Undeserving, page 22
Not that I was intimidated. “Move,” I demanded, gesturing angrily.
His arm muscles flexed, causing the dragons tattooed on his forearms to twitch restlessly. “Not a chance in hell, bitch. You need to calm the fuck down first. You start yellin’ at your old man now, you’re gonna regret it later.”
I mirrored his stance—arms crossed under my breasts, legs spread apart—and scowled up at him. His lips twisted, and dimples appeared.
“Put your fucking dimples away!” I hissed. “He lied to me for my entire life! Not just about my mother, but my grandparents too! I thought I could do this, but now—” I threw my arms up in the air. “I feel like I don’t even know my own father!”
I went from shouting to crying in the span of two heartbeats and collapsed to the cold floor with my face buried in my hands. Of course Deuce was right—I couldn’t lash out at my dying father, couldn’t let him leave this world thinking I was angry with him. Even though angry was exactly what I was. Furious, even. Confused, too. And a whole lot brokenhearted.
“You can do this.” Deuce’s voice was firm, yet soft. “I’ve seen you weather worse shit than this and still come out swingin’.”
I peeked up at him through my hands. “Worse than finding out everything I knew was a lie? Worse than losing my father?”
Deuce only stared down at me, stone-faced, those beautiful blue eyes of his suddenly ice-cold and swimming with ugly memories.
“Never mind,” I quickly whispered. Wiping my eyes, I took several shaky breaths. I could do this. I could get control of myself and walk back out there and do everything in my power to ensure Preacher’s last days were good ones.
Getting to my feet, I pressed a hand to my throat. “Deuce, the kids? Did you—”
“Taken care of. They’re all on the next flight outta Billings. First thing tomorrow.”
“Everyone is coming?”
“Every last one of them little assholes and all the damn fools they married.” His eyes began to smile. “My grandbabies, too. They’re all comin’.”
I lurched forward into his waiting arms and sagged against him.
“I should be able to do this,” I cried softly. “I’m a grown woman. Our daughter is practically grown. And I’ve got stepchildren with babies of their own. I should be able to keep it together!”
“Didn’t really care much for my old man,” Deuce said, chuckling darkly. “Hardly knew my mom. I think the closest thing I had to a real father was Blue. And darlin’, there wasn’t a goddamn thing on this Earth that could have kept me together when I found him sittin’ there dead. Not a fuckin’ thing.
“It ain’t gonna be easy,” he continued, “But I know you, Eva, and you’re gonna be just fine. You know how I know?”
I looked up to find his eyes on me. “How?”
A corner of his mouth lifted. “’Cause I’m gonna make damn sure of it.”
Tears welled in my eyes. Sheesh. I’d seen perfect couples before—like-minded people who shared the same interests and hobbies and who complemented each other in every way.
Deuce and I weren’t that—we fought just as much as we loved, and to this day the hard times still occasionally outshined the good times. But despite it all, I was unable to recall a time when I wasn’t either fascinated by him, turned on by him, or in love with him.
We were special, me and Deuce. All his sharp and jagged edges may not align perfectly with mine, yet I loved him anyway.
All my grief and guilt, all my shock and sadness, and all my anger suddenly took a very different path. Reaching up, I grabbed hold of Deuce’s face and crushed my mouth to his.
For a full ten minutes, we kissed each another with more passion than either of us had put into a kiss in the last five years, a fact I’d only just realized.
Children, grandchildren, and an entire club’s worth of lives to constantly care for and worry about had begun to dull what had once been such an ever-present and intensely demanding sexual connection. And wasn’t that always the way of things? Life happened, and then happened some more, and kept happening until you were so caught up in life itself that you forgot to actually live it.
• • •
It was Eva who broke their kiss, and Deuce reluctantly let her. He let her because he knew if they kept going like this, he was going to pull her pants down and bend her over the fucking sink.
Breathing hard, she pressed her forehead to his chest. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
He smiled at her. “Someone dyin’ sure has a funny way of makin’ everyone else want to get up quick and start livin’, don’t it? And darlin’? Don’t you ever be sorry for fuckin’ kissin’ me.”
Still clinging to him, Eva looked up at Deuce, her big gray eyes storming with emotion. And Deuce stared down into them, into the eyes of the little girl who’d charmed the shit out of him, the teenager who’d gotten him shot and the woman he’d fallen in love with. He still felt the same way about her; it didn’t matter how much time had passed. Take away the fine lines that had taken residence on her forehead and beside her eyes, the strands of gray intermingled among her dark brown waves, and she was twenty-two again… and he was still too goddamn old for her.
“We could ride home,” he offered. It had been far too long since she’d ridden on the back of his bike. And he was only now realizing just how much he’d missed having her there.
She nodded slowly. “I’d like that.”
“Good.” He released her with a hard slap on her ass. “Now go get some air. You’ve been locked up in this room with him all fuckin’ day.”
Eva started to protest.
“I’ll sit with him,” Deuce growled. “You go get some air, go smoke a damn joint. Fuck, bitch, just go do somethin’.” He opened the bathroom door and shoved her gently toward the hallway. “Go. I’ll call you if anything happens.”
Deuce waited several minutes, ensuring Eva was gone, before coming to stand at Preacher’s bedside. Preacher’s eyes were closed, his shallow, labored breaths echoing noisily throughout the otherwise silent room.
Gripping the bedrail, Deuce stared down at one of the most powerful men in the criminal underground. A man who’d crafted his own signature execution styles. A man that other men had both feared and envied.
He didn’t look like that man anymore.
“Preacher,” he said. Preacher stirred, but his eyes remained closed.
“Preacher,” he repeated, louder. “Everyone knows Deluva Sr. was hit by a fuckin’ truck on the Long Island Expressway. So how’s about you tell me why Joe is accusin’ him of puttin’ your parents to ground?”
Preacher’s eyes flew open, as did his mouth, and Deuce wondered if getting straight to the point had been a bad idea. The last thing he wanted to do was give his already dying father-in-law a heart attack.
“What did you tell Eva?” Preacher hoarsely demanded. “What the fuck did you tell her?”
Deuce shrugged. “Nothin’ yet. But if you ain’t gonna tell her, I sure as fuck will.”
Preacher’s sunken features contorted with anger. “Don’t you threaten me, asshole. You think you know what you’re talkin’ about, but you don’t. There’s more to it—there’s some shit I gotta explain first.”
“It’s true, then?” Disgusted, Deuce closed his eyes and shook his head. “You fuckin’ knew that kid came from crazy.”
Deuce was referring to Franklin Deluva Jr., better known as Crazy Frankie, the only child of the late Franklin Deluva Sr. and his wife, Maria, also deceased. Preacher had taken Frankie in after both his parents had died and raised him as his own.
“It might’ve been Eva who put that blade in Frankie’s neck,” Deuce continued angrily. “But it was because of you that she had to do it! You let that messed-up fuck into your house, into your club, and into her mother-fuckin’ bed!”
Preacher gritted his teeth and attempted to push himself upright. “I don’t need you to remind me that I failed my daughter,” he growled. “But what you’re not understandin’, you self-righteous piece of shit, is why I didn’t know what Frankie was doing to her. I was lettin’ Eva be. I was lettin’ her do her own damn thing, become her own woman. I was givin’ her the chances my old man never gave me. Hell, I did everything I could to make sure she had friends outside of the life. I woulda paid for any college she wanted to attend, too, didn’t matter if it was on the other side of the world. I gave her every out and she didn’t take a single one of ‘em. She refused to leave the city, refused to leave the club.”
Preacher paused to catch his breath, and the painful-sounding rattle in his chest grew louder.
“I thought she was always hangin’ around for Frankie. I thought someday I’d be handing the club to them both. I didn’t know enough, I know that now. And because I didn’t know enough, I never saw it. I never saw what he was doin’ to her. I just thought… I just thought she was…”
Shaking his head, Preacher glared up at Deuce. “In hindsight,” he spat, “I think maybe she wasn’t leavin’ because she was waitin’ on you, Deuce. You ever think of that?”
It was an accusation meant to give Deuce pause, and it worked. But fuck if Deuce was going to let Preacher know he’d struck a nerve.
“She wasn’t waitin’ on me,” Deuce shot back, “She knew she coulda had me. Hell, she did have me whenever the fuck she wanted me, and every damn time it was her who walked away.”
Walked away and went right back to Frankie.
Deuce’s heart rate shot up, and his chest grew uncomfortably tight. Just because he’d learned to live with Frankie’s ghost, didn’t mean he’d ever get over what that lunatic had done to Eva. Frankie’s brand of crazy had left a mark on everything it touched. You could cover it up and ignore it, but that mark was always going to be there, just below the surface, burning a slowly growing hole through whatever peace you thought you may have found.
“Eva is just like us, you fuckin’ asshole.” Deuce pointed between him and Preacher. “She’s lived and breathed the club from day fuckin’ one. And not one of us ever had a fuckin’ chance.”
As the two men continued to stare at one another, the anger in Preacher’s eyes began to slowly fade.
“You’re wrong,” Preacher said, sounding resigned. “I used to think that… but I was wrong. We had choices. I made the choice to bring Frankie into my home, and Eva chose to marry him. You made the choice to knock up another man’s wife and then drag her off to Montana with you. We all made our motherfuckin’ choices, and we’ve all been living with the consequences of ‘em ever since.”
Seeing red, Deuce’s nostrils flared. Drag Eva to Montana? Fuck that and fuck Preacher. He hadn’t dragged Eva anywhere. She’d come home with him because she was his. She had always been his.
“Preacher,” Deuce growled, feeling like crushing someone’s skull with his bare hands. “Forget fuckin’ Frankie and tell me about Frank.”
Preacher closed his eyes and let out a ragged sigh. When his eyes reopened, he stared out across the room. “Joe was tellin’ the truth. It was Frank who killed my parents.”
“Yeah, but when did you find out? Fuck, how did you find out? Was Frank at the rally?”
“He musta been. But no one knew he was there, no one saw him. As far as we knew he was in Philly.”
“Why’d he do it?”
When Preacher finally spoke, his tone was pained, his every word sounding as if it were being physically pried from his insides with a rusty blade. “Took me a long time to figure that out.” He swallowed thickly. “Even longer than it took me to find out it was him who’d done it.”
When it didn’t look like Preacher was going to elaborate further, Deuce switched topics. “The accident on the expressway. Was that your doin’?”
Preacher choked out an ugly laugh. “No. That woulda been too easy. Frank, that sick shit—he needed my hands on him.”
Preacher’s gaze suddenly swung to Deuce, glowering with the hate of a thousand deadly men. “My only regret is that I could only kill him once.”
Had Preacher not been lying in a hospital bed, knocking on death’s door, Deuce might have taken a step back. Because this was the Preacher who’d turned The Judge’s motorcycle club into an empire that rivaled most mafias. This was the man who didn’t think twice about taking a life—even the life of a friend.
This was the man other men both feared and envied… and with due cause.
Part Three
“Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.”
- Haruki Murakami
“Pain is power. It’s what drives me.
Suffering is what happens to those that cause me pain.”
- Damon “Preacher” Fox
Chapter 26
Parked on a one-way street in East Village, New York City, seated in the driver’s seat of a dirt-brown Monaco sedan, Agent Donald Willis of the Federal Bureau of Investigation glanced over at his partner. Thirty years Willis’s junior, Agent James Parker was fidgeting in his seat, pulling irritably at the wool scarf wrapped around his neck.
“It’s fucking cold in here,” Parker complained. “My coffee’s gone cold.”
“Roll up the window,” Willis replied. “You’re cold because you’re sitting here with the goddamn window down, letting all the cold air in.”
“Wouldn’t be sitting here at all if the cops did their fucking jobs.”
Willis glanced across the street, eyeing their target—the Silver Demons’ clubhouse—and bobbed his head in agreement. It was no secret that the local police department tended to look the other way when it came to the Silver Demons. The Bureau had long suspected the Demons were paying off the police, but they hadn’t been able to prove it… yet.
There was nothing Willis hated more than a dirty cop. A former police officer, Willis had taken his oath seriously and expected the same from his fellow peacekeepers.
“I don’t blame them.” Parker rubbed his hands together before blowing on them. “Someone offered me the right amount, I’d be looking the other way, too.”
Willis glared at Parker and the younger man laughed. “Kidding. Take a fucking joke, will ya?” Rolling his eyes, Parker slouched down in his seat and resumed pulling on his scarf.
“Once we get these guys,” Willis muttered, “then it’ll be easy pickings. They’ll be clamoring to tell us which officers they’ve got in their pockets, and their house of cards will come tumbling down right on top of ‘em.”
Parker shot Willis a skeptical look, silently conveying what Willis was already thinking—that the Silver Demons were too damn good at what they did. There were no holes in their operation—if there had been, the Bureau would have found them by now.
The telltale rumbling of a motorcycle approaching drew their attention to the street. The heavily bearded rider slowed to a near stop as he passed and flashed a grin—and his middle finger—at the agents.
Wearing matching sour expressions, Willis and Parker watched as the rider turned down the alleyway beside the clubhouse and disappeared from sight.
Willis didn’t need to leaf through his stacks of files to identify the rider; he’d long ago memorized all their names and faces. This particular man was Robert M. Schneider, age 31, known to his family in Queens as ‘Bobby’ and to his brothers in the Silver Demons as ‘Hightower’.
A former private in the United States Army and a Purple Heart recipient, Hightower had once been considered an American hero. He’d dragged several unconscious soldiers to safety after an explosion had detonated near their camp, an explosion that had left him with a severely mangled left leg and a nasty limp. Willis had seen the pictures—it was a miracle he’d ever walked again.
“No respect,” Parker muttered, shaking his head.
“Of course they don’t have any respect for us. They don’t respect the law, they aren’t going to respect the people enforcing it.”
“I think he did it,” Parker said, frowning at the clubhouse. “I think that son of a bitch offed his own damn parents. These guys are sick.”
Parker was referring to was Damon Fox, better known as ‘Preacher’, the eldest of the three Fox brothers, and recently appointed president of the Silver Demons. Six months earlier both of Preacher’s parents and a fellow club member had been brutally slain at a state park in upstate New York. And the case had since gone cold. In fact, the case had started out frigid. Many people had been questioned, yet despite the sheer number of people in attendance, not one had come forward with any information. Without a murder weapon, without any witnesses, there’d been very little to go on.
Willis stared down the street, rubbing his chin, mulling over the facts. Did he think Preacher had killed his parents? Maybe. But he doubted it. A family of criminals was still a family. And Willis had observed the Fox family long enough to know that, despite the healthy amount of tension between Gerald Fox and his sons, not one of those boys would have ever harmed their mother.
“No,” Willis eventually replied. “I was at the funeral. I saw them—they were grieving. My best guess is they pissed someone off, someone high up. Maybe the Rossi family, maybe even higher. Maybe whoever is bringing in the drugs from overseas.”
Parker blew out a steamy breath full of frustration. “The Rossi family is who we should be going after, or the Columbos. Not these lowlifes.”
Willis shrugged. “The U.S. attorney doesn’t agree with you. These lowlifes are working for the Rossi family—we get them, we finally get a shot the Rossis.”
Parker continued to huff. “There’s no fucking proof they’re even working for the Rossis!” His clenched fist came down on his thigh. “Both families are locked up tighter than a nun’s pussy. We can’t get a single one of these pieces of shit to turn rat. Hell, we still don’t know where they’re getting their dope from! We don’t know a goddamn thing!”
Parker was right; they had no substantial proof that the Silver Demons were confirmed Rossi associates or vice versa. Yet it was still well known that they were. The Rossis owned several restaurants in all five boroughs, and the Demons had been spotted at almost all of them at one time or another, meeting with the Rossi underboss or other Rossi family affiliates. Furthermore, the Demons owned several small businesses of their own—a couple of gas stations in New Jersey and a garage in Brooklyn—that employed known Rossi soldiers. The Bureau had obtained warrants to raid the garage twice now, hoping to find something to charge someone with—the Demons or the Rossis—but had come up empty both times.
