Have Gun, Will Travel (The Bare Bones MC #5)(19)
“Hey, my favorite old lady,” gushed Wolf, giving Maddy a bear hug from behind. Then he looked at me. “And my second favorite old lady. Your old man is in with Ford still. They’ve called for me to join in. I wonder what they want.”
“I’m not Sax’s old lady. But I’m flattered you think so. We only just met yesterday.”
Wolf wiggled his eyebrows. “Good. Then you’re still up for grabs? Fancy a lowly Prospect with an awesome future in the parts shed? You need a tailpipe for a John Deere excavator, I’m your man.”
Maddy asked, “You’re still working in the parts shed here? Well, maybe once you become fully patched they’ll let you work in one of the other companies.”
Wolf looked bitter. “Tuxedo rental’s not my style. I don’t like watching other people go off to have fun at proms. Nope. I’m the guy having fun at proms, pinning corsages, doing the Wiggle and the Whip!”
Wolf executed some Pee Wee Herman-type of ballet dance moves I’d never seen before. Not that I would be familiar with popular dances. Since leaving the convent, the only club I’d been to was The Racquet Club in Flag, and there wasn’t much dancing going on there, unless you counted the horizontal kind.
“Listen,” said Maddy, interrupting Wolf in the middle of him miming driving a laid-back gangsta car. “I need to talk to Ford about something. If he sees my face at his office door, maybe he’ll cut your meeting short.”
“Yeah,” said Wolf cynically. “I’m not looking forward to him sending me on another Costco run. Do these engineer boots look like they’re made for the cheese aisle? I want another adventure, like I had with Roman a few months back! I want a big important assignment, like when I offed those three chollos in the same room.” Wolf never missed an opportunity to remind everyone of his accomplishments.
“Let’s all go to the other side of the hangar,” suggested Maddy. “Bee, maybe you can convince Sax to take you to dinner. You two would make an adorable couple. I’ve been trying to convince that guy to stay in Arizona since I first met Ford.”
“And Maddy doesn’t like your Sir,” Wolf said, chipper. How did Wolf Glaser know so much about me?
Maddy slapped Wolf’s arm as we exited the game room. “I never said such a thing. I said he doesn’t seem to be the same sort of Dom that Lytton is. Lytton doesn’t make June crawl around on all fours, for example.”
“Lytton’s not high protocol,” I said. “That’s what it is. He’s more relaxed about his rules. Roscoe is very formal, by the book.”
“Yeah, well,” Maddy mumbled. “Your Sir seems more mean than dominant. June explained to me there’s a difference. Some alleged Doms, she told me, use their status to actually be sort of abusive. Yours sound like he might be in that category.”
I got sort of angry with Maddy, actually. How dare she presume to know something about a guy she’d never met? About a lifestyle she’d never once participated in? She was just hearing secondhand things from her sister, who had also never met Roscoe. If anything, her uneducated criticism made me feel closer to Roscoe, made me defend him. “He’s not mean,” I said thinly. “He’s just by the book.”
“Whatever,” said Maddy. Times like this I tended to fall back on my convent training, although I didn’t like to. If she didn’t like my chosen lifestyle, she could have kept her mouth shut. As it was, I had to turn the other cheek. It was becoming increasingly difficult to remember my training here in the secular world. For one, I didn’t want to remember much of it. In retrospect, it was a bad time in my life I wish I could just erase. I was still seeking something to believe in in the civilian world.
To be funny, Wolf whipped out his Costco card when he opened the door to Ford’s office. “Hey, boss! Ready to grab that five pound bag of sugar and that one pound canister of turmeric.”
Maddy turned to Wolf. “They have one pound of turmeric? That’s a good anti-inflammatory.”
Wolf raised his index finger. “I’m on it!”
Ford rose from behind his desk. He didn’t protest when Maddy and I drifted into the office. To be honest, we did think he was going to send Wolf to Costco in Prescott. The meeting seemed to be over. Sax was rising from his chair, and the club’s lawyer, Gudrun’s father Slushy McGill, was shuffling through some papers at the conference table.
Ford ignored Maddy, taking Wolf by the forearm. “Wolf Glaser. I know you’ve been a good man to have in an emergency. You were endlessly helpful to Roman when you pulled off that Bamboo Boy op recently. I know you’ve been kind of bored sitting around the parts shed, but as you know, that’s just your day job, your club job. I’ve got a new assignment for you. You dealt with Tony Tormenta when you worked with Roman.”
I shared glances with Sax. He appeared to not know what Ford was getting at, either.
Wolf said, “Not directly. Tormenta was in charge of the Bamboo Boys that we went after, but we never saw Tormenta himself. He was too busy making YouTube videos showing off his bling.”
“Then he shouldn’t be too hard to find,” Sax said, louder than was necessary.
Ford seemed to shoot Sax a dirty look. He continued addressing Wolf. “Look, Sax here is on a mission to find Tormenta. It’s not for the club, so it’s kind of undercover.”