” His hand opened and I fell back to the ground, my shoulder catching the raised hump between the two seats. It popped and I screamed, realizing that it had dislocated.

Real tears poured from my eyes this time and I continued crying as he climbed out, slamming the door. The car shook from the force and pain sliced along my nerves. I tried to shift my position to take my weight off my injured shoulder, but every small movement resulted in more pain from the ropes binding my arms and legs together. Spots appeared in my vision and my teeth ground together.

Resigning to the fact that I was going to die in this car, my strength began to dissipate. I’d been pissed off. I’d been scared. I’ll even admit that I’d been reduced to your typical damsel in distress, hoping in vain that the brothers of my club would come along to miraculously free me from the crazy son of a bitch who held me. However, now that I realized I wouldn’t survive, I tried to find peace in the fate that awaited me. I wasn’t a big believer in the afterlife, didn’t really think that there was some place good souls could go to meet up after the reaper paid them a visit. Maybe it was delirium, but I wondered if my mother would be waiting for me on the other side. The thought made me feel better. I still feared the death and the pain that would deliver me to the crossroads, but I didn’t fear what would be found once I arrived there.

The door next to my head opened, but I barely registered. I felt myself being lifted, carried through the Arizona sun and tossed into a cramped space in what I recognized to be a truck. Doors slamming again, ignition firing and the sudden movement of a car taking off at high speed. The pain in my shoulder had become intolerable, but at least there was air conditioning. My body felt cold when the frigid air hit my skin and my throat and nose opened up so that I could breathe easily. I still felt high, still felt like I was stuck in some thick abyss, just floating in some place where no person could touch me. Within another hour or so, I would learn the feeling was wrong. I could be touched. I had been touched and I would be touched again.

“I’m too fucking tired to drive anymore, Munch. We’re going to get a motel room.” His voice was rough, the pain he was obviously experiencing seeping out with every syllable he spoke. There was a drunken slur to his words, the individual letters running together as if they were ink on waterlogged paper.

The truck shook when he pulled off the road and onto what I assumed was a pebble driveway. After parking, he turned to pull a bag out of the area where he had me stowed. I watched him strip off his blood-stained shirt, tossing it aside into the floorboard of the front passenger seat, before pulling on another simple, black t-shirt. When he threw the bag back next to me, he turned. For the first time, and because of the streetlamp that shone in through the truck window, I saw the gold amber of his eyes. They shone in the dim light like jewels and were the color of whiskey. I imagined that they could warm a woman up just as much as the alcohol when this man was in a good mood. I wasn’t attracted to him, but after looking into his eyes, I was curious.

“I’m gonna go get us a room. I want you to stay quiet and stay still. Don’t try to attract anyone’s attention if they walk by ‘cause you’ll just be signing their death warrant. You get me?”

“Yeah.” I cleared my throat when I went to talk and it felt like only dust came out. “I get you.”

He nodded once, turning and groaning when he opened the door and stepped out of the truck. I was surprised he left it running, but I guess with my hands being tied to my feet and all, he wouldn’t have been too concerned about me having the ability to drive away. I wasn’t giving up though, so while he was taking his time finding us a room in what I could only imagine would be some nasty motel along route 80, I looked for any sharp object I could rub myself up against and hopefully cut this rope. The positioning of my body in the tight space, made it almost impossible for me to turn and look around. By the time, I’d shifted to the right to lift my head and view the entire cabin, he’d returned.

The door swung open and the dim light in the cabin was blocked by his large form. “Okay, woman, we have ourselves a room.” His hand reached beside me when he pulled the bag into the front again. “I’m going to need you to walk like a normal person for me. You’ll have a barrel pointed in the center of your back for the walk, so I don’t want any of the bullshit you played earlier happening again. Fighting on the side of the road is one thing, but it’s something different where people can sit around and watch us. Understand? I’m not fucking playing with you either.”

Silently, I nodded my head.

“Good. I’d hate to have to kill you, Munch.” Pulling a blade from the bag, he reached over and cut the cord that tied my arms to my legs. Pain shot over my spine when my body was allowed to lie flat, stretching out after having been forced into a fucking circle for the past few hours. He moved to cut the cord around my ankles, but replaced the knife in his bag before cutting the one around my wrists. I looked up at him and a small smirk curled the corner of his lips.

“Are your hands cold?”

My eyebrows furrowed in confusion at his odd question. “Um…no. We’re in fucking Arizona. Nothing is cold.”

His grin turned into a small smile. “Well, your hands are. I’m going to let you carry my cut and you’re going to be happy to hold it over that rope.”

Closing my eyes, I finally understood what he was saying. “Yeah, they’re feeling cold.”

Nodding he pulled a .45 from his bag and placed it on the seat. After he retrieved the cut from the passenger seat, he placed it over my hands and I gripped on as much as I could. When he grabbed my arm to pull me from the truck, I yelped and he let me go with an odd expression on his face.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” His head moved to scan the parking lot and when he was satisfied that no one had heard me, he looked back at me. “Answer me.”

“My shoulder. I think you dislocated it.”

“Fuck!” Whispered under his breath the word contained only a small grain of guilt. His tone seemed more annoyed than anything else. “When did that happen?”

“After you tried cooking me in the car the first time. You came back in a really fucking bad mood or don’t you remember?”

My eyes opened and were met by his lethal glare. Something mischievous flit across his expression and his lips curled into a mocking grin.

“Well, I’m not sorry about that. You weren’t exactly being a good captive. Talk back and that’s the kind of shit that’ll happen. I told you to cut the shit out on the road. Ain’t my fault you didn’t listen.”

I rolled my eyes.

He stared at me for a few seconds before finally speaking again. “Apparently, you’re not a quick learner. Get out of the truck, Munch. You and I are going to have a good night getting to know each other.”

Stepping out, I looked up at him, my legs barely able to hold my weight. He grabbed my uninjured arm and steadied me.

“Try anything between here and the motel room and you’ll be meeting the reaper. Got me?”

I nodded and took my first step when I felt the barrel of his gun press tightly against my back.

Chapter Five

~ JD ~

She hobbled into the filthy motel room and I felt a twinge of guilt for having been the one to injure her. It wasn’t enough guilt to help her walk or assist in any other way, but the twinge was there.

Slamming the door behind me, I walked to sit in a chair next to a crappy wooden desk they had on the left side of the room. She stood in the center, looking around as if she wasn’t sure where to sit. I cleared by throat to grab her attention and waved the gun in the direction of the bed. “Sit there.”

Without a single word she complied, sitting down softly on the disgusting woolen blanket and grimacing. She kept her eyes trained to the floor and I studied the little beauty.

The silence between us was thick and the pain in my side was becoming unbearable. Dropping my bag on the floor, I rummaged through and pulled out the bottle of Jack Daniels I’d grabbed out of Ranier’s house. Ranier was a French little fuck who was as flamboyant as they come. His hair was always greased back and every time I saw him, he had on a silk buttoned up shirt with slacks and wingtip shoes. Normally, I wouldn’t do business with the little shit, but he was the only person in town I knew who would have some decent blow. I wasn’t much into doing drugs. However, with the extra passenger I had for this trip, I needed to keep my eyes peeled because she was the type to shank me in my sleep.

Unscrewing the lid, I tossed it to the side and tilted the bottle of to my lips. The liquor burned going down, but helped to numb the pain in my side. At this point, I wasn’t even sure if the bullet had gone straight through or it was still lodged somewhere in the muscle. I know I hadn’t been hit in anything vital, because if I had, I wouldn’t still be conscious. It was a pretty simple formula to figure out how critically you’d been injured. But damn if it wasn’t time to check it out a little closer.