The Bare Bones (The Bare Bones MC) (18 page)

“That’s right…obey my every word…Makes you wet when I feel your boobs, doesn’t it?”

I saw more than felt his arm jerking rhythmically as his breaths grew hotter and more insistent on my neck. I “saw” with my new strange spirit eyes that he was jerking off against my ass. He gripped a tit as though it was a life preserver, and the closer he got to crisis, the faster he jerked and the less he tormented me.

I found that I could hover around the ceiling like one of those operating room patients who almost died. I was a light, disembodied spirit closer to the heavenly realm than the bodily one, and I was watching some grunt perform a routine, and gross, operation.

This had nothing to do with sex, with the beautiful, heavenly things Ford and I did with each other. What Cropper did to my body wasn’t sex. It was low, twisted, depraved violence, an assault on my privacy and pride.

When it was over Cropper staggered back to his chair and fell into it like an ape man. I could cover my bare ass with my dress but couldn’t do much about my neckline.

“May I have my phone back?” I asked meekly. I was dizzy, coming down from that ceiling, being sucked back into my body.

Cropper chuckled lazily. Apparently abusing his son’s old lady was just one of the many items on his daily “to do” list. “Why? So you can cry to Torino how mean his daddy’s being? Not a chance. You need to experience the total slave package. Besides. Torino’s going to be spending a few more nights down there. His mission just, ah, became a little more complicated than he knew.”

My heart sank lower, if such a thing was possible.

Worse, Cropper radioed for one of the sweetbutts to bring my suitcase. He rifled through it, removing all the panties, after smelling them, of course. “You’re going to walk around here commando, my little slut,” he decreed. “That means your cunt is open and free to me at any given moment. I look forward to putting my dick, hands, and face where my son’s dick, hands, and face were. It’s a family thing, you know.”

The worst, probably, was the way the sweetbutt looked at me when Cropper decided this. She
sneered
. All high and mighty, and sneering at low old me.

In front of her, Cropper unbuckled my fur-lined leather collar. Everyone knew it was symbolic of Ford’s ownership of me, and Cropper just tossed it like an old Christmas tree into his desk drawer. “For now, you belong to me, Cookie. You obey
me
and answer to
me
to repay your fucking brother’s debt.”

Then he cut the bodices of all my tops.

There would be no way to hide what a slut I was, especially not from Riker.

FORD

“I’ve lived out my melancholy youth. I don’t give a fuck anymore what’s behind me or what’s ahead of me. I’m healthy. Incurably healthy. No sorrows, no regrets. No past, no future. The present is enough for me.” ~ Henry Miller

S
oledad Jonas turned out to be one badass
vaquera
, a Mexican who had married a rich Arizona cattle rancher. The owner of Hardscrabble had died, leaving Soledad with the land and its legacy—the tunnel underneath the border, the main source of his income after slowly selling off all his cattle.

Ford didn’t get around to seeing Soledad for another couple of days. First, they had to lay low, let Slushy rest, and doctor him up. His arm was broken but they couldn’t take him to the ER, so Ford used his best SEAL training to reset the bone and MacGiver up a sling. Slushy screamed such blue murder they may as
well
have told the cops he’d been beaten by the cartel. They gave him so much booze he slept for the next twenty-four hours.

Then they had to hang around Nogales in a Best Western for another night because the mysterious Soledad wouldn’t see them until she got her lawyer. Ford had to keep an eye on Slushy, too, due to the flight risk factor. Nothing prevented Slushy from making a run for it and selling his knowledge of the tunnel to the next highest bidder. However, Ford had gone through Slushy’s pockets, and the most valuable thing he owned seemed to be a picture of a daughter and a safe deposit box key, both of which Ford took for insurance.

Slushy asked, “How do I know that once I introduce you, you’re not going to cut and run?”

“You should be so lucky,” said Ford, bench pressing a hundred seventy-five pounds in the hotel’s gym. “Where you gonna go? With us you’ve got family.”

Slushy snorted. “Some family. A bunch of hoods who beat each other up over a toothless blowjob from some skank.”

“Hey. That was Ziggy and Tall Peril. Us longstanding charter members don’t fight amongst ourselves.”

“Right.” Turk stood over Ford, spotting him. “We just beat the shit out of rival clubs.”

“What’s the attraction?” asked Slushy. “Ford, you said your dad’s the President. But Turk? Why would you want to join? Something about never having had a family?”

“You got it,” grunted Turk. “Cropper and Ford
were
my family growing up. We all lived at the clubhouse, at the Bum Steer, until Cropper got a citizen wife—Ingrid, Madison’s mother. By then I was old enough to run the army surplus store alone, so I lived in the back until they built the Citadel. I imagine that’s where you’ll live. It’s nice. An old army airfield on top of a gorgeous mesa.”

“Madison,” said Slushy. “She’s someone’s old lady? See, I know the lingo. Jesus. I was on my way to Belize and I wound up here.”

Turk answered for Ford. “She’s Ford’s old lady. She’s a nurse.”

Slushy made a lip fart, caressing his injured arm. “Could’ve used her the past couple of days. How’d you wind up with a
nurse
, Capone? I guess opposites attract.”

Ford finally gave the thin-haired lawyer something. After all, the guy had a daughter somewhere. He was human. “It’s a fatal attraction that goes way back, Consigliore. We were meant to be.” Ford was frankly pissed off because he hadn’t heard from Maddy since he’d left P&E. He had only left one more message, not being the stalkery type. If a woman didn’t want to call him, he didn’t force himself on her.

Madison was supposed to be telling that dickhead doctor she was moving out. That alone had Ford’s nerves on edge. When he became edgy, he was more liable to explode, to prematurely react to something, to blow it, so to speak. He needed to be calm, cool, collected for this meeting with Mrs. Jonas. Every excuse he could think of for why Maddy wasn’t calling him was a bad, terrifying excuse. Something had gone wrong.

He had even called Faux Pas to get the lay of the land. “Oh yeah, I’ve seen her around the hangar,” was all Faux Pas would say. “I think she’s giving some medical exams to the whores.”

What?
Why would Madison be doing that, and not answering his calls? A very foreboding feeling was hanging over Ford’s head. He was rarely wrong when this black cloud came hovering.

He said, “Listen, Slushy, what’s your real name? And why Slushy?”

“Slushy was what pirates always named their cook. The fat boiled out of meat was called slush. The cook guarded it with his life. The fatty slime that rose to the top was used as lubricant for ropes, rigging, almost everything.”

Turk chuckled. “So you’re named after slime?”

Ford said, “After a cook, asshat. Because he cooks the books.”

“Exactly,” said Slushy. “The slush was our first modern chapstick. I’m actually Aaron McGill, though you won’t have much use for that name. Ah, money laundering isn’t what it used to be. God, do I miss the nineties. Have you guys put any thought into zombies?”

Exhaling painfully, Ford replaced the bar onto the rack and sat upright on the bench. “Zombies? I’ve thought about them. In which way?”

“They’re hot. If you could find someone who could create a zombie video game, we could pay him with dirty money. Each copy bought would earn him forty dollars, right? Just make sure it’s someone you trust, of course. I’ve got a million ideas, some good smurfing plans. The zombie game doesn’t even have to be very good. You can just have those cheap-ass bendable buddy zombies that move like an old silent film, like three frames per second. They could be slow zombies that wouldn’t scare a 7-11 clerk. Doesn’t matter. Although, of course, if it
were
good, all the better. You might make some legitimate cash.”

Turk said, “We actually do have a guy with zombie connections.”

Ford thought about it. No matter how hammered Faux Pas got, he always showed up to the film sets where he worked. He could be relied on to make a guy really look like half his face had been shot off. Since that was a good excuse to call Faux Pas again, Ford took his phone outside the gym and called him.

He only got Faux Pas’ voicemail, so he called Cropper. Cropper would know why the fuck Madison was hanging around the Citadel doctoring sweetbutts.

Cropper wanted to talk about the tunnel, whether or not it really existed. Ford assured him the tunnel was real, and they were set to see it with their own eyes tomorrow.

Cropper said, “Make sure a Mr. Lyle Bloodgood is included in the meeting. He’s Mrs. Jonas’lawyer. He knows all the ins and outs of dealing with moving the product through the tunnel. Mrs. Jonas likes to have plausible deniability, which is understandable. Then you need to get a date from Mr. Bloodgood. That’s the date the first product will need to be picked up on the ranch. We can put Tall Peril in charge of that, so take him when you view the tunnel so he knows where it is.”

That was all fine with Ford, and he was finally able to ask, “Hey, I’ve heard Madison’s been at the Citadel? What’s she doing there?”

“Who told you that?” was Cropper’s first response.

That raised Ford’s suspicions. Why shouldn’t anyone tell him that? What did it matter? “What difference does it make? Why’s she there?”

Cropper affected a casual tone. “Oh, she’s giving the sweetbutts exams. About time, right? We’ve never been able to force them to get examined at the clinic, and I’m tired of having pants rabbits and seam squirrels running around my jeans.”

That was an extremely good idea, actually, so Ford didn’t question it. He was tired of the Neapolitan Bone Aches, too. “Well, she hasn’t returned any of my calls. When you see her, tell her her phone is dead or something. We’ll be back tomorrow night.”

“Tomorrow night? Now, don’t rush this business, son. Take your time. Make sure this McGill is legit.”

“If by ‘legit,’ you mean does he seriously know how to cook the books, then yeah, he’s legit. I think he’ll be valuable. Now I’m assuming that Ochoa didn’t know about this tunnel or he wouldn’t have cut Slushy loose.”

“Slushy? That the lawyer? Right, Ochoa had no clue. I don’t think it’s been used for quite a while, not since the lady rancher’s husband died. So we have to make sure no one else has got their finger in this particular pot, you dig?”

Ford dug, but he wasn’t very happy about it. He knew he was hopelessly in love with Madison by how surly he became without her. It was beyond strange that she was giving exams to sweetbutts and ostensibly sleeping in the hangar, yet she hadn’t returned any of his calls.

Ford knew he had to see the tunnel with his own eyes. Make sure it was passable, make sure it was big enough for a person carrying a backpack full of cocaine or weed. Ford had to ensure everything was watertight, security-wise. He had to make sure, as much as was possible, that this Soledad woman wouldn’t crack under pressure, or wasn’t dealing out of both sides of her ass.

Sometimes Ford hated this sort of business. It wasn’t often he really got homesick. But now that he was together with Madison, he had a feeling that’d happen more often. He wanted to stick to Illuminati Trucking business from now on. Stay close to home.

MADISON

I
t was a degrading few days—a lot of slapping, inspecting, and stroking of my labia, like they’d never seen a cunt before. They treated me like a toy poodle with all their smacking and caressing. I think part of the thrill for them was knowing I was Ford’s property. Maybe a lot of them had grudges against Ford. But knowing they were pulling and nibbling on my nipples, clamping on tassels they could pull at while smacking my bare ass, well, that seemed to be the height of eroticism for them.