Stay Vertical (The Bare Bones MC #2)(8)
Lytton felt as though his brain was bleeding. Of course he knew Cropper Illuminati. Everyone in Arizona knew Cropper Illuminati. He had died last year in a strange accident down near the Mexican border. He had been president of the huge Illuminati Trucking empire and owner of a buttload of other businesses in and around Pure and Easy.
And president of The Bare Bones motorcycle club, the Cutlass’ mortal enemy.
Iso sneered. “Prez of The Bare Bones. Yeah, you heard right. You’re a spawn of those twisted motherf*cking Boners, so we shouldn’t even be doing business with you.”
Iso didn’t even need to add the rest. It was all like so much water off a duck’s back as Zelov grabbed his sergeant-at-arms and dragged him down the aisle of white buckets toward the front door.
Lytton barely heard what Zelov was saying. Now he felt like holding onto the marijuana trunk for dear life.
“You walking hard-on. Don’t you have the sense God gave you? We need Driving Hawk on our side, not going over to the enemy. We need his f*cking expertise. He knows all that weatherman shit like climate control, lighting, and airflow…”
CHAPTER THREE
JUNE
“Ingrid has pancreatic cancer.”
For weeks on end now, I had imagined sitting next to Madison and giving her Ingrid’s diagnosis.
Not once had I expected it to be like this.
For one, we were sitting in an airplane hangar. Yes, one of those old decrepit airfield hangars with all the broken windowpanes, the no air conditioning, the corroded underground storage tanks leaking jet fuel into the soil.
Built in the forties on a flat butte on Mescal Mountain, now the hangar was headquarters and corporation yard for Illuminati Trucking—and also, apparently, The Bare Bones biker club. I had forgotten how much I loved the red sedimentary rocks of the Pure and Easy area. Looking now out the window I could see the upthrust plates of hematite-stained strata where erosion had eaten away the softer sandstone underneath, leaving grand, dramatic citadels and towers of rock.
These were the sorts of hills Madison had slept in as a forgotten kid, and I wondered how she was able to handle the view. However, it wasn’t even the same person who sat next to me now. For one, she had ten years of responsible, practical nursing experience behind her. I could see it in every plane and curve of her face, the maturity, the responsibility.
I know it sounds corny, but you have to know it was nothing short of a miracle that we’d both made it out of there alive. Madison was poetically calling the old Cottonwood ranch house our “House of Early Sorrows” for all the grief it had caused us. It was a downright f*cking miracle that we both hadn’t turned to drugs or prostitution—or worse, turned into a twisted, bitter old witch like our mother. Against all odds we had risen from that muck—and now Madison even had a baby!
It sounds even cornier to say a baby is a miracle, but Fidelia truly was. She toddled around Ford’s office in her achingly adorable little tennies, at that age where she had the need for speed. She had her father’s lush, black mane of hair, satiny curls tumbling over her shoulders. There was a wedding photo of the two of them on Ford’s desk, and I was surprised how much it wrenched my heart to see his devilishly handsome face again.
I had never found anyone to love the way Maddy had. The closest I had come was some British guy serving as a volunteer near Lake Turkana. I had imagined it was love with Randy—after all, we had so much in common. We both loved Africa with a passion. We agreed on every tiny political agenda. We even liked the same beer and food. We really had everything in common on paper, which was why I overlooked how awful he was in bed—if you called a square of fabric in the sand a bed—and how little old ladyish he was about his spice rack.
I know. Everything in life is a trade-off. No one is going to be that perfect soul mate, your exact mirror image the whole way. Vive la difference. Opposites attract. Why, God, why, of all the f*cking things that a guy could possibly have going wrong for him, would I fixate on his god damned spice rack?
Well, I thought it was a sign. He wouldn’t let me use the last of the garam masala because he wasn’t going to Nairobi for another three weeks, and God forbid he run out of garam masala in the meantime, and isn’t that what garam masala is for in the first place, to cook with?
But I took it as a sign that he’d be stingy and selfish about other things, and I supposed I wasn’t that in love with him after all if I let something small like that prevent me from moving to Khartoum with him, like he wanted when he was transferred. Maybe I was scared of commitment or maybe I wasn’t ready to follow someone else around the globe, or maybe my job was that important to me. I was broken-hearted without Randy, and would cry myself to sleep with my face pressed against the warm sand, Randy’s kanga wrapped around me, singing along to the mournful songs of the tribespeople.
Turk Blackburn stopped by to take Fidelia somewhere. I remembered Turk from the Cottonwood days when sometimes they’d have club meetings—called “church”—at our house. He had been Ford’s best friend growing up. Damn, that was one hella fine babe. He was one of those men so painfully gorgeous that people on the street would stop dead in their tracks and drop their jaws to the ground. It was said people used to rush up and ask him to be in their TV commercials, though I don’t know if he actually ever did any.
He was a polite, sort of mild-mannered biker, if such a thing was possible. He kept his beard neatly trimmed, and he had the softest expression, his long lashes framing glittering eyes. As Maddy’s little sister, I’d always known Turk was way out of my league too. He still didn’t wear a wedding ring, and I was a lot more mature and filled-out, but I knew I didn’t dare hit that.