A Gorgeous Mess Read online

  Twinkletoes vanished, and Ormond half-assedly eavesdropped on Turk’s conversation with the mercenary. A mercenary. How glamorous. A mercenary didn’t wear a uniform, but they certainly packed enough tactical weapons and gadgets to qualify them as objects of Ormond’s interest. There was definitely that buff, alpha aura about them that Ormond required in a man.

  Turk said, “I’ll tell you where I land on it. I think it’s this rival MC, the Hellfire Nuts. They’re based in Gila Bend but I’ve been getting grief from them lately. Noise that they want to take over running the work in our new territory. We haven’t really staked a strong enough claim yet to our turf. A void was left when we made the new agreement with Lock’s old club that they’d back off, let us run things in this area. We need more muscle to show the Hellfires we mean business. You’re the perfect man for the job, Anson. No, not because you’re half-Navajo. Although, hell, that might help, too, since I’m convinced those baby gangsters who robbed us were Navajo kids. As you know, they fucking hire them for peanuts to do their grunt work.”

  A Navajo merc. That intrigued Ormond even more. When Turk hung up, Ormond asked, “When’s this sexy mercenary getting here?”

  “We’re meeting tomorrow around lunch at the clubhouse. You should be there for tactical purposes, but I’m telling you, this guy isn’t for you. I’ve known him since I was knee high to a grasshopper. He’s as straight as a gun barrel. Don’t even think of irritating him with your peccadillos.”

  “I wasn’t about to. I know business is business. You know I don’t mix the two.”

  “True. But I can tell you just came from ‘not mixing business’ because you’re not wearing your cut and you look like hell.” Turk had requested Ormond a long time ago to leave his cut behind when he wanted to go cruising for fresh meat.

  Normally, Ormond would have been mortally insulted, but tonight he was forced to agree with Turk. “Yes, I had kind of a…strange experience with a soldier.”

  “Hey, I get that. You know I used to get my kicks at truck stops before I met Lock. Sometimes when members of my own club were parked right out front. I get why you’re a badge slut.”

  “A nightstick polisher,” Ormond freely admitted, almost cheering up again.

  Turk grinned. “Not that I agree with fraternizing with the enemy, which, by the way, cops are. But I understand the need for outside validation, even if it’s some fat fucker wearing a backward baseball cap you’re never going to see again. As long as you made him weak with desire, you’re the man. You’re jacked, until the next time you need validation, which is usually the next fucking day.”

  “Exactly!” Ormond pointed at his Prez, excited. It was still so fresh and new to him, having brothers he could discuss things like this with. When he got excited, Ormond wished more than ever that he was more articulate, with English as his second language. “As long as I feel wanted by the authority figure, as long as I can bring him to his knees with craving, as long as I get him so riled he bosses me around with fervor, then I am happy. I know there is some silly Freudian thing going on, Turk, some daddy domination thing.”

  “Was your dad a cop?”

  “No. He was someone who should have been arrested by the cops.”

  Turk grinned crookedly. “I get it. Maybe you’re trying to right something that was done wrong a long time ago.”

  Ormond tilted his head, wondering. His father was always out and about, committing vaguely criminal acts. Stealing, Ormond thought, doing heists. Mr. Tangier worked for shady men in expensive suits and it had even been suggested a couple of times that he was a mafia man. “I thought the mafia only existed in books and movies, but there was a definite power structure to my father’s organization.”

  “Like a cartel.”

  “Like a cartel. And look, here I am now. An outlaw myself. Look, Turk. I know I’m a cum slut. It covers up a craving for love. I want someone to love me, I am figuring out. Then I’d stop being so loose.”

  Turk chuckled skeptically. “Well, be careful who you choose for your old man. I don’t think the club could take it if you picked a man in uniform who puts us in his sights.”

  “Don’t worry,” Ormond assured his Prez. “I will only choose someone who shares the same beliefs as us. If he does not love every aspect of who I am, he is not for me.”

  “Good. It’s about time you started showing more respect for yourself. I know that’s hard advice to take. But I’ve got a buttload more self-respect now that I’m monogamous with Lock. Hey, listen. Maybe you could help Anson out tomorrow. You know some of those Rez Indians.”

  “I do.” Hope welled inside Ormond to think he might be working with the exotic half-breed Navajo. Ormond didn’t necessarily have to always gulp the cock of an authority figure with a badge. He could do just fine working side by side with the man. He may have only been a special effects artist, but he had insight to offer. Ormond saw things most men didn’t. He had a great ability to decipher a man’s motivation, his desires, what made him tick. That ability had just failed him with Sergeant Van Winkle. “How do we know those Navajos weren’t sent from Fort Mojave by Lock’s old club, the Assassins?

  “We don’t, other than their word that they wouldn’t infringe on our new turf. They’re more interested in the whole Vegas power base.”

  The hand-held radio scanner Ormond kept clipped to his belt crackled with activity. He took it out from his saddlebags when he rode, so he could keep on top of the action. He was beginning to become familiar with this new lady dispatcher. She liked to talk all fancy and cop-like. Apparently there’d been a car wreck on Palo Verde and Pioneer, and out of habit Ormond went to a mirror to comb his hair.

  “Already a new date?” joshed Turk. “I thought you were burning out on that sort of thing.”

  Ormond grinned at the reflection of Turk in the mirror. “I want to make absolutely sure I am burned out.”

  “Oh, I see. You need to test it out. You wanna borrow a shirt or something? I’ve got some T-shirts with pot leaves on them.”

  Ormond was bare-chested under his plain black leather jacket after Justin had torn his wifebeater from his torso. “No, thanks. I think it’s sexier this way.”

  Turk had to follow Ormond to the front door to let him out. “I’ve got to say. It’s a relief to have someone so good-looking all the people want you to be in their TV commercial instead of me.” Turk was so handsome people stopped in their tracks on the street to stare open-mouthed. But then, so was Ormond. He had done some modeling in his time, but it wasn’t for him.

  “And,” said Ormond, “a relief that no one in The Bent Zealots will ever get a police ticket.”

  He strode to his ride, forgetting about his gargoyle in his studio. If he was going to change soon, if his cum slut activities were going to slow down or come to a standstill, he wanted a few last memorable flings. He wanted some more fun before he accepted defeat and admitted that thirty was not the new twenty, and he was old. Old, man, old.

  “Sergeant Blaster, 81 will be en route.”

  The voice of his lady dispatcher made him feel comforted.

  CHAPTER THREE

  ANSON

  They say that people don’t notice whether it’s winter or summer when they’re too busy being happy. Winter’s approach was gnawing through my leather jacket and piercing my heart with a million blades as I rode my Panhead from the nightclub to the cheesy motel I’d chosen. The motel was on a frontage road so that Turk didn’t catch an eyeful of me and go, “Hey, what the fuck, Anson? I thought you weren’t arriving in Lake Havasu until tomorrow.” My restored ’65 Panhead with custom pipes and Springer front end was obvious a mile away, the constantly dying sound of the electronic ignition system.

  Thing was, I didn’t want to start the new operation until tomorrow. Tonight, I wanted a big blowout. I wanted to get hot and heavy at the sleaziest night spot in Havasu, to remind me and my giant ego how desirable I was. I needed the boost, a springboard to yanking myself out of the low muck I’d be
en wallowing in. The self-pity, the resentment, the fucking rage against the world. But I still needed a buffer against the frightening dreams that began to pop into my damaged brain at night. Getting down and dirty in a seedy dive would provide just that.

  But all I’d really managed to do was receive an unsatisfactory blowjob in one of the back cubicles, so I decided to hit the motel where I could really get my drink on and get angsty before starting the new job for Turk. Maybe I could drunken email Sheena from my notebook. Maybe my boss had emailed me begging me to return to Kabul, dying for my counterinsurgency skills. Maybe the moon was made of green cheese.

  So when I drove by the motor vehicle accident, of course I pulled my bike over to help. It had obviously just happened minutes before, as several uninjured passengers were flailing their arms, wandering in dazed circles, and shrieking to the gods.

  Two cars had been involved. The four-door Chevy looked to have cut in front of the Toyota SUV right in front of a 7-11 parking lot. Two people in the SUV seemed afraid to get out of the vehicle. I parked in that lot to give EMTs more room, although none had arrived yet. I dashed to the comatose person near the Chevy. A gal in her twenties, maybe Mexican or Native American, it was hard to tell with all the blood already pooling from her form. The blood gleamed purplish in the overhead streetlight. The people who had been in her car were so dazed and confused, only one person kneeled by her, maybe her boyfriend.

  Whipping my Bowie knife from my boot, the first thing I did was make a cut in her cotton sleeve from wrist to armpit. I could already hear sirens getting closer, but this chick clearly had a compound fracture, a sharp piece of her humerus jutting from the blood-soaked skin of her upper arm.

  “Her arm’s busted,” said the boyfriend dully. “We weren’t fucking drinking.”

  “I’m sure you weren’t,” I replied, equally as dully. The brachial artery had been punctured by bone, each heartbeat pulsing a fresh wave of blood from the arm. I was already drenched up to the elbow by the time I ripped her sleeve into several tourniquet strips. “Here, you know what you can do? Give me your hand.” I showed the guy how to apply pressure so the brachial wouldn’t spurt so heavily and the blood loss would slow. He was helpful and game, I had to hand that to him. Everyone else was running around like chickens with their heads cut off.

  The EMTs arrived as I tied the tourniquet. I explained the situation, then I headed to the 7-11 to get more smokes and maybe a pint of whiskey. Something manly that would lubricate my thoughtful, pensive, and downright eloquent email to my daughter. I needed to somehow convince her to give up whatever drugs she might be doing, for the safety of the baby, if it wasn’t already too late. I could invoke her mother’s memory, maybe more than hint that meth had worsened Adelaide’s diabetes, that it had been a perfect shitstorm of poison and ill health that had killed her. And did Sheena want to die? That would be a dramatic, fatherly thing to say.

  But just as the overhead light hit me, just as I was about to enter the store, I noticed I was virtually dripping with blood. My leather jacket up to the elbows was soaked, and from the knees down my jeans looked like clown pants—or like I worked in a slaughterhouse. Either way, the store clerk would definitely be hitting the panic button when he got a load of me.

  So I returned to my bike to at least stash the horror show jacket in the saddlebags. Maybe the clerk wouldn’t notice me from the waist down. I returned to the ambulance to grab the sleeve of someone who wasn’t immediately involved in any lifesaving.

  Ormond Tangier—only of course I didn’t know it was him at first—struck me at first sight. I was socked with insta-lust for the creamy-skinned Spaniard with the charcoal-lined eyes. Maybe I felt a camaraderie with him because he, too, wore a black leather jacket. When my gaze dropped to his chest and I realized he was shirtless and heavily inked, I knew he was no EMT. But I wanted an excuse to talk to him.

  “Think you can get me some paper towels? I’m not really presentable the way I am.” Whoever he was—some kind of ambulance chaser, judging from the hand-held scanner he had clipped to his belt—he was built and fit and obviously worked out, just the sort of sultry, Mediterranean guy I was usually attracted to. Well, I’d had most of my guy-on-guy interactions overseas in places like Afghanistan and Iraq. Of course my partners were dark-skinned, Roman-nosed guys.

  I had just come from cruising a pup with a mop of dishwater blond hair like some boy band member, and even a handful of his full, pulsing package hadn’t done much for me. We had retired to one of the back cubicles where sweat-and semen-stained walls could tell quite a story. Suddenly, my heart just wasn’t in it, and I left after buying him and his friends a round. I put it down to the fact that I was now in Arizona, where the imminent danger was of running into a saguaro or being hit in a crosswalk by a drunken Indian. In Afghanistan, the constant life-and-death battle kept my adrenaline so pumped, it was a necessary way to blow off steam to grab some sexy, smoky college student with pouty lips and tear off a good one up against an alley wall. With condoms, naturally. I was all about humping the tall, dark, and handsome Arabs, their heads swathed in checkered keffiyehs. I was not interested in pups or twinks. I wanted someone who could fight back.

  “Sure.” The shirtless wannabe EMT leaped into the back of the ambulance and emerged with a handful of towels. He handed them to me, looking distinctly as though he’d prefer to be drying me off himself. “I saw you saving that girl. Good work. Are you an off-duty officer?”

  “No,” I said simply. “Shit. The blood’s already soaked in. This won’t work.”

  “Were you trying to go inside the store? I could go for you.”

  That made sense. So I told him what I wanted, gave him money, then waited outside by the Red Box video rental kiosk. When he came out with my smokes and whiskey, I couldn’t just cut him loose. Besides, I really wanted a smoke, after all that blood. I went around the side of the 7-11 so as not to annoy anyone with my smoke. That’s truly why I did it. Ormond followed me like a puppy.

  “Then how’d you learn all that first aid?” he kept on.

  “Military.” That was true. I’d been Special Forces before I’d struck out on my own with my company.

  His accent was rich with Latin flavoring—Spain, if I had to guess. “Oh, I nailed it, then. Watching you work, you were so virile, so sure of yourself, unafraid of the blood and gore.”

  I knew he was pandering, but I wanted to be nice to him. He seemed like an entirely harmless guy, a friendly sort who lived to be in the public eye, a very social sort of animal. Besides, his talk was boosting my ego, and wasn’t that what I’d been searching for all day? “That’s all in a day’s work for me. Military we have to deal with all sorts of gore.”

  He tickled his fingertips up my bicep, where some Persian calligraphy allegedly said, “Without others, yes—without you, never!” I had been carried away for a while by a young business student, before events had torn us apart. I swore never again to develop feelings for another man. It was far too complicated of a business. It was hard enough finding a woman, but that was the direction I’d pursue from here on in. I needed what the MC world called “a citizen wife” who wouldn’t mind if I occasionally prowled around bungholing other dark-skinned beauties. The wife could keep me stable, keep me from flying off the rails.

  “You are very manly. Just the type I like.” His fingers traveled to my nipple, brushing it with an insistency that hardened my prick. This guy was good. Classy and good.

  “Maybe you’ll tell me why you’re chasing an ambulance with a scanner, yet you’re not taking photos or helping out. You’re not a newspaperman, an EMT, and I’m gathering you’re not a lawyer.”

  He laughed richly. “None of the above. I am Ormond Tangier, special effects makeup artist to Hollywood.”

  I was actually impressed, if he was telling the truth. I was used to brutal, filthy, fellow mercs, not men who glued prosthetics to Meryl Streep. I flicked my cigarette before I’d even half-finished it, suddenly not wantin
g it. “Then why the fuck you live in Lake Havasu City? Not exactly glam central. Not exactly anything central unless it happens to be spring break for drunk kids.”

  “It is where I wound up. Quartzsite, actually, a few miles to the south, before we decided to form a new motorcycle club up here. I followed a man here, a man who turned out to be no good. But before I knew it, I had my own studio and was working from here.”

  “And why the fuck do you have a scanner, then? What’s in it for you, going to these crime scenes?”

  Ormond looked sly. It suited him, that sly look. He had a lush, creamy beauty that would be at home modeling fragrance on a white beach. Maybe advertising some Greek liqueur. “I am a badge slut. I get off on pleasing men in authority, men in uniform. Policemen, firemen, EMTs, military men—anyone in authority.”

  I was floored. I’d heard of such a thing, of course. I’d just never come face to face with such a delicious piece of man meat who had a special fetish for—well, me. That was handy. My knees went a bit weak, and my dick lengthened inside my jeans, pulsating with my heartbeat against my hip. That kid had drained me at the night club, but maybe my apathy in that case meant I was ready for another go. I grabbed Ormond Tangier by the back of the neck, aggressively jerking him to me. I wasn’t quite ready for a kiss, but I wanted to be serviced by this long-limbed Spaniard, now.