Devil May Care: Boxed Set (54 page)

“Let me come in this time,” I said.

“No way.” He shook his head. “Not a chance in hell, shorty.”

“C’mon, Slim,” I begged. “Just this once.”

He sighed and ran a hand through what little remained of his hair. I knew his resolve was weakening.

“Please?” I asked one more time.

“Alright, fine,” he growled as he clambered out of the car. “But keep your damn mouth shut.” I barely heard him as I was too giddy with excitement. “And don’t look anyone in the eye.”

I ran around to the other side of the car and swooped him up in a big bear hug. I lifted him off the ground as he yelped, “Put me down, you son of a bitch!” It was hard to believe that five years had passed since he’d found me broken and dying in that alley. I was big and strong now. My muscles bulged across my chest and at the sleeves of my shirt. Already, I towered over him.

I set him back on his feet and planted a big kiss on the top of his balding head. He muttered curses to himself as he turned and headed to the dirty, graffiti-tagged door set in the wall to the left of the building. I smiled.

Slim was a good guy. He’d taken me under his wing, teaching me everything he knew about boosting cars. He was the best in the business, or so he proclaimed, and everything he did seemed to back up that boast. Those twitchy fingers of his could spring a car door open before I could blink. No lock was smart enough to keep him out. It hadn’t taken me long to pick up the tricks of the trade either. Before long, I was hot-wiring engines to life even faster than he could.

The best part, though, was driving. The moment before you pressed the pedal, when the whole road was wide and open, just waiting for you to push the vehicle to its limits. I had a knack for it. The wheel just made sense under my hands, like the second I touched it, I became part of the car. I read it and it read me, and together, there was no corner that I couldn’t drift around, no gap I couldn’t hit with just the right amount of horsepower and torque to leave cops and enemies alike in the dust.

Not that we ever got to hold onto the cars for too long. This was a business, after all, and there were buyers to satisfy. But that was one part of the gig that Slim did his damndest to keep me away from. “You’re too young for this shit,” he’d always tell me. “These aren’t guys you want to meet.” No matter how much I’d prodded and cajoled, he insisted that I let him handle all the transactions.

Until today.

We walked up to the door and Slim knocked twice. A slit at eye level was swung open, revealing a sliver of someone’s face. “Yeah?” the voice drawled.

“It’s Slim,” he said. He sounded nervous, although, to be fair, he always sounded that way.

The miniature door closed again without the man saying another word. I heard the clank of multiple locks and chains rattling before the whole door swung inwards.

A man stood at the doorway. I looked him up and down, awed by what I was seeing. He was huge, or maybe he just seemed that way due to the piercings and tattoos that covered every inch of his skin. His muscles stretched tight against the leather jacket he wore. When he looked at me, I felt power rolling off of him in waves. This was not a man to be fucked with.

He extended an arm towards the back of the building, inviting us inwards. Slim nodded and gestured for me to follow him. We walked inside. The door shut behind us.

Indoors, I heard the clack of pool balls skimming across the green felt of the billiards table and deep voices rumbling. We emerged from the dark hallway into a low-lit bar. Men like the one at the door were scattered around the room. Some drank, others smoked and played pool. All were equally as huge, equally as intimidating. Every single one of them looked up at us as we entered. We froze in our tracks.

A man unfolded himself from the booth to my right and sauntered in our direction. He stubbed out his cigarette as he strolled over. When he stood in front of us, he folded his arms across his chest and cleared his throat.

“Hey, Jawbone,” Slim stammered. His hands were wringing in front of him like he was trying to squeeze out the last few drops of water from a dishrag.

“Slim,” replied the man, inclining his head.

“Got a, uh, we got a good one for you today, yep, uh-huh,” he babbled.

The man shifted his gaze from Slim to me. His eyes were dark and stormy. They raked up and down, peeling me apart like an onion. “Who’s the runt?” he asked, jerking his chin at me.

“Oh, this? This is my, um…”

“I’m Dom,” I interjected. I folded my arms across my chest to match the man’s posture and drew myself up to my full height. I had more room to grow, but I could already tell I was going to be a big son of a bitch. This bastard didn’t scare me. Nothing scared me. I was Dom. A man of the streets. I stole cars and drove fast and did whatever the hell I wanted.

The man’s eyes glistened. “And what are you doing here, Dom?”

“I work with Slim now.”

“Is that so?” the man said, turning back to Slim. Slim nodded and kept wringing his hands. His gaze darted around the room, never resting for more than a beat on any one thing. The other men had gone back to their mugs of beer or their game of pool, but there was still a palpable air of violence in the room. Bad things had happened here, I could just tell. But I liked it. It had the same pent-up vibe as the silence of a stolen car right before the engine roared and the wheels caught and I went flying down the street away from anything and everything trying to stop me. It felt dangerous. It felt right.

“Yeah,” I said before Slim could say anything else. “That is so. Who are you?”

“Now, Dom, let’s just…” Slim started to caution, laying his hand gently on my arm. I shrugged him off and glared back at the man.

He stared back at me stonily. “I’m Jawbone,” he said. “I’m the president of the Broken Bones MC. This is my clubhouse you’re standing in.”

The Broken Bones.
So this was them. Slim was always careful not to reveal too much about who bought the cars we boosted. But he’d let that name slip a couple times before. His tone when he said it was identical every time without fail. He said it the way you’d say the name of the devil if you were worried that, if you said it without the proper respect, you might accidentally summon him. Respect and fear all rolled into a few syllables that clattered off the tongue with a nice, rugged edge. It reminded me of the first time I’d cursed, way back in my foster care days. Just like the word “fuck,” the name of the Broken Bones MC had a ring to it that nothing else could quite match.

And this man. He knew what that name sounded like spoken out loud. In fact, he was the physical embodiment of it. Tattoos ranging over his tanned skin, muscles that had no doubt been earned the hard way, scars earned even harder. He had a steel barb piercing each ear and a set of rings on his fingers that had points suggesting they were there for more than just show.

He should have scared me, intimidated me. And in part, he did. But there was another part of me that didn’t see him as a predator or a bully like Slim did.

It saw him as a brother.

Slim started babbling about the car, and Jawbone’s attention flipped back to my partner in crime. But I could feel a piece of his awareness stayed rooted on me. He was testing me. There was not a chance in hell I was going to let him sense any weakness. I kept my arms folded and my face scowled, like nothing here impressed me.

“It sure is a nice whip, lemme tell you that much,” Slim was saying. “Brand new leather interior and a custom engine. Here, here, come, let me show ya.” He waved, gesturing for Jawbone to follow him out to the curb where the stolen car was parked. He turned and started walking. Instead of following right away, I hesitated for just a moment. My eyes locked with Jawbone’s. I wanted to tell him one more time,
Pain doesn’t scare me. You don’t scare me. I’m Dom.

Then we went outside.

# # #

We sat on the sidewalk and counted the stack of cash for a few minutes after Jawbone had driven the car into the garage and disappeared. The bills were crisp and fresh. They had that beautiful smell that nothing else in the world could match. Nothing beat the scent of new money.

Slim was giddy. He riffled through the stack half a dozen times. I kept the scowl planted on my face long after the door to the Broken Bones clubhouse had shut and locked behind us.

“Oh, we are lookin’ real nice now, ain’t we, partner?” Slim cackled, shifting back and forth where he sat. “Dough for days, ain’t that right? Yes, it is! Yes, it is!”

I didn’t answer. I was still in the middle of processing the weird sense of belonging that had swept over me when we walked into the interior of the clubhouse. I had an unnerving intuition that those were my people.

Slim was my people too, of course. He’d saved me. I owed him more than just gratitude; I owed him my life. And his lessons were what had allowed me to make a living on the streets. We made a hell of a team, and in our few years running around together, we’d grown close.

But still, I couldn’t shake the feeling that inside that clubhouse was where I belonged.

“Slim,” I began in a solemn voice.

He jerked his head up and looked at me with that funny sideways glance of his. “What’s up, youngin’?” he asked. “Something’s on your mind, ain’t it?”

I looked at my hands. They were stained with oil and grime from that day’s work, but beneath the muck, they were strong and capable. I flexed once, twice, savoring the feeling of power in my fingers. “What’s the deal with these guys, anyway?” I deflected, not sure yet how to ask the question I wanted to ask.

Slim craned his head to look back at the clubhouse. It was completely nondescript, no sign that anything illegal or dangerous was on the other side of the walls. To a passerby, it would look just like any of the million chop houses and car garages that littered this part of town. But Slim and I knew different.

“These is dangerous men, kiddo,” Slim said softly. “Hard men, you understand?”

I kept looking at my hands, flexing and unflexing, over and over.

Slim continued, “The Broken Bones is guys that’s not to be messed with. They run half the damn city—well, they run everything that the Capparellis don’t. Between them two groups, there ain’t a damn alleyway you could piss in without urinatin’ on someone’s turf.” He eyed me, searching for any reaction. For a guy who seemed as neurotic as he did all the time, he had a way of understanding right away what was going on in my head. I wasn’t ready yet for him to confirm his suspicions. I didn’t look up.

“They seemed awful cool to ya, didn’t they, shorty?” Slim asked.

I hesitated for a moment. When I looked up at Slim and nodded, he could see right away in my eyes what I’d felt.

“I was afraid of that.” He sighed and ran a hand through his hair.  “You know, I done found you more than five years ago? You was a mangled-lookin’ piece of shit, just a li’l kid all beat up in that back alley. I dragged your ass down to my tent and I wasn’t sure you would, but you pulled through. We done alright together, haven’t we?”

I couldn’t tear my eyes away from him. He seemed so sad. I noticed his hands had stopped their incessant shaking.

He went on without waiting for me to answer. “Yes, we sure have. But, shorty, you are too young to do the kinds of things those men do. They fight some awful battles. You and me, we’re just little guys out on the edge. Those guys in there,” he pointed his thumb over his shoulder behind us, “they wade through blood. They been fightin’ the Capparellis for years, and it ain’t a pretty, nice little squabble. It’s war, son. You is way too little for any of that. I know you think you big, but you ain’t so big yet. Not yet.”

He stood up and offered me a hand. I looked up at him from where I sat on the curb. He was frail, quickly graying, the years spent scrambling for survival starting to catch up to him faster than he could run away. When I clasped his hand, mine felt so strong and hardy in comparison to his.