Wild Ones (The Lane) (6 page)

“Well, kid, I have to be at work soon. Unless you’d rather...?”

“No. Go,” I told him firmly. “I’m good. I’ll probably go back to sleep.”

“Okay. Well, if you need anything—”

“I’ll call.”

He looked mildly satisfied as he stood, then helped me up. I let him just to humor him and not because I felt as if I’d been hit by a freight train.

“Take your pill,” he instructed once I was fully upright. “Hell, take two. I can always get more from Fury.”

I gave him a mock salute and he strolled off toward his room. I found the fallen Vicodin in the mess of glass and water. It was slightly dissolved, but I stooped to pick it up anyway, ignoring the rest. I grabbed another for the road from the bottle next to the sink, then shuffled back to my own room, vowing to curl up around my bottle of Jäger and sleep the aches away.

Chapter Six

I ended up calling off Saturday, which I couldn’t really afford to do. I told Jax it was because I was still sore. The reality was I just didn’t want to face Preach. Cowardly, maybe, but junkie or not, I kinda cared about the old fucker.

I forced myself to go Sunday. I’d never avoided anything in my life and I sure as hell wasn’t going to start now. I was nervous and it was a foreign feeling to me. What if he was there? What if he was waiting for me and he had an explanation, a good explanation, for what had happened? What if he didn’t have one at all? I wasn’t sure which would have been worse.

Until I pulled into the lot and parked in my usual spot, despite Jax’s warnings about sticking near Duke’s. I knew then which was worse. Preach not being around at all.

My mind was instantly on overdrive and I was considering every possible scenario. He was avoiding me. He was high somewhere and had lost track of the days. He was hiding out. He had overdosed.

Brooding Turner had killed him.

Shit.

I climbed out of the car, clutching my shoes and backup purse, the one I’d moved everything into. I was shaking but I wasn’t sure if it was out of anger or worry. If Preach was guilty, I wanted to be his judge and jury. I didn’t want someone else playing executioner. It didn’t take much to picture Turner in that role, even having just met him. If you could even call what had happened meeting someone.

By the time I slipped into the back door of Duke’s, the night was already in full swing. Jax and Aaron, our Sunday night bartender, were mixing drinks with the kind of gusto only Sunday nights could bring. Suzy and Miranda were doing their intricate tangos in that graceful, practiced way of theirs. On the platform, however, it wasn’t Chase belting out Elton’s “Rocket Man,” but the smooth voice of Louis, our backup piano player.

I frowned and gestured to Suzy as she swayed past me.

“Where’s Chase?” I asked. Louis moved on to Dylan’s “Hurricane” and I did have to admit, he sounded a hell of a lot better than Chase ever did.

Suzy’s brow furrowed in response.

“That’s the thing, isn’t it? Didn’t show back up. King never commented on it. No idea,” she replied in that breathless, shorthand way of hers.

“But he wasn’t hurt that bad, was he?”

“No. Thanks to you.” She gave me a wan smile. “Still hasn’t been back. Not since then. Weird.”

“Yeah. Weird,” I echoed as she flitted away, back to the floor and her tables.

Jax was scrutinizing me as he fixed a drink. I jerked my head in Louis’s direction and Jax shrugged. Scrunching up my nose, I glared at him. It was my stink face, my “Don’t fuck around with me” warning expression, and Jax, noting it, shook his head. He was telling me he didn’t know, hadn’t thought to mention it and wasn’t trying to keep anything from me. I nodded, taking his word for it, not failing to note the irony that we hadn’t actually spoken a single word. The ability to communicate without speaking and the courtesy of taking what wasn’t said at face value were courtesies I extended only to Jax.

The night slipped by in spurts and drags, as Sundays so often did. They were my shortest day of the week, but they inevitably always ended up feeling like the longest. Maybe it was the subdued crowd we got in on those nights, the souls that threw up a finger to the pearly gates and came down to have a drink with the sinners. Maybe it was the knowledge that we only had one night to go in our work week. Whatever the reason, time stretched on and on. Then, out of nowhere, the lights were coming up, Louis was singing Semisonic’s “Closing Time,” and Duke’s was suddenly no longer a dangerous speakeasy where the cops were able to come bursting in at any minute. It was just a basement, the bare concrete walls a little depressing, the mismatched tables and chairs kinda shabby. The magic was gone in a blink of an eye, and the last of the stragglers shook themselves awake, no longer under a spell, and headed toward the stairs.

We rushed through cleanup, laughing as Louis provided us with background music, songs he wasn’t allowed to play during the night. We were dancing around to his renditions of Creedence Clearwater Revival, singing along to “Bad Moon Rising” and “Run Through the Jungle,” wiping down tables, and pausing for shots Jax or Aaron poured us in between their own cleanup. We were seduced by our own youth, the infiniteness that came with it, charged with excitement. It was twirling behind us, the seducing excitement, dancing along with us.

When we were through, we shut out the lights and filed out the back door, pausing only long enough for Jax to lock up. Our animated chattering and laughs were their own kind of music as we headed up the stairs to the street, a soundtrack of anticipation. Suzy and Mike were the only ones to separate from our little group, waving their goodbyes as they walked toward the employee lot and their cars. The rest of us—Jax, Miranda, Louis, Jared, Aaron and I—made our way out front, where people were still lingering on the street. Their night was over, even if they didn’t want to admit it. Ours had just started.

We attracted attention as we walked across the street to the Tap Room, located directly opposite Bar 9 and Duke’s. We always did. It was the sight of Miranda and I in our red flapper dresses, elaborately curled hair and bright lipstick, Jared in his mobster suit, Aaron and Jax in their tweed pants and suspenders, Louis in his Old Hollywood tux. We were a blast from the past, a faded photo in a history book come to life and transported to the present day. It was one thing to see us in Duke’s, where they were the outsiders in our world. It was another thing to see us in theirs.

We went around the back of the building, gravel crunching under our feet, arms laced through each other’s. There a rusted staircase waited for us, beckoning us up to a row of apartments situated above the bars below. Our destination was the first door, the one with music and voices already spilling out into the night.

When we entered, we were hit with another blast from the past, but it was the 70s we stepped into. Shag carpet, vinyl furniture, lava lamps and psychedelic music playing from the large speakers in the living room. Every bad acid-dropping cliché you could imagine, it was all there. And standing in the middle of the room, surrounded by people, was Fury, owner of said clichés as well as our gracious host for the evening. Dressed in all black, only a shade or two darker than his skin, a matching golf cap perched on his bald head, he spotted us just as we cleared the threshold, and pushed aside his guests to greet us.

“Motherfuckers!” he exclaimed, grasping Jax’s hand and pulling him forward to pound him on the back. “How fucking good it is to see you.”

“How’s it going, man?” Jax grinned at him, used to Fury’s over-the-top personality after years of attending his weekly get-togethers for the working side of the Lane. No one knew exactly how they got started, but they were tradition now, and we never missed one.

“It’s going fantastic, my man. Absolutely fantastic. Good to be me, yes it is. And there’s our girl!” he shouted enthusiastically, spotting me in the back of our group. “Get over here, Bri-baby! I never get tired of looking at you.”

I slipped my arm free of Louis’s with a smile and moved around the others to receive a bone-crushing hug.

“Good night?” I asked when he released me.

“The fucking best. Always the fucking best where I’m at, Bri-baby. Always. And hey, there’s the music man! How you doin’, music man?” And he was off, talking to Louis before moving on to the others, then the group coming in behind us. I moved closer to Jax and we grinned at each other.

“Kitchen?” he asked.

“You read my mind.”

It was packed in there, bottles lining every available surface. We stopped and chatted with others, fellow servers and bartenders from the Lane, people we usually only saw on Sunday nights at Fury’s. We were all still in our uniforms, and during the week, it was what set us apart from one another, made us competitors in a race for drunken sales. But on Sundays, it was what brought us together. We were comrades, we gatekeepers of legal sin, the ones who contributed to society’s moral decline. We were the ones who enabled bad decisions, one-night stands, breakups. We helped customers drown sorrows, celebrate victories, nurse torn hearts. We saw people at their best and their worst, sometimes in the same night. Sometimes in the same moment. Night after night we were everyone’s best friends until closing time, and on Sundays we grouped together in a small apartment overlooking the Lane, our sinful kingdom, and compared stories over our own drinks.

I was throwing back shots with the new bartender from Sharkie’s when I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned to find Fury standing there and behind him, a smirk on his face, was none other than Dark and Brooding Luke Turner.

“Got someone here who wants to meet you, Bri-baby.” Fury was smiling in a conspiratorial kind of way.

“Oh yeah?” I arched an eyebrow at Brooding Turner.

“This is my boy Luke. Good man, Luke. Gonna make your boy Nicky a lot of money. Ain’t that right, Luke?”

Brooding rumbled an agreement, the amused look never leaving his face.

“Good man, good man. I’ll let you kids get to know each other.” And with that, Fury swaggered off, disappearing into the sea of bodies. In the living room the music slid back a step to the late sixties as “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” came on.

“So it’s Bri, is it?” Turner asked, his voice teasing.

“Brianna,” I replied, playing along for a second before narrowing my eyes. “But you already knew that, didn’t you?”

He shrugged, unapologetic, and my suspicions were confirmed that he had gotten both my address and name from my license Thursday night. “You don’t look like a Bri.”

I arched my eyebrow again, because if that wasn’t a pickup line, I didn’t know what was.

“And what exactly do I look like?” It wasn’t flirty, my response. It was deadpanned. And I was preparing myself to throw the drink in his hand right in his face if he said something painfully cheesy like “Candy” or “Angel.”

But he didn’t. He didn’t say anything close to that. With a straight face and a serious voice, he replied, “Trouble mostly.”

I grinned.

“Astute. And you don’t look like a Luke.”

“Yeah? Do I look like trouble too?”

“No. An asshole.”

He threw his head back and laughed. It was a dark sound, there was something lethal lurking in it, and I was grinning because I liked it.

“How do you know Fury?” I asked after a minute.

“Fury?” He looked confused. “You mean Nicky?”

“Yeah. You know. Like Nick Fury?” I gave him a disbelieving look. “Don’t tell me you never noticed the resemblance.”

“Sure. Didn’t make the connection though. Clever. He’s an investor of sorts.”

“You some kind of businessman?” I squinted, trying to picture him in a suit and tie. It wasn’t an image easily conjured.

“Something like that.”

I thought about his timing on Thursday night, where he had to have been in order to intervene, the stuff that guests were currently snorting in the bedrooms, and my heart sank.

“Oh, God. You’re a drug dealer, aren’t you?”

He laughed again, deeper this time, clearly amused by my reaction.

“No, sugar. Not a drug dealer.”

I let out the breath I’d been holding. Lord knew I didn’t have a lot of morals and I’d never be accused of being a Goody Two-shoes, but after seeing what drugs did to people, people like Sarah and Preach, it was the one thing I’d never be able to be truly okay with. The shit was poison, a thief that took everything from the ones trapped in its spell, and the ones who dealt it to them were assholes.

“Good.” I frowned then, thinking again of Thursday and Preach. “Hey. That old man. You know, the other night? What happened to him?”

“You insinuating something, sugar?”

“Not unless I should. Call it curiosity.”

He stared at me for a minute. Questions hovered between us that I could tell he wanted to ask but didn’t.

“Took off. Caught up to him at one point, but didn’t bother with him.” The look I was giving him was steeped in skepticism and he gave me a half shrug in response to it. “He’s old. Wasn’t much of a threat. Not the one who physically jumped you, at any rate. Speaking of, how’s your head?”

“Still attached.”

He grinned and the sight of those even white teeth flashing was a little mesmerizing. “Miraculously. Knew girls got attached to their purses. Never came across one quite so dedicated.”

It was my turn to shrug. “It’s mine. What’s mine is mine.”

He gave me a speculative look. “Funny. I feel the same.” It was the purr of a lion and I felt heat slam into my stomach.

Down
,
girl.

Jax chose that moment to interrupt and a part of me was relieved. I hadn’t realized we’d drifted so far away from the others, halfway down the dark hall, until Jax sidled up to me, handing us both a beer before placing his hand at the small of my back and fixing Luke with a level stare.

“Just wanted to thank you for the other night. Bri told me what went down. I appreciate it, bro,” he said sincerely.

Luke looked slightly uncomfortable, or maybe just caught off guard, but he nodded once and took a swig from his bottle.

“No problem. Right place, right time.”

“Yeah, well, like I said. I appreciate it.”

Luke was giving him the once-over, and it dawned on me that he was trying to figure out if Jax was staking some kind of claim. Pissing on me to mark his territory.

“You gotta excuse Jax. He thinks he’s my guardian,” I piped up, wanting to set the record straight.

Jax’s grin was a little sheepish, but mostly unapologetic.

“She gets into a lot of trouble.” He laughed and Luke, damn him, gave me an appraising look that set my blood on fire.

“Jax, I see you’ve met my boy Luke.” Fury was back and his host face was still firmly in place. Always the entertainer, Fury.

“We’ve met before. Briefly.” Jax smiled and I knew, I just knew, that he wasn’t thinking of the bar fight, but of seeing Luke’s bare ass the next day.

“Luke here’s gonna make Nicky some crazy money Friday. Crazy money. Big fight and Nicky’s got all of it riding on Luke to win it.”