30. Blake
30
BLAKE
There are no words to describe my hatred for Kenneth Stricklin. It’s a hatred that’s consumed me to my core. Poison that’s invaded every part of me and leaves me in a cold, sadistic trance with a taste for blood.
His blood. His destruction .
I bide my time. Wait for the right moment.
I track his every move, the muscles in my face taut. My gaze unblinking and focused.
Inside my chest, my heart hammers away. My pulse surges, leaving me high on adrenaline. Senses heighten to animalistic levels.
Stricklin doesn’t get it.
He’s already a dead man. It’s all about choosing when.
The sick fuck laughs striding toward the bed where Korine’s handcuffed. His eyes gleam in triumph. He boasts about Janessa being obedient and waiting for him. He brags about how I’ll have to watch him have his way with Korine. The tears that track down her cheeks only seem to make him relish the moment more.
The fucker’s got a bulge in his pants.
He stops in front of the bed. His left hand fumbles with his belt buckle. The right keeps his gun trained on either me or Korine.
“I know you’ve missed this, Kor,” he says, licking at his chapped lips. Bruises decorate the rest of his pale face. “You’ve been a bad girl. You thought you would disrespect me and go be this biker’s whore. That’s all over with. I’m going to remind you who you belong to.”
“Ken… don’t do this…” Korine chokes out.
He grins wider, still fumbling with his belt buckle. “Not only am I going to do this, I’m going to enjoy this. I’m going to make this piece of trash biker you love so much watch!”
The opening comes when he still can’t undo his belt buckle. He forgets to keep his aim steady and lets it slip. His attention shifts to the metal prong that’s stuck under the belt’s bar.
I throw myself at him. My priority’s on the arm that holds the gun, on making sure it’s pointed away from Korine. Wrestling it out of his grip. Overwhelming him as I catch him by surprise and take him down.
Korine erupts in a terrified scream. Stricklin howls as my fist connects with his jaw. My other hand’s latched onto the gun. His finger’s curled around the trigger. We tumble down as he squeezes the trigger, and the gun goes off.
BANG!
“BLAKE!” Korine cries, tugging desperately on her binds.
But I can barely hear her. I’m lost to the violence. I’m in attack mode.
I throw my fists. I smash his face. I slam him into the ground. My hand wraps around his throat and his eyes bulge in their sockets. His throat muscles work in desperation against my suffocating grip. He sputters out coughs for air. I lift his head up and ram it back down against the ground.
As hard as I can.
I slam his head down again and then again ’til I’m busting open his skull and blood splatters. Seeing his consciousness fade from his expression only feeds my lust for violence. It only makes me smash him harder. Choke him tighter.
I’m dripping sweat, heaving heavy breaths, on the brink of murder.
So deep down a black hole it takes me another second to realize the bedroom door’s been kicked open and a group of men flood the space. I’m wrenched off Stricklin, pulled upright with my fist still clenched for more.
Mace’s got me. Several others have come with him. Silver tosses a blanket over Korine’s lower half and, together with Moses, they try to uncuff her. Ozzie enters gripping Janessa by the upper arm, asking how she’s involved in what’s gone down.
I haven’t come down from my rush of adrenaline. It roars in my ears. I husk for more breaths and shove Mace from his hold on me.
“You can’t fucking stop me,” I rumble out, the madness inside me uncontainable. It’s broken free and there’s no putting it back in the cage. I whip around to launch myself at Stricklin all over again.
Mace piles onto me to hold me back, clapping his arms around my front. “You can’t kill him! We’ve got to be smart about this. We’ve got guys from the Barreras who are going to?—”
“HE NEEDS TO DIE!” I bark.
“And he will! He’ll suffer! But we’ve got to do it in a way that keeps our hands clean.” Mace grapples with me ’til he’s able to get through to me.
The fury that’s driven me insane fades enough for me to see for the first time in minutes. I struggle for more breath on my come down, my chest heaving up and down. I’m slicked with sweat, blood staining my skin and clothes. Mine and Stricklin’s.
He’s barely alive on the floor. His face is swollen to the point of being grotesque. He curls onto his side and spits up blood and a couple teeth.
The sight should be satisfying, but it’s not when he’s supposed to be dead.
I clench my jaw and grit out, “When?”
“Tonight,” Mace answers. “They’ve got a guy that’ll do it. Even dispose of him. Part of our latest deal.”
“Blake.”
My name’s spoken in a soft cry. Korine’s been set free from the handcuffs trapping her to the bed. The instant our gazes meet, she’s darting toward me with a desperate vulnerability that reminds me where I am and what’s happened.
More than murdering Stricklin matters in this moment.
My girl’s wellbeing takes precedence. I pull her into my arms and press my face into her hair. “Kori,” I breathe, feeling her shake against me, “we need to get you to a hospital.”
“I’ll take this dirtbag downstairs,” Ozzie says. He walks over to yoke Stricklin up off the floor.
None of us see it coming.
Stricklin hacks up more blood and lets Ozzie yank him to his feet. He even lets himself be dragged a couple steps toward the door, practically limp with how loosely he moves. Then, as everybody’s guard’s down, he snatches the Glock 19 that’s strapped to Ozzie’s waist. He aims in our direction and fires.
Mace ducks down. I dive for cover, folding Korine inside of my body.
Bullets fly. Both Stricklin firing Ozzie’s Glock and Mace and Moses shooting back at him.
Stricklin doesn’t hang around. He’s already split from the room. Ozzie’s the first to rush after him.
The adrenaline that had been consuming me earlier returns at full force.
I unwrap my arms from Korine and push myself up off the floor. Both Mace and Korine call after me, but there’s no stopping this time—I dash from the room, leaping over Janessa’s collapsed body—she’s been shot in the crossfire and lays in a puddle of blood. I race down the stairs just as Ozzie chases Stricklin out the front door.
“HE’S MINE!” I roar, leaping down three, four steps at a time.
I shove my way past Ozzie in time to watch Stricklin thrust himself into the front seat of his patrol car. He flicks on the switch that controls the lights and siren and then swings out of the front drive so recklessly he almost rams an older woman out walking her dog. She clutches at her chest in a horrified scream, first from witnessing him almost mow her down, then me as I mount my bike and rumble after him.
We streak through town like this—Stricklin’s patrol car whirring as if he’s racing toward an emergency and me barreling down on him from behind. More than a few times he checks the rearview mirror to make sure I’m still following him, then swerves hard to the left or right. Once, he almost collides with a metro bus picking up passengers.
The farther we make it across town, the more corners Stricklin begins cutting. He weaves between other cars in traffic and runs a red light, narrowly avoiding another crash. He makes a sharp turn around a corner that almost has him mowing down a group of pedestrians. He spins off road across the grassy hills of the park.
All things he does to try and shake me.
Each one I anticipate and work around. As he cuts a path through the park, I circle another way and meet him once he’s careening back onto the streets.
Finally, as his manic desperation becomes too much, he twists around in the driver’s seat and opens fire on me. A skilled rider that’s dealt with my share of shit on the road over the years, he’ll need to try harder. I’m smooth as I glide left, then right, dodging his attempts.
I’m keyed into the same violent urges as earlier. Only difference being I’m smarter this go round. More strategic.
Stricklin’s operating off of the same kind of hunger. He’ll do anything to see me go down. That becomes clear with each law he openly breaks in public. Every wild turn of his patrol car and bullet he fires.
By the time we’re closing in on the trailer park and ravine, he’s broken the law in front of half the damn town.
I hang back far enough to let him self-destruct. Let his mania fester and then implode. All I’ve got to do is trail him, show I’m closing in, and can’t and won’t be stopped. It makes him that much more desperate to beat me.
He contorts himself from the front seat of his patrol car to take aim yet again. His clammy, bruised face shines as he bares his teeth and squeezes the trigger. I anticipate his move, veering left in time to avoid the errant bullet.
Stricklin doesn’t set himself right in time to avoid the row of trees leading to the ravine. The car smashes straight on with one of the towering oak trees. The sound of metal crunching and twisting as it collides with wood decades older echoes for miles across town. Smoke hazes the air, almost obscuring the accordion remains of what was once Stricklin’s patrol car.
I’ve gradually braked coming upon the crash.
The crinkled driver’s side door wobbles open, half off the hinges. Stricklin pours out onto the ground, more bruised and banged up than ever. He’s still clutching Ozzie’s gun as he stumbles onto unsteady feet and half falls, half jogs.
I don’t even got to do anything but walk toward him. He’s not getting away. He’s so fucked up, so disoriented, he’s about to collapse any second.
The sirens of real police and emergency responders ring in the distant background. People around town must’ve called 911.
Stricklin stumbles all the way to the spongy edges of the ravine, where the wild grass meets the strip of water that passes through. In his rush to flee, he trips over some pebbles, landing in a bed of jagged rocks. Rolling over onto his back, his hands tremble as he tries to take aim at me.
“Stay the fuck away!” he coughs out. Blood dribbles down his chin. “You… you must have a death wish, Mr. Cash.”
I don’t stop approaching him, cutting down the distance between us, closing in on him like he’s feared.
“It’s over,” I say. “You lost.”
“I didn’t lose a damn thing!” He double blinks, struggling to keep his right eye open. It’s swollen shut. “You just couldn’t let it be! You couldn’t let me have what was mine!”
“Kori was never yours.”
“SHE’S MY WIFE!” he yells. “She was mine, not yours! But you had to take her away! You had to fucking ruin my life!”
He’s pathetic. It’s never been more obvious than in this moment. As he lays on the bed of rocks, bleeding and swollen, shakily pointing a gun at me, he’s destroyed himself so I don’t have to. He’s got nothing left and he knows it.
Killing him would put him out of his misery. Does he deserve that level of mercy?
Stricklin attempts to steady his grip on the Glock. First he aims it at me with his finger curled around the trigger as if he’s about to do it; he’s about to shoot me.
I couldn’t be less concerned. He’s no threat, even with a loaded gun. He’ll miss if he tries.
And he does.
He squeezes the trigger of the gun. But not at me.
The hatred melts from his bloodied features, morphing into a pitiful clench of sorrow amid a sudden flood of tears. He releases a strangled sound and turns the gun on himself.
The bang rings out. He slumps against the rocks, parts of his body twitching. His fingers and his eyelids. No more than twenty seconds later, the cops and emergency responders we heard in the background are pulling up.
I haven’t moved from where I stand. But I already know what to do when they arrive and fan out onto the scene.
I raise up my hands and wait for the inevitable. Handcuffs slap around my wrists as I’m pulled away…