JAGGED EDGE: A BILLIONAIRE ROMANCE (ALPHA MALE) (14 page)

Bikers were predictable and made them feel safer than the straight world. Again, the rules were simple. The biker society was ruled by the men; the girls that thrived in it managed to pick out one bad-assed dude from the herd and do whatever it took to make him think that he hadn’t really lived until he’d met her. She’d do anything for him, and in return she had a role in that world. A standing. No one expected her to cook or clean house. No, she’d hang around with her man, say nothing when he flirted with other girls, and hang onto him by lighting him up. It was mostly sex, at least at first, but some of the guys had the same old lady forever. In that way they weren’t any different from anyone else. Some guys and some girls screwed around and some didn’t.

Dirk’s luck with women was mostly bad luck. He’d thought his last old lady was a keeper. She’d been hot and funny, always happy for a good time, if not particularly bright. They were together for a year and then she got sick. The end had been mercifully quick. Since then, although he’d been with other girls since then, he hadn’t met anyone he wanted riding with him. For a biker that was the big thing. Living with a girl was fine. If she pissed you off, you could leave. But taking a girl on rides, except on a job like this, meant something. She had to have the right vibe, she had to love the road the same way you did and not be bitching that she smeared her makeup or asking a thousand questions.

Try as he would just to enjoy having a hot chick riding behind him, this one was a nagging mystery. He couldn’t even begin to imagine the world she’d come from, the world she was escaping from. What she was doing, running from her old man, might be incredibly stupid, but it was gutsy. She was running away from everything people said they wanted, because she knew the clothes, cars, money, didn’t mean anything if you weren’t free.

He understood that, respected it. When you got down to it, freedom was the only thing he really valued. They shared that value but it made him want to know more about her, damn it. Besides, her attitude, that gutsy, ballsy attitude, was even more of a goddamn turn on than her curvy body, that luscious little ass of hers, those sweet titties.

As he rolled that big machine down the highway, he let himself imagine being naked between those soft, pale thighs, her arms and legs wrapping around him as he rammed his swollen cock into her.

Focus on that. Focus on how sweet it will be to just fuck her.

Even with that, he sensed that somehow his feelings about her were changing. He wanted her more than ever, but he wanted her to want it too. He had the feeling that she was drawn to him. That complicated things and Dirk didn’t like complications. He wanted things simple and as black and white as he could get them.

She wasn’t helping. Liking her could be bad news. He might even want her to like him and that wouldn’t happen. She might want him as a hard core biker lover, but she wouldn’t ever like him. She couldn’t. He was cursed.

Chapter Four

Smiling Jack Crawford didn’t smile unless he was enjoying himself, and when he was enjoying himself it meant that someone else was in pain. A lot of pain. The more pain they experienced, the more fun he had. As long as he was the one causing the pain, that is. And it wasn’t just a hobby. Jack took pain, other people’s pain, very seriously and he’d made a study of it—how to inflict pain, how to keep a person suffering for a long time, holding them right on the edge.

He’d been smiling quite a bit that morning, but the smiles were over for now. His patient, as he called him, was unconscious. He knew many ways to wake him, but the man’s nerve endings were overloaded. Just the sight of the bloody scalpel in Jack’s hand, a recollection of the pain he’d endured, would probably make him pass out again.

No, there wouldn’t be any real pleasure in it until he’d rested a bit.

Not much. Just enough. Jack knew the boundaries where pain met oblivion and his personal joy came from herding his patient, keeping him on the side of pain as long as possible.

“He’s here.”

Jack turned and looked at the goon who’d spoken to him, broken his reverie. “The client?”

The man nodded. Jack’s world recognized four categories of people: clients paid him to apply his skills to extract information, punish the wayward, or simply to provide a lesson; there were goons he hired for muscle and other tasks he didn’t like soiling his hands with or have the particular skills for; there were his patients, either selected by clients or for his own entertainment; and there was everyone else. This last category he thought of as simply victims—beings you killed if they got in your way, or ignored.

He’d worked for this client before, he knew his terms, his preferences. He liked what Jack did but lacked the stomach to do it himself. He directed the scalpel, but couldn’t wield it. That told Jack volumes about the man, told him he was weak but wanted the world to fear him.

Setting down the scalpel, he nodded toward the goon. “Go meet him. Tell him I’ll be right in.” As the goon went out, Jack went to the sink. He took off the rubber gloves he’d been wearing and threw them away. Then he washed his hands and his scalpel thoroughly, taking his time because he knew it would irritate the client. That was the most pleasure you could extract from a client beyond their money. He pictured Terrance Montrose’s face and imagined him tied up and tracing a red line across the man’s neck with his scalpel—not a deep cut, just one that he’d feel enough to remind him of his vulnerability.

Perhaps one day, just for fun, but not now. Not while he was a paying customer. After all, Jack had a business to run and a crew to pay, and he loved his work. This client paid well and gave him interesting assignments.

He went into the room where Montrose waited, sitting stiffly in a chair, not wanting to rumple his expensive tailored suit. He dressed impeccably, this weak, rich, asshole. Terrance Montrose was a very handsome 28-year-old who looked significantly younger than that. He had pale skin, an almost pretty face, floppy blond hair, and bright blue eyes that looked deceptively innocent.

Montrose didn’t go anywhere alone. That was a sign of his fear. By reflex Jack sized up the bodyguard, noting offhandedly that he carried a gun in a shoulder holster. Jack didn’t care for guns and wondered why the man thought he needed one. He was pretty big. Montrose liked to surround himself with a variety of impressively big goons and this one was undoubtedly well trained. Perhaps the gun was just to reassure Montrose.

Jack hired a lot of the goons himself. They had their uses, but he held them in disdain. Big men were clumsy and slow, in his experience. Jack was about five seven and weighed a trim 175 pounds. Goons didn’t take littler men seriously. His red hair and sunken green eyes gave him an almost clownish appearance that he’d found useful. Guys like this goon wouldn’t believe he’d even challenge them or be a threat. If things started to happen, that worked in Jack’s favor. By the time they realized he intended to make a move they would be on the ground with their throat cut, lying in a pool of their own blood, bleeding out. Unless he just incapacitated them, saving them for encounters that promised more fun.

Montrose looked up at him.

“Did you learn anything?” he asked.

“I learned that he doesn’t know shit. His story holds up. He took her to the doctor and she snuck out the back way.”

“You believe him?”

“I had a quick chat with the doctor. The asshole nearly shit himself in his rush to spill his guts. She paid him to let her go out and for him to sit there and not do anything for the entire session. He thought she was coming back. He was thinking she was meeting a guy for a quickie and would come back before the session was over.”

“Okay. But the driver had to guess something was going on. If she was planning a runner…”

Jack took a baggie out of his pocket and handed it to Montrose. He took it and looked at it.

“A finger? What the fuck? You believe what he told you ‘cause you hacked off his finger?”

“No. I cut off his finger so he’d believe me when I told him he had to tell the truth or I’d cut off his balls and feed them to him.”

Montrose smiled. “And you’d do it too.”

“I do have my reputation to think of. At any rate, I’m sure he didn’t know her plan and didn’t help her.”

Montrose nodded to his goon who took a flask out of his pocket and handed it to Montrose. He opened it and took a drink, not bothering to offer Jack one. Jack had a short fantasy of playing a game where he made Montrose bite off his own finger. He’d tried that a couple of times with patients and gotten some to take serious bites, but never quite bitten one off. Montrose was weak. It would be fun to find out how far he could push him.

“So how can we track her down?”

The question broke the spell and Jack took out a clean scalpel from the leather pouch sewn into his coat that held a nice variety. He put his hand on a table and traced the outline of his own fingers with the edge, imagining what it would feel like if he cut one of them off and watched the blood spurting on the rich carpet. “I thought to ask about more than what happened today,” he said. “The driver admitted that she’d been stopping at pawn shops over the last year.”

“She was getting money together to run?”

“Likely. What other resources would she have?”

“Not much. She doesn’t have any credit cards, so she couldn’t rent a car or get a plane ticket. They won’t do it for cash. So I’ve had my boys searching the bus and train stations.”

Jack thought those things mostly a waste of time but they kept Montrose and his boys busy and out of his hair. “That’s hit and miss. If you find her that way it will just be luck. If she’s disappeared and running with cash, and you’ve had her pretty much isolated, I’m sure she has gotten help.”

“Help? Who the fuck would help her?”

“A boyfriend she managed to cultivate? A private detective or something? Hard to say. But if she was smart enough to convert what she had to cash and managed to con that doctor, then I’d guess she is working with someone who’ll help her disappear.”

“And you can find her?” The sneer on the man’s face amused Jack, made him think of using his scalpel to extend it to the man’s ears.

“That’s one of my skills. It will cost you though.”

“That isn’t a problem. How will you go about it?”

“We do everything from seeing if we can track the GPS in her cell phone to reaching to contacts in the highway patrol, customs and immigration at the borders…. Does she have any family or friends she might go to?”

“Her mother is dead. No one else, no friends.”

Jack sized him up. Guys like Montrose didn’t lay things out for you. Expected you to read their fucking minds, so you had to tease information out of them, find out what they really wanted. “And just so I’m clear on my instructions… you want me to find her, but do you want her brought back to you alive?”

Montrose laughed. “Not brought back. I want you to find her and take her to someplace secure. Then call me. I’ll come to you. I want to arrive and find her alive and healthy enough to be terrified of what will happen to her next.”

“And if I’m right about her getting help?”

“What about them?”

“If she has a boyfriend or a hired hand, do you want him dead?”

“You know… You talked about cutting off the driver’s balls. I really like the idea.” He laughed. “It would be great to make her watch you do that and then make her eat them while he’s still alive. That way she’ll know it’s on her. I’d like to see that. Yeah, capture both of them so I can watch that. I’ll pay extra for that show. Maybe I’ll even video it.”

Jack almost smiled. The way the job was shaping up he didn’t care much about the extra money but it was a good idea to negotiate for more—get the client buying in. “Done. So I’ll get on it.”

“What about the driver?”

Jack shrugged. There was still some pleasure to be had there, but he didn’t really have time if he was going to catch up with the girl.

“He’s not much use to me now. The fucking idiot let the bitch con him.”

Jack tilted his head toward Montrose’s muscle. “Having your boy kill him, what’s left of him, would send a message.”

He watched the man’s eyes light up. “That’s a good idea. Paul, go wake the bastard up, explain things to him and then blow his brains out. Take a video for me.”

Jack watched him go to the door. The muscle wasn’t thrilled with killing a coworker, but saying no wasn’t an option. That pleased Jack too. He didn’t really like just killing. Where was the joy in killing where there was no suffering?

“I’ll find the girl,” he said. He signaled to his own goon and the two of them headed toward the door. There was nothing left that would incriminate him even if Montrose’s people made a mess of things. Working for a guy like this you had to watch your back. The man was a fucking idiot.

For now, Jack had his assignment and his plan. He’d do his own alerts. He had the girl’s cell phone number and he’d paid a geek he knew to try and trace it. That might end up a dead end, but Montrose had paid half in advance and he’d start spreading money around. There were people who could find all sorts of information if the price was right.

This was turning into an interesting job. Montrose brought him a number of them, and while he appreciated the business, the opportunities to be paid to enjoy himself, he found himself looking forward to the day someone would pay him to do to Montrose. It would be an incredible high to do all the exciting things he had in mind for him. If someone wanted to pay him to take out this jerk then he’d do whichever of the goons were around for free. Just for practice.

When this was over, he just might track down some of the man’s enemies and sound them out on the idea.

Chapter Five

It isn’t a good idea to dwell on a past that’s overfilled with scary ghosts and unpleasant memories. It’s an even worse idea, really dumb in fact, to reminisce when you are riding a motorbike down the highway. Highway speeds require your attention and quick reaction times. When your brain mixes what-might-have-beens with strange, and at times erotic speculations of the future, you fall unnoticed into the seductive arms of the rhythms of the road. That makes you vulnerable. Awareness simply fades away, and if you’re tired to boot, it can happen so subtly you never notice. Ultimately you are daydreaming, flying on autopilot, and simply not paying attention.

The twisty two-lane blacktop road he’d chosen ran through the shadows of trees that made the light flicker hypnotically. Audra’s bare arms wrapped around his waist, the feel of her face pressed against his back, the steady rumble of the confident engine, lulled him into a comfort zone.

A few turns ahead he saw a white Chevy sedan coming toward them. As it approached, he noticed a ratty blue pickup truck following closely behind the Chevy, periodically poking its nose out to see if he could pass, as if the solid yellow line didn’t provide enough of a clue for the driver of the truck. As they approached, the truck pulled out right in front of Dirk and pulled alongside the Chevy, filling both lanes coming at them head on.

With nowhere to go, Dirk swerved hard to the right. “Hang on!” he screamed as the bike went off the road onto the rocky verge. As the cars swept by, his motorcycle bounced under him, across the rough edge of the road. Audra clung to him but they were both being jostled by huge bounces. Her head was banging into his back, and he felt her lose her grip. Keeping the motorcycle under control took both his hands, and he was unable to help her.

The front wheel hit a large rock and they bounced. He felt her hands slip from around his waist; she fell off the bike with a shout of alarm, her foot catching him in the back. The handlebars twisted violently in his hands. The steering, the suspension of a big road bike wasn’t made for going off road. It had been designed for paved roads, and it took all his strength to keep the bike from going down. Bouncing over the verge, it was slowing, but not fast enough.

Suddenly he saw a fallen tree lying across his path. Unable to avoid it, the front tire bounced over it, but the center of the bike hooked on it, stopping the forward movement and catapulting him over the handlebars.

He hit the ground and rolled, letting the roll absorb the shock. Then he got to his feet. Nothing broken. He went to the bike to shut it down. As he switched it off he saw Audra limping toward him, holding her arm. He shook off a bad feeling. This wasn’t a good start to the road trip. Dirk didn’t usually think much of omens and signs, but this didn’t seem good. It was like seeing dark clouds on the horizon—you knew trouble lie ahead, but not exactly where or what.

He stared down the now empty road. Part of him wanted to scream after the white car. He felt he should be shouting: “Fucking asshole,” into the dark and shaking his fist. That’s what regular people did. His temperament and training kept him still and the desire to indulge in that outburst died a quick death. He knew blowing up wouldn’t make him feel a bit better. Not at all.

At least Audra seemed to be intact. That pleased him on two levels—he hadn’t screwed up the job, and he didn’t want to see her hurt. Not on his watch, anyway.

* * * *

“I’ve called Wrench,” he told her, sounding extraordinarily calm as he examined her injuries. They were superficial. Painful, but nothing she worried about. “He and the other guys aren’t far back, and they’ll stop and get us, get the bike sorted out.”

She nodded.

“You were limping. How’s that leg?”

“Hurts a bit, but I think I just twisted it. I think it will be fine.”

He examined her arm. “You’ve lost some skin here.” He got out his first aid kit and cleaned the nasty scrape on her elbow. After he’d covered it with antiseptic cream and put a gauze bandage on it, he looked at her. “Anything else? Any other aches and pains?”

She held up her elbow and looked at it. “You call that road rash, right?”

He laughed. “Right. That’s your first badge of honor.”

“Then I was lucky.”

“It could’ve been a lot worse.”

“Sure could.”

“You said you called Wrench. Who or what is that?”

“The club mechanic. You met him.”

An image popped into her head of a man of medium height, muscular, with big callused hands. “I remember him.” Dirk shot her a look of surprise. “I met him at the clubhouse, sort of. He was sitting at the bar with us when we talked about the job. At some point he said his name was Greg, so I forgot about the nickname.”

“Right.” After a moment he seemed to look pleased. “Did you just remember him for some reason, or do you remember other people too?”

“I have a good memory for faces. An excellent memory. Always have.”

He nodded. “That might be helpful on this trip.”

“How?”

“Spotting a tail.”

“You’ll need to explain.”

“I’m pretty sure we weren’t followed when we left town. Ordinarily I wouldn’t expect anyone to locate us, but with your husband’s money, if he’s half as wacko as you say, he’ll hire people who really know how to track people, who know all the tricks. We have no idea what resources he has and we don’t know what any of his people look like, so we need to be looking over our shoulders for anyone who shouldn’t be there. So if you see a familiar face, one of his goons, or just someone who shows up more than once as we travel, that could mean that we’ve picked up a tail. You see anyone like that, or even think you do, point the son-of-a-bitch out and we will inquire as to his intentions.”

That made sense. “Can Wrench fix the bike and get us back on the road? I hate the thought of losing our head start.”

“No problem. He is our one-man version of AAA. He’s as good with bikes as Scotty was with spacecraft on Star Trek.”

He was looking at her, watching her move. She decided he didn’t entirely believe her about having no other injuries. Well, she was sore. Her arm ached but she shook it off. “Is it serious?” she asked. He looked at her curiously. “The damage to the bike?”

He shook his head. “I don’t really know. The good thing about having a good friend who is a magical mechanic is that you don’t have to answer those questions; the bad thing about having a buddy like that is that you never bother to learn to answer them. So the truth is, I know enough not to ride the damn thing until it gets fixed, but I have no idea how serious a problem it is.”

“That fool ran us right off the road. What the hell was that about?”

He shrugged. “The way he was driving, I’d guess the bastard was drunk. If not, then either he didn’t see us or he did it on purpose.”

“What? How could he not see us? And why would he run us off the road? He didn’t even know us.”

“Now that you’ll be putting on some miles on a bike get used to the fact that some people can look right at a motorcycle and never see it at all. Same with bicycles. And then there is another bunch of drivers don’t like sharing the road with two wheelers of any kind. They think they own the road and we are just road kill.”

“Doesn’t that make you angry, furious?”

“Sure.”

“You look so calm.”

“Stomping around fuming wouldn’t do us much good. I’m pissed that the bike is damaged, but I can’t do much about it. And whatever the driver’s problem is, he’s long gone.”

“I think I’d be furious anyway.”

The fury was there, hidden from her as it should be. He would save it, nurture it. For now he was looking under the bike, noting the way oil was dripping down onto the ground. He looked at her. “The truth is that if he’d stopped and given me some shit I might’ve torn his head off. If he’d been angry, I probably would have exploded. I’m not a nice guy. I don’t take shit from people. But seeing as he’s gone and I’m not going to catch him, being angry would waste a lot of energy.” Looking at her face, he laughed. “I guess I’m disappointing you—the big, bad biker isn’t threatening to chase the schmuck to the end of the universe to beat the crap out of him.”

The idea that she was disappointed embarrassed her—he was right. She grinned. “Well, kind of. Yeah. You expect people from a different universe to do things like the stereotypes tell you they will. When they don’t it can be disorienting.” He seemed to enjoy the idea that he disoriented her. She did too.

She looked around. “He’s gotta be some distance away. Wrench, I mean. Do we just wait for him here until he shows up?”

“No. I called for a cab. We aren’t far from the place I intended to stop anyway. We’ll leave the bike here and head up the road to the next town and find a motel. Then I’ll call Wrench and tell him where to find the bike.” Then he grinned again. “I know it must be yet another big disappointment that I don’t have some alternate lifestyle solution to the situation and here I am just doing what any ordinary Joe would do—calling roadside assistance and all.”

She laughed. “Actually, I’m glad. I could use a meal, a shower, and some sleep. We can work on the biker mythology more when I feel up to it.”

* * * *

The taxi dropped them at a Greek restaurant where they ate a subdued dinner that they washed down with retsina. She was famished and wolfed her food. Dirk got a bottle of the wine to go, by slipping the waitress a bill, then they went outside. “The motel is close by,” he said. “Care for a stroll?”

As tired as she was, the walk was nice after a day of riding. Her elbow burned, but her leg was fine now and somehow, rather than being upset by the accident, she thought it just made the escape seem more doable.

The motel was a shabby place a few yards off the road. It was getting dark, and an odd assortment of people milled about in the courtyard, some stood in the doorways of rooms as if they were waiting for something. A man wearing dirty army fatigues, with long scraggly hair, swept the sidewalk in from of the rooms. A thin blonde, wearing a torn cotton dress and no shoes, stared at Dirk from the shadows just inside a room as if she knew him.

“A friend of yours?”

“Probably the friend of anyone willing to pay her price. Odds are she’s a meth whore,” Dirk said.

“Everybody has to be something,” she said, trying to sound more confident than she felt. Falling off the bike had unsettled her more than she wanted to admit and she felt a need to live up to Dirk’s nearly professional composure.

Dirk went to a window, marked ‘night window’ and paid the woman for a night in cash. No one asked for identification.

“I don’t imagine your old man will think to look for you in a place like this,” he said.

She laughed. “Probably not. He wouldn’t even come here himself.”

When they went to the room, the squalid nature of it didn’t surprise her, but she’d never been in a motel quite so trashy before, and she allowed herself to see it as a novelty. This escape had to be an adventure or what good was it.

Still, the room was something remarkable. An old television sat on a stand chained to the wall; the room smelled of marijuana. She allowed herself a sigh of relief to see that there were two beds. Dirk turned on the air conditioning unit, which roared to life, and she sat on the bed by the bathroom. “I’ll take this bed,” she said.

“Fine.” He sat on the other one and stretched out, putting his boots on the covers. She guessed his boots were probably cleaner than the covers.

“Is he really that much of a prick? Bad enough you have to run?”

She looked at him, seeing his hands tucked behind his head. “My husband?” Of course that was who he meant. “Absolutely.”

“All that money must make it easier to deal with though. I mean he’s an asshole and all, but living with him you have nice shit.”

She laughed, a choking laugh. “When you are locked in a room with no food, and not even allowed to go to the bathroom, you don’t care how much money you have.”

Dirk sat up. “He did that to you?”

“A lot.”

“Why?”

“Various reasons, most of which never made sense. I thought I had done something to piss him off at first, but he’s a sadist. He says it’s to punish me for misbehaving, but then he does things that force me to upset him so he can punish me. So it’s simple. He enjoys making me suffer.” She stopped for a moment, remembering, never having had a chance to tell anyone before. “Once things went to shit, he grew more abusive, hitting me, raping me. I figured out that he liked it when I fought back. But then once he tore my clothes off and slapped me around, he couldn’t get it up. I made the mistake of sneering at him. Partly it was relief. He blew up and after he beat me, he decided to lock me in my room. He left me there for three days.” She shrugged. “Then he decided that was great fun. Bring home some girl or another, fuck her in front of me, then lock me in my room while they went out to dinner or whatever.”

“Shit. This happened a lot?”

“More and more.”

“So you finally decided to run.”

“First I decided to kill him.”

“Really?”

“I had the money I got secretly selling off things he gave me when he was in a good mood. I needed to do something. I heard about your club, your rep and I thought I might hire your gang to kill him.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“I’m not entirely sure. I guess I thought that if I had him killed his evil would stick to me, like some kind of disease. I couldn’t stand the idea that I’d never be rid of him. That’s when the idea of just escaping came to mind. Your club, bikers… no one like Terrance pays them much attention.”

He scowled. “I suppose that’s right.”

“Trudy told me you are the club Enforcer.”

He looked over at her, and she saw him trying to read her face. “Yeah. That’s right.”

“You cut people? Is that why they call you Cutter?”

“Yeah. I’ve cut people.”

And he had. The streets he grew up in were dangerous and he’d learned that a knife was a great equalizer. He liked knives. They never misfired or ran out of ammunition. They did what you asked of them as long as you kept them sharp and the one he carried in his boot was always sharp.