Vulnerable (Barons of Sodom) (8 page)

DET. RAMIREZ:
Okay, okay, okay—here's where I begin
to get confused. Even your earliest police reports indicate a kind of...well,
okay, Ms. Calyer. Have you ever heard of Stockholm Syndrome?

BRIDIE:
Course I have, you patronizing horse's ass.
When a kidnapped victim begins to fall in love with their captors.

DET. RAMIREZ:
I apologize for any assumption on my
part. But, didn't you begin to worry, after your
single day
on the camp,
that there was something strange about your captivity? Or, better phrased: did
you feel like a victim?

BRIDIE:
Well, Detective—I won't pretend I was
operating at some high, intelligent level. I woke up that morning frightened
and alone, and then certain forces saw fit to send me a friend. I did a day's meaningful
work, for the first time in my life—and it was difficult and interesting and
that, I'll admit, I fell in love with. I really did like working with those
engines. Something about 'em just made perfect sense to me. And I already told
you, Athena was a peach—

DET. RAMIREZ:
But what about the other Barons? You
weren't afraid of them?

BRIDIE:
I was her ward. She told me they wouldn't
mess with me, and they didn't. Besides—something about the light of day, and
suddenly all those greasers didn't seem so scary to me. A few of ‘em were
regular old men. It was like Athena said: everyone had gone through some
visible pain. I realized that day that I was no different, then, from these men—only
I had the opportunity to make my toughness on the inside. Didn't need to run
around intimidating people on a bike.

DET. RAMIREZ:
We'll come back to this, alright? Now I
want to talk about Officer Cannon. What did you really make of him, when you
first met?

BRIDIE:
Well since I'm under oath and all, my first
giddy girl reaction was, “God Damn, this suit looks just like the man from the
movies.” He was a stone cold fox, I'll give him that.

DET. RAMIREZ:
Ms. Calyer.

BRIDIE:
Can't apologize for hormones, officer. And
I'm just being honest.

DET. RAMIREZ:
Ms. Calyer...

BRIDIE:
He didn't scare me. Seemed too goofy, somehow—too
aware of himself. I didn't know whether to trust him or not, but the first
thing I figured was: “here's a man who tries very hard to seem scary, and he
doesn't scare me a bit.”

DET. RAMIREZ:
And what about later?

BRIDIE:
Later?

DET. RAMIREZ:
Later.

BRIDIE:
(
Long pause
) Well yes, Detective. He
scared me later. He scared me a great deal, later.

Though he wasn't an epic drinker—nothing like Grizz, or
various other Barons with reputations to protect—Tuck could typically hold his
whiskey.
Typically.
But thanks to some combination of his own boredom
(due to the lack of MC assignments) and his own lust (due to that infernal,
miserable, horrible, BRIDIE), that evening seemed like a good night to get
tanked. As soon as he'd slid his mustard-colored ride into the parking lot
behind Dixie's, Tuck decided to settle in for a good long haul. He'd walked up
to the bar and ordered two Evan Williams' neat, and knocked them both back before
sitting down.

There were some civilians lurking by the jukebox, as usual—high
school girls with fake I.D.s, a few townie party animals moving into a second
happy hour, all the predictable barflies—but tonight, none of them looked worth
the hassle. None of them looked worth a second glance, in fact—even in the
forgiving low light of the bar—or perhaps it was that no one looked beautiful
to him while Bridie was out there, toiling over bike parts in the moonlight.
For all his friggin luck, she and Athena were probably having some sort of sexy
gal-pal pillow-fight sleepover at this very moment, while he twiddled his
thumbs. The image of this sent Tuck's beleaguered-feeling member into another
spasm. This, in turn, made his horny ass mad.

“You look worn down, sugar,” drawled Penny, the bar's oldest
tenant and best bartender. (Presumably, the original Dixie had never existed.)
She slipped another finger of Evan Williams into Tuck's already thrice-drained
glass. “Wanna tell mama where it hurts?” Penny had a whiff of the Old West
about her, which made Tuck—and presumably, all her other clients—feel a bit
like cowboys. She wore garter belts and fishnets and low, taffeta dresses. Her
kinky hair was always wrapped up into dozens and dozens of microbraids, but these
she situated on her head into elegant pompadours. She was certainly an older
woman, but because she kept herself in such high spirits, one couldn't say
easily just how old. Forty-five, perhaps? Sixty? The Barons had a pool going.

“Girl trouble?” Penny winked.

“Now what would make you say that, Ms. P?”

“I can always tell,” the bartender said, sauntering down the
bar towards a few new customers. Tuck watched her ass as she traveled, but
again, any pleasing part of a woman only served to remind him of Bridie.

“How do you know when—” Tuck started, but then he stopped
himself. The question suddenly seemed too stupid to utter out loud. The club
was reaching peak hours—which didn't say much, considering the dive-y quality
of Dixie's—but he still couldn't risk the idea of someone overhearing him
making sappy chit-chat with the bartender. What was he, some kind of suburban
bank teller? Somebody's father, with a lawn to mow and taxes to pay?

“I've been
professionally unsatisfied
for the past
few weeks,” Tuck said instead, pondering the empty bottom of his glass once
more. “Barons just haven't had much to do. Guess there's not much scandal in
Waco.”

Penny cocked an eyebrow down the bar. “Guess you haven't
been reading the paper, hoss.” With a flick of her elegant wrist, the bartender
tossed a daily onto the bar. The paper, dated today, had a headline that ran:
Investigation
into Trailer Park Murders Continues.

“I already read about this. It's old news.”

Penny raised her eyebrows. “Look further down.”

“
Local Police May Have Botched Murder Investigation, FBI
Says
,” Tuck read aloud. His whiskey-addled mind lurched slowly toward the
words' meaning, but Penny's arch glance helped him along. “Luckily my district
is under Barons' jurisdiction,” she said. “Can't trust a damned nobody anymore,
seems like.”

A bar back emerged from the kitchen with a question and
whisked a tutting Penny away.

Tuck gripped the sides of the newspaper for a moment,
letting his eyes skim the pertinent details. There was a picture of the murder
victims—a man with the chin of a matinee idol, and a tweaked-out older woman
with crazy braids going every which way. The woman was no longer beautiful, but
something about her sad smile suggested she once had been. In fact, something
about her sad smile was eerily familiar...

Stumbling further down the page, Tuck's gaze caught on
certain phrases: “suspected drug ring”...“the deceased leaves behind a loving
niece”...“young girl, aged eighteen”...“now reported missing.”

Tuck folded the paper over and jammed its pages into the
back pocket of his jeans.
So what,
he told himself. No big surprise that
Bridie was connected to the recent murders, or that the Waco police were
slightly crooked. The whole piece looked like speculation, anyway—likely some
second-tier reporter scraping the barrel for secondhand news.

And yet—there
had
been something fishy about God's
connection to the police officer the night before, when Bridie had arrived at
camp. In fact, the whole Bridie thing seemed like too much of a coincidence. But
what did anyone have to gain, covering up a murder or botching an
investigation? The Barons were relatively new to Waco, and Lord knew none of
them were poking their heads into any funny business; whatever enemies the club
had made so far couldn't run deep. Tuck shook his head, once, twice—then he
resolved to think about the whole mess later, when his head was clear.

“Is this seat taken?” drawled a woman's voice behind him—her
voice slightly familiar, riding just this side of a giggle. Tuck turned—slightly
too fast—on his teetering stool, and drank in the strange sight of Athena Sark
in her Sunday finery. She wore a black leather jacket (likely swiped from her
friend's personal stash), a snug black skirt, and a low tube top patterned over
in dark maroon shapes. While he usually elected to overlook his best friends'
sex appeal, her magnificent breasts looked full in the tight fabric. He lurched
toward them, instinctively.

“Ho ho, cowboy,” Athena laughed. “Someone's drunk. Better
look sharp before the rest of the Barons get here.” She righted him on his
stool, and neatly pushed the whiskey glass out of his reach. “Oh, Penny? How
about a water on aisle three?”

But as Athena attended to his hydration needs, Tuck felt all
his senses sharpen and hone in on a new figure: Bridie, Baby, looking every
inch the woman of his jukebox dreams. She wore a light shimmer of red make-up
on the apples of her cheeks and the full thrust of her lips. Her body was snug
and sleek-looking in a black dress designed to kill. The cloth swished about
her hips, fell smooth over her ass, and stopped just short of the knees. When
she turned her head to look his way, Tuck saw the girl in slow motion: he
watched first the swish of her raven hair, before his gaze moved across the
contours of her sweet, smart face. The glinting fierceness in her eyes. The
prominent arch of her collarbones, the elegant fan of her cleavage. Athena was
lovely, but she wasn't beautiful like this. It seemed to Tuck that no woman
was. And he'd never, ever wanted a woman so much.

“Want me to wipe that drool off your chin, sugar?” teased
Miss Penny. Snapping back to earth, Tuck realized he was staring—creepily, from
the vantage of a barstool. Athena wore a look of burnt disappointment; he
caught a glimpse of deep pain. Well, it wasn't as if he could help it. Didn't
all the books and movies say that when you knew something was for real, you
just knew?

Bridie, impossible, gorgeous Bridie, sauntered toward the
bar, already looking more like a woman than she had the day before. The girl
plopped down on the vacant stool just beside Tuck—visibly surprising Athena,
who had hovered over the seat moments before.

“What's everyone drinking?” the girl asked, her voice
impish. Though Penny wasn't one to abide by the state drinking law, she rolled
her eyes slightly.

“Let's start with sodas for all, and see where we go,” she
murmured. But she winked at Tuck.

Athena—bless her heart—got the clue. “Tuck, give me a
quarter? I'll put on some music before the rest of the Slayer fan club arrives.”

The
jukebox.
The jukebox just made him think of her
nipple in his mouth, the miraculous content of his dreams. Yet here they
were...Bridie and he, side by side on barstools. Tuck knew he was supposed to
say something, but what?

“Hey, doll,” he tried.

Bridie just smirked. He studied the curve of her lips, in
search of some sign of mutual attraction—that is, until his gaze ambled south.
Her breasts looked firm and lovely in whatever dress Athena'd lent her. Her
arms were thin, but muscular. Her long hair was swept away from her face,
falling so far down her back it grazed the top of her ass.

“
Doll?
Is that the best you got?”

From behind the bar, Penny snorted. Wordlessly, she poured a
tall amount of Jameson into a glass and nudged it toward the newbie. Something
about this made Tuck furious—the insolence of it. While ten other townies vied
for his attention, this one little tough bird thought she could play coy with a
LaRouche
? He reminded himself that he was too old to play games. But
just as he framed some snippy retort, Athena's jukebox selection began to pour
out of the speakers. It was the opening riff to Joe Walsh's
Life's Been
Good.

“Oh, I love this one,” Bridie said then, and proceeded to
close her eyes and sway to and fro. “
My Maserati goes 185
...”

“This one seems a little before your time, kid,” Tuck
laughed. Yet, she looked so earnest, dancing with her eyes closed. It made his
heart ache.

“
I lost my license, and now I don't drive...
I've got
a radio, don't I?”

“I don't know what the hell you've got.”

This remark seemed to startle the girl back into reality.
She gripped the edge of the bar firmly for support, and Tuck watched a flicker
of something—pain? Fear?—dance across her vision. It was hard to remember for
some reason: the circumstances of Bridie's arrival were shrouded in tragedy.
She had, of course, lost everything she “got.” Maybe everything and everyone,
and all so recently.

“I'm sorry,” Tuck found himself saying sheepishly, though he
regretted the words as soon they'd left his mouth. He summoned the Barons' Code
to the front of his memory:
to ride was to always demonstrate strength. To
be on the wire was life.
He recalled that he'd seen enough blood and pain
of his own to know that no pussy was good enough to lead him from this path.
And fuck her perfect breasts, her sweet little smile.

Bridie looked at Tuck with a plaintive gaze, as if she were
about to say something. By the jukebox, Athena swayed like a crooner.
What
if I kissed her now,
Tuck thought, his tune changing again. He'd kiss her
good and hard, he'd give her the kind of kiss a backwood barbie wouldn't have
experienced yet. He loved the vision of this—startling that big, dumb look off
her baby face. Bridie on her knees, begging for him. Yes, exactly. This wasn't
love, what he was feeling—it was merely lust. It was hard to remember. He could
still claim this girl, as he'd intended to only the day before. And he wouldn't
be compromising any shred of dignity or power, were he to take her like a man
was meant to take his reward...

Just then, the swinging doors of Dixie's opened and a slew
of Barons pushed their way into the bar. Grizz and Spivey led the charge,
looking already three sheets to the wind. Yak—who grew especially sullen when
he was drunk—slouched behind them. Hearing Joe Walsh on the tinny speakers, the
gang began a mismatched a capella rendering of Bridie's favorite song.

“Your boys sure know how to run a ruckus,” the girl said—and
it was like a little window had shut. The slice of vulnerability that had
appeared in her gaze was now utterly gone, replaced with that nascent
mechanic's toughness. Smiling tightly, Bridie knocked back her double pour of
Jame-o and stood to join Athena in the corner. Tuck put his head in his hands.

The mood of Dixie's changed with the arrival of a mess of Barons.
The townie girls grew more brazen, beginning to shout their conversations over
the small space. Spivey and Buck each grabbed a woman as if from the ether,
pulling them into a messy square dance. Penny seemed to retreat into Jaded
Bartender mode, pausing less for conversations with her patrons. It was a
rumpus, alright.

Yak rolled toward the now-vacant spot at the bar and began
to yammer away about some big plan for the club (Yak always seemed to have some
big plan for the club...), and soon the promise of a solitary evening at the
bar had faded away. Now this was just like any other night. Except for the new
girl, the intermittent angel—changing the very feel of the air one minute,
vanishing the next. Tuck contemplated the bottom of his glass while Penny
raised an eyebrow in judgment over the bar.