Chapter 35
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
S aint…
“You ready to do this?” Axe asked me, and I grinned savagely.
“Fuck yeah,” I said.
It’d been a few weeks, maybe even a couple of months since we’d disposed of Basilisk and had rushed Temperance out of town.
Velina had resumed playing Louie, and it was for the best, honestly. She was able to keep her ear to the ground and still move in the Bayou Brethren’s circles, even if it was more on the periphery than before.
She’d played things careful, keeping things to text with Carver and playing the game of a girl with her feelings hurt after the way he’d treated her surrounding her supposedly being sick and “ditching” him at the bar.
They’d taken a break, and he’d kept trying, while she’d kept stringing him along, acting skittish, and only agreeing to meet with him publicly in the Quarter, and not allowing him to pick her up or drop her off.
She played it like he needed to rebuild trust with her and gave him the illusion that she’d give up her pussy at the end of the fucked-up rainbow, and he bought it. Which is right where we wanted him.
Tonight was the night that she would lead him right to us and that she planned to retire Louie altogether.
We had plenty else to go on for the rest of the club by way of the information Temperance had been imparting.
We’d spent the last several weeks compiling her info, doing reconnaissance, pinning photos to boards, and mapping movements.
We weren’t just sourcing the information from Temperance, either. We’d greased some palms in the city and had more help than the Brethren reckoned. A lot of the bars in the Quarter were sick of them coming in and starting shit and were more than willing to help us out to get rid of the problem. We knew that would only be a matter of time, but the waiting was killer by the same token.
Axe and I lounged on our bikes, waiting for Velina’s signal that they were leaving the bar and heading for her hotel room. She’d moved from the LaChiquita into my house with me, but we still rented a room at a cheaper, even less savory place on the edge of the Ninth.
Yes, it was further from her cover job cleaning hotel rooms in the Quarter, but at the same time, it was closer to us and our stomping grounds. It also was in a hood where no one would call in gunfire, nor would anyone ask questions. It was a place where everyone minded their own fucking business.
She’d used the excuse of an outrageous rate hike to make the move, and the dipshit she was going with had bought it all hook, line, and sinker.
I got the text and sat up. “They’re on their way this way.”
Axe smiled and cracked his knuckles. We were waiting and watching. It wouldn’t be long, now.
We let ourselves into the room next door to the one Velina had and waited. Our bikes were in a parking lot over the low cinderblock wall separating the properties. Conveniently, the wall was high enough to keep the bikes hidden from the parking lot. There was only one angle you could approach from where they would be visible, and Velina and her quarry would, one hundred percent, be coming in from the opposite direction, so it was good.
We heard a bike outside, and Axe peeked out the curtain and said, “Yeah, it’s them.”We kept our fucking mouths shut.
Game. Set. Match, motherfucker, I thought, and we both waited at the door adjoining the two rooms, listening intently.
The main door to the outside opened, and I heard Velina’s familiar giggle. My blood pressure spiked when those giggles I so coveted were accompanied by the sounds of kissing and masculine laughter.
Axe put a hand on my shoulder, and I scowled at him. He took it off, holding it up in surrender, and gave me a look like okay, I just needed to make sure.
We waited until the bed squeaked under their combined weight before slipping through the conjoined door.
Velina was straddling him, and she pushed up off his chest with her hands, tearing her mouth from his and sitting up.
I put the plastic bag over his head and kneeled, pulling it tight over his face.
He bucked and fought, and Velina stared down at him dispassionately. No, that wasn’t right. To stare at him dispassionately would imply that she had any kind of emotion on her face, which she didn’t. She just stared with a blank expression and rode him as he clutched at his face and scrabbled at his throat while Axe took up position.
Dude wasn’t completely dumb. He opened his mouth wide and punched a hole in the bag with his finger. I ripped it off his head just in time for Axe to press the barrel of his gun to the guy’s forehead.
He held up his hands in surrender, and Velina sat back on him.
“Not so happy to see them, huh?” she asked.
“You fucking bitch .” His tone was full of a venom, and I knocked the taste right out of his mouth with a swift punch to his jaw.
“You’ll respect my woman,” I growled.
“No need, baby,” Vel said. “I don’t want his respect.”
He looked from me to her as Axe pressed the gun into his face a little more insistently.
“I just want to know one thing,” she said.
“I’m listening,” he said cautiously, and I could see him running the math on if or how he would get out of this.
“Were you there the night your club pulled the drive-by on their club?” she asked, tilting her head in our direction.
“Yeah,” he said. “We all were.” He grinned slowly and savagely.
Velina pushed off of him and climbed back off the bed.
“You killed my brother, Louie, that night,” she said and turned her attention to Axe and me. “If it’s all the same to you boys, you can go ahead and make this as slow, painful, and bloody as you’d like.”
“Oh, we plan to,” Axe said. “Just not here.”
I took out my burner and made the call. When the line picked up, I said, “Yeah, we got a quarter slab of gator for the smokehouse.”
The line went dead.
It didn’t matter who had picked up, the result would be the same. A couple of the guys would come by with the van. Ol’ Carver may or may not feel just what his name felt like out at the smokehouse while his bike would be left in the lot for later. With any luck, it’d be the only way to identify his body by the time we got done with our plans.
Velina stood by and said, “I’ll tell you one thing, this room’ll never be cleaner in its whole existence by the time I get done with it.”
I nodded, but my eyes were on Carver, who was breathing heavy and was about to take a deep breath to holler. I clocked him with a set of brass knuckles I pulled out of my pocket, and he went out like a traffic light.
“I promise to make it hurt, baby,” I said, and Velina smiled.
“Oh, I know y’all will. I’m counting on it, in fact,” she said.
“For Louie,” Axe said, and she raised her solemn green eyes to his and nodded.
“For Louie, so there are no more Louies, and for me, if you don’t mind,” she said.
Axe grinned. “You got it,” he said.
Torture is a laborious business, and Carver ended up being a tough nut to crack – but crack him, we did.
He confirmed a lot of what we already knew and gave us more than a few nuggets of wisdom that we didn’t. But it was pretty fuckin’ apparent by the time we finished with him that we’d wrung everything we were going to get out of him that we could and that we had our work cut out for us when it came to culling the Bayou Brethren herd.
Of course, we could run through every single bottom-feeding hang-around, prospect, and fuckin’ member, but it wouldn’t do any good.
No, we needed to cut the head off the snake, and that would prove to be much harder.
There were only a couple of guys in the upper echelon of the Bayou Brethren who knew where Lazarus hung out on the regular, and nobody knew where he laid his bald fuckin’ fucked-up head.
It was frustrating, but we’d made progress.
Baby steps, I guess.
By the time Axe and I returned and got our bikes, false dawn was a glimmer on the horizon.
We posed Carver’s body and torched the motel. We’d done things right. There were no broken bones. By the time the fire got done with him, there wouldn’t be enough left to determine a cause of death, and it would be chalked up to smoke inhalation or burning.
It’d be a while before anyone called it in. We’d rented out practically the whole place under the table. It was on the verge of shutting down anyway, being considered a nuisance property.
Wasn’t going to be a problem anymore except clearing the land and making yet another empty lot in the Ninth.
I went home.
Velina was waiting up for me, watching some shit on television that I had no interest in. Some sappy romance series or something.
I guess she needed sappy after doing what we’d done. I didn’t know.
I showered and came to bed, stretching out beside her and kissing her firmly, checking with her by asking, “You doing alright?”
“Pfft,” she said. “I’m fuckin’ great . You have no idea how relieved I am that I never have to see or deal with that asshole again.”
I chuckled and asked, “You quit yet?”
“If by quit you mean I walked out of my last shift with no intention of ever going back, then yeah.”
I snorted and said, “I thought you liked it there.”
“Yes, and no,” she said with a gusty sigh. “It was alright, but I’ll be much happier leaving my Louie girl persona behind and just being Velina.”
“Gonna have to avoid the Quarter for a while,” I said.
“That’s about the only bummer out of all this,” she said. “I like it there.”
“Well, I thought we might head on out to Florida for a bit, soak up some sun, check on your friend, take a breather from it all.”
“I really like the sound of that,” she said.
“We’ll get rid of your car and take Temprence hers,” I said. “Make it look like Louie just moved on to another city, just like she planned all along.”
“Sounds good to me. I’m not that attached to my car. Not sure what I’ll do in the meantime, but honestly, I’m due for some kind of an upgrade.”
“We’ll get that shit sorted. For now, it can stay in the garage,” I said. She nodded.
“So, how’d it go?” she asked, and I gave her a look.
“Good,” I told her.
“Good,” she said with relief and dropped the subject.
She was learning.
“I love you,” she said spontaneously, cuddling up to my side and laying her head on my shoulder.
I put my arms around her and held her tight.
“I love you, too, baby,” I said, then asked, “You doing alright? For sure?”
She nodded against me, and her silence told me all I needed to know. She would be okay. She would remain loyal, but for right now, in this moment, she struggled a little, which was only natural. She was still so shiny and new to all of this.
“You sleep at all?” I asked.
She said, “No, I waited for you.”
Ah…
“Come on, get comfortable,” I murmured, and she did, wriggling until she was close, draping her leg over mine, and closing her eyes, her eyelashes sweeping against and tickling my chest on the one side.
She had these moments when it was just her and just me, and no one else around, where she allowed herself to become almost childlike in my presence.
I liked it. It wasn’t weird to me at all. It was like she needed to regress some in order to make some progress in her healing and I got that.
She spent all day, every day, putting in a herculean effort, was a badass bitch around and with everyone else, and yet with me? She would be soft and vulnerable, and that meant a fuckton to me.
“I got you, baby,” I said and kissed the top of her head. She sighed out, her body losing some of the tension that rode it, right up until she was with me, and could let it all go.
I loved being her safe haven, and she had no idea what it meant to me that she was mine.
I closed my eyes, let the peace that was my woman in my arms wash over me, and looked forward to the rest of our lives.