“You sure, girl?” He smirked at me.
“Roxy, sir.” I went for a wide-eyed, innocent look.More like the scared saloon girl.“I don’t want any trouble, Mr. Holliday.”
“I hear there’s some vermin hanging around town. You should get back to the Blue Angel.” He tipped his cowboy hat at me before walking away. He was only a few steps down the street when he called over his shoulder. “Better keep my seat warm at the bar, Roxy.”
We waited until the crowd moved with them before heading back inside.
“Damn, girl, you don’t know what you’ve just done.” Lulu held my hands, jumping up and down, but she let me go when I wasn’t jumping with her.
“What happened?” Angelica emerged from the kitchen.
“Doc Holliday told Roxy to keep his seat warm at the bar.”
They both squealed, and I had to stick my fingers in my ears.
Angelica instantly made plans. “I’m not calling Francene back. You two can split the room, and the tips should make up for the slow morning. I’ll bus andrun food, and Bri can be the hostess. No one will say anything about the wait if she’s at the front door.” She clapped her hands, doing a spin move as her brown hair twirled out from behind her.
“What are you two on?” I was utterly confused.
“Doc Holliday is having lunch here.” Lulu grinned, eyes full of excitement. “Every tourist is going to fight for a table just to see him.”
A full restaurant meant tips. If the car was ready next week, I could leave sooner than I planned. This place was a time warp, and I wasn’t letting it trap me.
Chapter nine
Trapped in Tombstone
Cactus
My burner phone rang, but I ignored the vibrations coming from my ass, not giving a fuck which brother it was. I couldn’t get it through their thick skulls that they needed to knock it the fuck off. Each time one of them called for something stupid, they were giving away the club run’s position.
“Are you going to answer that?” Tumbleweed moved the chew into his other cheek before he smiled at me. His teeth were streaked brown from the shit, and there were always glasses lying around the clubhouse with his spit in them. I tried to tell him he’d get caught at some crime scene over the fucking stuff, but he just laughed at me.
I wanted to push his bike over and let it pin him to the dirt. He would see it coming, and it would be more trouble than it was worth. After the last drop-off, we’d camped in an RV park overnight, making sure we were early for today’s pickup.
I shook my head, not bothering to answer. It didn’t matter where we were going or what business we had. If Scorpion scheduled a run, I was on it, and that fucker liked to stack as many as he could into a short amount of time.
I rolled my eyes, internally moaning and groaning some more. Scorpion hated me because I’d forced him to step up and be a man until he had outranked me. Ididn’t care for him because he always chose excuses over his family. Now he held more power, and the line between us was razor thin.
We were at the pickup location, our bikes sitting in formation on a narrow dirt road, engines cut. Out in the desert, silence wasn’t peace—it was a warning. We could hear anyone coming for miles. Most of us wore open-faced skullcaps for helmets, so we didn’t need to remove them.
It wasn’t hard to figure out why the brothers bothered me. We lived surrounded by violence, and no one from this chapter had ever made it to their forty-first birthday. I had ten months to go, and every brother knew it. Some of them wanted to make sure I was alive, others, to keep track of my location in case they had to claim my body. Add in my beef with Scorpion, and it was a clusterfuck waiting to blow. Knowing my luck, today was the day.
The wind kicked up enough that it danced along the brush on the side of the road, spinning up dust devils.
I’d been a nomad, stuck somewhere west of the Mississippi River, the first time Angelica had called in a panic. I hadn’t expected her to break down, and it had haunted me ever since.
“Grant,” she had cried, “I need your help. Dad’s going to kill Brice if he finds out I’m pregnant.”
The silence pressed harder, and my mind replayed the conversation word-for-word as if it was happening all over again in my ear.
“I told you to stay away from him,” I could hear myself say. Brice had been the kid down the street with his own military father to deal with, but where ours had been overly ambitious, his had been a violent drunk.
“You don’t know him like I do,” she’d grumbled, and I could imagine the stubbornness settling on her face.
“I know he’s never going to man up to support you. How is he going to be a father when he can’t even wipe his own ass?” I wouldn’t allow anyone to tear down Angelica. My mother had suffered enough through my father’s ambitions. I couldn’t sit and watch as my sister suffered a similar fate. “I’ll come home,” I had said, the memory fading as I heard Tumbleweed trying to speak to me.
“What if it’s your girl?” Tumbleweed asked. He’d finally decided that he was well enough to get out of bed and do his fucking job. As road captain, like me, he didn’t have a choice. He was the best tracker I’d ever known, and he knew these trails better than the coyotes.
