Chapter 5 Bronx
FIVE
brONX
I wiped down the bar after I finished slinging a few drinks around.
The place was busier than normal despite the fact that we didn’t open to the public.
Well, we were open to the public, but we didn’t advertise our services or anything.
Word of mouth got around in the biker community and they alone kept us afloat.
San Diego was a hot spot for bike weeks and trips and shit like that, so we always got a massive influx of rebel rousers and tough-looking men, which was enough to drive the rest of the public away.
But we did great business throughout the year. The guys never complained about it, and I never brought up the need to advertise the bar around the community.
Now that we’d gotten into this tight spot, however, I kept bringing it up with Stone.
In private, of course. But if we could tap into the public and get a good foundational community base as well, our profits would skyrocket.
With my calculations, if we did even forty percent of the business with locals as we did with bikers and the like, we wouldn’t have a need to build another bar until it was absolutely necessary.
Stone didn’t want to take the chance, though. He didn’t want to bring unassuming college kids and shit like that into the bar until we knew it was safe. And while I couldn’t blame him for that—and actually admired him for it—the numbers haunted me at night.
We had it within our reach to get out of this illegal shit for good. But it all hinged on us getting out of this shit with the Chinese.
And getting this damn detective to stop breathing down our necks.
“Go home.”
Stone’s voice reverberated behind me before he slapped me on the back.
I whipped around, tossing the rag over my shoulder as my brows furrowed together.
The man was never behind the bar. He hardly ever worked at the place.
He helped manage staff, he hired and fired, but he never slung drinks around.
And there he was, cracking open beers and sliding them down to those waiting for their orders.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
“Go home, Bronx. I’ll close down,” Stone said.
“No, what are you doing here? What’s going on?”
He eyed me hotly, trying to get me to back down with nothing but a glare.
“You spend too much time in this place. The employee meeting went fine. I see you remedied the tip jar situation by bolting down a fucking tip bucket on either side of the bar. Take the night off,” he said.
“But what about—”
“Get the hell out of here, Bronx. Before I change my mind.”
I nodded curtly and tossed the wet rag over to him.
I took two more orders and mixed up some drinks and then started for the back door.
I knew why Stone was here; I just wondered if he was able to admit it.
Stone had only worked behind the bar four other times that I knew about, and all four of those times were when he couldn’t gather his thoughts.
Stone operated best while under pressure.
He came up with his best plans when he felt things breathing down his neck.
And when he came up empty-handed, he came to work at the bar to see if he could conjure up some of that pressure for himself.
Stone was coming up empty-handed on what to do with this shit show of a situation.
It worried me, but I wasn’t going to question a night off. Even though Stone working the damn bar didn’t mean good things for our future plans, I tried to look for the silver lining. I didn’t work a damn bit tomorrow, which meant a nice, long weekend for me.
Which gave me plenty of time to think about the club falling apart at the seams.
I slipped onto my bike and cranked it up.
I nodded to a few of the local bikers from another smaller group that rode just for fun.
Bunch of dads who needed to get away from their nagging wives and spoiled kids.
I waved at them before I sped off, needing to clear my head.
I worked my way over to Highway One and cruised the coastline, wrapping around to ride up and down the road.
My little beach shack wasn’t too far from much.
Twenty minutes from downtown. Fifteen from the lodge.
Twenty from the bar. I’d bought it last year when the owners wanted to offload it.
The property itself was hard to maintain.
It sat on a deserted part of Highway One that overlooked a staunch cliffside.
It had a gorgeous view of the ocean, but it didn’t have a yard.
Out back was the steep drop off with a jagged walkway right onto the private beach.
And right off the front porch was a patch of sandy, pathetic excuse for grass as the highway took a turn away from the house.
No more than half an acre of purchased land, and the shack was the only house for miles.
And hardly anyone traveled that far up Highway One.
With the bypass that opened up a few months ago, this side of the highway had practically rotted away.
No one came up this far, especially if they wanted to get up the coast. They took the bypass because of its faster times, smoother asphalt, and the promise of better beaches than the one my back porch overlooked.
Which meant, despite the road only forty feet from my porch, not many people came back here.
I liked it. The beauty. The privacy. The control I had over my environment.
But tonight, I wasn’t ready to go back home.
Every time I came to that last bend in the road, I turned around and rode back up the highway.
I was restless. Confused. Itching to do something but without a clue as to what.
There were plenty of renovations that still needed to happen to my house.
Over the past seven months, I’d gutted the place, pulled up the carpet, and replaced it with sealed marble.
Redid all the insulation behind the walls.
Painted over the walls with bright colors that caught the light of the sun perfectly as it dipped behind the ocean at night.
I was in the process of putting the finishing touches on the second bedroom before starting in on my master bathroom.
But tonight? Those renovations didn’t call to me. That hard work, back pain, and sweat didn’t call to me like it usually did.
I came to a stop at the only stoplight on the highway.
It was halfway between my place and the lodge.
The road that dead-ended into the highway was the only road that intersected this way, hence the light.
I sat there, the only person at the light coming from any angle and tapped my hand against my thigh.
I had all this restless energy and no passion to throw it into anything productive.
Until something caught the corner of my eye.
As the light turned green, I continued to sit there.
I saw shadows struggling in an alleyway beside a bar I recognized.
Chopper’s. A run-down bar that was two ticks away from closing.
I squinted my eyes as a man fell to his ass in the shadows and then a young woman appeared.
I couldn’t see much of her in the darkness.
But when she came out of the alleyway, I most certainly heard her cries for help.
“Get off me! What the hell? Stop it!”
The guy scrambled off the ground and reached for her wrist. He stood up, tugging her back along the brick wall while the young woman struggled to get away.
The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end.
My hand stopped tapping, and my feet pushed off the asphalt of the highway underneath me.
As I took a left-hand turned, my energy focused.
My eyes stayed trained on them. The man kept pulling her along as she clawed at him to get away, his eyes set on the deserted parking lot on the other side of the bar.
My hands tightened around the handlebars of my bike as the man grabbed the woman and pinned her to the brick wall.
My teeth gnashed together as I revved the engine of my bike.
I pulled straight up to the curb, destined to intervene and break this asshole’s nose.
I hopped the curb and got off my bike, not even flinching when it hit the ground.
I strode for the man and fisted the back of his shirt.
The woman shrieked as I pulled him off her.
Tears streamed down her cheeks and she shook violently, her fear taking over.
I slammed the man against the brick wall, pinning him there with my knee between his legs.
“What the fuck are you doing!?” the man growled.
“Showing you what it feels like when you pick on someone your own size,” I said, grinning.
Then, without hesitation, I pulled my fist back and slammed it directly into his nose.