“The fuck—” Mick muttered as he straightened up.
“We got a fucking problem,” Shepherd rasped. He threw the girl down on the floor. The big bad bikers shuffled backward as though her bad luck might be contagious. “This stupid bitch had one job, and she fucked it up. And after Ville told me she could be trusted.”
Nobody bothered to pretend they hadn’t turned to look at Ville. He lurched painfully out of his chair and swung a kick at the girl. She rolled out of his way before his toe could connect to her ribs.
“Stupid bitch,” Ville slurred through swollen lips. “What’d you do now? All you had to do was a watch a fucking baby. How hard is that?”
Shepherd casually backhanded Ville into his chair. “I could ask you the same question, Ville,” he spat. “I send you on vacation, all expenses paid for you and your favorite whore here—”
“Not a whore,” the girl muttered.
“Shut up.” Shepherd used his boot to shove her back down on the floor. “All you had to do was find someone to sell you a healthy baby and bring it back. Instead what the fuck happened? You bring back some defective inbred Mexican brat, and now we’ve got a problem.”
He lifted his foot. The girl shuddered and pushed herself up on skinny, wiry arms. She shoved her hair back from her face with the back of her hand. “The baby was going to die. I didn’t tell anything, just gave Ribka to doctor and left. No one was told anything, no one has your name, and no dead baby.”
It was the girl from Tag’s building, the one with the sick baby.
Fuck.
Bass took a long, cold drink of beer and wondered what the odds were that Tag wasn’t involved.
