Sly (3 page)

“Your ass better be down here in five minutes if you don’t want to be out of a job.”
 

I shook my head and looked skyward as I made the turn toward the freeway.
 

“Hello is what you’re looking for,” I said. “You could even politely ask me if you caught me in the middle of something, Lewis.”
 

“Fuck you, Scarlett,” he said. “You know damn well how bad it looks when I have to make excuses for you.”
 

“Your level of delusion is starting to concern me and piss me off. I’m just leaving Hurley’s shop. It’s a twenty-minute drive. Unless you’ve built me a teleporter, you can tell the client to expect me in about nineteen minutes and thirty seconds. Don’t forget it’s your ass that
I’m
saving here. What’s the drill, Lewis? Do I usually meet with the clients or do you?”
 

Dead silence. Heavy breathing.
 

“That’s what I thought you said,” I said. “I’m what you call the talent, my friend. And I said I’m on my way. And I’ll be glad to tell the client when I get there how
your
little fuck-up has probably ruined his chances of getting a good result with this one.”
 

Silence. Good. Let the little fucker stew for a minute on whether I’d really do just what I said. Lewis Fitz had been a thorn in my side for going on five years. I’d made a bit of a career cleaning up his messes, which sucked. Except for that fact that it had also been a singularly lucrative career. This job though ... maybe it wasn’t the Big One ... but it had real potential to be the Last One. Then I could finally retire.
 

After a string of epithets and panicked apologies, Lewis clicked off and my satellite radio came back on. Lewis. I had to keep reminding myself why I put up with him. It had started out as sentimentality. He’d been my brother’s partner and one of the last connections I had to Mickey. And there was an advantage to having Lewis act as go-between with the clients. It kept my life much cleaner that way. But his greed and paranoia were becoming a real problem. With any luck, I’d soon be in a position to never have to deal with him or the clients again.
 

I pressed the pedal, hitting close to ninety. But there was no one around. Just open road and a mountain vista in front of me. I told them twenty minutes, but at this rate, I’d be there in ten. I knew I should slow down, but I didn’t want to. Not for anything.  I had the top down and the wind whipped against my face so hard it stung. My hair flew in a tangled mess behind me. I turned up the stereo, blaring Radiohead loud enough my ears stung too.
 

What the hell am I doing here? I don’t belong here.
It suited my mood.
 

In that moment I was free. Freer than I’d felt in months. Maybe years. It was just a small taste of what might lie ahead of me if I could just get through this next job. It would be easy.  It
should
be easy. Except they were never easy. And I couldn’t get the image of Sly Cullinan’s devilish dimple out of my head and how solid his chest felt when I touched the soft leather of his cut. So maybe this job wouldn’t be so easy. But it didn’t mean I couldn’t have a little fun before I had to do it.
 

He might come in a pretty package, but I wouldn’t—couldn’t—forget who Sly really was. An outlaw M.C. was an outlaw M.C. It didn’t matter if their patch read Great Wolves or Devil’s Hawks, or Red Brigands. They were one and the same and what I had to do would be a service to society. I knew all too well the carnage they left in their wake. Once upon a time, I had been part of that carnage. When I finished this job, it wouldn’t change the world, but at least for a little while, the people of Green Bluff, California could sleep a little easier.
 

***
 

Lewis waited for me at the end of the winding gravel driveway before a looming yellow farmhouse. It seemed an odd choice for this type of meeting, but I’ve definitely been to odder places. A couple of dozen dairy cows grazed in the field to the west and Lewis wrinkled his nose when the wind shifted. He looked out of place in his ill-fitting three-piece suit.
 

“Nice touch,” I said as I got out of the car. My eyes went to his ridiculous snakeskin cowboy boots. Splattered mud covered the steel tips of them and the hem of his suit pants. I gathered my unruly mass of hair in one hand. There was nothing to do for it but wind it into a top knot until I could get my hands on some conditioner and a hair brush.
 

“You look like a fucking hillbilly,” he said, eyeing my cutoff shorts and flip flops.  I flipped him off.
 

“We meeting inside?” I asked, walking straight past him and up the steps to the wrap-around porch. The thing was complete with a suspended swing and cane rocking chairs. It looked more like a Cracker Barrel than an outlaw biker’s hideout and I supposed that was the point.
 

Before Lewis could answer me, the screen door swung open and one of the said outlaw bikers came halfway out. He didn’t bother to disguise the lustful look he gave me. His thin mouth curled into a smirk and his eyes settled straight on my tits. This. This had been what I expected when I ran into Sly Cullinan and his crew. Well, I’d give them credit for better manners, but not by much.
 

“Boss is getting impatient,” he said, directing it to Lewis behind me. Great. It meant Lewis had been giving them his version of what happens next. It was going to make it that much harder for them to understand how I work.
 

I didn’t wait for Lewis, I went through the screen door. The creep at the door puffed his chest out, making sure I’d have to rub against him a little before I could pass. One more move like that and I’d drop him on his ass. Yeah, these guys definitely needed an education in how I worked starting right the hell now.
 

I turned as Lewis started to walk in behind me.  “You,” I said, crooking my finger at him.  “The less you talk from now on, the better. Don’t forget why you need me here, understand? If not, the next step I take is going to be back out that door.”
 

Lewis’s eyes flicked from me to the creep. He had a different kind of smirk on his face and it made me glad. This guy might be a lot of things I hated, but maybe stupid wasn’t one of them. I turned to the creep and held out my hand.
 

“Forget everything this asshole has told you,” I said. “You’re dealing with me now. My name is Scarlett Shaw. You can address me as Ms. Shaw from now on if you plan on staring at my chest. Scarlett if you remember your manners. What do you want me to call you?”
 

The creep’s face lit up. He was shorter than me by a couple of inches, wide through the shoulders with a pot belly that hung between the leather lapels of his vest. He had wispy blond hair that hung past his shoulders and I realized I’d maybe been a little hard on him when I judged him for the smirk. It was permanent. The guy had a badly mended cleft palate that gave his whole face a certain lopsided charm.
 

“Jinx,” he said. “You can call me Jinx.”
 

I laughed. “Well, Jinx. Let’s work on you not living up to your name.”
 

“Boss is in the back,” he said, practically shutting the door on Lewis. Good. Jinx learned quickly. Let’s hope his boss did too.
 

“You know I’m going to have to pat you down, Ms. Shaw,” Jinx said.
 

I crossed my hands in front of me and thrust my right hip toward him where my small leather purse hung. “I have a Glock 26 in my purse. If handing it over is a requirement for entry, I’ll save you the trouble and leave right now.”
 

“Is it loaded?” he asked. I lowered my chin, thinking I maybe needed to lower my opinion of his intellect again.
 

Jinx smiled. “Fair enough. You might wanna refrain from any sudden movements though. Boys back there tend to get a little twitchy.”
 

“Sounds like we have a few things in common then.”
 

Then Jinx put his hands on me. I took a steeling breath as he ran his sausage fingers over my rib cage and past my hips. He patted my back pockets, satisfying himself I wasn’t carrying a knife. I opened my purse to show him my gun.
 

“You make any move toward that it’ll be the last thing you do,” he said, lifting his vest flap to show me his holstered piece.
 

“Right,” I said, confident in my ability to outdraw this asshat if it came to it. “We going this way?” I pointed toward the hallway.
 

Jinx nodded and nudged me ahead of him. Lewis brought up the rear. I didn’t like the long hallway we headed down. We passed four closed doors. But the doors stayed shut and Jinx
took us through the kitchen and out the back door. A cookout was in full swing. I scanned the yard quickly. Two men stood at the grill with nothing more lethal than beers in their right hands. Each had a bulge against their sides under their cuts but their focus was on the rack of ribs on the grill and each other.
 

Four other men sat around a long picnic table. They straightened when Jinx brought me out. I got leers from two of them, but I knew instantly to pay closest attention to the guy at the end of the table. He was big and broad-chested like a gorilla. From a distance, he would have looked like a much older man. He wasn’t though. Late fifties, probably. But he had a head of striking white hair that he’d clubbed in back. He sported a white handlebar mustache and fixed his clear blue eyes at me. The others looked to him. He smiled when he saw me; his eyes darted to Lewis but then settled on me and stayed there.
 

Shrewd, I thought. And careful. The rest of these guys would take their cue from him. If shit went wrong today, it would start with some small gesture from him. I’d have to watch him close.
 

“This is Scarlett Shaw,” Jinx said. Lewis sputtered behind us, trying to catch up. Lewis was a pain in my ass, but he wasn’t stupid either. He knew he’d already lost control of the meeting. Actually, he’d
never
had control of it and the fact that he didn’t get that is what made him dangerous.
 

“Mr. Kagan,” I said. I took a step forward but didn’t extend my hand to his. I regretted my wardrobe at the moment. It had been necessary though, for the first phase of this job. Still, even at my height, it’s hard to look imposing in flip flops and red toenail polish.
 

Kagan gave a look to the other three men sitting at the table and they practically tripped over themselves to get up and leave. They didn’t go far though. They went to other corners of the yard. Between them and the guys at the grill, I was pretty much surrounded. I came around and took a seat on the other side but not directly across from Kagan. Lewis sighed and came to sit next to me.
 

“Sorry about the long drive,” Kagan said. “Meetings take place on my turf or not at all.”
 

I nodded and answered while Lewis sputtered. “Of course. It’s better for me anyway.”
 

“So you wanna tell me how you plan to fix your partner’s fuck-up?”
 

My turn to shoot a wry smirk in Lewis’s direction. Here was the crux of the matter. How to spin Lewis’s mistakes, keep the job, and keep from getting my head blown off. And I would
love
to get to a point in my life where I wouldn’t care if Lewis’s got blown off.
 

“Can we speak freely out here, Mr. Kagan?” I said.
 

He nodded. “That’s one of the reasons you’re here, Sweetness.”
 

“I think we can all agree that what happened last night was a disaster. Amateur hour.”
 

Lewis kept sputtering. His face had gone purple and he looked at me with murder in his eyes.
 

“But you agreed to it,” I said, leveling a stare at Kagan. “You signed off on it.”
 

I heard some rumblings from some of Kagan’s men. Clearly, they weren’t used to anyone talking to the president of the Devil’s Hawks M.C. this way. Tough shit.
 

Kagan narrowed his eyes at me then shot a look to Jinx behind me. “You check her?”
 

I turned as Jinx nodded but some of the color left his face. “She’s got one in her purse.”
 

My purse was currently on the table in front of me but readily accessible for the amount of good it would do me. If Kagan wanted me dead, sure I’d probably be able to take out a few of his guys first, but I’d still be dead. I was outnumbered. But I knew that’s not what he wanted.
 

“You know that’s not what I’m talking about.” Kagan directed the comment to me.
 

My heart raced, but I expected this. One last job. If I could just keep this particular fish on the hook.  This was dangerous, yes. But if Kagan planned to kill either of us, he wouldn’t have asked to meet him in his own backyard. Of course, that didn’t mean his plans couldn’t change.
 

“I don’t know you,” he said. “Your partner bungled a simple job last night. And now you show up asking
me
questions. The kind of questions that make me nervous. I need a little show of good faith. Your partner’s not wearing a wire. Are you?”
 

Jinx made a move toward me and I put a hand up. I got to my feet and stepped to the end of the table. Kagan was smart. I could respect that at the same time I wanted to rip his sneering face off. But I was a big girl and this was business. Five years. If things went well, this would be my tenth hit. Ten and out. That was the deal I’d made with myself.
 

 I straightened my back and lifted the hem of my t-shirt, bringing it over my head in one quick jerk. Kagan’s eyes glistened and settled on my chest. I stood before him in my plain, white bra. He lifted his chin and shot a look to Jinx. I would
not
let any of these assholes lay a hand on me. They could eye fuck me all they wanted but that’s where it would end.