Touch Me

9. Karl

Karl

She almost looked peaceful, lying like that in my guest bedroom. I'd doped her up pretty well with the mickey I'd spiked her drink with, enough so that I wouldn't have to worry about her wandering around my house while I tried to conduct business, or sleep.

Relax, I didn't have any plans to take advantage of Jassy. It was just that, whether she was walking the street or ending up in a hotel room with a dead pimp and a dead John, she seemed to have a knack for being where she wasn't supposed to. She proved that again when she showed up in the meeting room during the vote.

My hand still smarted from earlier in the night. Hopefully, I'd taught her a little bit of a lesson when I'd bent her over my knee. Of course, as I adjusted my half-erect c**k, I also hoped she learned slow. There'd been something immensely hot about her form bent over my lap like that, having her submit to my hand the way she had. I liked the way she fought it, at first, but ended up relaxing and pushing back into it, by the end.

But, whether she needed another lesson later, or not, I had other work to do still.

I quietly closed the door to the guest room and headed back downstairs and into the small guest bathroom. I removed the lid from the ceramic toilet tank and reached inside to grab the bag, and the disposable cell phone it contained, that sat at the bottom.

When you do the kind of business me and the MC do, you get paranoid. You never use the same phone more than a few times, you always keep them rotating, and you certainly never use one that's registered under your name. You also follow the same rules when it comes to calling out on the phone. Just because your line ain't tapped, doesn't mean your buddy's ain't, too.

I dialed in the number for Fed's burner of the week once I'd pulled the phone from its waterproof bag and turned it on. As the phone began to ring, I pressed it to my ear and waited.

“Yeah?” Fed said when he answered on the fifth or sixth ring. We'd arranged the times before I'd left Hellfire, so I was a little surprised it took him as long as it did to answer.

I kept my concerns to myself, though, and tried to fight back any others I might have. Fed was my right-hand man, and questioning him would just lead to questioning myself. No good can come of that, no matter which way you looked at it.

“What'd we hear from our little buddy?” I asked. Fed was our point of contact for the guy in Volkov Arms. Early on, we'd discussed how it would be a bad idea for me to be involved on that side of things. When I'd brought Jassy home with me, and set Fed to putting Benji to work, I'd also made sure Fed knew it was time to move on with our original plans.

Sven had been a bust, after all. But, you couldn't let a little kink in your plans f**k everything else up. It didn't matter if you got knocked down a hundred times, my old man used to say. What mattered is that you got back up a hundred and one times.

“One week, or thereabouts,” Fed said, his voice hollow and scratchy through the cheap speaker of the cell phone. “Got the numbers.”

“They gonna be what we need?”

“Mil-spec,” he said. Military Specification firearms, is what he meant, though. Full-auto, selective fire, high-capacity rounds, chambered for larger calibers. “Out on one of those bayou roads”

Those things would go for a pretty penny on the open market. A couple of the right deals, might even be enough to set us up good and pretty. Not enough for the rest of our lives, or anything, but enough that we wouldn't have to take such crazy risks going forward.

I looked at myself in the mirror, at the sleeves of tattoos covering my arms, at the beard covering my face, at the certainty in my eyes. This was what we needed, I reminded myself with a nod. This was what Fire and Brimstone MC needed to keep moving forward.

“Good,” I said, my mind starting to formulate a plan. “We'll take ten guys. You, me, and eight others set a stolen truck as a roadblock. Guy pulls over, we stick the guns in the window and yank him down. Pull around our pickup and unload everything. Easy-peasy, man.”

“I dunno,” Fed said. “I don't trust this whole thing, man. This Sven guy that got in touch with us? How the hell did he know we were involved?”

“He never said he thought we were involved,” I reminded him, even though, in retrospect, it did feel a little strange. “Said he thought we might be interested in the idea when he put his feelers out. He knew something was going on, Fed, and wanted a piece of the pie same as anyone else. I bet they got tons of drivers seeing that action, right now, and wanting in.”

“Damnit, Karl, think. Why the f**k was he running a prostitution ring, if he was a trucker? What kind of trucker does that s**t? If anything, he'd be one of the damned customers, not the pimp.”

“Nah,” I said, shaking my head. “Just the mark of another greedy bastard, that's all.”

Silence on the other end. I walked out of the small hall bathroom and headed out into the living room, c****d my ear to the side to make sure Jassy was still sleeping like a doped-up baby.

“You there?” I asked after a while.

“Sorry,” Fed said quickly, “yeah, I'm here. Turn on the news, channel six.”

“What for?” I asked.

“Something about our favorite corpse, Sven. Might find it interesting.”

I found the remote and turned the TV on. I wasn't in time to catch the beginning of the news story. I was treated, though, to two pictures on the screen.

The first, on the left, was a picture of a young man that was clearly related to the hooker currently asleep in my guest room. It looked like the picture was maybe a high school baseball photo, the kind they took for yearbook. He was decked out in his uniform and trying to look serious, like he really knew his s**t. Poor kid couldn't have been more than sixteen. Under the young man's smiling face was the name Tomlin Spears, with the word victim in parentheses after.

The second, on the right, was the photo of a man who could be a Russian mob extra in Hollywood. It was so stereotypical, I was amazed he wasn't wearing an Adidas track suit in the image. Under the picture of the mob extra was Sven Morokov. A voice over of a local crime reporter saying, “Authorities are still unsure why the young man was meeting with the Volkov Arms executive in the Hilton hotel room. If members of the public have any information that can contribute to the murder investigation, they are encouraged to contact local law enforcement.”

I wasn't exactly sure, but Tomlin Spears there didn't exactly look like the type to be renting an hour or so with a family member.

“You watching?” Fed asked after a minute.

“s**t,” I breathed.

“s**t is right.”

I wiped a hand down my face. I couldn't believe I'd bought into any of that s**t she was selling. I mean, I knew something was f****d up with her story . . . but that her own brother was involved? Of course the cops would come looking for her!

“How do we want to handle this?” Fed asked from the other end of the line.

I shook my head. “I dunno yet. I'll let you know tomorrow.”

Fed sighed. “Yeah. Alright,” he said before we both hung up.

Clutching the burner phone like my life relied on it, I let my hand drop to my side.

What was going on here? What had I dragged myself and the MC into? Whether this Sven guy had zeroed in on Fire and Brimstone as his culprits, or not, it was clear they were looking for us. Whether they would find us, or not, was another matter. These were businessmen, after all, despite their looks. I was pretty confident they wouldn't go to the police, or try to make waves. Otherwise, they would have already.

But, still, to know I'd gotten played so far by some amateur that was crashed out in my guest room, and that Fed and I had been that close to walking into the same room with Sven Morokov. That was too much.

Suddenly, the stress and the bullshit of it all was too much. “f**k!” I yelled, forgetting myself. “f**k f**k f**k f**k!”

When I'd stopped yelling, the silence of my house returned. Nothing stirred, nothing buzzed. No baby cried, no wife asked me what was wrong. Just solitude and emptiness.

Luckily, Jassy was drugged up enough to keep a horse down. Should have been plenty for even a foul-mouthed hooker.