father, but not in the way I’d thought he was. No, he was now connected to him in a way that might be really dangerous for him and his club. Fear gripped my chest. “Did my father ask you to kill Billy?”
“What if he did?”
“I’m not kidding around. I’m asking because it’s important. Are you going to kill him?”
“Not personally, but yeah, it’s a job.”
“So the club is going to kill him.”
Blaze shrugged. “It’s a job, sweetheart.”
Anger boiled up inside me. “Stop calling me sweetheart. It’s patronizing.”
“Well, I'm just a stupid biker who doesn't have the extensive vocabulary you have, so I guess I just wouldn't know what the word patronizing means. Sweetheart.”
Obviously he knew what patronizing meant. I wanted to smack him. Smack him for bringing me here. Smack him for being a member of his stupid club. Smack him for getting involved with my father. And above all, smack him for not being smart enough to understand when he was being set up.
“Let me spell it out for you in small words,” I said, my words punctuated with all the rage I’d been building up inside. “Billy is not just some guy. He’s not a college freshman from Iowa with a couple of farmers for parents. Do you know what his last name is?”
Blaze just stared at me, the muscles in his face flexing as he clenched and unclenched his jaw.
“His last name? It’s Randolph.” I could hear my voice getting louder now, and I struggled to keep it under control. Keep calm, I told myself.
Blaze’s face paled.
“Does that ring any bells, sweetheart?” I asked.
“Randolph. Are you sure?” He was suddenly much less cocky now.
“Yes, I’m fucking sure. Do you understand what I’m talking about? The Randolphs. Your club was tagged with killing Billy Randolph. How do you not know who he is?”
“Mad Dog agreed to it. We didn’t have the details yet.”
“Is your club in the habit of agreeing to shit without having all the facts?”
Blaze sighed. “It’s probably already done.”
“How would the club do it without knowing who he is?”
“Mad Dog is not exactly up on politics, you know. Even if they told him Billy’s name, I’m not sure he’d put two and two together.”
“No one in the club watches the news?”
Blaze shrugged. “They’re not brain surgeons. I wouldn’t trust them to figure it out. It was just supposed to be a hit on some college kid.”
“Just a hit, right? So this is the kind of shit you do all the time? This is who you are?” I was angry with him for being exactly who I feared he was.
“What do you mean, this is who I am? Your father is the head of an international smuggling operation.”
“Yeah, and?”
“You think he doesn’t kill people? And besides that, what the fuck do you think he smuggles? You think he’s smuggling clothes?”
“I don’t want to hear it.”
“No, you don’t, do you? You think your dad is some innocent guy.”
“Of course not. I know who he is.” He had no idea. Blaze was accusing me of being blind to who my father was, but I knew my father was a monster. He was a monster, but he couldn’t do the things Blaze was insinuating.
“No you don’t, little girl,” he said. “You don’t know who he is at all. You think I’m not a nice guy? You think us doing a hit on Billy is a not nice thing to do? Your dad is a million times worse. He’s in a class of his own.”
“I thought this was your first time doing business with him. You have no idea what he does.”
“No? Your dad smuggles people, sweetheart. All that shit you have- that shit you’re wearing? The hot car you drive? It’s paid for by women, maybe even kids. You know what those they're doing? They’re sure as shit not coming here to be adopted into some rich family. They’re bought. By people who are into that kind of thing. That’s where your dad’s money comes from.”
“You don’t know that.” He didn’t have any way of knowing that. My father might be a criminal, but that - no, that was beyond him. It had to be. The problem was that when Blaze made the accusation, I knew in my gut it was something that my father certainly had the capacity to do.
Blaze smirked, and I wanted to smack the stupid smile right off his face. I didn’t have to take his shit. I might have to stay here, but I didn’t have to make nice with him.
Dani was back in the bedroom pouting, and I was stuck here out on the couch, unable to get what she said out of my head- the little comments she had made about my reading. She sounded genuinely surprised I was able to read. She was just as stuck up as I’d thought she would be. So much for being Mr. Nice Guy. I had cooked dinner, bought wine - what the fuck was I thinking, trying to impress her? Screw that. I didn’t need to impress her.
I had lost my temper with her. The shit she'd said about me going legit, being smarter than what I was doing - I guess it hit a sore spot with me. What I'd said about her father trafficking people? Even if I had my suspicions, I didn't know for sure it was true. I had just said it to hurt her, and it obviously did. Now I regretted it. It was a low blow.
But what she’d said about the deal with Guillermo, the hit he’d ordered - that’s why I was out here now, waiting until she was asleep to deal with it. That had the potential for our club to be in some serious shit if we went through with it. Or if we didn’t go through with it. I knew there was something off about Guillermo. Something about him didn’t feel right. This shit left a real bad taste in my mouth.
If we carried out the hit, we’d be targets for the Randolphs, who had limitless money and power. If we didn’t do it, I’m sure Guillermo would take us out, kill our families. That was how guys like him operated.
He had said the Furia MC had basically betrayed him by setting up some kind of deal with the Armenians. So he had to be planning on enforcing consequences for their disloyalty. My mind raced with the other possibility. Or, he was still aligned with the Furia and we were just the patsies for his dirty work. Either way, I wasn’t liking the outcome here.
I peered down the hallway at the closed door. There was no light under the frame and Dani had drank almost an entire bottle of wine. She was probably passed out by now. I needed to get in touch with Mad Dog.
I rode down the road ten miles to the spot where I knew cell coverage began again, and made the call on a burner cell phone to Mad Dog’s burner number. Mad Dog needed to be aware of this. He'd have to bring this to the table. I wasn’t there in person, but the members needed to vote on this. They needed to know the potential for serious shit happening if we did this hit.
“Yeah.” Mad Dog’s voice was hoarse. It was late, but I doubted he was sleeping. It was more likely he was getting his dick sucked by his some girl at the club or by his Old Lady. It was a tossup which one.
“It’s me.”
“You at the safe house?”
“Yeah, Boss, I’m at a safe house.” This was a safe house of sorts. What he didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him. It was just my safe house instead of the club’s safe house.
Mad Dog chuckled. “You entertaining yourself? She’s a hot piece, that one. I’d get me some of that.”
“Jesus, Mad Dog, it’s Guillermo’s daughter. He’d cut your throat.”
“I’d die a happy man.”
“Put your dick back in your pants,” I said. “I got some serious shit going on here. Did you guys take care of the business with the college kid?”
“We’re going to be on it soon. I’ll send Axe up with a couple of the guys. He’s good at that kind of thing.”
“Do you know who the kid is?”
“Some kid. Randolph or something.”
“Yeah, man. Look him up on the internet. His family is not just some random college kid’s family. It’s like doing a hit on one of the Kennedys.”
Silence. Then, “Fuck, man.”
“Yeah. You need to make sure the club knows this shit. I think we might be screwed. The shit with the Furia and the Armenians? Are we sure they really have an alliance?”
“What do you mean?” Mad Dog was alert now, no question about it.
“Look, I don’t know if we’re getting fucked over here. Guillermo could be planning to use us to do some shit, then cut us loose when there’s fallout.”
“You mean use us to do the hit, and then let the shit blowback on the club?” Mad Dog asked. “Makes no sense. Why would he approach us about protection and only mention the hit later?”
It was true. He couldn’t have been planning on killing Billy until after Dani got home and he realized what the guy had done. But that didn’t mean he wasn’t planning on screwing us with the other jobs from the very beginning. “Look, maybe there’s something off with the protection jobs.”
“You sound just as paranoid as that Mexican motherfucker,” Mad Dog said.
“He’s Panamanian. And you need check on this, make sure this is kosher. Maybe the Furia don’t really have an alliance with the Armenians. Has Guillermo made a move to retaliate against them?”
“No, but he’s smart. He doesn’t want to some high profile shit going on.”
“Exactly. That’s my point. Think about it, Prez. Why would he have us do a hit like this? It’s the ultimate in high profile. Something’s off with this guy. It’s not right.”
Silence. “Yeah, I feel you. Thanks man. I’ll take it to the club. We’ll do some research.”
"Hold off on it," I said. "Sit on it. He's a college kid. He's probably going home for the summer. Shit, he's a Randolph, so he's probably leaving the fucking country for the summer. We wait, the problem goes away. Takes care of itself."
“You got any more intel on this shit, how much longer we’re out here?”
“I don’t know. I’m waiting to hear from Guillermo. Keep in touch. A week, a couple of weeks? I'm not sure."
I tossed and turned on the couch all night, thinking about the hit and Guillermo and the club. And Dani. Before I drifted off, I’d replayed the night at the hotel with her in my head. My hands on her breasts, her laying in the tub, head on my chest. I needed to get her out of my head. Hell, what I really needed was to get laid.
When she walked out of the bedroom the next morning with her hair all mussed from sleep, wearing a strappy little top and a pair of shorts that barely covered her ass, I groaned inwardly. Was she purposely trying to make things as difficult for me as possible? I sat up on the sofa, shifting uncomfortably, covering my lap with a blanket.
“Good morning.” She flopped into a chair, arms crossed over her chest. “I heard you leave last night.”
“I had to get in touch with the club."
“About what we talked about? Billy?”
“Yeah.”
“So they know it’s a bad idea."
“They know. I told the club president.”
“So they won’t kill Billy then.” I wondered if she was so stuck on this because she still wanted to be with this Billy guy.
Why did I feel so jealous? I shrugged. “They’ll look at the angles, figure it out. He's a college student like you, anyway. Doesn't he go home for the summer or something?"
"Home," she said, laughing. "I'm sure he's headed off to Ibiza or whatever other spot has the hottest girls."
"There you go," Blaze said. "So he's probably gone now anyhow. This Billy guy, was he your boyfriend or something?”
Dani laughed. “No way. I met him, like, six months ago. I was sitting in my history class, totally hung over, and he sat beside me, tried to chat me up. I think the only reason he kept talking to me was because I didn’t give him the time of day the first time. Anyway, he dates girls whose daddies are senators and whose moms are on the boards of charity foundations. Not girls whose daddies would put your feet in a bucket of concrete and throw you in the Hudson River if you crossed them.”
“But you wanted to, then.”
“No! He was just a bit of fun, casual. I mean, we traveled together a couple times. His parents have a private plane,” she said.
“So it was just casual,” I said. “Was he in the habit of smacking you around?” I was irritated with this conversation, angry at her for being with Billy, but I couldn’t stop myself from asking questions I didn’t want answered.
“He got weird before,” she said, looking down, fidgeting with her fingers. “We were in St. Barth’s once. He took something and got crazy, grabbed me too hard. It left marks. But it didn’t happen again, and I figured it was just a drug thing. It wasn’t like we were in a relationship, like he was an abusive boyfriend or anything.”
“Right,” I said. “Except when he choked you.”
“Yeah, well, I got the fuck out of there, didn’t I? It’s not like I’m going back to him.”
“You sure about that?” Where did that come from? I had no call even asking that.
“It’s not really any of your business, is it?” she asked. “But, no, for your information, I won’t be going back to Billy again. Like I said, it was just sex.”
Just sex. Like Dani and I. She was intentionally trying to hurt me.
“You do that a lot then, the whole 'just sex' thing?” I asked, immediately regretting my words. Why do I care? It's the same thing I did.
Dani shrugged. “I went to boarding school with bored rich kids,” she said, as if that explained everything. “You get a bunch of teenagers together, kids with lots of money and fucked up parents, and what do you think happens? They take Adderall, snort coke, and have threesomes. You don’t find boyfriends in boarding school. You have flings. Everyone sleeps with everyone else. It's kind of hard to go from orgies to a vanilla boyfriend-girlfriend relationship in college all of a sudden.”
“Geez.”
“What, are you shocked? You’re a biker. It’s not like you’re some kind of fucking saint.”
I laughed. “That's true. It’s not the sex part. I just can’t picture you at some boarding school with a bunch of rich kids.” That wasn’t entirely the truth. I hated the thought of her with Billy, and even though I knew she and I had been just a casual fling, I was surprised at how it made me feel to hear her talk about “just sex” with someone else.
“What do you mean?” Dani asked, affecting a British accent. “I’m fucking classy.”
There it was, a glimpse of the Dani I’d met before, the one from the diner. “Yeah, you sure are.” I said it sarcastically, but she really was in a completely different class than I was.
“Actually, I really didn’t fit in at boarding school,” she said. “My father has money, but it’s not the same, you know? People like that, the kids from boarding school? They don’t really mix with people like me. My dad cleans up messes for people like them. No matter how much money I had, I’d never be in that class. That’s just a fact of life.” Dani looked up at me, her expression sad. “I didn’t fit in there. I thought I could get away from all that at Stanford. I was wrong, I guess.”
I felt a pang of empathy for her. It couldn’t have been easy for her, especially after her mother died. She fidgeted in her seat, and it was obvious she had something to say. “That stuff you said last night, the stuff about my father? I know he’s not a good guy. I’m not naive.”
“I don’t think you’re naive.” I wasn’t sure what I thought of her at this point.
“I’ve been out of the house since my mother was killed, since I was fourteen. I don’t know what my father is doing anymore, not really. What you said about his smuggling, do you really believe that?”
I shrugged. “I have no way of knowing for sure.” Why couldn't I bring myself to tell her that I had gotten angry and said it to hurt her?
“Yet you’re fine working with him.”
“I didn’t say that. Not at all. But the club voted on it. Whether I like it or not, it’s what the club decided.”
She didn’t say anything after that.
The next couple of weeks passed slowly. I always thought of this place as my little time warp. There was never any rush up here. Things always just seemed to drift along and I soaked in every ounce of the freshness of this place as if I could somehow bank it and withdraw it when I was back in the soul-sucking city. I