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The bartender glanced over, but didn’t make a move, clearly more interested in his own survival than his patron’s.
“Holy fuck, we need him alive,” Talon said from just behind him.
Brick dipped and slid the tattoo across his shoulders in a fireman’s carry.
“He’s out, not dead. Easier this way,” he said, making for the front door.
Deuce threw a twenty on the bar beside the blood smears, “For the mess.”
The bartender snagged the twenty, ignored the blood, and went back to wiping a greasy towel across greasy glasses.
Talon opened the front doors, stood back out of the way, and Brick carried the tattooed meth head, also known as Reaper, to the van parked at the curb.
When Deuce slid the panel door open, Brick dumped the body.
Lucky glanced back from the driver’s seat, “He dead?”
“Jesus, what is it with everybody and dead?” Brick asked, wiping his hands on his jeans.
“Seriously?” Lucky asked, throwing a questioning look at Talon.
Brick scowled and slammed the van door.
“Mood you’re in tonight,” Deuce said, straddling his Harley, “people gonna see the other side.”
Brick flipped him off, threw a leg over his own bike, and the roar of his Harley filled the street. Then he eased out into traffic, leading Lucky and the van back to the compound.
The clouds had settled in, and Brick could smell rain on the air, the weather doing nothing to improve his mood.
Brick knew his brothers appreciated what he did because when push came to shove, it was a job most of them didn’t want. Enforcing punishment, interrogating enemies, prying information from closed mouths. It was only the knowledge of what he saved his brothers that kept him sane.
That knowledge was also what kept him from taking a woman of his own. He heard things the groupies around the club whispered about him.
Stone cold. No heart. Too mean to die.
His brothers made it a joke.
But it wasn’t.
He was all those things they said about him.
And he was afraid, somewhere at the bottom of his soul, that God hadn’t created the woman who could find him in the pit where he’d buried himself.
*************************
Gate
By the time Gate got to the basement, Brick had Reaper tied to a chair and the tools of his trade spread out on a table across from the door.
Reaper was still unconscious with blood dripping from his nose, head lagging to one side.
“What happened to him?” Gate asked.
“Brick,” Deuce answered, crossing his arms and leaning his back against the wall.
Gate glanced at Brick who shrugged in response.
“Get to it,” Gate said, and Brick moved toward the table, but Talon’s words stopped him.
