Wild Rider (Bad Boy Bikers Book 2) (16 page)

She watched Beretta stiffen as Ivan laughed at him. After a long swig of the bottle, Ivan leaned back into the table and shook his head.

“Can’t really do it, can I boys? Not without some payment. We just don’t trust you enough. You could be using that explosive shit for anything. Maybe you'll blow up city hall. You goddamn Wrecking Crew got a reputation.”

“You don’t trust us?” asked Ace. “What the hell was that fight downstairs all about, then?”

“Come on, Ace. You think I can take a deal like this just because your man beat mine? That was about respect. Okay? You ain’t run your own MC before. I’ll tell you how it works.”

Ivan took another long drink and then a puff from his cigar before speaking.

“Some guy walks in and wants to run a deal with you—a rival, even if he’s an ally? You can’t just speak with him off the bat. It’s a bad precedent. You ain’t shown this club nothing. No money. No gifts. No respect. And—
and
—you ain’t had much opportunity, I know that. So I gave you one.” Ivan held out his hands. “And lo and behold, you blew it out of the fucking water. Well done. But look at what you’re asking us.” He started making shapes on the table with his hands. “You want me to give you
incredibly dangerous
materials for reasons unknown, in return for a payment that I don’t know that I’ll see and which I
have
to assume you’re robbing from somebody...well.” He chuckled and took another long swig from his bottle. “Fellas, I was born on a day but it wasn’t yesterday, you know what I mean?”

“What do you want, then?”

“I gotta have something from you. Goods or currency, I don’t care. That’ll be the down payment. You can subtract it from your...fifty thousand there.”

Helen’s stomach sank, because she knew exactly what they could use to pay this man.

She leaned in to Beretta. “Ask him what he would want from a hospital pharmacy.”

Beretta turned to look at her straight on.

You serious?
his look said.

She nodded, already scoffing to herself at what she was setting up.

When she'd come back to work, Georgetta had taken her into her trust. And already she was going to abuse it worse than anyone else could.

––––––––

“Y
ou think we'll get away with this?” said Locke.

Tank looked at his close friend, surprised at his hesitation. They were in a used car lot and it was the middle of the day. The plan was to go in, steal a couple of vehicles, and get out. It was all part of Beretta's plan.

The man knew how to organize. It was just too bad nobody  ever told him that you couldn't plan for every contingency. Tank, who had lived a thousand lives in the Pits and been close to death for every one, knew that life had no plan. Life was chaos, and you did your best just riding on the wave as it let you move.

“We've stolen cars a hundred times,” said Tank. “What's the difference here?”

“Not that,” said Locke. “I mean this plan. All of this. This heist. You think it'll work?”

Tank shrugged. “I don't think I've done much to earn the luxury of making predictions. I think we'll do what we do and it'll fall out however it falls out.”

“You,” said Locke, “are fucking creepy sometimes, you know that? You can't just be a zen master ass kicker.”

“Why not?”

“It's unfair to the rest of us who need to get drunk and laid all the time.”

Tank chuckled at that. They circled through the lot, looking for the vehicles they needed. Both needed to be heavy and capable of carrying a lot. It was a lot of cash they were hoping to transport. A lot of cash, a lot of people, a lot of explosives.

Locke found a van suitable for their needs and got inside the front seat, taking out a screwdriver and starting to jimmy with the panel underneath the steering wheel. Tank kept a lookout, scanning the lot, wondering where the salesmen were.

Then one appeared right behind him.

“You know,” said the man, his voice small and tinny. “There are thieves in here every day. It's just that most of them work here.”

Locke adroitly buried his screwdriver in his jeans, moving to cover up what he had been doing. “Uh,” he said, “this paneling is loose. I'm wondering if you can knock off a few hundred to—”

The salesman held up a hand. “Spare me, please.”

He was not an easy man to look at. His hair was thick and dark, and his frame short with a pronounced gut. But that was not the hard part of him.

He had a scar that traveled from his upper cheek down across his mouth. The tissue was thick and puffy, cracked in places, and looked as though it needed constant attention and treatment to be kept in line. It made his face look like a motocross arena.

Locke and Tank gave each other a long look—how to handle this? It would be nothing to knock the man out and take what they wanted, but that would leave a trail. Ace had been very specific about not leaving witnesses.

“You're the new bikers in town,” said the salesman, looking at their vests.

“That's right.”

“Bikers stealing cars? That's how it is now? Strange world.”

“We haven't stolen a thing,” said Tank.

“Not yet,” said the man. He rubbed his face. The scar tissue was thick and ugly. “You got a problem with the Copperheads, right? Rattler?” He must have noticed the surprise on Tank's face. “Word gets around. Everybody hears things in Stockland.”

“That's right,” said Locke. “We've got a problem with Rattler.”

“I know him,” said the salesman. “Known him a good long time. He takes his protection money from me every month. One month I couldn't pay. He left me with this,” he drew a hand across his face, tracing the scar. It looked as though he had practiced the motion many times before. “Hard to get a date, now.”

“I see.”

“I'm not the only one. You go to enough businesses in this town, you'll see more of the same. A scar here, a cripple there, a burn somewhere else. A town like this, everybody knows somebody's got to pay a little to stick around. It's a community. We don't mind much when we got the cash. But if we don't, if times are tough, then he takes his payment in flesh. See?”

“Yes,” said Tank. “He's not a man with much honor. Someone should take care of him.”

The salesman nodded. “What you're doing here...that have anything to do with that?”

“What do you mean?”

“If you walked out of here with a van, say—”

“A van and an SUV,” said Locke. He pointed at one—an older black model, sturdy and wide with a grille guard on the front of it. “That one.”

The man smiled. It was a twisted thing with the scar running across his face. “Sure. Two vehicles, let's call it. That would help you? That would hurt Rattler?”

“That's right,” said Tank. “It would be essential to the whole operation.”

“And you'd remember, huh? If it worked out. You'd remember your friends.”

“Yes,” said Tank. “And we'd forget them if it didn't work out.”

The man's smile grew. “Well boys. I'm sorry about those vehicles you wanted to buy. They just disappeared right off my lot. I can't even say for certain that I ever had them in the first place.”

––––––––

B
eretta had been to hospitals in big cities before. Well-funded hospitals, flooded with money from philanthropists from every kind of business, all of them eager to leave a mark on the world after finding out that their money didn’t make them anything noteworthy in the cosmic scheme of things.

Beretta knew what they had found out: money didn't validate, money didn't justify, money didn't resolve—all money ever did was flow or stagnate.

These high-end hospitals had color-coded floors and vacuum-locked windows, room-by-room climate control, high-definition televisions for each patient, and he’d even been to one with an arcade in the in-patient waiting area. They also had complex security—cameras everywhere, long patterns of rotating guards, keycards for every door and every wing.

Stockland was not a big city. Stockland had a very small collection of business owners with expendable wealth, and none of them were philanthropists.

And so, Stockland did not have that kind of hospital. The pharmacy had the best security the hospital offered—a locked door that required a key-card to open. The problem with the system was that
anyone
hired at the hospital in a medical capacity was able to get into the pharmacy with their key card.

That Saturday morning, Beretta had Helen’s key card. They went to her work the following morning after collapsing back at the motel.

Well, in truth, they collapsed for all of about twenty minutes before finding their bodies intertwining once again, her mouth on his cock and his mouth firmly attached to her pussy. All they had to do to go wild on each other was to be alone.

Increasingly, Beretta found it harder and harder to keep himself separate from Helen. Not just his body, but his thoughts too. 

There was a way to do it, he knew. He hadn’t exactly been celibate since Madeline died. With other women, it hadn’t been a problem to keep his feelings to himself, his thoughts separate from his actions. He didn’t let them in, no matter how crazy or good the sex got.

But Helen was getting in. Helen was seeping into his mind. He owned her—she was his old lady—but even if that was just for show to keep her alive, he had been wanting it to be for real since the second he proposed it.

At around six in the morning, they rolled up to the hospital, Helen already in her scrubs—a fresh blue pair. Her shift would start in a few hours, and so they figured she could pretend to be showing up early if someone who knew her ran into them.

Beretta quickly stuffed his colors in the saddlebag on his bike; he would have ridden in them, but this was a mission of the covert persuasion, and it wouldn’t do to announce who he was to any cameras or guards that might somehow catch his image.

So he wore a normal outfit—tight pants, black A-frame shirt, and a denim jacket. The parking lot was mostly empty and the sun had not risen all the way yet. Some morning dew was still splattered on the cars and concrete.

“You ready to do this?” Beretta asked her.

“Ready? Yes. Willing?” She laughed harshly. “I’m working on that.”

“The time to back out was a while ago,” he said. “Before you suggested it.”

“I know. I know that. But the concept is one thing, and the execution is another.”

“Ain’t that the truth.” He put a hand on her shoulder, guiding her forward to the hospital. “You oughta let me tell you about a meeting I had in a hunting cabin one time.”

“Cabin meeting, huh?”

“It was a very exciting time.”

They walked inside and upstairs, using a side entrance to avoid the traffic of the front where all the eyes were. With Helen’s knowledge, they managed to successfully avoid most of the staff. Most of her job was done on the first and second floors, so as long as they stayed clear of the workers there, they ought to be good. Beretta kept his distance from her, always walking a good ten or fifteen feet behind. They moved through the stairs instead of the elevator to avoid being seen together for any length of time.

This was hard, of course, because just seeing her made him want to shove her against the wall and fuck her rotten. It was impossible for her to be near him and not produce at least a semi-hard cock.

Everything about her made him ready to go. Even in those formless scrubs, he wanted to take her, to fill her up like only he could. That she filled the scrubs out so nicely probably didn’t hurt. The fact that months ago, when he met her for the first time in a bar, she had been wearing scrubs and he was disastrously attracted to her then, didn't hurt either.

The hospital pharmacy was in the middle of two hallways on the fifth floor of the hospital. Glass doors were on either side, perpetually open. Beretta was always confused by that kind of policy. Why have the doors in the first place? It wasn’t like the hospital closed.

There was a security guard posted in front of the pharmacy, not good enough at his job to give Beretta the long look a man like Beretta should always have from law enforcement. The guard was clean-shaven but had a long mass of hair that was too young for him, ironically making him look older and more out-of-touch. His gut was too big and he read a paperback sci-fi novel, licking his thumbs to push the pages along.

Beretta sat down on a bench in the hall, waiting in the shadows and pulling a magazine from a nearby table, pretending to read about the ten best ways to resurface his deck. Helen, meanwhile, sat closer to the doors and fiddled with her phone. In all, they waited for about ten minutes for the pharmacist to go on break. Once he did, Helen waved Beretta forward—the game was on.

Along the way in the hospital, Helen had picked up a wheeled cart full of supplies—boxes of gloves and needles and empty containers, that sort of thing. Helen walked across the stretch in front of the pharmacy, “tripping” and pushing her cart over, sending its contents sprawling all over the ground.

The security guard walked over to help her. His belly stretched far over his belt. His pants clung tight to his rear and looked as though they might split open at any moment. All the same, he bent down and picked up what he could to help Helen out.

“Sorry,” said Helen, hands scrambling and making the mess even more pronounced even as she pretended to pick things up. “I don’t know where my mind is.”

“It’s all right, ma’am,” said the guard. “You ain’t the first to slip in this hallway, that’s for sure. Though most of them that do are usually a little under the influence of whatever they’ve picked up from the pharmacy.”

Beretta snuck forward as the guard’s back was turned and used the key card to get inside. Helen’s voice raised to cover his entrance, saying something about her favorite sci-fi novel, noting the guard's book.

Once in the pharmacy, Beretta went straight to work—grabbing only from those piles that Helen had put on his cheat sheet. Painkillers, disassociatives, stimulants, muscle relaxants. From those, he only took about half the pile—leaving enough there to ensure that the alarm wouldn’t be raised the second the pharmacist returned. They did a full inventory once or twice a week, Helen said, and so there might be a big long window before anyone even knew that something was missing.