Have Gun, Will Travel (The Bare Bones MC #5)(56)

“Le madre que te parió!” shrieked Sax, nearing his breaking point by now. The mother who gave birth to you! He wasn’t used to this shit like the other Bare Boners were. He turned his rage on the spot where Tormenta had been, but the kingpin was getting away, Slayer still stumbling under his arm. Harte took another shot at Tormenta, which missed.

“Let him the f*ck go!” Sax took one last stab at ending things peacefully.

Tormenta twirled around. Now Sax could see the Corvette which had apparently been driven out of some underground garage. “You f*cking gabachos!” Tormenta shrieked like a woman. “Look what I’ve done to your associate! And I’ll do much worse if you don’t let me go now!”

“Eyew, God,” said Wolf. It took a lot to gross out the Prospect, so Sax squinted to see what the f*ck Tormenta was holding up. Wolf raised his binoculars just as Harte breathed,

“It’s his f*cking ear. He cut off Slayer’s f*cking ear.”

Sax held his hand toward his son in a “steady” signal. “No more shooting. He’ll do much worse if we keep filling him full of lead. We’ll get him. He’ll probably throw Slayer out of the car once he doesn’t need him anymore.” Louder, he yelled, “You win, Tormenta! Get the f*ck out of our sight! I don’t want to see you around my club ever the f*ck again!”

“Fine with me!” Tormenta dragged the poor misbegotten Slayer toward the Corvette. “Who needs your stupid club anyway?”

“Finish me off!” Slayer lamented. “Just do it and get it over with! Would that your knife was as sharp as your final ‘no’!”

Sax actually had to grin a little that Slayer was apparently quoting some poetry as he was dragged toward his doom. He admired the guy’s straightforward thinking with a missing ear.

“We’ll come find you, Slayer!” Wolf yelled through a cupped hand.

“I know you will! You guys have been honest and true through thick and thin! Your brotherhood will never be tainted or broken by the scummy likes of wifebeaters like this here—ugh!”

Sax had to physically put his hand on Harte’s forearm to prevent him from taking another shot as Tormenta kneed Slayer in the gut before shoving him in the passenger door. The three men could do nothing but watch helplessly as the sports car pulled out, Tormenta flipping them the bird out the driver’s window.

Then Wolf pointed out something. “I’m sure that road winds back around and hooks up with ours. I hope Tormenta doesn’t shoot Tobiah or Crybaby in the head.”

As they jogged back across the flat boulders, Sax noted a strange thing. His cut was full of holes. He felt at least three spots where rounds had torn the leather, but had failed to pierce his skin, as far as he could tell.

What. The. Fuck.

I wonder what Bee would say about this. Maybe it’ll renew her faith.

It sure as hell had renewed Sax’s.





CHAPTER THIRTEEN




BEE


I spent the day in Sax’s garden.

I had been the gardener at the abbey, so it was a natural move for me to borrow money from my old church spiritual director to purchase the Flagstaff nursery. I felt safer, more secure, outdoors surrounded by plants. Indoors, I was vulnerable, for some strange reason. Outdoors, I could lay down and sleep and nothing bad would ever happen to me. I didn’t know why that was.

The more I thought about it, it became clear. My father had left when I was about seven. My mother was a very unstable woman, in retrospect at least bipolar, with violent tendencies. Madison and I had bonded over our horrible mothers who could vie for the Mommy Dearest of the Century award. My mother would often chase me, for reasons I can’t recall at all now, out of the house and into the yard. Sometimes she’d give up there, lock me out of the house, and I’d just sleep in the yard. Often, though, she would kick me out of the house entirely and I’d wind up sleeping in unlocked cars or up in the hills, another memory I shared with Madison. Down in Cottonwood, she had slept in canyons. In Flagstaff, I slept under the Ponderosa pines, not a pleasant way to live in the winter. Once, I woke up to a bear sniffing at me. Another time I stumbled across a rattler sunning itself. It coiled up, rattled and hissed at me not three feet away. I brained it with a rock and watched it for five minutes as it looked cross-eyed at me, flicking its tongue. Finally it slithered away, thank God. Although I thought the whole time about how cool its skin would look on my wall at “home” if I had to brain it again.

But the outdoors was obviously safer than my house, so I sat in the garden tended by Sax’s former roommate Lila. Cypress trees were twisted into fantastic shapes, as though blown by a constant wind on the coast. Lavender and heather among the stones gave the feel of an English garden. I couldn’t see Sax tending the garden without Lila. I was even so confident as to think He needs me to do it. Our father in heaven, how arrogant a woman could become once collared and claimed by a macho biker. I had to smile at that. I was getting a swollen head, one of the deadly sins always taught to us.

He trusted me alone in his house. That displayed a giant step for the standoffish rolling stone I had fallen in love with. The only disappointment was that he probably thought himself too old to have kids with me. I had sacrificed a lot when joining my order, mainly my overriding desire to have a family, to have children.