“My mission in life’s been to take those fuckers down.”
“I’m sorry, Clay. I’m so sorry.”
“You know, I haven’t told this story since…since right after it happened. The cops didn’t give a shit. They had bigger fish to fry than some poor little smackhead like Carly, but I knew…I knew exactly who’d done it. It was the fucker she’d been hanging out with. A racist MC son of a bitch. Those bastards killed her. The official line was that it was an OD, but I’d seen her body. I’d seen what those motherfuckers had done to her, and I knew.” He stopped talking, and she tightened her hold before stepping back.
“Jesus, how did I end up here? With you? The most amazing woman I’ve ever met. I…I’m not sure I deserve this. Whatever this is.”
“Whatever it is,” she echoed, and looking at this man, she knew it was more than sex. She wanted to show him with her body, her embrace.
“Come on,” she whispered. “Come to bed with me.” She urged him. “Please.”
“There’s more. I want to tell you everything.”
“I know. Let’s go to bed, and you can tell me.”
They settled in, Clay on his back and George on her side, facing him. She wanted to touch him everywhere, to wrap him up and never let him back out. She wanted to save him. Instead, she put her head on his shoulder, curled one arm over his chest, and waited.
“I don’t know where to start.”
She pictured Clay the first time she’d seem him. “Your eyelids,” she said with a long caress. “Start with your eyelids.”
“That was Ape, a.k.a. Harold Herndon. But he’d beat the crap out of anyone who used his real name.”
“So, Harold.” She forced a smile. “He did your lids?”
“Yeah.”
When he didn’t go on, she prodded. “Against your will?”
“With a tattoo needle against my eyeball.” He paused, shuddered, and then turned to her. “Same night I was shot. The whole damned operation was coming together that night. Ape and I were supposed to go with Handles for the final exchange, but he surprised us all by leaving alone. He must have known, even then, about me. Or had his doubts. And while he was gone, somebody ratted me out to Ape.”
“Who was it? How did they know?”
“Still got no idea. But it was someone close.”
“You mean—”
“I mean somebody on the inside. Someone who’s supposed to be on my team.”
“Oh no.”
“They shut me up in my room, waiting for Handles to come and…I don’t know, deliver the fatal blow or whatever. That’s when the shit really hit the fan. I wound up on a bed, with a couple of bullet holes in my back…one in my thigh.”
George’s pulse took off fast, too fast. He had to see he was killing her.
“Your thigh?” She reached down and ran a hand down one leg, then the other, until she found it—a chunk taken out of the side of his thigh. “This is why you limp.”
“Yeah.”
“Clay, I’m—”
“It wasn’t the worst thing that ever happened to me. Another time, I got stuck at the bottom of a well shaft with a dead woman and another biker.”
“Another biker? You thought of yourself as one of them?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I was one of them.”
She took that in, understood it for what it was. A warning? An admission of guilt?
