Shelter From The Storm (The Bare Bones MC Book 6) (17 page)

He shook me by my shoulders so violently I had no choice but to shut up. An instinctual fight-or-flight reaction made me open my eyes, and he was not a pretty sight to see. It was then for the first time I saw the hitman side of him. I suppose it’s there in every man, especially every man who has seen bloody battle. There is some off-kilter, crazed PTSD look in a combat veteran’s eyes when he’s fighting to preserve something he holds dear. I’d seen it in Russell’s eyes when he cold-bloodedly turned me over to the Joneses. And I’d seen it in the eyes of the baby gangsters working in the warehouse when the ATF had raided us.

“No
what
?” I shrieked.

“No I am
not
going to kill you!” And he angrily took several steps away, his back to me, then stopped.

I wasn’t about to let up. “But you admit you work for the Joneses.”

He came back, looking frantically from side to side. “Keep it
down
, woman!
Yes
I sometimes work for the fucking Joneses. But that’s not what this is about.”

“Oh, it’s
not
, is it? You’re a
sicario
for the Joneses and I’m testifying against the Joneses and it’s just a fucking
coincidence
you show up in Pure and Easy?” I had to force myself to shut up in order to hear the answer. I could have screamed forever.

“Listen, Flavia, the answer isn’t that simple. Maybe I
was
sent originally to track you down. But once I saw you, once I realized their beef against you wasn’t legit—”

“Oh, you
changed your mind? You changed your mind?
Holy
shiz
,
Travis McShane
”—I yelled that name extra loud, on purpose—“you were sent here to
bury me
but I’m supposed to forget all that because you
changed your mind
?”

Fox shifted in his boots, looked around at everything other than me, huffed and puffed. He clearly had no answer.

I slapped my thigh. “Oh, that’s just
great!
Just fucking
great
! What am I supposed to do now? Should I tell my handler about you, and get relocated all the fuck over again and start yet another brand new fucking life just because
you
decided to
change your mind
?”

“Well what did you expect me to do?” he yelled. “
Not
change my mind? Just go ahead and
do
it?”

He had a point. We stood panting, shooting daggers at each other, our jaws askew, at a loss for words for once.

And then his fucking phone chimed.

And he fucking answered it
.

It wasn’t just any call, it was some moron—Santiago Slayer, as it turned out—FaceTiming him, Skyping or whatever it’s called when someone does a video call.

“I’ve got to take this,” snapped Fox, holding up a forefinger. “Don’t go away.
Hola, ese
,” he said to the smiling, well-groomed face of his brother in the murder trade.

“
Que esta pasando
?” Slayer said smoothly. “How is the conflagration of the annual motorcycle going?”

“How the fuck did you know where I was?” I heard Fox ask, although I was angrily storming away.

Slayer guffawed. “Oh, pfft. It is not that difficult when you have faces in all the right places.”

Fox guffawed right back. “One of the Bone Lickers told you.”

“Well,
perhaps
, but it always comes down to who knows who.”

I had stormed too far by then to hear any more of their idiotic conversation. I had almost stalked right past Tobias, too, by the time I recognized the sullen, lonely tech guy. He morosely drank a beer while casting glances at the fiery motorcycle.

“Tobias!” I said, almost angrily. “Have you gotten any news on my sister?”

He sighed deeply. “Sister, schmister. Everyone wants something from me except that which I’m prepared to give.”

“What?”

“Nothing. Yes. I’ve got news. Sorry. In the heat of having my fighting skills laughed out of town by every biker within a five hundred mile radius, I forgot to give you the intel on your sister.”

“Let’s go somewhere quiet. There’s a bar a couple blocks up.”

“Agreed, as long as it’s somewhere I don’t have to have my face ground into the combined crotches of Tracy and Wolfgang Fuckboy Glaser…”

FOX

A
house divided against itself cannot stand.

I knew the day would come that Pippa would confront me with knowledge of who I worked for.

I just didn’t expect it to happen so soon.

I was unprepared, fumbling around like a moron in the bushes, not knowing what to say to her. When Santiago Slayer called me with an uncustomary bad sense of timing, I had to take it. I had no fucking choice. Who knew when he’d move onto the next party or hit, and go off the grid?

“
Que esta pasando
?” He seemed to be in a hotel room from the sterile, uniform looks of things. Nauseatingly, he was shirtless, displaying a sort of gold monogrammed necklace, and two skanks cavorted on a bed behind him in their underwear. But he was all business for the moment. “I have found your Phil Din for you, and in the most unexpected of places, I might add.”

My antennae went up with the readiness of a radar system locking onto a mark. “Where?”

He chuckled. One thing you had to hand the guy. He didn’t let the stresses of this job get to him. “Well, you are not going to believe this,
hermano
. That
pinche guey
with the dissolving jaw posted his resume on LinkedIn.”

It was as though Slayer were speaking Russian. Linking a resume? Did
sicarios
even
have
resumes? “What the fuck is that?”

Slayer closed his eyes with patience. “LinkedIn. It is a very lame and corny place where only
pinche gueys
would bother going if they want to network with other
pinche gueys
in a business atmosphere.”

I sort of got the picture. But not really. “So he posted his resume?”

Slayer guffawed. “Yes, isn’t that unbelievable? But not under the name Phil Din, naturally. He used the name Jim Fell. Ladies, ladies. Not now.” He smiled indulgently at the snatches in the background who had become bored with each other. They draped themselves over his shoulder, causing his handheld camera to shake. Another minute was wasted while he set his phone on a table and detached the women.

I was snorting with exasperation by then. “If he used the name Jim Fell, how’d you know it was him? Did his resume
say
‘expert in ordnance, military grade weaponry, and snuffing out innocent people’?”

Slayer was suave. “Of course not. No, this
gilipollas
went ahead and”—he closed his eyes while he held his stomach and chuckled with mirth—“he goes ahead and—”

“
Slayer
.”

His eyes popped open. “Oh. Sorry. He goes ahead and posts his photo to LinkedIn.”

Even I had to laugh at that one. “His photo? Good one. That mug is a one in a billion.”

“Yes, you could easily tell it was him from the way the inside of his mouth was showing on the outside. Have you ever seen his forearm? It seriously looks like someone applied zombie makeup. You can see through to bones and tendons. Who would hire someone who looks like that? Hard to believe someone can still be alive and look that bad. He was wearing one of those narco polo shirts.”

We were both silent for a few seconds, the implication being that Phil Din would
not
be alive for much longer. There was no loss in that. The life expectancy for a Krokodil addict was two years at the outside.

“Okay, so how does this help us figure out where he is?”

Slayer once again chuckled jovially. “He mentions in the comment section that he’s currently staying at the Atomic Inn in Beatty, Nevada.”

“Beatty? Didn’t we pass that on the way up?”

“You are correct. It is exactly an hour and forty-one minutes north of Vegas. So I need not add, you must act fast. I will send you the phone number he posted, although it only pings off the nearest cell tower which, in Beatty, Nevada, of course is of no help.”

The implication was that Din was hot on my trail too, since he’d moved from Pure and Easy to Beatty, directly in the path to Winnemucca.

I said, “The Atomic Inn is good enough for me. I owe you one, Slayer.”

“Pshaw,” said Slayer, making a gesture of wiping the slate clean. “You can show me a good time next time I am passing through Winnemucca.”

Indeed, the Kindly
Sicario
hung up then without any more fanfare, and I was left staring at a blank screen.

Spinning around, I looked for Pippa. Of course, she was nowhere in sight. Could I fucking blame her? She was probably on the phone to her handler giving him my cell number, real name, and license number. Hell, she was probably going first thing in the morning to the FedEx office to send him my Ben Wa ball for fingerprinting.

But there was no fucking need for that since I’d given her my real name.
What an asshat
. I strode quickly back to the bonfire which was showing signs of flaming out now. The charred skeleton of the Harley started to crumble. I saw Tuzigoot and Brunhilda, and Faux Pas and Sapphire, but none of them had seen Pippa. Ploughing on ahead, I asked Ford and Maddie, Speed and Tess, coming up empty-handed. Where the fuck had she gone between stalking off in a rage and now?

I backtracked, rooting through a few bars that fronted the square. I found Wolf Glaser and Tracy playing pool with Roman and Gudrun. Nothing. If anyone had seen Pippa it would have been Tracy, who seemed to be her new bestie.

I had to get the fuck out of town, get down to Beatty before Phil Din got the drop on me. One last thing I did was ride to the motel where someone had booked a block of rooms. No Pippa Lofting. No Flavia Brooks, no single woman anywhere.

Who the fuck
hadn’t
I spoken to? I ran through the Bare Bones roster in my head. I’d seen Russ Gollywow practically humping some Bone Licker in a different bar, different pool table. Sax Saxonberg and Bee had been waiting in line at a roach coach with the late-night munchies. Kneecap had been in the same line, looking like he’d gone back for thirds. Who the fuck
hadn’t
I seen? I could think of no one.

So Pippa had taken off with
no one
?

Of course, I’d tried calling her several times. Of course, it sounded like her phone was turned off. Out of desperation I even texted her.

Pippa. I need to talk to you, to explain.

But explain what? I had no fucking idea.

I
had
been sent to kill her. I
had
decided against it almost immediately.

But are those really mitigating circumstances? “Well, yeah, I fucking admit it. I was sent with a hit on your back, but when I saw your excellent rack, I changed my mind”? I absolutely couldn’t blame her for running far, far away from me. She might already be on a flight back to Pure and Easy to collect her things and move to a new town.

Lytton
. That was the one guy I hadn’t seen. He answered on the first ring.

“Hey. I’m in our room with June. Where are you?”

“Out in the parking lot. Listen, I’ve lost track of Pippa. I’ve asked everyone, and no one has seen her.”

Lytton consulted with June. “June saw her go into a bar with Tobias.”

Tobias
. That guy hadn’t occurred to me because he wasn’t an official Bare Bones charter member. I also instantly knew
why
she was going into a bar with Tobias. “Okay, listen. Shoot me Tobias’ number when you get a chance. I’ve got a bead on Phil Din. I’ve got to take off right now or the moment’s lost forever, if you know what I mean.”

“I get it. Are you coming back to my place when you’re done?”

“Absolutely, man. Abso-fucking-lutely. If you see Pippa, just give her a vague reason why I had to split. You don’t need to go into detail. She’ll get it.”

“Godspeed, man.”

I pounded it as fast as I dared back to 80 east where I’d hang a south at Battle Mountain. Once I got through the network of bikes coming and going from Winnemucca, it was clear sailing. I had changed out the plates on my Panhead in case it wound up a Road Warrior type of deal with Din on the highway, but I didn’t think it’d come to that.

Tobias must have come up with intel on Pippa’s sister, the intel I had not been able to provide. I kicked myself for not having warned Tobias long ago to refrain from giving Pippa any intel. It was too dangerous for her to even be caught calling her sister. I was intimately familiar with the pain of being unable to call a sibling. Especially since her predicament was none of her doing, I agreed there had to be a way for her to call Shelda. She could call from one of Lytton’s burners, for instance.

Shit like this was flying through my brain as I cleaved the desert in half. I had Street Viewed the Atomic Inn in Beatty. Some woebegone, rundown midcentury crap house with a cardboard alien out front to draw in the nuclear crowd. There were some empty hills immediately to the northeast of the shithole. It would be like shooting fish in a barrel.

I wanted to ask Jones what in the name of a strongly worded Human Resources sensitivity training memo he was thinking, putting another
sicario
on my tail. He obviously didn’t trust me, but did he mean for Phil Din to kill me? If Phil was reporting back to Jones, it was pretty painfully obvious he’d told Jones that I’d been seen in very close proximity to the mark, Flavia Brooks. I felt trapped—in an almost worse dilemma than when I had to run from New Mexico.