Wild Rider (Bad Boy Bikers Book 2) (2 page)

“That's blood.”

A man stumbled forward past the opening, pushed there by Rattler. Beretta waited, knowing it was a trick, a feint—but Locke opened fire.

The man was lit up across his side and dead before he hit the ground. Beretta swore and rushed out from behind cover, hugging the wall close to the alley.

“Identify yourselves!” Rattler roared. “Who the fuck are you to come at me?”

Rattler was thin, wiry. Too much meth to keep him healthy, not enough to kill him. That was Rattler in a nutshell. His lips were covered in burn marks from hitting the pipe too hard, his teeth falling out where they weren’t already cracked and twisted, like some bridge-squatting troll. His body was hairless; long scars trafficked across his scalp.

He had a habit of running a knife over the top of his skull. He did it now, powered by nerves and the tension of the situation. Sometimes the blade dug in too deep, cut too long, his movements fueled by speed and the nerve-endings up there all killed long ago.

“Wrecking Crew,” Beretta called back. “And we'll put you in the goddamn ground.”

He spun out from cover and fired down the alley—but Rattler was waiting for him, now. Quick bastard—fast! He'd already climbed up onto the fire escape, firing down at Beretta from above. Sparks flew across the alley as their bullets cracked against stone and the metal of a lamp post.

Two bullets ripped quick across the edge of his hip, and he staggered back into cover. Pain shot through his body, hot and hard. The wounds were shallow but burned like hell. Beretta’s body was made for all sorts of things, but fighting in particular was when he was in his element.

He was built for it—all dense tissue and heavy bones. In him was a distant attitude to pain, letting it come like hot water from a faucet. He liked to dive his hands in and out, to see how close he could get to being scalded. And the longer he stuck himself in it, the less he felt.

“Think you can come into my territory, do you, you fucking bitches? This is my town.” Rattler’s voice was strangely high-pitched, but that only made him more menacing. “
My
fucking town, and you’re gonna burn in it. There’s not gonna be enough left of you to fit in a fucking grocery bag!”

Locke now was coming—finally out from behind the dumpster.

“Son of a bitch,” he said. “I got him.”

“No,” said Beretta. “Wait—!”

Locke heard him, but a moment too late. The second he stepped into the open, gunfire lit up on him. He dove down, landing against Beretta. His shoulder was shot through, right in the meat.

Beretta looked around. With both of them shot, they needed to retreat, and quick.

But that didn't mean they couldn't leave a little souvenir for Rattler before they left. He knew which one was Rattler's bike—it was custom-made to look as though it had been made from bones. The handlebars were longhorn horns; the exhaust was a long femur, the front fender a series of skulls grafted together.

Gathering up Locke's bloody form on one shoulder, he opened fire on the bike, destroying it as best he could—taking out the tires, the gas tank, the engine. The bullets tore the metal apart, busting through the chrome, breaking delicate machinery apart, sending oil and gas leaking everywhere.

With that done, it was time for a retreat. He and his outlaw brother needed medical treatment.

He'd taken a shot at the kingpin of the town and he'd missed. It was a play he'd come to regret, and sooner rather than later. Their bikes were stashed down the street, and they kicked them over, starting off into the night.

“I’d call that a bust,” said Locke. His voice was already weak.

“Yes,” said Beretta. “Yes it was.”

––––––––

H
elen leaned over the nurse station, whistling softly to rouse her supervisor.

“Georgetta, I’m taking a break, all right?”

The older woman stirred, shaking herself. She was black and wore big glasses that made her eyes look like that of an owl or a frog. When she took the glasses off to rub herself awake, she was actually quite lovely, her face small and caring like a young grandmother's.

Georgetta said she kept the glasses on at work to keep the patients from flirting with her; she wanted a new lover like she wanted a lump in her neck.

Helen could sympathize. All she had ever gotten from love was broken hearts and a head full of bad thoughts.

“What’s that now? A break?” Georgetta shook her head. “I need some coffee, damn. Put some together on your way out, huh?” She glanced at the clock, yawning deeply. “Be back in twenty for Mister Robbins in 215. He’ll need his IV switched out again.”

Helen nodded and patted the desk, yawning herself as she slipped down the hall. Of all the afflictions passed around these walls, there was nothing as contagious as the yawn.

As she walked, she tied up the thick mass of her dirty blond hair into a pony tail. Being at work, her form was covered in scrubs, which always made her feel more average than usual—which was pretty darned average. Everything about her felt this way—her height, her weight, her face. Men told her different—that they liked her curves, that her lips were lovely, and so on—but then, you couldn't really trust a man about that sort of thing.

The coffee machine was near the back stairs. She put together a pot, making it strong as hell. Both she and Georgetta liked the strong stuff; it was always annoying taking a shift with a doctor or a nurse who not only liked weak coffee but also insisted on making coffee themselves.

Helen always wanted to slap them a little, maybe dump some morphine in their lunch if they wanted to go around half-awake. Those bastards could always water their coffee down; if Helen wanted to get her fix , she’d have to drink three times as much of their shitty half-coffee just to get it out of the way so she would be able to make a new pot.

That done, she glided down the stairs, sliding out her phone on the way down. There was a text message from Randall.

“Oh, god.”

Missing you all night tonight. Maybe you’ll come see me at the diner after your shift?

Fucking. Asshole. Fucking Ass. And. Hole.

The fuck gave him the right to try and play with her like this? Who in the hell appointed him captain of the ship of her personal misery? She’d thought about changing her number before, but always decided against it. Too much of an inconvenience. But now, just like all those other times, she began considering it again.

She’d had a firm policy of severing with Randall for nearly a year now. Once upon a time, she'd lived in a town in southwest Texas named Marlowe, and she dated him while she lived there. He was a handsome man with a nice chin and a well-paying job as an executive lawyer. He was also controlling, exacting, and punitive—barely falling short of abusive, and she only gave him
that
much rope because he’d never hit her.

But he had tried to shut out her friends. Probably would have tried the same with her family if she’d had any. She moved in with him only after a month of dating when her apartment complex was torn down for some few dozen code violations. By the time she moved out, she’d had to bring a few doctors and nurses with her from her hospital during the day while Randall was working to keep him at bay just in case he showed up.

She had moved to Stockland, getting her new job at their hospital, completely rearranging her life mostly to get away from Randall. And then he had followed her.

Fuming and in desperate need of the strongest fucking cup of coffee she could find, Helen slammed open the door to the outside, forgetting entirely about the auto-lock.

It hit home when the door clicked shut; she swore and kicked at the door, tugging at it and then kicking again.

“Goddammit!”

She stopped, feeling her temper get the better of her. She was better than that. Better than that asshole’s poison. She let her forehead rest against the door, taking a breath.

I’ve got a whole five hours left on this shift
, she thought.
I can’t go back in like this or I’ll beat someone over the head with a bedpan
.

That thought made her laugh.

Men. It all came down to men. She'd had some rotten choices in them lately. After Randall, she'd rebounded with a heart-thumping stud, the kind that she'd dreamed about since she was a little girl. Big, tough, strong, and a biker, he had been everything to her.

All her life, she had wanted to be with a biker badass. She had wanted to feel that strength. She wanted to wrap her arms around him and make out madly after he’d bruised his way through a bar fight, victorious and bloody. She thought from time to time that maybe in a past life she was the prized bride of some Viking warrior, cheering him on while he raided out townships and plundered their land, bringing it back to their homestead.

A stupid, weird dream. But it was her dream.

And then she'd fucked it all up.

One day she just stopped seeing him. A terse, quick phone call—
I can't do this anymore. I'm so sorry—
and that was all she gave him.

It wasn't something about herself she enjoyed remembering. All that fear and insecurity, the bad feelings that followed her like shadows. She pushed them away, hoping the memories would bury themselves for good this time.

She turned the corner past the door, ready to make the walk back around to the front of the hospital. It would take most of the rest of her break, but it wasn’t a bad walk. Quiet, usually, especially this time of night. Stockland could be a bad town for a soft-hearted nurse—lots of violence, lots of drugs—but tonight had been relatively low-volume so far.

And anyway, Helen wasn't exactly soft-hearted. She'd been a nurse for close to four years, and while she hadn't seen as much as someone like Georgetta, she still felt herself a pretty hardened soul. Bullet wounds and knife gashes did nothing to her anymore; the sight of blood was as familiar as turning on a car or hooking a dress onto a hanger.

The door she had exited from opened up into the lot where the ambulances were kept. It was a well-lit lot. The concrete was cracked in places, tarred over in others. In the earlier parts of the day, coming out here meant she could watch workers refill the ambulances with their supplies.

A banging, crunching sound filled the air. Not sure why, Helen followed the sound. For some reason, she thought it might have been a dog snuck onto the lot and pouncing on top of one of the ambulances.

Animal control didn’t actually control much in Stockland, and packs of strays roamed the numerous empty plains between shopping centers and neighborhoods. They survived on garbage and small prey, often grouping up with coyotes and wolves. In previous nights, on her breaks, she'd seen dogs out there and wished she could help them somehow. Her apartment complex wouldn't allow pets, though.

Now,
why
exactly she thought “stray dog” and “go see!” were good cooperative ideas was lost even on Helen.

But it wasn’t a dog. In the rows of ambulances, she saw a tall man with a crowbar in his hands. He had used it to jam the ambulance door open. Blood dripped down from his shirt. He wore a leather vest covered with patches—a motorcycle gang member. From behind, all she could really tell about him was that he was large. Large enough for her to be scared.

She froze. The way the lot was arranged, she had come across him almost suddenly, leaving only ten feet of clearance between him and her. The second she decided she would run—that’s when he snatched her.

Nobody moves that quick
, she thought, stunned at how he had turned and closed the distance in such a short time. One second he hadn't even been looking at her—and the next, his hands were on her.

She looked up into his eyes. Time felt like it stood still. They were dark, swirling pools of emotion—not quite rage, not quite lust, not quite concern, not quite
anything
except for unique. For some time—maybe five seconds, though it felt like five hours—her body responded only to those eyes. A sensual, furious heat filled her, and her breath caught.

It was Beretta.

That man? That dream of a biker who had swept her off her feet, who'd been everything she'd wanted, who'd made her nights hotter than the sun and had made every last breath feel like she was breathing into
him
, who had spun her mind into a web of ecstasy so dense that she never thought she'd leave?

He stood in front of her now, bloody, holding her, looking down at Helen with confusion and recognition both.

Then, the stark, horrific reality caught up with her senses. This man had a
hold
of her, and he wasn't letting go. He was
armed
. He was
huge
. And no matter how handsome he was, he was covered in blood—and probably not from some benign accident either.

“Helen?” He smirked. “I forgot you were a nurse.”

Hearing his voice did all kinds of things to her body, none of them particularly complimentary given the danger he presented. Her heart raced faster, stomach fluttering like a bird's wings.

“What are you doing here?”

He glanced at the ambulance, broken open from his crowbar.

“Come on,” he said. “You can do better than that.”

“What is this?” she asked. “Did you follow me here? I moved away from Marlowe.”

“I can see that,” he said. “I moved too. Unrelated. I had no idea you were here.”

She didn't believe him. Why would she believe him? Why the fuck was he
here
?

He pushed her up into the ambulance and sat her down.

“Stay.”

His voice was like molten glass, hot and smooth. Not knowing why—a callback to one of their intense nights, maybe, when he'd blindfolded her and slid her hands into cloth restraints, teasing and pleasing her for hours, she obeyed. Immediately she hated herself for her easy submissiveness to him—but his tone had brooked no argument.

If she ran...would he tackle her? Would he use the crowbar? How far would he go? He was bloody already, injured. A stupid, pitiable impulse took her—to treat the wound, see him healed.