Page 39 of Race With The Devil

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Tanner

We enlisted the Bare Bones’ help in getting the body down to my rental car.

Bobo Segrist ran the Bum Steer, so he was around. Faux Pas was having a drink there after returning from a Banksy exhibit in Phoenix, so he helped. And Duji had just come from A Likely Story, in a rush to give a grandchild a copy of Where the Wild Things Are, so he just watched.

“Reminds me of the old days,” remarked Duji. “All wrapped up in a rug.”

“My only rug,” mourned Unity.

“You’ll get it back,” I assured her.

“I don’t think I want it back.”

Faux Pas’ mood was light as he went down Unity’s side stairs with his rolled-up burden. “Remember that time we wanted to hang that Ochoa from that bridge as a warning sign but we had no rug to transport him?”

Duji removed the cigarillo from his mouth. “Do I! We had the Bum Steer, so we wound up wrapping him a thousand times in Saran Wrap.”

“When a pig stopped you,” reminisced Bobo, “you said you were playing a bondage game with your girlfriend.”

Faux Pas said, “Good thing we cut a mouth hole to make it look realistic.”

There was no doubt what Corey Shabazz was doing in our rug. We’d had to move a bunch of bikes from the alley to make room for my car, and Fox and Roman were engaged in keeping lookie-loos from staring down the alley. I’d backed the Honda in, but when we went to stuff Corey into the trunk, it became apparent I should’ve paid more for a mid-size versus a compact. The guy was a skinny runt, but he was tall.

“We’ll just have to do the back seat,” said Faux Pas.

“Don’t speed or anything,” said Duji helpfully, gesturing with his cigar.

“If we get pulled over, I’m saying I don’t know you,” said Unity, and I wasn’t sure if she was kidding or not.

I wouldn’t blame her if she pretended not to know me. Associating with me had been nothing but a disaster for the luscious woman. Being on the receiving end of a fair to middling orgasm under the waterfall was no doubt the high point of her association with me. Everything else had been nothing but a bunch of sketchy blowback for the disappearance of her friend. What satisfaction had Unity even gotten out of it? We weren’t even sure Lavinia had fallen over a cliff. Maybe that was so much smoke like everything else, meant to distract us. Maybe Lavinia was in a giant vat of chemicals at Goodfella Ranch, Tutti’s compound where I now stupidly took Unity.

“You shouldn’t come,” I said for the hundredth time as we drove down Bargain Boulevard.

“Wild horses couldn’t keep me away.”

“Look, I’m just delivering a body to the next of kin, as far as I know. I doubt we’re going to find out anything important.”

“You never know. And Tutti’s a lot less liable to do something horrible to you if I’m there as a witness.”

She was probably right, although it wasn’t in my code to bring women into the line of fire, to use them as human shields. I just lamely patted her thigh, and she put both her little hands on mine. We headed north on the highway toward Slide Rock State Park, where Bare Boner Sax Saxonburg had a house in the forest with his wife Bee and their daughter Zelda.

More and more my mind had been turning toward creating a ranch out there. I really only had two employees running Hang Town Ranch in St. Louis—Curly and Josie, another vet with PTSD who was recovering from a suicide attempt when I grabbed her to rehab on the ranch. The Bare Bones were starting to feel like a brotherhood to me. Down to a man, they were accepting of who I was, even my haphazard life’s story. Duji and Ford had joked about making me a Prospect, although I didn’t know how I could do that, run the ranch, and go to med school. And, at age forty-two, I was a little old for that, although Sax had done it at forty-five. The whole possibility boggled my mind.

After awhile, it became evident that Unity’s hand on my thigh was doing more than comfort me. Her fingers were a mere inch away from my cock, where arteries deep inside were dilating rapidly. Channels opened and blood rushed in. I knew from scientific study that millions of little pockets in the two spongy tubes—corpus cavernosum—were filling with blood, puffing my cock to embarrassing proportions. And I knew from looking in the rearview that Unity was avidly watching her handiwork. The corners of her mouth were lifted in that sly little smile.

The more she squeezed, the more nitric oxide—the very stuff of Viagra—was released by arteries in my dick. Knowing the scientific side of it didn’t make it any less sexy. I wondered where she intended to go with this. Was she going to jack my dick like she’d done under the waterfall, my load splattering our faces? We were approaching sunset and I wasn’t opposed to this idea, so I let out a few groans when her hand clamped down over my erection. I rotated my hips as if to get more comfortable in the seat.

“You’ve got a big, juicy prick, Tanner,” she said, matter of fact, squeezing my hard-on like it was a puppy.

“So I’ve been told.”

Wrong reaction. She withdrew her hand as though she’d been burned.

“Why do you do that?” she cried, clearly hurt. “Why do you act so arrogant as though it doesn’t cost me a lot to compliment you?”

Oh Law! Had I made a big mistake. I grabbed her wrist with my right hand. “No, no, my queen! I didn’t mean it that way.” Oh yeah? Then what way did I mean it? “I just meant that, you know, in the air force and all, people have been known to—“