White Wolves MC: A BWWM Interracial Romance (2 page)

“Mercedes Powell,” Doug said, pulling a folder out of his brief case. He tossed it on the table and a black and white photograph of a serious looking young woman in her late 20’s tumbled out. Beneath that, a resume that looked to be several pages thick, at least.

Powell. Mercedes Powell. Why did that name sound familiar?

Wait.

Shit.

She was Fred’s wife. She was black. That might not fly in the White Wolves. As the name might indicate, it was begun as an all-whites gang back in the day. Even now, we’ve only got a handful of Latino guys, and that’s it…

“Mercedes Powell…” I said hesitantly, reaching for the picture. I remembered the pictures Fred had shown me, back in Afghanistan, back in Kabul, when we were talking about our girls back home. I didn’t have one. Fred had a beautiful young wife finishing up law school.

And then, a sniper took off his head three days before he was to go home for her graduation. I pulled his lifeless corpse into our HUMVEE as the other Marines lit up the city block, shooting anything that moved in a desperate attempt to waste the sniper. We didn’t find Fred’s killer, but we did liquefy a few stray dogs. In the meanwhile, Fred went home in a body bag, his skull still sprinkled on the dusty, off-white wall of an abandoned physician’s clinic somewhere in downtown Kabul.

It had to be her. I remembered those eyes, that thick darkhair—she had been younger when I saw the pictures of her, and she had grown up a bit, grown serious—but who could blame her, after what she must have been through? I found myself biting the inside of my lip, biting it so hard it was on the verge of bleeding.

And then, I felt the coppery, hot blood spilling onto my tongue.

Mercedes Powell. She was going to be my partner. Not only that: she was going to pretend to me by old lady, my main squeeze, my bitch—you know a man’s a biker when he can only relate to women with the most infantile fucking titles.

“Everything okay there, Viper?” Doug asked after a few moments while the waitress I had groped silently cleaned up the mess I had made. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“You could say that.”

“What do you mean?”

“Nothing,” I said, shaking my head, pushing thoughts of Fred and Mercedes, thoughts of that dusty street in Kabul with the sun directly overhead, baking Fred’s blood into the earth, his corpse slick with gore as I heaved it into the back seat of our ride.

“Nothing at all. Everything’s dandy. When do I meet Agent Powell?”

MERCEDES

I felt the cold, hard plastic of my pistol in my vest pocket. A standard issue FBI Glock. How was it still so cold, even when everything around us was so warm?

Winston sat next to me in the passenger seat of the white Ford Bronco we had been assigned for this mission.

“Powell, are you okay?” he asked carefully, his dark eyes searching. Although you’d never guess it from his name, Winston Bragg, he was Haitian—having grown up in Miami, he spoke Creole and Spanish fluently, in addition to being nearly six and a half feet tall.

We made an odd pair, the two of us: him, a massive hulk of a man, terrifying to behold whether in a suit or undercover, while I, petite, dusky skinned, my dark brown hair pulled back into a bun, wouldn’t terrify anyone.

“Yeah,” I grunted. “Fine. Let’s do this.”

“Go over the plan once more?”

“Bolo will be here in ten minutes. He’ll have 90 kilos of cocaine to sell us. Once the deal goes down, our back up will swoop in and we’ll make the arrest. Easy as pie.”

Winston had been the point for this mission, handling all the communications with Bolo, a well-known Haitian gangster whom Winston had even known while growing up—they had lived down the hall from one another in the same housing project back in the day, though Bolo apparently didn’t recognize Winston anymore.

The negotiations had continued apace for weeks, with shifty go-betweens preceding a final meeting between us and Bolo. He was a big man, as big as Winston, but not nearly as handsome, not nearly as put together. While Winston wore his hair cropped short, Bolo had let his hair grow long into dreadlocks, which he wrapped around his head or otherwise put up into a bun. In addition, he had at least four or five golden teeth which created a horrifying effect whenever he smiled.

Our official story was that I was a nightclub owner and Winston was my head of security. Bolo had seemed uncomfortable with the idea of a woman taking part in negotiations but as soon as we revealed how much we knew about the price of cocaine in Miami (and, after all, who would know better than us, the FBI?) he seemed to relax, ready and willing to cut a deal for us.

And now, it had all come to this—it had all come down to this meeting in a deserted dockyard, lit only by the ghostly glow of street lamps and ships drifting out to sea.

“You locked and loaded?” I asked, my voice little more than a whisper. I had a bad feeling about this. A feeling I hadn’t had in a long time.

“I sure am,” Winston replied, cocking his pistol. We had to be ready for anything.

The last time I had this feeling? It was when Fred was deployed.

The last time he was deployed. The last time I said goodbye to him. I had the dead, sick, nauseous feeling in my stomach of someone who knows that she’s talking to a living corpse. I had it now and I hated it.

I wanted to get this over with, but I was afraid of what that might bring.

A trio of black cars approached, like harbingers of the apocalypse.

“This’ll be them,” Winston muttered. I reached into the back seat of our SUV and seized a suitcase. It was full of cash—real cash. We couldn’t risk Bolo noticing counterfeits, since he would invariably check. But every fourth bill was marked—not enough to draw suspicion, but enough that we’d be able to track Bolo’s spending. If he got away. If we didn’t.

If things went wrong.

We both exited our car, the last piece of protection left for us as we strode towards the cars.

A group of about twelve men left the cars. Centered among them, with guards flanking him on either side, was Bolo—looking like some sort of horrific voodoo demon, grinning in the darkness.

“Well, well, well…” he cackled gently. “I didn’t think you’d all show up.”

“We’re here,” I replied. “Let’s see the goods.”

Bolo jerked his head and three of his guards broke off, jogging around to the back of their cars. The kilos of cocaine, wrapped into neat little bricks, began to spill out of the trunks of the identical black cars. It was as if these were demonic little sprites, building a castle of misery out of black and white, playing a children’s game the entire time.

But this was no game.

One of the guards approached us. He handed a gleaming white brick to Bolo, who drew a switchblade from his back pocket, a clean, long Italian model. He sliced a tiny, perfectly thin cut into the brick of cocaine, just enough to tease out a slow stream of powder. He spread it over his finger and snorted it, shuddering in pleasure.

“Not bad. Not bad at all.”

He tossed the brick to Winston, who ran the cocaine along his finger and lifted it to his nose without skipping a beat. Winston shuddered too, but I knew he’d be able to keep his wits about him. This was something we’d planned for—Winston was no stranger to drugs, given where he’d grown up, after all, and he would be at least familiar with the rush coursing through his veins right now, not to mention the crash that would be coming in about twenty minutes, give or take.

Winston turned to me and nodded.

“It’s clean. Solid stuff.”

“Right. Then we’re getting our money’s worth…” I said, my voice tight.

“Speaking of which…” Bolo hissed, his lips twisted into a cruel grin.

I held up the briefcase and cracked it open. Bolo approached, his grin still gleaming as he peered ever closer at the cash.

“No sequentials. Bolo like, Bolo like,” he growled.

“Are we good?” Winston asked impatiently. From where he stood directly in front of me, Bolo peered up at the other Haitian standing next to me, peeking over the rims of his horror show glasses.

“We good…” he said slowly. “You look familiar.”

My eyes widened in spite of myself. In spite of my years of training. No. No. No. Fuck.

“You look like… The Bragg boy at Roseland…”

Roseland was the name of Winston’s housing project growing up. The same as Bolo’s.

“We lived on the same floor,” Bolo growled, though his growl was slow, drawn out, as if spilling out of a dream. “But you became a cop and I became a gangster…”

I dropped the case and drew my pistol in a single smooth motion.

“FBI. Bolo Lacroix, you’re under arrest…” I started to say but I lost my balance when Winston threw his hand out, knocking me back and out of the way of the salvo of fire coming from Bolo’s guards.

“Fucking rats! Fucking cunts!” Bolo screamed, drawing his own pistol, unloading into Winston. My partner crumbled like a paper doll, making horrific noises that I had never heard a human make.

We were being monitored this whole time, though. Two helicopters lit up the skies over the dock, with agents pinned to the sides, prepared to rappel down to back us up.

“This is the Federal Bureau of Investigation…” a loudspeaker began. “Lay down your weapons and place your hands on your head. You are surrounded…”

I saw Bolo take off running and I found my trigger. I unleashed two well-placed shots into his leg, sending him sprawling.

The other gangsters had already begun to scatter. I rolled onto Winston, his dark face terrifyingly pale.

“Bragg, Bragg, Bragg…” I gasped, tearing away at his shirt, desperate to stop the bleeding.

“Mercedes…” he grunted, blood spurting out of his mouth. “Bolo… Arrest Bolo… Otherwise…”

I knew what he was going to say.

If we didn’t arrest Bolo, then this all would have been for nothing.

I pressed my lips to Winston’s sweaty forehead and took off running, into the darkness, into the dockyard.

Bolo was easy to track. He left a trail of blood in his wake. And even if he hadn’t, he was no professional. He screamed at me the entire time, staggering loudly from shipper container to shipping container.

“You fucking… Fucking bitch!” he screamed as I took careful, slow steps, my pistol up and level.

“Bolo, it’s all over. We’ve got an ambulance waiting to take care of that leg…”

“Fuck you, cunt!” he screamed. I pivoted around a corner and almost ate a mouthful of lead from his sidearm.

“Bolo Lacroix, you’re shooting at a federal agent right now. I don’t think I need to tell you what kind of suck you’re going to be in when this is all over.”

“Eat me, cunt…” he yelled, his curses degenerating into a long string of incomprehensible Creole slurs.

I could have waited for back up, but I was mad. And I wanted the satisfaction of taking Bolo down myself.

And, to be completely honest with you… I didn’t care if I lived or died. I hadn’t, not since Fred died. It’s probably what made me such a good agent.

I reached inside my flak vest and found a flash bang. I clicked its fuse and lobbed it gracefully towards Bolo. A brilliant burst of light cut through the muggy Miami night and as it dissipated, I dashed around the container, my gun drawn.

I found Bolo propped up against washed out green shipping container, his blood splattered all around in a lewd, disgusting pattern, as if he had been trying to offend us in death. He squinted at me, started shooting, but his rounds went wild and in a second, I was on top of him.

In the academy, we learned Krav Maga and my instructor had always told me I was a natural. My knee connected solidly with Bolo’s jaw and then I slammed the barrel of my Glock onto the bridge of his nose, shattering it with a sickening crack. As he screamed, my fists connected with his throat, his face, and then my elbows, for good measure.

I worked my hands around onto his sweaty neck, under his unwashed, bloodied dreadlocks. I forced his face down into the concrete, taking no pains to be gentle. I took special pleasure in grinding his glasses into the pavement as I forced his arm behind his back, and then the other, finally slapping handcuffs onto him in triumph.

“You’re under arrest,” I whispered. “You have the right to remain silent…”

As I dragged his beaten and broken form back to the meeting point, I saw the results of the sting: the entire dock was full of cops, FBI, and ATF, milling around, taking reports, treating wounds. All over but the shouting.

And then, there, in the middle of it, I saw a form being loaded into an ambulance, covered in a white sheet deformed by huge red splotches.

I pushed Bolo into the arms of a nearby cop and took off running, hoping against hope that the body beneath the sheet wasn’t who I thought it was. He wasn’t wounded that badly. He wasn’t. He wasn’t.

He was. I knew it.

Doug Wong, my boss, caught me before I could reach the ambulance.

“No, damn it!” I screamed at him, sending a hard jab his way. He caught it almost effortlessly, his hands like steel vices gripping. God, how was a desk jockey this strong?

“Powell, relax, relax… There’s nothing you can do.”

“No! No! No!”

“Mercedes, Mercedes, Mercedes…” he said, repeating, his voice firm. “You got Bolo. You and Winston did.”

“And he’s…”

“Yes.”

I pushed Doug away and watched the ambulance take off, knowing that it was going to the morgue and not the hospital.

“I’ll kill that cock sucker…” I hissed, turning to the cop who was loading Bolo into a squad car. I started off, reaching to load another magazine into my pistol as Doug caught me.

“No, you won’t. He’s going to get a trial. He’s going to tell us the details of his operations. And we’re going to shut him down and put him in jail for the rest of his life.”