Have Gun, Will Travel (The Bare Bones MC #5)(4)

Harte exploded. “Well isn’t that just f*cking lovely, then? You’re going to invite that maniac back into our clubhouse just so he can do the same thing—or maybe worse—to another one of our women? You know what? You disgust even me, Dad. I don’t expect you or Birdseye to do anything about it, seeing as how no one has even bothered walking down that f*cking hallway to see how Cassie is. That’s it. I’m washing my hands of you motherf*ckers. I’m calling Uncle Sax.”

“No!”

Leo’s bark stopped Harte cold in his tracks. Harte had his cell in his hand as if about to punch his uncle’s number. But Harte chuckled with disdain. “You think you can stop me? Sax is the only one who’ll do anything about this. He’s the only one left with any decent, human emotions. Maybe because you drove him away ten years ago. He was never under your vicious influence.”

Harte made as if to split, but Leo grabbed a handful of the front of his leather cut. Touching a man’s cut was an unforgiveable offense, but Leo was the Prez, as well as Harte’s father. Harte stopped.

Leo snarled, rattling Harte mercilessly. “Let’s keep this buried, boy. I don’t know where you get the idea that that nomad loser Sax is suddenly going to ride over here from Maine or Bumf*ck or whatever hellhole he’s currently growing moss in. But he’s going to care about some slashed-up * even less than I do. You give him far too much credit and I don’t know why. He’s a worthless, shifty nomad, and always will be.”

Harte finally wrenched his cut from his father’s grip. His angry voice spewed from him, lizard-like, as though possessed by a demon. “Don’t f*cking touch me. And I don’t know why you’re always badmouthing Sax when all I’ve seen from him is good.” He stalked off down the hall.

Leo shouted, “You f*cking call Sax and I’ll send you on that run to Nogales tomorrow.”

“I won’t go,” bellowed Harte from the end of the hall.

“That’s what you think!”

Leo, too, stormed off. We women breathed easier. Like I said, never a dull moment around here. Normally that was why I liked it, but I was starting to question my attraction to the club. There was good excitement, and bad excitement. This was definitely the bad kind of excitement.

Missy said, “Maddy will be here in an hour with her medical bag.”

Brenda sighed. “I always knew Harte was a sweetheart. Now I’m convinced of it. Can you believe he’s the only one who bothered coming to see how Cassie was?”

I said, “And he wasn’t even here when it happened. You know what? Let’s put a f*cking bounty out on Tormenta’s head.”

Instantly, things seemed to brighten up the dark room. Rhetta was on it like sonic. “Yes!” she cried. “We’ll all put money into the pot and give the bounty to whoever manages to…” She trailed off, unsure what the desired outcome was.

I wasn’t even sure, and I was the one who’d proposed the idea.

I wasn’t quite so hardass, so faithless, as to propose what truly lay in my heart. I’d trained for years to assist the downtrodden, not kill the pathetic, the hopeless, the heartless. I could never truly wash my hands of my charitable, altruistic nature. How could I verbally propose what went so against the grain of all I’d stood for, until recently? Just because I’d lost the conviction of my beliefs, my hope for humanity, didn’t mean I could verbally propose—aloud—something that went against everything I used to believe in.

But I was holding a slashed, bleeding girl in my arms. I’d finished dabbing her wounds. The bowl of water was now a solid, deep red. Her face looked like a bowl of chili, already swelling, puffing up around the canyons of the knife cuts. There were far fewer cuts than I’d originally feared. A few of them slashed her nose like a hashtag.

It was Cassie herself who finally spoke. “Whoever manages to kill that douchecanoe.”

Her speaking it aloud gave us all more courage.

Brenda nodded emphatically. “Yes. Yes! Whoever manages to bury that f*cker gets the bounty.”

“Like in the old west!” cried Rhetta. “We need a hired gun, that’s what we need!”

I was carried away with enthusiasm for the plan. Someone else had dared give voice to it, and now I was only going along. “No one even has to know who did it! Just hit him in the dead of night—like his sicarios do to Mexicans and people who try to escape from their cartel clutches. Hit him when he’s down, and boom! Whoever does it gets the money.”

“Take him out no matter where the sicario finds him,” agreed Missy. “Sitting on the toilet, raping some girl, who cares? I’ve got about three grand I can put into the pot.”

That sort of sobered us up. That was a hard act to follow. As a businesswoman, of course I lived month to month. But I had a small savings for emergencies. I said, “I’m in. I’ll see your amount, Missy.”

Rhetta said, “I know plenty of guys who’d do it just for the first three large.” I wondered what Rhetta could contribute. She’d been a refugee from some whacked cult in the mountains above Pure and Easy. Of course the cult took everyone’s last dollar, so she’d been a pass-around ever since, moving from the P and E chapter up here to Flag. “I can give probably one large.” That surprised me.

Brenda, too, was carried away by the spirit of the thing. “I can match you first two gals. Three large for me.”