“Relax, hon. I like being out of jail. I’m not going to do anything to put me back in there.”
Hailey nodded.
“Come,” I said, taking her hand in mine and leading her to a private side room.
Her hand felt warm and soft to the touch. It fucking electrified me. That was a bad sign—babes were meant for fucking, not for creating feelings like this. I suppose, though, even Satan himself could get excited at a first time every once in a while.
The room reeked of sex. Probably not the greatest first impression, but who was I to care?
“You want me to speak on camera about some bullshit? Why? You know I’ll have no comment.”
“You brought me into a room that smells like an orgy went down last night, and, given the clothes on the floor—including some bras—I’m not wrong.”
She was wrong. It was two nights before.
“So clearly, if all you wanted to say was no comment, you could have just done so right out there. So I know you have something more to say.”
Oh, she was going to be trouble. She was fucking good.
“I brought you in here because I didn’t trust your little motley crew of cameramen and reporters to not pull some shit off the record and use it on their TVs. You know you guys pull shit like this all the time.”
“I know,” she said, stunning me with her honesty. “And that’s why I agreed to come inside.”
I didn’t really leave her with a choice, but glad to hear this gal shoots it straight.
“But I’m not going to sit here and feel like I’m in a boiler room. I want to know what you wanted to say.”
“I’ll let you know what I want to say when I want to say it,” I said, taking a breath. It wasn’t like the “when” was years away. “We’re happy there’s peace in this town. But that kind of shit never lasts long. And frankly, I’m convinced that even if I say that, you’ll go on camera with your little makeup and cute little hair and start talking about how we’re a menace to society. We can’t be trusted. We should be shamed.”
“I mean, have you looked in the mirror?”
“I have, and I like what I see.”
Her face went red. She liked what she saw too. This was going to be fun.
“As handsome as you are,” she said, suddenly sounding like she wished she hadn’t said that out loud, “you aren’t exactly a publicly appealing face. The tattoos, the scowl—those aren’t the things that are going to be on billboards anytime soon.”
“Fucking good thing, considering we just want to be left alone,” I said. “This is the shit you journalists never understand. Our attitude isn’t ‘fuck the world.’ It’s ‘fuck the world for trying to interfere in our lives.’ Yeah, we fuck shit up. But you know what? When we’re left alone, we take care of ourselves and those around us. Ask any business we frequent; they fucking love us. But because some pearl-clutching white MILF in the suburbs faints at the sight of tattoos and is afraid of ‘what it might mean to the children,’ she insists that something be done about us.”
I rolled my eyes.
“And the second I go on the record and say all that shit I just did, we get police cars spying on us. We get probes into tax evasion. Shit that we have no problems with, but shit we have to deal with anyway. So forgive me if I’m not especially keen on jumping into your lap and letting you broadcast every fucking complaint I have about society. I’m smart enough to know what public battles I’ll lose, and the answer is almost all of them that don’t involve fists or guns.”
Hailey sat there in silence. She gulped, then stood up from the couch. I suspected it was as much an attempt to stand tall as it was to get her ass off a spot where some prospects had gang-banged a club bunny.
“What if I tried to give you a report in a different light?”
I laughed so hard I nearly hurt my abs. It was rude, and I didn’t give two shits.
“Babe, you’re cute, but—”
“Don’t call me babe,” she said, but I could see her fighting her desire for me. “I came here to talk to you as a professional.”
“OK, fine, Miss Reporter, perhaps you’re serious, but let me spell it out for you. I fell for that trick once. ‘Oh, we’ll give an honest and fair assessment of who you are.’ And then I turned on the news, and I didn’t even finish the fucking thing because I’d broken the damn TV screen with my remote!”
I took a deep breath.
“You want the fucking truth? The fucking truth is that we don’t bother anyone that doesn’t bother us. We want to live our lives in some goddamn peace. We run a mechanic shop here that provides us income, and we do a fucking good job at it. Look online; it’s the truth. If some suit-and-tie shits his pants when he sees us, that’s not our fucking problem. We get in bar fights, sure, and we get drunk too much, but if that’s the fucking worst of it, then we’re not the menace to society some of you journalists think we are. We’re certainly not a bunch of fucking gangsters and trouble-makers.”
