Nomads' Fall: Burning Bastards MC (4 page)

“Thank you for calling, I don’t have a cell phone anymore, and had no idea what I was going to do.” She knew it was time she told someone about her problem. The woman was right, if James caught up with her, who would know what happened to her, or why. As long as she didn’t give the name of the club or anything, she should be able to trust that none of the information would get out, right?

She was so tired of living like she had been. The release of her emotions earlier on the front steps seemed to have helped her come to terms and straightened out a few things for her. She could take a stand, or she could keep running.

Gladys sat watching her, and the words just seemed to spew out of her mouth. She heard herself explaining why she didn’t go to the police in the first place. “Cops come in that place and get star treatment, everything from free drinks to free time in the back rooms with some of the girls.” She shook her head, “I wouldn’t have lived for ten hours if I’d gone to them.” The other woman showed no judgment, she was actually nodding her head.

”I can’t figure out how they keep finding me, or if I am just being paranoid, but I can’t take the chance. James is a scary bastard with dead eyes.”

“There’s only one way they could be finding you. You must be carrying something with a transmitter, like a chip they use on dogs. What’d you bring with you from your old life? Think about it, right now we should get the golf cart and start up the road. I have lights on the buggy, but it's dark out, and Beadle isn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer.”

After an hour of sitting at the end of the drive to the campground, Beadle still didn’t show up. By then Gladys was good and pissed. She punched some numbers in her phone. “You call that miserable little fucker at the garage, and tell him I said to go fuck himself. Leaving a woman on a deserted road, knowing she needs gas, and I called the little bastard over an hour ago.” She listened to whoever was talking on the other end of the line for a minute and although she couldn’t be certain, Jolly imagined smoke radiating off the woman’s head.

“You know what, Mr. Big Bad Biker fuck, you can kiss my fat ass too. Don’t bother dragging your delicate ass out into the nighttime air. Call your boy and cancel, I’ve already called Merles, they said they’d be here in twenty. Have a nice night, asshole.” She punched the screen, and smiled at Jolly. “Let’s go gas up the car and get it into the barn.” She reached back and pulled up the tarp revealing a five gallon plastic jug filled with gas. “I use this for the lawnmowers and chainsaw.”

They got the vehicle started, and Jolly followed the golf cart back to the barn. For some strange reason, relief washed over her when the door closed behind her junk car. She felt safer than she had in months. As they waited for Beadle, Gladys offered her a job at the campground for the summer, and after that, they’d see what direction she should take.

It was close to eleven at night by the time they’d determined Porter’s parting gift was the giveaway to her whereabouts. Gladys used a small wrench that she usually used for her winter craft projects to remove the back from the gold and diamond watch. There was a small disk under the back case. The watch was a kinetic, and it didn’t need a battery. “Here we go, this is your homing device. They must really want to keep tabs on you for some reason. Are you sure all you did was strip? You haven’t forgotten a lover or something?”

“I think I would have remembered something like that. My last relationship was in college, when I was a sophomore. When he found out what I really did for a living, he freaked out. The only thing I’ve had since that, that even resembles sex was a close encounter with a drug dealer named Mr. Grim. Trust me when I say I would never imagine how fucked up some men are. He was in the mood to drive his warning for me to leave the neighborhood in a very effective way.”

Chapter
Three

Knight knew Georgie must have had words with Gladys again. The man had Vicky on her knees, and his hands were holding her head steady ready for his prick to drive deep into her throat. He came with a roar and staggered back to his chair without bothering to zip up his jeans. At least his prick had retreated behind the denim so they weren’t subjected to the sight of Mr. Squirmy. Vicky stood and gave him a dirty look. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and walked away.

“Well, brother, that makes what, four of the Bitches you’ve pissed off? You keep this shit up and the only pussy you might get is on the weekends when the sluts and round heeled party girls show up.” Georgie gave him the shit stare, but it didn’t faze him anymore. “I went up to Big Lake campground today. We have a sighting of Dorsey, and I hafta say that Gladys is a hell of a woman. She shot him in the ass when he was trying to kill off one of her pet geese. She didn’t see any particulars, but she saw the Bastards patch when he turned and limped off.” He laughed at the thunderous look on Georgie’s face. “She shot him in the ass or the leg. I’m voting on his ass.”

Georgie shut his eyes and lifted his face heavenward, probably asking for patience.

“She took his kit from the beach, handed it over to me and Needles. His phone, a bundle of gold chains, and a thousand in cash. We got his saddlebags and blanket too. I told her to be careful, he’s gonna want his shit back. She told me she’d be fine, but I think we should set someone to watch over her for a few, just in case.”

Georgie had it bad since he’d met the snappy little bitch. Even knowing she was married to Ralph hadn’t phased his interest. She was short and a bit stocky, but she was sexy as hell, and he’d wanted her too long to chance close contact now that she was a free agent. Hell, she’d just buried Ralph a few months back. If he came onto her now, she’d always think of him as an even bigger asshole than she already did. He wanted to go to her and keep her safe, just in case Dorsey developed a worse case of stupidity. He wanted her safe as much as he wanted Dorsey dead.

After tonight’s call from Gladys, he wasn’t sure if he even stood a chance with her once she was ready to see another man anyway. “I just talked to her. She seemed the same bitchy woman she always is. I’m not sure what Beadle is thinking, but he pretty much blew her off when she called the garage for someone to do a gas run for a stranded woman on the road by her place. She says to tell him to fuck off, and she didn’t want to listen to me telling her the boy was probably too busy to cater to her at the snap of her fingers. She called me a biker fuck. Gladys doesn’t talk like that.”

Knight signaled for two more beers and thanked Pinky for bringing them. One went to his inebriated, love struck friend, and he drank the other one. “Face it, man, women are hard to understand. A man can give her his money, a roof over her head and food for her belly. It’s not enough, they aren’t happy until you lock down and hand her your prick and the hammer to smash your balls with.” He clinked longnecks with Georgie, who kept nodding his head at the philosophical viewpoint.

“Look at Butch, that poor sucker is fucked, he doesn’t see it that way, loves those cute little babies. I was there with him when his old lady died. That was one miserable man, he had the doc by the neck, and I had to pull him off. Lucky for all of us that pretty little Asian nurse gave him a shot while I held onto him. That calmed his ass right down.” He took a long pull on the beer. “Butch is in bad shape, and says he’s the one that wanted the kids so soon after they married. He’s blaming himself for her dying.”

The two of them talked about how men got tangled in a woman’s web one way or the other. There was no escaping it, if a woman had her sights on a man, he was as good as screwed if she was half decent looking, and he liked her to begin with.

Georgie passed out sitting up, and Knight took the empty bottle from his fingers. He figured it wouldn’t hurt to take a drive by the campground first thing in the morning, just in case there’d been any problems overnight.

He made his way to one of the backrooms, instead of going home or to the bunkhouse. He needed to run into town to check on Demon, and find out if there was anything they could do for the woman that’d been hurt trying to help him. Maybe he’d check in with Butch and see how the poor bastard was doing while he was in the area.

*****

Jolly came out of the room she was given to sleep in to find the bathroom. She saw a figure in black walking down the hall in front of her. She slipped back into the room and pulled the .9mm from its nylon holster.

Gladys heard the slide snap,
How did he get behind me in the hall?
and realized it must be her houseguest. “Jolly, it’s me, don’t shoot for crissakes, and don’t turn on the lights.” She slowly turned and saw the girl still held the pistol trained on her, and wanted to praise her for being smart. There wasn’t time to have the heart to heart right now, not if she wanted to find Dorsey before he came back and found her. “I’m going out for a while, and I’ll be back in a couple of hours. There’s something I need to check on, and now is the best time for me to take care of it. Just stay inside with the doors locked, when I get back, we’ll talk.” She turned around and kept moving.

Jolly followed her and watched Gladys open the closet in the dining room and step inside. “You might as well come in here, you’ll be curious when I leave and snoop anyway.” The woman was right, she would have opened the door and looked inside once she’d left.

The right wall of the walk-in closet was open, and Gladys was bent over a computer keyboard clicking away for a few minutes. “What’s going on here? Gladys? I do know how to shoot a gun, I own two of them. I’ve had to learn to be sneaky and hide in the shadows myself, so let me help you. Just tell me what we’re hunting for and I promise I won’t slow you down.”

Two monitors with four picture frames showed up on the screens. Gladys was studying each square carefully. “I’m not worried that you’ll slow me down, I worry about what you’d do if I have to kill this guy. He’s dangerous and some friends of mine are looking for him in the area. He kills people and when he gets cornered, he’s a damn coward. He was on the property yesterday and I shot him in the ass on accident. If I aim a gun at him again, and he makes me shoot him, it won’t be an accident this time.” She stood and turned around.

Jolly got the picture then. Gladys was dressed in black, her head was covered in a nylon hood that was snug against her neck and somehow blended into the black cargo pants and long sleeved figure hugging shirt. She was wearing black hiking boots and the wide belt on her hips sported a knife in its sheath, two small black leather pouches, and two guns in holsters. The slots for extra clips on the belt were filled, and a small LED flashlight hung from a loop. She looked like a Power Ranger, minus the cartoon aspect, and the color accents. “What are you, an assassin?”

Gladys shook her head, “Not any longer, I admit the suit’s a bit tighter, but I managed to squeeze into it. Let’s just hope I can still hunt as good as I used to. Now, you can watch the perimeter, on these monitors. If you see anyone moving, I want you to hit one of the keys one through eight. It will tell me where the activity is on the property so I can find him faster. I have my phone on vibrate, and silent, so don’t bother trying to talk to me, I won’t answer the phone. Got me?” She spent a few extra minutes showing Jolly how to pan the view and the zoom features. “I have three numbers written down next to the tower over here. If I’m not back by daylight, or haven’t called you, call the first two numbers. If they find me dead, call the last number on the list. Whatever you do, don’t call the last number until you see my dead body for yourself. Can you do this?”

“Of course I can do this, a trained bear could do this. I’ll be here, but don’t play the hero okay? You are the first potential friend I’ve met in two years, I need you alive.” Jolly was still confused, but now she had a mission, and she would help this crazy woman. After she came back, they were going to talk all right? Everything she wanted to know would be cleared up. She wanted to beg Gladys to come back, or let her go along, she did neither of those things. Truth was, she’d probably throw up if she saw another dead body. Just like she had thrown up when she’d killed a man on the highway in Utah. He’d been a bad guy in preacher’s clothing. She’d killed him with his own gun while he was trying to rape her in the backseat of her broken down car. It was another time when she had to move on fast, and was four hundred miles from putting another state between her and James, when the water pump blew. It was nighttime and he pulled his car in behind hers. He was all smiles and expressed such concern for her plight that she began to trust him to help her. She’d opened the back door of her car to get her duffel and he was on her. She ended up badly beaten and bruised, before she got her hand on the snub-nose .38. He told her, “It’s not personal, all you whores need to be tenderized before a man can take a good bite outta your hide.” His beefy hands had been around her throat, cutting off her air supply, when her flailing hands encountered his revolver. She’d torched both cars where they sat. That night she learned to swim. There was a small river between her and the cars on one side, and an open field on the other.

Now she sat watching the screens almost afraid to blink because she might miss something. She played with the zoom feature and the gadget finally hit pay dirt as far as she was concerned. A small campfire was barely visible in the section marked with a number seven in the picture. She quickly hit the number and continued to watch that panel more than the others. No matter how she zoomed the lens, she couldn’t get anything better as far as the picture went. She watched the other screens to make certain there was nothing else to concentrate on. She was concentrating on the screens so hard the sound of breaking glass made her jump.

Shit. What happened? It couldn’t be Gladys back yet. She’d only left an hour or so ago. She left the small space and shut the door to keep anyone from seeing the light from the monitors, and peeked around the closet door. Her gun was in her hand, ready to use and it was a good thing too. She could see a large male figure stumbling around the wet bar in the dining room. He was drinking from a bottle of something and pouring another on the beautiful wooden surface of the bar. He lit a cigarette and she heard him give a low laugh. “Fuckin’ bastards.” He belched and looked around the room, but he didn’t bother to look at the closet door. He walked into the kitchen and she followed in the shadows. She crouched behind the low wall between the kitchen and living room. He dug through the fridge and pulled out half a chicken. From the little she could see from her hiding place, he was scarfing the thing down as if he was starving. He took one hand off the chicken and reached for the bottle he’d been drinking from. The grease on his fingers caused the bottle to slip through his fingers and drop onto the hardwood floor. “Fuck, that was some good shit.”