Rogue (In the life of the Rogue Book 1) (2 page)

“Don’t he look pretty?” I asked.

“Fuck you, Tristan.” He laughed, and usually I did too, but this time I couldn’t seem to even utter one chuckle. And he noticed it. “You okay, man?”

I’m not okay
. “Yeah, man.”

He pushed my glass into my hand and topped it off with the good stuff. We sat for a moment—well, he stood, and I fell into the only chair in the tight room—and we drank, smelling the dead smell of Jimmy Ricky and saying nothing.

“Where we dumping him?” I asked.

Zander reluctantly sat his drink down and pulled out the clipboard of our body drops. His fingers trailed down the long list. “We can take him to Rickers; they got a titty bar over there.”

“Low on cash,” I mentioned.

“Me too. Shit. They didn’t give you a head ups before dropping the stiff?”

“Papa”—and I didn’t mean my father—“didn’t give the order for the stiff. Johnny did this one all by himself.”

A thoughtful smirk snaked up Zander’s stubby face. He jetted a thumb at Jimmy Ricky’s corpse. “That the idiot that was caught plugging Lu?”

“Yup. The boys who did him had to be on Papa’s payroll and not my dad’s. They were way too messy and way too heavy on the grunt work—most of the bones in his face were broken.”

“Jarred Rogue finally put away a wife fucker,” Zander added. He rubbed his chin again, his dark eyes making their way over to me. I knew what he was about to say even before he could get enough breath to say it. “That could be you next.”

“No, not me. At least not anymore; she killed it off with me tonight,” I told him, hating the catch in my voice.

Zander gave a dry laugh. “Can’t say I’m sad for you. That heartless cunt bitch will get a good man killed.”

“None of us are good men, Zander.”

****

Zander slid behind the wheel and pulled out our last bottle of the night. He filled his cup, and I just drank what was left in the bottle.

The burn was a welcome feeling all over again.

“What we got left?” I asked him.

Zander leaned back into his seat. His dark eyes seemed even darker as he panned the outside world. He took a sip of his drink, waited till the burn hit his stomach, then exhaled. “I’m tapped, T.”

Of course he was. We had been going for as long as we could, holding out on buying food and paying rent and bills like lights, TV, and water, but stuck to what was important: ass, cigarettes, and liquor. We had hit a brick wall—one of many to come if circumstances didn’t change.

I ran a hand through my curls as I let loose a defeated breath. I lit a cigarette. “We can go to your dad’s.”

“I’d rather beg a street hooker for a freebie.”

That wasn’t a good idea. Street hoes were off limits. Who knew what you were screwing? I would rather lick a public toilet seat, which would just about sum up what it would be like to fuck a street hooker.

So we only fucked street hookers when our need for self-destruction was at an all-time high—which seems to be more and more these days.

Zander slipped his cigarette between his lips. I held out a light for him.

“That’s good, Tristan.” He waved away the lighter’s flame. He rolled down the window and blew a stream of smoke as he pondered if he could handle his dad for a single night. “I just don’t feel like hearing his shit tonight.”

“Fine, that’s cool. We don’t need ass tonight.”

He breathed a laugh and rubbed the hair on his chin. Sure, it wasn’t fine to go home horny. It was a cycle that we both particularly didn’t like. To go home horny meant a late night of pornos until you finally relented and took care of the issue yourself, but the need would be even greater the next day.

We were both sex addicts.

My addiction to sex was a very deep-rooted problem. For Zander’s need, I never was sure, and I never really cared to ask another man as to why he needed to get laid every single day without feeling crazy or useless as a man.

For me, it was just the need to feel close to someone, the need to feel like you were the only one, if only for a minute. To feel a heartbeat against your chest as another breathed a moan into your mouth was like a drug. I couldn’t explain the need for it any more than I could explain the feeling of completeness when I experienced it. Not every woman had managed to give me the feel of completeness. Katie had. Lulina had. Only the best and most expensive whores had.

Zander cranked up the car. He tossed the cigarette out the window and exhaled. “We’ll go to my dad’s place.”

He was drunker than I was and drove like he hadn’t taken a drink of anything. He was good like that. So was I. We drank so much that we barely felt it.

Zander was bothered, though, and I sensed it just as easily as I could sense my own feelings.

He ran a hand through his hair. “We can’t keep this up, Tristan.”

He was right and we couldn’t. 

I sat back in the warm seat. It was cold outside and warm on the inside. The car was a cursed wreck, but it worked. Both Zander and I shared it. Life was hard outside the Rogues’ giving a hand to its family members. Before Katie, the money hadn’t been grand, but it had been a hell of a lot better, and there would have been more as the years passed. I was just starting out back then, twenty-one sniffing at twenty-two, so my father was tighter on the money; he wanted to be sure I would handle it right. Now, that life was gone, and a harder life had taken its place.

***

Zander and I walked through the dark-skinned bodies wearing different assortments of baggy oversized hoodies and jackets and triple-X pants. It was Eddie’s hole-in-the-wall joint, once a shitty club now turned into an even shittier establishment. I nodded toward Eddie’s private muscle—a massive man positioned at the corner of the club, eyeing everyone—his expression was hard pressed and cold, like anyone who crosses him would be broken.

I call him the Bruiser.

Eddie was Zander’s father: a screwup who couldn’t seem to find himself on the right hand of the Rogue business, but, unlike Zander, he at least tried to be worth more than shit. Edward Rogue was a wannabe kind of man. He wanted to be tall and handsome and important, but he was short and pale, balding, and looked much older than my fifty-seven-year-old father when he was in fact younger. And he was as important as a car not starting up the first time you turned the key but roared to life on the second try—which was not very important at all. His teeth were yellow from too much tobacco use, but his suits were as expensive as ever. How Zander had managed to have Eddie as a father and still be tall, dark, and actually handsome enough to get a nice-looking woman to look at him in a manner that didn’t include repulsiveness—that is, until he opened his mouth—was a wonder to me, and I was sure I wasn’t the only one who shared this wonder.

The illegal dice and craps games were crammed deeper into the club. Zander and I never ventured to these areas, sticking only to our addictions of booze and sex, not wanting another vice, or an addiction, to add to the collection of shit we had to deal with in our own fucked-up lives. But there was more than just gambling in Eddie’s club. Drugs infested the place, which was one the reasons we never came here unless we were completely broke, out of options, and too stupid to call it a night—that, and the fact that Zander used to have a drug problem not too many moons ago.

Most of what the club made, if not all, went to Rogue pockets. Eddie ran the place all by himself. It was his attempt at helping out with the Rogue family business. It was his attempt at not calling himself useless. My father was just nice enough to allow it, turned a blind eye, but with his hand out.

Zander was instantly uncomfortable when we made it to the bar. The bartender knew us, and the drinks were free, but they were always extremely watered down, and even when I wasn’t paying for them, I still felt cheated.

Eddie slapped me on the back of the neck and pulled my head down for a kiss on the cheek. “Tristan!”

“Unc Eddie—”

“Here for pussy?”

“If the fish is fresh, yeah.”

Zander sulked into his glass and ignored his father. “We ain’t got any money, Dad.”

Zander would try to get me to believe that he hated his father, but he didn’t. No matter what a parent does, hating them is almost an impossible emotion to obtain. Not that I put it past anyone. Zander was living outside the
inner Rogue
circle because his father put him there. Like me, Zander deserved it. See, Eddie loved his mixed-breed son, wanted him right next to him when he was working his club.

It hadn’t been a good move. Every Rogue man had some kind of an addiction. Yet, Zander was the poster child for the word. It seemed like he had an addiction for being an addict. Almost like he liked being out of control, beholden to the need of something he couldn’t get internally. His happiness could never come from within, only from the outside. 

Drugs went missing in Eddie’s club, and when they weren’t missing, they were borrowed, and the dealers would confront Eddie, asking for their money that Zander promised he would pay if they gave him the drugs up front. Drug use was not tolerated in the life of the Rogue, and Zander seemed to be in the center of anything that dealt with it. Instead of Zander admitting he had a drug problem when Eddie confronted him, and dealing with the consequences, he fled, married, and had kids, and appeared content without the Rogue life for a few short years. He managed to screw up his marriage and relationship with his kids by having extra women on the side—and yet another suspected drug problem that caused him to beat the shit out of his wife. Finally, when she couldn’t take it no more, she called Eddie, crying and begging him to please help his son, take him away, because she was afraid he would kill her.

Long story short, Zander came back with his tail between his legs. Eddie had pulled him back in the Rogue business but kept him on a very tight leash. It was better than nothing. If Papa had his way, Zander would’ve been dead.

To Papa, weak men were dead men. 

I half suspected the reason Zander was paired with me was because of his bouts with drugs. Papa had wanted me to get mixed up in them too, I guess. Wanted one more strike against me so he could have me killed or completely shunned from the family.

Eddie rolled his eyes at his son. “It’s on the house, like the drinks.” He squeezed Zander’s shoulder. “You look like shit. How about you lay off the sauce some?”

Zander slammed his glass down on the counter. “I don’t drink no more than Tristan does.”

“Tristan holds it a hell of a lot better,” Eddie argued. “And he’s younger.”

“I ain’t that much older.”

“Thirty going on forty-five and look like fifty-three.”

Zander glared hatred at his father, then he turned his stare on me. “And you’re going to tell me Tristan looks like he’s a poster child for
GQ
.”

Eddie chuckled and slapped me on the back again. “He could be; that’s for sure. I would go as far to say he’s God’s gift to a woman’s cunt.”

I laughed to ease the tension. Not the tension between father and son but between the son and me. “You have the best way of wording things, Uncle Eddie.”

I moved between the two and motioned to a man standing in a corner of the club. “Who’s the guy in the leather jacket?”

The man stood out because he was white. He wore a long leather jacket that stopped at his knees, and had black pants and a shirt underneath. He had a beard that had maybe spent two days growing. He held a drink in his hand that hadn’t been drunk, only held long enough for the ice cubes to be almost gone. His eyes weren’t glazed, but sharp and watching. Not enough jewelry to be a pimp and too nicely dressed to be a dope peddler.

Eddie forgot about degrading his son more and slowly turned his head to the man, and then looked back at me. He leaned in to say something, but a fight erupted nearby. Two men were throwing each other all over the floor, punches given and curses shouted over the music as the brawl ensued. Bruiser must have moved through the crowd like a cat that no one seemed to notice until it was in your lap and mauling you with its claws. We watched the Bruiser in his finest moment of strength as he grabbed both men by the collars, rammed them into each other, then moved them toward the exit.

Eddie motioned a chocolate goddess over. Her hair was long and fake, but it was okay. She didn’t look run down by the streets, and if she was an addict, then it was an early addiction and the side effects had yet to show on her face.

“This is Coco.” Eddie pressed his lips against her cheek. “She can be one of you boys’ friend tonight?” He threw a smirk at his son. “How about we settle our little debate, Zander?”

Eddie gently pushed Coco out in front of us. “Here, sweetheart—how about you choose who you want to befriend tonight.”

Coco walked to me. Her hands traced my chest through my sweater.

It was a nice touch and I exhaled.

Here’s my replacement for tonight.

“You,” she said, and it sounded like a whisper with the music. “I want you in me tonight, baby.”

She touched my face, and I tried not to melt in her hands. The man in the corner who looked wrong in this place was pushed to the back of my mind and losing ground fast. Even Eddie and Zander arguing was on its way to being a muted buzz in my ears.