CHAPTER 6 IRON JACK
IRON JACK
I’m watching Hoss and Two-Shit knock balls around the pool table when Christina stops by to let me know Greta is back in her room.
“I forgot to give her a toothbrush when I showed her around.” Christina holds one out, still in its plastic packaging, along with a travel-sized toothpaste and a packet with a make-up wipe. “I thought you might want an excuse to go see her again tonight.”
Two-Shit looks up from where he’s lining up his cue stick, his wild gray hair flying around his face with static electricity. “Iron Jack brought himself a woman back for the night and he’s in here with us?”
I stand up from the stool. “It’s Merrick’s sister.”
“Oh.” He resumes his concentration.
But Hoss is still watching me. He rubs his scruffy chin, his heavy frame leaning against the wall. “Something’s up, if you’re playing the delivery boy.”
Christina passes me the stash and backs away. She’s not going to say anything. She knows better.
“Greta’s here to spy for the Pickle family,” I tell him. “I’m showing her the Wild Hair weren’t raised in a barn.”
Two-Shit cracks the ball, sending the red stripe into the pocket. “I was raised in a tool shed. That count?” He laughs at his own joke.
“Is she a looker?” Hoss asks. He’s always on the prowl.
“Fuck with her and you lose an eye,” I tell him.
He holds up both hands like he’s innocent, thumb hanging on to his cue stick. “Just asking.”
Two-Shit smacks the bottom of his stick on the ground with a thud. “I think our president has an interest in the lady.”
I shrug, like it’s nothing. “Her uncle already interfered in our business. Trying to head this one off at the pass.”
That seems to convince them. “Fucker,” Hoss says. “Bringing in the cops when we had it handled.”
“Exactly,” I say. “The sooner she’s out of here, the sooner we can resume our business.”
I head for the door.
“Hey, Iron Jack,” Two-Shit says.
I turn to him. “Yeah?”
“I heard a member of the Kin went to the Leaky Skull tonight. Said they weren’t the ones who killed Steel and Theron.”
A dark shadow crosses my vision. “He said it. Doesn’t make it true.”
“You think they’re trying to clear the way to come back?”
I grip the toothbrush package so hard that the plastic caves in over the bristles. “They better fucking not.”
“That’s what I say,” Hoss says, bending over the table to examine the line of the balls. “We’ll torch them again. Take it all down this time.”
With that, I head out into the hall. I put Greta in the room we had Merrick use for a while, before he and Marietta decided to live in his house instead.
I listen to the sounds of the club as I walk her way.
Sounds like Adam has that house mouse in with him.
I reckon she’ll be changing her status before long, if not an ol’ lady then a girlfriend. We’ll be down to one house mouse again.
Low Joe and Betz must be back from the bar, as she’s yelling at him over the sound of their television in his room.
The next few doors are quiet. Chain, probably still at the bar. Stoney, out doing a protection gig. Then Hoss’s and Two-Shit’s rooms. At least the part of the club closest to Greta won’t disturb her for a while.
I pause outside her door.
What am I doing here, holding toothpaste and barking up her tree? She’s only here a week. She didn’t give me the time of day last time she was down, and she’s only here now because she wants intel for her uncle.
I should stay focused. Follow up on that Kin visit. I should have kept my knee on that man’s chest. But I saw his patch. He’s the Sergeant at Arms for the Kin. Wouldn’t take too much to figure out his name, his time with the Kin, and if he was around back then.
It’s worth pursuing. He entered Wild Hair space for a reason. I should find out why, and if he had a motive other than telling me I was wrong about the Kin’s involvement in my parents’ deaths. I ought to know what he wants out of the deal.
This woman has already been a distraction.
There’s a thump inside the room, then a muffled curse that makes me smile. She’s up. I wonder what she could be doing. I stand there, working up something to say to her once I’ve passed over the toothbrush, when the door flies open.
She slams right into me, knocking everything out of my hands.
“Oh!” She springs back. “You’re right here!”
“I brought you a toothbrush.” I bend down to pick it all up.
She kneels with me. “Oh! Thank you. I just came out to see if anyone had a charging cord. My phone won’t make it through the night.”
“I might have one. What kind of phone?”
She takes the toothbrush and other items and sets them on the dresser. “This one.” She holds it up. “USB-C.”
“Yeah, I have that. Come on. I’ll get it for you.”
She slides her phone in her pocket and follows me to my room.
It’s no different from when I showed it to her an hour ago, but this time, she’s calmer and more settled. She sits on the end of the bed. “I like it in here. It’s dark but still, I don’t know, peaceful.”
“Mom liked it.” I aim my thumb toward the closet. “You can look in there and see the bed I slept on until I was about five. Then I got my own room. Stoney’s kids have it now.”
She walks over and opens the door. “How cute! You’re like the kid under the stairs, only in the closet.”
I open my nightstand drawer to dig through the jumble of cords, half watching her as she peers into the closet.
“You have a very specific wardrobe,” she says. “Jeans. Black T-shirts. Oh, and one suit.” She pulls it from the hanger and holds it in front of her. It obscures her completely. “For weddings or funerals?”
“Security gigs, actually,” I say. “Club members wear cuts to a funeral.”
“Cuts?” She slides the suit back on the bar.
“Our club vests. It’s called a cut.”
She returns to the bed. “Why a cut?”
“Goes back to when bikers would cut the sleeves off their jackets to make it easier to ride.” I succeed in disentangling a cord and pass it to her.
“Thanks,” she says. “It makes sense.”
She doesn’t get up. Maybe she doesn’t want to leave me either. A biker can dream.
“Why don’t you plug it in here? We could drink a beer on the back deck.”
She stares at the cord in her hands as if she’s thinking about it. Finally, she says, “Will you tell me more about the club?”
“Sure. That’s why you’re here.”
We leave the phone charging by my bed and head out through the kitchen. There’s a line of ice chests by the door. They’re a fixture each evening and all day on weekends. A house mouse is in charge of that.
I pop one open. “Got everything from Guinness to Dos Equis, depending on how dark you like it.”
She peers in and extracts a Guinness. Nice.
I grab a second and open mine on the lip of the chest, passing it to her and taking the unopened one.
“Thanks.” She turns to the treeline, a row of darkness slightly blacker than the moonlit sky. “It’s peaceful out here.”
“When nobody’s partying, sure.” I pop the second top and stand beside her. “When it’s rowdy, you won’t be able to escape the noise.”
She takes a swig, and I find myself staring at the shadow of her in the moonlight, her throat bobbing as she swallows. I think she’s downed half of it in one go. Damn.
She finally lowers the bottle. “Can I expect things to get rowdy this weekend?”
“There’s always a blowout on a Saturday night. A minor version Friday, but we have a pretty large protection gig then that will tie up half the club tomorrow till late.”
She looks around at the chairs and selects an oversized canvas one. “Tell me about the gig.”
I drop into a seat near her. “It’s another club. They’re having a wedding, and they want their people to participate rather than guard. They hired us to watch the perimeter and handle any threats from another club.”
“Clubs do that to each other? Disrupt weddings?”
“The groom is marrying the sister of a rival club member. It wasn’t wise, but you love who you love.” I watch her to see how that idea lands.
She shakes her head. “Love is stupid. But hey, maybe they’re the exception.”
Spoken like a woman going through a divorce. But I’m not touching that. “Regular Romeo and Juliet situation. We expect trouble.”
She takes another drink. “And how do you handle trouble like that? I assume the brother of the bride isn’t invited?”
“He kidnapped his sister two weeks ago to prevent it. So, no, he’s not invited.”
“This is the stuff movies are made of,” she says. “Not real life.”
“Club life isn’t ordinary, that’s for sure.”
“How do you know? You were born to it.”
I take a swig before I respond to that. I’m not sure how much of my personal life she needs to know. That smacks of getting her invested in me, not the club. But I say, “I got out in my twenties.”
She leans forward. “You left your parents’ club?”
“Mom encouraged it, actually. I did martial arts when I was a kid, then wrestling in high school. I got recruited to a local mixed martial arts fighting club, and, it turned out, I was pretty good.”
“So you became a fighter?”
“Yeah. L.A. came calling about eight years ago. I worked my way up the circuit until I had a shot at the big time. I was torn. But Dad was barely fifty and at the height of his prime as president. Mom felt I should stay and see what I could do.”
“How long did it last?”
“Five years. I had just qualified for the pro circuit when they were killed.” I try hard to make the last word sound like the others, but there’s a tone to it. An echo of the feeling I had when I got the call from Chain.
Greta leans her head back on the chair. “That must have been brutal.”
“It was.”
“And your club determined that Lucifer’s Kin was responsible?”
“Not at the time. They hid their tracks pretty well. We’d had altercations with them before, of course, but we had bad blood with lots of clubs. And the eighteen-wheeler that hit them wasn’t part of any club. Just a random overworked driver pulling an illegal long shift.”
“When did you decide it was the Kin?”
“Years of thinking about it. Paying attention. Listening to rumors. Only when they encroached with their meth labs did I do anything about it. Two birds, one stone.”
“But that man tonight, didn’t he say you were wrong?”
This irritates me. She’s barely walked into the situation. “What else would he say?”
“But he didn’t have to. He came into Wild Hair territory alone, which means he was desperate.”
“He’s lost his club. He’s not used to going it alone.”
“But he was wearing his cut. He could have spread rumors without being so obvious. Without coming at you directly.”
Something tickles at the back of my head. She might be right. But this is a conversation for the club, not the sister of our newest member.
And certainly not something I want her taking back to her meddling uncle. He’s caused no end of annoyance to Diesel and Merrick over the bar. And now he’s trying to push in on our club.
Maybe a better tactic is what Betz said herself. Scare her off. She isn’t for me anyway. City girl.
I aim my beer at the woods. “There’s gators in the marsh,” I tell her. “Hoss once wrestled one into the mud until it finally gave in.”
“Did it drown?”
“Nah. Gators can go for hours on a single breath. He recognized the bigger predator.”
She shakes her head. “That sounds like a tall tale.”
“Maybe so.”
“It’s really dangerous out there?” she asks.
“Most of the Everglades are, if you’re not familiar.”
“I’d like to see them. Take a hike, maybe.”
I laugh under my breath.
“What?” She turns to me.
“You come here in your heels and can’t even ride a bike without feeling like you might die, but you want to take on the Florida swamps?”
“It’s so primal,” she says. “Nothing like my life in New Jersey. I’m pretty scrappy, you know. I take kickboxing and do indoor bouldering.”
I decide not to take a jab at her city version of fighting and mountain climbing. “So let’s go,” I say. “I’ll take you out tomorrow.”
“Really?”
I down half the beer. “Yeah. We’ll get your stuff from the hotel. Then take a swamp tour.”
“Okay! I better get some sleep, then.” She stands up, passing me. I watch the shape of her as she goes, all curves and hair that glints red in the light of the kitchen window.
Stoney comes out, moving aside to let her pass. “That’s one hell of a woman,” he says. “You thinking about keeping her?”
I huff out a laugh. “I don’t know if anyone keeps someone like that.”
He grabs a beer and knocks off the top before settling next to me. “The Kin showed up at the Leaky Skull.”
“Yeah. Motherfuckers.”
“And you fell for the bait.”
My gut tightens. Stoney doesn’t talk to me like that often. “You think it’s bait?”
“Doesn’t make a hell of a lot of sense.” He takes a long swallow of beer.
“You think I should ignore it?’
“I think it’s been three years.”
I sit up. “And we haven’t done shit about it. Somebody killed them. Somebody ought to pay. I had Anarchy right in my sights when the damn cops showed up at that raid.”
“You think the Kin is good enough to pull off an operation so slick that a random truck driver took the fall? Come on. He had drugs in his system. He ran off the road.”
I let out a low, feral growl, and he stops.
“Think of the club, Iron Jack. We’re doing a lot of shit that doesn’t need to be happening over your—” He cuts himself off.
“My what? Vendetta? Revenge? Pointless obsession?”
He doesn’t answer that.
I don’t know. Maybe he’s right. But his parents are tucked nicely in a retirement home in South Miami. He doesn’t come from a club legacy. Hasn’t watched one die.
“I said my piece,” he says. “You’re the president.”
But his words sit with me. Right now, my VP is making more sense than I am.