Slam (The Brazen Bulls MC #3) Read online

  Russ had been the only customer in the bar on this early afternoon, so Jenny focused on the newcomers. The sunlight streaming through the open door cast them in silhouette, and all she saw at first was three sizable blobs. The jukebox wasn’t playing, and the volume on the television above the bar was low, so she could hear the clomp of boots as they came in.

  Then the door closed, and she blinked and saw that they were all wearing kuttes. They were Brazen Bulls. Gunner and Rad and one she didn’t know.

  The last time any of these sons of bitches had blighted her bar had been the year before, when Gunner had shown up out of the blue and coerced her into giving him a recent photo of Kelsey. For Maverick, Kelsey’s father.

  Who had ruined her fucking life and was therefore out of it. Forever.

  Now there were three of them walking toward her. She crossed her arms and turned her attention on Gunner. Of all the Bulls besides Maverick, she knew Gunner best. She’d liked him, in a different life. “What the fuck do you want?”

  Gunner opened his mouth to speak, but it was Rad who answered. With a chuckle in his voice, he said, “Dial it down, darlin’. We don’t mean trouble.” He nodded at Gunner, who reached into his kutte and pulled out a fat, business-size envelope. He held it out to her, and Jenny stared at it, leaving her arms crossed.

  The Bulls gave her money every month, something she supposed Maverick had worked out from prison. It was for Kelsey, and Jenny took it, notwithstanding her intention for Kelsey and her father never to meet. She saved almost all of it, only hitting it in emergencies—like last year, when Kelsey had had meningitis and been in the hospital for eight days. She never wanted to come to rely on that money for her daily living, and she meant it all to be a way for Kelsey to go to college and get her life started.

  She got money from the Bulls on a regular basis, but not like this. Normally one of their hangarounds brought it by. And the envelope was never this thick. From the look of it, it was several times the normal amount.

  Russ had turned on his stool and was considering the Bulls. He was a senior citizen whose body had been devastated a couple of years back in a cancer fight. There was quite obviously nothing he could have done against three big, burly bikers, but he still asked, “Jenny? You need anything here?”

  For that, she spared her regular customer a grateful smile. “Thanks, Russ, but I’m okay.”

  Since she’d made it clear that she wasn’t taking that envelope from him, Gunner set it on the bar.

  “That’s more than usual. This whole thing is more than usual. Why?”

  This time, Gunner did speak. “He’s getting out at the end of the week.”

  “What? Why?”

  She’d kept track of Maverick’s sentence. She knew that he’d been scheduled for release the year before and had had time added, and she knew he was scheduled for release again right before Kelsey’s birthday. If he was getting out this week, it was early—almost a month early. She wasn’t ready. Sharped-edged wings of panic fluttered in Jenny’s belly—and something else, too, something fragile and long unnourished. Even after everything, after the wreck her life had become, her love for Maverick Helm made her quiver.

  All three Bulls, even the big blond she didn’t know, took on the same angry expression, like a shared mask of offense. Rad answered with a snarl. “He did his time. All you need to know.” He turned his glare on Russ, who shrank a little but held his seat.

  Beginning to understand what that envelope and this visit were about, Jenny didn’t want Russ to be privy to the conversation. “Can you give us a few minutes, Russ?”

  He glanced sidelong at the Bulls and then studied her. “You sure?”

  “Yeah. I’m safe.” She believed that, at any rate. They wouldn’t hurt her.

  “Okay. I could go squeeze one out, anyway. I won’t be far.” He slid off his stool headed toward the bathrooms in back.

  Jenny watched him go. When she turned back to the Bulls, she said, “You think you can pay me to let him in. That’s what that is.” She tipped her head toward the stuffed envelope.

  “He’s her dad, Jen,” Gunner said. “He wants to be her dad.”

  “Then he should have been out here, being her dad.”

  “Jesus fuck,” Rad muttered. He slammed his palms on the bar and leaned close.

  Radical Jessup was the club Sergeant at Arms. He was big, a scowl rested more easily on his face than a smile, and he was almost as quick to violence as Maverick. Jenny fought the need to step back, out of his reach. She made herself stand firm and meet his dark, angry eyes.

  “I don’t know what story you worked out in your head to make him a bad guy in this, but he did what he did to protect you—”

  She scoffed, unable to hold it back, and Rad slammed his hands on the bar again, even more forcefully. She was also unable to hold back her flinch.

  “If your life is shit now, that’s on you. You could shove that bastard in a state home and be done with it, but you like playin’ Little Miss Martyr, don’t ya?”

  He was making a lot of assumptions about things he had no knowledge of. “Fuck you, Rad. Get the fuck out of here, all of you.”

  Nobody moved. Then Rad reached out and grabbed her arm. He didn’t hurt her, but he used force to drag her close, until the bar cut across her ribcage, and he put his face right in hers. Jenny wondered whether she’d been right—would he hurt her?

  “It goes like this, Jenny. Maverick is that girl’s father. He wants to be in her life. He’s a Bull. The Bulls got his back. So he will be in his little girl’s life. Whatever we have to do to make that happen. That envelope right there is one way. But there are other ways. You think about that.”

  He glared into her eyes for another few seconds. His eyes were dark, dark brown, so dark his pupils were barely discernible. It was like looking into him and seeing nothing but abyss.

  The words he’d said had been full of threat, but his eyes scared her most of all.

  He let her go with a little shove, and she took a quick couple of steps to keep her feet.

  Rad spun on his heel without another word and stalked to the door. The blond one followed.

  Gunner held back. When Jenny made eye contact with him, he pushed the envelope closer to her. “Jenny, come on. Last year, I told you how bad he needed you and Kelsey. This year has been a fuck ton worse, but he’s finally getting out. You know he’ll be a good dad.”

  She knew no such thing. He was a violent hothead who always had to have his way and never thought about the consequences before letting his fists fly. She’d been raised by exactly such a man, and he had not been a good dad at all. Now, because of Maverick and his flying fists, she was saddled with her father for the rest of his life.

  Jenny didn’t answer Gunner, and she didn’t touch the envelope. Finally, he sighed.

  “Friday. He gets out Friday.” He turned and headed for the door.

  When she was alone in the bar, she picked up the envelope and pulled the flap free. It was stuffed with loose bills. Hundred-dollar bills, all of them. Riffling through it, she estimated that there was twenty thousand dollars in that basic white envelope. Several times more than usual.

  Twenty thousand dollars.

  That was what the Brazen Bulls thought her daughter was worth.

  ~oOo~

  “‘Then he lay down close by and whispered with a smile, ‘I love you right up to the moon—’”

  “‘AND BACK!’” Kelsey yelled the rest of the sentence and grinned up at her.

  Jenny closed the book. “Okay, it’s time for all good little pixies and sprites and fairies and elves to go to sleep. Who do you want a slumber party with tonight?”

  Kelsey sat up and considered the giant herd of stuffed animals corralled on the floor. “Mrs. Misty,” she said.

  Jenny got up from the narrow twin bed and picked up a stuffed Labrador. She handed it to her daughter, who settled it in the crook of her arm, and tucked them both in. She switched off the bedside lamp, swit
ched on the nightlight that cast pink light over the room, and kissed Kelsey’s head. “Good night, pixie. Sweet dreams. I love you.”

  “I love you, too, Mommy. That’s...five.”

  “Yep, that’s five.”

  Pulling the door to, Jenny went down the hall to the living room. Darnell, her father’s second shift nurse, was cleaning up the dinner he’d just fed him. The television was on, showing some cable news program. She stood in the entry to the living room and watched Darnell wipe her father’s mouth.

  Nonstop since the Bulls had stormed the Wayside that afternoon, more than she had since Kelsey was an infant, she’d been thinking about Maverick, her father, and her life.

  The man in that wheelchair was not tall, but he had once been barrel-chested and heavyset. He’d had a thick wave of brown hair and a fleshy face creased with suspicion. He’d been a voluble speaker with a biting humor and an arsenal of offensive jokes and observations, which he’d regularly deployed to cause harm.

  He’d also been capable of sweeping gestures of love. Jenny had grown up pinging between his warm hugs, his cold words, and his stiff belt.

  For the past four years, he’d been the man in that wheelchair: frail, balding, grey, sagging, unable to control his body enough to walk, or feed himself, or handle any of his own needs. For the past four years, he’d had the mind of a six-year-old, and a vocabulary of four words: need, no, now, and Jen.

  Before the wheelchair, he’d been held in a wary esteem by the residents of their East Tulsa neighborhood. In public, he was a neighborhood leader, a businessman, active in civic events and politics and admired for his good works. Jenny felt sure that they’d all known the kind of man he was in private, with his family, but no one had interfered in his private business.

  The Wayside Inn, the tavern her father had opened as a young man, had been a neighborhood touchstone for Jenny’s whole life. For the past four years, she’d run it. And lived again in the house she’d grown up in, with the man in that wheelchair, who’d ruled over her childhood, doling out love and anger in equal portion but wildly erratic manner.

  Earlier in the day, Rad had called her a martyr. From the outside, maybe it looked like she was. Her life would have been easier, certainly, to have left him to become a ward of the State of Oklahoma. He deserved it, certainly.

  She thought about it sometimes. Even with the nursing help she managed to pay for, living this way was hard on Jenny and on Kelsey, too. If she could have afforded a decent place, a private facility instead of a state-run warehouse, she’d probably have done it. But the two shifts of home nursing were hardship enough.

  Still, on the really hard days, she opened her address book to the page for his caseworker and considered arranging any bed she could find for him, anywhere. But one thing stopped her and would always stop her: she needed to be a better person than he’d been. She needed him to know, to the extent that he could, that he hadn’t warped her into an image of himself. That she was a good person. A better person, who took care of her family.

  Did that make her a martyr? Jenny didn’t know. She stared up at the patched ceiling and wondered.

  If he hadn’t become the man in that wheelchair, she would have turned her back on him. She’d been trying to do exactly that when hell had broken loose in her life. Four years ago, almost to the day.

  July 1993

  Jenny was in the kitchen fixing supper when Maverick got home. As always, he came straight to the kitchen and stood behind her, smoothing his hands over her huge belly. She was careful to tip her head so he kissed her right cheek.

  “My girls have a good day?”

  She still hadn’t figured out how to talk to him about her day, so she shrugged and said, “Sure. You?”

  “Normal and dull, so yeah. Smells good. What you got there?”

  “Pork cutlets.” She turned one in the skillet, and the sizzle kicked up beads of hot oil. “And you’re gonna get us both burned if you’re not careful.”

  Another kiss, and he stepped back. Jenny heard the fridge door open and the snap and hiss as he uncapped a beer bottle. He was on her left side now, so she gave her head a subtle shake and made sure her hair was a curtain between him and her face.

  It was stupid. He was going to see; there was no preventing that. She’d had a couple of hours to figure out what to say, how to manage the situation, but her brain had refused to deal with the problem. And it was a big problem. She was thirty-four weeks pregnant. Maverick would lose his shit. He was always on the verge of losing it over her father, anyway.

  She poked at the cutlets and tried to force her pregnant brain to organize last-minute words, but then Maverick came up to her left side and brushed her hair back.

  For a few seconds, the scene froze. He stood there with her hair lying over his hand, holding his beer in the other. She stood staring at the cutlets, the fork in her hand hovering over the skillet.

  “I’m going to fucking kill him.”

  The words slithered slowly out of Maverick’s mouth—he didn’t yell; when he got really angry, he got quieter, not louder. He’d never struck her, but she’d seen the damage he could do with his fists. She’d seen that damage several times.

  He slammed his bottle on the counter and stormed from the room.

  “Mav, wait!” Jenny turned off the burner and hurried after him, as fast as her belly would allow. “Wait! Stop!”

  He ignored her, but he’d pulled his boots off when he’d come in, as usual, and she caught up with him as he was yanking them back on. “Maverick, listen to me. Talk to me. Let this go.”

  “He fucking hit you, Jen.” He scanned her face. “Twice—he hit you twice, didn’t he?”

  She touched her swollen lip, and then her cheekbone. Yes, her father had hit her twice. He’d knocked her down, but she wasn’t going to tell Maverick that. “I provoked him. I made him so mad. I said things I shouldn’t have said when I was alone with him. I knew he’d probably strike out, and I said them anyway.”

  Though she hadn’t planned what had happened, part of her was glad her father had hit her. Sitting on the floor with her mouth bleeding and her eye blackening, Jenny had known that she’d be able to leave him behind. She wouldn’t feel the pull of guilt that had always drawn her back in the past. He’d hit her while she was pregnant. For her daughter, she’d stay away. Cut him out for good.

  “Jesus, listen to yourself! How many fucking different ways can you blame yourself for getting hit?” Maverick yanked his second boot on and grabbed his keys. “This fucking ends now.” He slammed out of the house.

  “Maverick, wait! Please!”

  Jenny didn’t care if Maverick beat her father. She didn’t think he’d actually kill him, but she wouldn’t care if he did. But she would care if he went to prison and left her alone with a new baby, and her father would absolutely press charges. Their hatred was mutual and molten hot. So hot that Maverick wouldn’t stop once he got started.

  Jenny worked her swollen feet into her sneakers and waddle-ran out to her car.

  ~oOo~

  Maverick must have gone like hell on wheels, because by the time she pulled up in front of the house, she could hear the crash of violence coming from inside.

  The front door was standing open, and the ruckus was loud enough that it had drawn the attention of her father’s next-door neighbor. Mr. Turner was crossing between their yards with a shotgun in his hands.

  “Stay back, Jenny!” he yelled. “There’s some kinda trouble inside! I called the police.”

  “Wait!” she called, but Mr. Turner ignored her and ran into the house.

  She got through the door just as the neighbor fired a blast into the ceiling. Plaster showered over him, and Jenny was distracted by the snowy scene. Then she turned and found Maverick and her father on the floor.

  The blast hadn’t distracted Maverick at all. He was straddled over her father, perfectly silent, dealing blow after blow, all with his dominant arm. The blows had torn her father’s face to shr
eds, and a pool of blood oozed out around his head.

  Her father’s only movement was the rocking and twitching reactions of his body to the blows. His eyes were open, but he wasn’t fighting at all or even resisting.

  As Mr. Turner cocked the shotgun again, sirens sounded outside.

  A sharp spasm clenched across her belly, and Jenny cried out. That stopped Maverick. He jumped up and came to her, laying his hands on her belly—hands dripping with her father’s blood.

  “Babe, you okay?”

  As a cop outside used a bullhorn to announce their presence, Jenny knew that no, she wasn’t okay and never would be.

  Maverick had killed her father, and law was right there with them. He was going away for murder and leaving her alone to raise their child.

  CHAPTER THREE

  At wake-up on the day of his release, Maverick’s eyes were already wide open. He wasn’t sure he’d closed them, even to blink, all night. He’d lain on his bunk with his two photos of his daughter on his chest, his hands folded over them, and he’d let his imagination run. On that night, for the first time in years, he let himself really think about what he would do on the outside, how he would live in freedom.

  He’d gotten word at the beginning of the week that he was being released almost a month early. Just a summons to the warden’s office for a three-minute meeting in which he was told he would be released on Friday. No reason was offered, and Maverick hadn’t bothered to ask for one because he hadn’t believed it was true. He’d simply nodded and gone back to his prison life.

  But in the days that followed, he’d been given information about release procedures and told how to handle his scant belongings and insignificant affairs. The guards had left him alone and pulled him off a scheduled fight. Evans had sneered in irritation and said it wouldn’t do to mess up his pretty face.