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As I bawled, I heard their boots crunch through the gravel. Two bikes fired up and then sped away, the roar of their engines receding into the night.
5
Jack
Istared at the wall of my den as I sat there in the darkness.
Mostly I felt numb. Like a fire had burned away every nerve ending in my body, somehow without touching the rest of me. Just a corpse with a pulse… a dead man walking.
But underneath that, I knew the pain was lying in wait. Like somebody had torn out my insides and replaced them with shards of glass. Heart, lungs, guts… all of it gone. Just broken bottles and razor blades in their place.
While the numbness was still there, I couldn’t feel it. But as soon as the numbness wore off, I knew it was gonna be hell.
I’d felt enough agony for one night. When Lou got the truth out of Fiona, I didn’t believe it at first…
…and then I saw her face.
When Sloane asked for a divorce, it didn’t hurt one tenth as much as tonight. The end of my marriage had been a long, slow decline. I’d had two years to spread out the pain.
Tonight, in the space of two minutes, an atomic bomb had gone off, leaving me without a past, without hope, without my old life.
Without the woman I’d loved.
Fiona was as dead to me as if Lou had shot her in the Roadhouse.
Deader, even. If he’d shot her, at least I could have grieved for her.
That is, if I hadn’t found out she was a traitor before she died.
“Nice of the cops to bring my bike along and leave it at the Roadhouse,” Kade said from the leather recliner across the room. “Even left my keys in it.”
I looked over at him in a daze. I’d forgotten he was there.
He poured some more scotch into his glass. “Of course, they were probably just covering their asses. If Lou shot me, they didn’t want any evidence they’d helped him hanging around the impound lot.”
His voice was unemotional as always. You never would have guessed that an hour ago, corrupt cops had handed him over to his former friends for what could have been a gangland-style execution.
Kade lifted the glass of scotch and took a gulp. “Still, it was nice not having to ride bitch back here on your bike.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” I snapped.
“Small favors.”
“Well, could you not right now?”
His face didn’t betray an ounce of emotion at my chewing him out. He just sat there in silence and went on drinking my scotch.
I turned back to the wall and resumed my thousand-yard stare.
I got about thirty seconds of silence before Kade said, “Could’ve been worse.”
“‘Could’ve been worse?’ We just lost the fuckin’ club. We got backstabbed by a motherfucking son of a bitch who threw us out on our asses like bums. We’re laughingstocks. Worse, we’re fucking targets. Every douchebag who wants to prove he’s a tough guy is going to be spoiling for a fight. After we punch his lights out, he’s going to get all butt-hurt, then come around later and try to shoot us in the back.
“The cops, who are now completely under Lou’s control, are going to make our lives miserable. And without the club’s protection, we’re open game for the Santa Muertes – or any other asshole who wants revenge.
“Once word gets out about tonight, nobody in town is going to want to cross Lou, so they’re not going to come to the body shop, which means we lose the business and any means we had of supporting ourselves. Selling my house is out of the question, because nobody’s going to cross Lou on that, either. The bank will probably just do whatever Lou says and foreclose on it after I miss a couple of payments.
“Not to mention that every effort we ever made at fixing the club? Making shit legal and aboveboard? That’s gone. Up in smoke. We’re gonna be broke and homeless and walking around with bullseyes on our backs. Our only option is to move to another state without a penny to our names and start over again completely – and Lou is probably still going to put out contracts on us, because that’s exactly the sort of psychopathic asshole he is. And you think it could’ve been worse.”
