Chapter 27
Chapter Twenty-Seven
The house Greer walked up to wasn’t on the worst side of town, but the atmosphere was expectant—as though waiting, breath held, for a drunk to start raving and shaking his fist at the world. Once at the door, she calmed her own breathing, but it didn’t still the nerves jumping in her stomach.
Alex could be in there right now. They could have hurt him…or worse.
She tapped on the door.
Nothing.
She knocked again, louder this time.
From the corner of her eye, she caught a twitch of the blinds in the window. Someone was home.
She pounded on the wood with the side of her fist. Again and again. “I know you’re in there. You damn well better open this door or…or…”
The door swung open to reveal a handsome Latino man with a soul patch on his chin and a Jude the Apostle medal hanging heavy on his tight T-shirt.
Both arms revealed elaborate tattoos. Alex’s work?
If so, he was even better than his brother had been.
“If you’re selling Girl Scout cookies,” the man said arrogantly, “we only buy from the girls wearing short skirts and knee socks.”
“Where is he?”
The cocky smile still stretched across the man’s face, but his eyes narrowed fractionally. “I’m the only he here.”
From what she’d read about gangs, she doubted that was true if he was one of head honchos. Those guys always had protection. “Where is Alex?”
He ran two fingers down his soul patch, apparently made a decision because he stepped back and pulled her inside, his fingers a bruising clamp above her elbow. “How did you know where to find this house? Did he tell you?”
God knows she didn’t want to put Alex’s mother in danger so she blurted out, “I’m resourceful.” The details of the house barely registered in her mind when she’d normally catalog every fabric and color and texture. Now, all she cared about was looking for Alex. “Is he here?”
“He was here.”
“Was? What did you do with him?”
“Tell me, what do you know about Alejandro Villanueva? Do you have any idea where he’s been and what’s he’s seen and done?”
“I know he’s not proud of everything in his past, and I know he’ll do whatever it takes to get Nicolás out of this life.”
“Problem is, he didn’t bring me whatever it takes.”
“But I did.” Greer lifted the grocery sack. “He was short ten grand, right?”
Another stroke of that soul patch. If the guy kept doing that, Greer would yank every one of his facial hairs out strand by strand. “That was the old deal.”
“You son of a bitch.”
“I’ve been called worse, chavala.”
“Don’t little girl me,” she said. Alex’s former gangmate might be older than her by a couple of years, if that.
“So I guess you’re the güisa Nicolás told me about. Some big-shot art person. The one who’s making Alejandro a mandilon, pulling him around by the huevos.”
She took a step closer. Screw how supposedly dangerous this man was.
“First of all, no one leads Alex around by the balls. Second, I don’t give a damn about being a big shot.
I care about the art and how it can change people’s lives.
Alex has a gift and I don’t want him to throw it away. Not for anything.”
“Just Alex?”
“Just Alex what?”
“You give a shit about other artists or do you just have some lady hard-on for him?”
“I’d hate to see anyone half as talented as Alex waste what God gave him. I care about art, but more than that, I care about the people who create it. They make the world beautiful.”
“I guess you’re into those watercolor things and dainty, breakable shit.”
Greer swept a hand down her body, highlighting her paint-splattered T-shirt and jeans with both knees ripped out. “Art isn’t about being untouchable. In fact, it’s about being accessible and real and raw.”
He didn’t follow her motion even though he could’ve used it as an excuse to look her over. Instead, he studied her face, stared into her eyes. A tiny thrill flashed across Greer’s skin when he looked away first. “You can wait for Alejandro in the kitchen.”
Alex was scouring the neighborhood for Nicolás when Ruben’s two guard dogs showed up and persuaded him into a late model Cadillac SUV.
“What the fuck?”
“Ruben decided he wants to see you again.”
“I don’t give a shit.”
“Maybe Nicolás does.”
“Where is he?”
“Ruben’s.”
Well that answered the question as to whether or not Alex was going to jump out of a car rolling at forty miles an hour. A little of the tension he’d been carrying eased. He could still get Nicolás out of this shit.
“Your girlfriend’s there too.”
Tension wasn’t the word for what yanked on Alex’s entire nervous system.
It was as if he’d been strapped down on one those machines that tore a man apart inch by fucking inch.
Give it another minute and he’d be able to look down and see his insides spilled out on the floorboard.
“Call Ruben right now and tell him to let her go. I’ll do any damn thing he—”
“Hey, she came to him, and by the looks of her—” Wifebeater Boy cut a look at his cholo that made Alex want to smash their heads together, “—she don’t have no plans to leave.”
He should’ve known better than to get involved with someone like Greer Maddox. She wasn’t a woman who was satisfied to do what she was told and live on the periphery of a man’s life. Damn good thing too because she deserved way better than that. Way better than him.
But he had to figure out a way to get her out of that house without setting off a situation that he couldn’t rein in. Ruben was known for having a relatively level head, but then again, that was compared to gangbanger hotheads who’d just as soon shoot you down in the street as anything.
Before the SUV rolled to a stop at the curb in front of Ruben’s house, Alex jumped out and was running for the door.
“Hey, Tatuaje,” one of the guys behind him shouted, “you can’t—”
“Watch me.” Alex hit the door with his shoulder, but it didn’t budge. Not a surprise. He kicked at it, but he’d seen the deadbolts on the other side of that thing.
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
He reared back and put his fist through the closest window. He was pulling it out, glass shards, blood and all when the front door swung open.
Ruben stood there, his expression a mixture of humor and pissed off. “Dude, you ever hear of a doorbell?”
“Where is she?”
One side of his mouth quirking up, he leaned against the doorjamb. “She came in here asking the same thing.”
Alex barreled into Ruben, backing him up like an offensive lineman mowing down the defense. “She has nothing to do with all this. Let her go.”
“Nobody’s keeping her. She’s sitting in the kitchen.” Ruben stepped aside so quickly that Alex stumbled and hit the hallway wall with his shoulder. He threw out his hand to catch himself, and red rivulets ran down the beige wall.
When he swung around the doorway into the other room, Alex’s lungs almost exploded. There Greer was, sitting at Ruben’s table chatting with Nicolás and sampling a bowl of posole. “What the fuck, Greer?”
She vaulted from her chair and rushed over to him. “What did you do to your hand?”
“What are you doing here?”
She went to the sink and wet a paper towel as if she sat in Ruben’s kitchen every damn day of her life. When she returned, she bent her head over his hand and dabbed at the cuts, pausing once to pick a glass sliver from his knuckle. “Delivering a message.”
Alex bent close to her ear. “I want you to get out of here. You don’t realize how dangerous this is.”
She looked up, her blue eyes full of ice and fire. “You came here. I thought we were a team.”
“I told you that wouldn’t work out.”
“Because you gave up. Gave up on Prophecy. Gave up on me. Gave up on yourself.”
He couldn’t look her in the eye, because she was right. But that was the only way he knew to solve this whole fucked-up mess. To stay away from the people he cared about. So instead of responding, he turned to Ruben. “You let her out of here, and I’ll give you any damn thing you want.”
Ruben plucked at the hair on his chin. “Anything?”
Alex swallowed the lump of fear and suspicion wedged sideways in his throat. Whatever deal Ruben wanted to make, it wouldn’t be good. But it would ensure Greer’s safety. “Yeah.”
“Then I want what your girlfriend brought in that bag.” He pointed to a grocery sack between Greer and Nicolás. “I want you to finish the tat you started before you ran out on the Tejanos.” He paused, ran a hand over the back of his neck, and finally said, “And I want one other thing.”
“What?”
“Money and ink first,” he said.
Alex shot a hard look at his brother. “Clear all that shit off the table.”
Nicolás’s lips drew into a teenager’s you-ain’t-the-boss-of-me sneer, but he slowly got up and started moving bowls and spoons to the counter.
“Tell your boys to get my stuff out of the car,” Alex told Ruben.
Ruben yelled instructions down the hall and pulled his shirt over his head. The designs on his body made Alex almost as sick as the ones on his own did. He’d designed and inked every single one. And the ornate Tejanos Pintados tat that was supposed to span Ruben’s back was only halfway done.
“Why didn’t you have someone else finish that?”
“Because you’re the best.”
Ruben’s simple explanation did nothing for Alex’s ego.
He had been the best. And he’d designed that swirling script for Ruben with the intent that every Tejanos member would eventually be inked the same way.
Just the thought of finishing that thing—something Ruben proclaimed so fucking much pride in, something that had killed Javi, something that could kill Greer—made Alex want to hang his head over the sink and heave.
But he swallowed that down too.
“Nicolás,” he snapped, “get some soap.”
“Alcohol,” Ruben corrected.
Rather than going for the isopropyl, his brother pulled a bottle of eighty proof out of a cabinet. That would do. It wasn’t ideal for tattoo sterilization, but Alex no longer cared about the quality of his work, just that it got done.
“On the table,” he said to Ruben.