Shelter From The Storm (The Bare Bones MC Book 6)(11)
“Yes,” agreed June, her eyes all lit up. “Let’s get going. You got your water? Good. Follow me.”
On the way out the side door, I bumped into a guy who fairly reeked of marijuana. This was going to be a good town for a dispensary, I could tell.
“Well, hello, gorgeous,” said the asswad.
I frowned at him. He was kind of a pudgy guy with frizzy hair cut into a clumsy pompadour. You could tell if he didn’t get it cut all the time, it would bloom into a ’fro. He looked like one of those high school losers who were a member of the student council and the chess club and tried to be cool by wearing Ray-Bans and smoking weed. Well, some things never changed.
“We’re in a rush, Wolf,” called June.
“Say hi to Tracy for me!” Wolf called.
Within ten minutes, we were snaking through a gloriously flaming canyon. The steeply banked walls and narrow road gave the appearance of shooting through an Egyptian temple, where brilliant sandstone obelisks towered above. I could’ve gone on and on there forever, but soon we popped out onto a plateau studded with gnarled Ponderosa pine. As if on a gentle roller coaster, I followed June over softly undulating fields of black-eyed susans.
It was starting to feel pretty good, living in Arizona. As long as I didn’t somehow blow it with this dispensary job, which paid about five bucks an hour more than the tuxedo job, I could see having a decent life. For the first time since the warehouse raid in Corpus Christi, things seemed to be on track. As long as I avoided all known felons and kept my head down, things would proceed apace.
I could even see finding a boyfriend. That f*cker Russ had been the last one I’d banged, at least voluntarily. The past hundred men I’d been in contact with hadn’t made a good impression on me. There was one Jones affiliate who dropped stuff off at the warehouse. He always looked at me with the pity one reserved for that poor elephant in the zoo, stuck in a cramped enclosure, doomed to roam the same rocks and clumps of grass for all eternity. That guy had probably been decent. We held conversations in rudimentary Spanish. I knew he couldn’t handle coffee, it gave him the jitters. He was single. And he liked chalupas. He brought me some from a roach coach a few times. Then one day I heard rumors of a hijacking of a Jones truck, some couriers murdered. I never saw the guy again.
But I was lonely, and I was straight. I wasn’t about to bitterly turn to women in my rage. My mother had been like that, claiming that all men were worthless idiots, and I was determined not to be like her. Every time I found myself enjoying classical music, eating tofu, or gardening, I had to mentally slap myself. Stop it, stop it. She’d been such a violent, unpredictable, cold bitch. I’d forged a good career for myself just to get away from her. I’d still been paying back student loans when the Joneses nabbed me. Hah. The joke was on them.
Three times in my life, everything had been yanked from under me, my life thrown topsy-turvy on its head. The years when my witch of a mother ruled with an iron, erratic, and crazy fist. I’d gotten out of there age fifteen. The second, when Russ sold me out to the Joneses in exchange for wiping out a drug debt. Yeah, they’d wiped it out all right. A few months after taking me captive, they couldn’t wait to come gloating to me about how they’d popped off Russell, while he was sitting primly in his dress uniform, no less, watching a parade. But they still kept me captive to churn out meth.
The last and most recent upheaval was when the ATF turned me over to the DOJ, who in turn, gave me to the US Marshals Office. I’d had enough turmoil. If I could just keep my head down and not draw any attention to myself, I could hold onto this job and maybe even get a better apartment than the tiny thing over The Bum Steer.
Was that the lake? That puny little pond? Huh. Made me wonder what that alabaster-skinned guy had been so eager to see up here. Having nothing else to think about—the cassette tape deck in the Corolla had been broken when I bought it—I thought of Fox Isherwood. He had very unusually handsome features. A pointed nose, a sly mouth, like he knew something no one else did. Arching eyebrows that told everyone how skeptical he was of them.
He wasn’t dark, but he was tall, with a very arrogant bearing that intrigued me. Maybe I shouldn’t have been so quick to dismiss him…
What? I was wrenched out of my reverie by the whine of a cop alarm, the flashing of its cherry in my rearview mirror. Good gracious, Ignatius. Of course WITSEC had provided me with all fresh documentation carrying Pippa’s new identity. It was just a major drag to get pulled over. June didn’t even seem to notice and kept on going.
“Shitpickle.” I muttered to myself, but pasted on a smile when the motorcycle cop came to my window.
“License and registration,” he commanded, without telling me what he thought I was doing. Even before my Jones ordeal, I’d had a massive loathing for cops.
Like an *, he took my paperwork back to his bike without giving me any more information. I blew a raspberry of exasperation and grabbed my phone to text June.
PIPPA: Just got pulled over, probably for speeding. Don’t worry. I’ll catch up with you.
For lack of anything else to do, I checked other texts. But who other than Emily at the tuxedo store and Madison Illuminati knew my number? I sure did miss getting texts. I had a very active social life back in Corpus Christi. The hours at the Coast Guard base were long as we worked on a very important jet fuel remediation project, so we partied hearty the rest of the time. Pure and Easy was as quiet as a last breath compared to Texas, as I struggled to get a grip on my new identity.