Knife & Flesh (The Night Horde SoCal Book 4) (4 page)

“You sound like you’re looking to pimp me out.” Trick leaned into his refrigerator and pulled out a couple of bottles of Shock Top. He handed one to Connor and then twisted the top off the other, pushing the fridge door closed with his elbow. “That’s fucked up, Con.”

“I’m not pimping you out. There’s no expectation. I’m just telling you what is. She’s asking for you. I think she likes you.”

Walking past his friend, Trick went to the living room and sat down on his futon. Connor followed, dropping into the chrome and faux-leather armchair. For a few moments, they didn’t talk. Then Connor added, “She
is
hot.”

“Fuck you. I’m not fucking La Zorra. The woman cuts people who piss her off into sections. If I go to the meet, you’re asking me to fuck her or reject her. Why is that on me? I’m nobody in the club. Not an officer. Just a soldier. I haven’t offed any more of her enemies, so she doesn’t need to ‘thank’ me again. There’s no reason I should be at that meet. Can’t Hooj just tell her no—at the club level?”

“That’s the plan. Like I said, there’s no talk of asking you to do this. I’m just running the option by you, in case you
want
it.”

Connor should have known better. They were close; he knew Trick better than anyone. He knew his taste in women, his worldview, just about everything. Not everything, but nearly. Trick hated that his friend would even ask.

“The answer is no. I know she paid for my grandfather’s house, but if she thought she was buying me with that, then I’ll figure out how to pay her the money back.”

Connor lifted an eyebrow. He knew Trick had the money to pay her back, probably a couple of times over. He also knew that Trick didn’t use that money. He lived off what he made designing bikes. “Understood. Just thought it was your right to refuse.”

Trick set his aggravation aside. There was a lot Connor didn’t know about what had been going on in his head lately, or the depth of his antipathy toward La Zorra because of it. Connor thought only that he was giving him a chance to make up his own mind on the matter.

Dora Vega, the cartel queen they worked with, had contracted the Horde for a hit on Allen Cartwright, the L.A. County District Attorney, nearly a year ago. Trick, a former Army sniper, had done the job, and he’d done it cleanly. The case was still open, but so far there hadn’t been any light on her or the Horde for it, and at this point, Trick felt like any faint trail they might have left had grown ice cold. He could relax. He’d run the job through his head thousands of times, and he hadn’t made a mistake. He’d sacrificed his dreads to that job, so he could blend in as he’d made his way to the top of a skyscraper hundreds of meters away from the target.

Since that hit, Trick was struggling with shit he’d thought he’d dealt with and shipped off long ago. Sighting on that poor bastard’s head had dredged up years of memories. Right then, set up on that rooftop, stretched out on his belly, looking through the sight of the M25, gauging the environment so he could set his shot, everything around him had turned bright and brown. The sounds had changed, no longer the bright, brassy noise of the midday American city but the dark, tangled sounds of the warzone. The man in his sight had been hatless, his thinning hair styled in a businessman’s neat haircut, and he’d been wearing a suit—a sedate navy pinstripe and a red tie. Trick had known all that, but what he’d seen in the crosshairs was the
keffiyeh
of a Taliban soldier.

That flashback had augured a full-on reprise of his first years out of the service.

They did some wack shit in the Horde, violent and bloody, but nothing like what he’d seen and done in Afghanistan. He’d told no one, not even Connor, that the nightmares were back, and the flashbacks. He was keeping an even keel, but there were days when he was managing it by the skin of his teeth.

So no, he was not interested in fucking the woman who had brought that back to him.

Dora was grateful for a job well done and, though she’d paid the club handsomely—seven figures handsome—she had also bought Trick’s
pappoús
’s little house in Santorini. His grandparents had lost the house during an economic catastrophe in Greece, and within a year of their displacement, his grandmother had died. Now, because of La Zorra, his grandfather was back in that old cottage, talking with his beloved wife, whose spirit, he insisted, had never left it.

Trick was grateful, more grateful than he could say, for the kind thing Dora had done. But that didn’t mean he was willing to be whored out to her. In fact, the simple thought of it, that she might think she had some kind of right to him, made his skin itch. Even if he’d been attracted to her, that would have cooled him off.

“I refuse. I’ll be happy if I’m never in the same place with her again.”

~oOo~

After Connor left, Trick took a shower, his second of the day. His skin was still crawling with the notion that Dora Vega wanted him for some kind of boy toy, and thinking about her now always brought the feeling of the desert on him, the way sweat and sand made a constant film on every part of the body, even those parts that were covered by layers of gear. So he showered and scrubbed, and when he felt clean and calm again, he toweled off and pulled on a pair of board shorts. He thought about getting into the pool; the chlorine was good for making him feel clean and nowhere near Afghanistan, but it was the weekend, and he could hear that it was busy. He wasn’t in the mood for people.

Instead, he did a couple of shots of whiskey and chased them with a fresh beer that he swallowed down while he was still standing in the open door of the fridge. Then he got another, put on some music, and went back to his office.

As his day job, if that was what it was, he was the lead designer at Virtuoso Cycles. Though the mainstay of their work was contract customizations of stock bikes, as well as repair and maintenance jobs, Trick designed bikes from scratch. Sometimes he did a commission job, but for the most part, he did his own work for his own inspiration. The one-of-a-kind bikes he built sold for tidy sums, but they sold slowly. His chief value to the business was good press. He had a case of awards, including one from Sturgis a couple of years back.

Hoosier had given him the title of ‘lead designer,’ but the truth was only he designed bikes. Everybody else did mods. Which was fine—his own bike was a modded V-Rod. But changing out a stock exhaust or installing wider wheels wasn’t design. Demon got closer to actual design than the rest of his brothers; he’d rebuild and reconfigure any part of the bike, digging all the way in, so his stock customizations often looked like freely designed bikes. The Night Rod he rode was one such: though it was all readily available mods, Demon’s ride was noticeably unique.

Trick had just finished a project a week or so ago, and he’d been dry since. None of his old sketches excited him, and nothing new had sprung from his fingers yet. But he found time every day he was home to at least sit at his drafting table and sketch. Inspiration rarely struck unless a pencil was in his hand.

His sketches always looked the same at first, starting with the basics: two wheels, the engine, the seat. There was little give in those details; change those up too much, and you were no longer designing a motorcycle. Physics dictated that the engine couldn’t be repositioned too much; same with the seat. In the same way that physiology dictated the human form, and a sketch of a person started with the same series of shapes, so did physics demand a certain conformity.

Some designers, he knew, started with the interior specs: what kind of engine, what kind of power, what design would support the guts. Trick’s approach was more aesthetic: he started with the look, then tailored the guts to it. Often, his finished work looked more like a sculpture than a motorcycle, but everything he’d ever done was roadworthy and street-legal.

And the art pieces won the awards.

The afternoon was getting dusky, and the natural light from the uncovered window over his drafting table had started to dim. Still casting about for an idea that would take him to his next project, but having spent a few peaceful hours not thinking about things that shredded his head, Trick dropped his pencil in its space in the organizer at the back of his table and went to wash his hands. He tended to wipe his fingers over his sketches as he drew and thought, so his hands were always black with soft graphite after a session with his sketchpads.

His stomach rumbled, and he realized that he hadn’t eaten…yet today. Just the beers with Connor and the whiskey and beers later. Laughing to himself, he went to grab his phone out of the dock and call the Thai place down the street. They delivered. Trick could cook, but he wasn’t in the mood.

Before he could dial, there was a light knock on his door. He didn’t get visitors he wasn’t expecting, so he set his phone down and pulled his Glock from a shelf, then checked the peephole.

Juliana and Lucie.

His heart rate hadn’t changed at the knock, even though he’d picked up his gun; that had been more reflex than anything, the caution of a man who’d live most of his life with enemies. But seeing those girls standing on the other side of his door made his pulse quicken a little.

He’d left them the morning before, feeling a strange emptiness as he’d walked out while the smell of pancake syrup was still in the air. He’d told her the truth: although he’d been worried about her, he’d had fun taking care of her and her little girl. He’d felt quiet and peaceful. And Lucie was a great kid.

Since then, with Juliana obviously doing much better, he’d stayed away. There was some danger there for him, he could tell, and he was having a hard enough time keeping his head straight.

While a woman like La Zorra held no interest for him, a woman like Juliana really did. In appearance, they had a lot of similarities—both beautiful Latinas with dark eyes, long dark hair, and olive skin—except that Juliana was tall, while Dora was petite.

It wasn’t about appearance, however. Though he hadn’t spent a great deal of time with either woman, he understood that Dora Vega’s beauty was cold. She was socially proper and gracious, but she was ruthless and calculating, and that ice was visible. Trick wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that she had traded her soul away for her power.

Juliana’s beauty was warm and lively; it was soulful, and her personality shone through vividly. It wouldn’t necessarily be a stretch to say that Trick had a crush. And now that crush had extended to her daughter, who was a delight.

But she had made it clear that she wasn’t interested in him. On Friday night and Saturday morning, he’d felt something that gave the lie to that assertion, but she’d been concussed, so he didn’t suppose he could consider any signs she might have given then to be reliable.

And honestly, she was right not to be interested. Jesus, he’s blown a man’s head off last year—a man who’d done him no wrong, who’d done no wrong to anyone he cared about. A man who had small children who would now grow up without a father. He still did not fully understand why La Zorra had wanted Cartwright dead. She’d asserted that he was corrupt, but Trick had no evidence of that.

She’d told the Horde to kill, the Horde had told him to kill, and he had killed.

Juliana and her daughter deserved somebody better than that.

All of that ran through his mind as he took a pieced wood box down from a top shelf of his bookcase and put the Glock in it. There was another light knock, and then Trick went to the door and opened it.

Lucie was holding a little plant—one of those tiny Japanese trees. A bonsai, he thought they were called. She lifted it up like an offering and declared, “Hi, Trick! It’s a flower for thank you!”

He grinned and took it from her. “Wow, that’s great! Thank you.”

“You’re not s’poseda thank a thank you. That’s silly. You’re s’poseda say ‘you’re welcome’.” Lucie poked her head around the door frame. “Your house is backwards from our house. You were right.”

Before she could walk right into Trick’s apartment, her mother pulled her back and held on. Juliana laughed shyly and met his eyes. “Sorry to just drop by, but we wanted to say thank you for helping us the other day. What you did—well, Lucie was really scared, and I obviously needed some help, and I’m not sure what would have happened if you weren’t there.”

“I told you that no thanks were necessary. I’m glad I was there to help, too.”

“You have a lot of books!” Lucie exclaimed, still straining to see inside. “Do you have Magic School Bus?”

“I don’t think I do. You want to come in and check?”

As Lucie yelled “Yeah!” Trick looked back up at Juliana and smiled.

“I don’t know…” her brow furrowed subtly. But she let go of her daughter, who hurried into the room and right up to Trick’s extensive bookcase—which went from floor to ceiling and covered two walls of his living room. And was nearly full of books.

Juliana followed her daughter, still looking hesitant and uncomfortable, and Trick closed the door. Setting the bonsai on the counter divider between the kitchen and the dining space, he asked, “How are you feeling?”

She turned and smiled, and Trick’s eyes landed on that little dark dot above her mouth. “I’m better. Just a sore spot on my head, but otherwise, I feel good. Normal.”

“That’s great. I’m glad to hear it.

“Mami, look!
The Hobbit!
Like we have!” Lucie brought a book over, and Juliana crouched down to her daughter’s level.