Page 26 of Fighting for Irish
Chapter Seven
Aiden rolled up in front of the tattoo shop below Kat’s apartment and killed the engine on the GSXR. He glanced around for signs of the guys who’d been tailing her the night before, but he didn’t find any.
He’d give it a few minutes and see if they wanted to approach him on the street. It’d be better for him if they did. It was only eleven, so the tattoo joint was still open for business, and with those gigantic windows and the street lamp directly above him, it’d be hard for anyone to miss a guy getting beat with bats.
Setting the kickstand, he got off the bike and wished like hell he wasn’t wearing his snug leather riding jacket and gloves. They were suffocating him in this weather, but if these guys were from the East Coast and knew anything about the fighting world, they could recognize his tattoos and make him.
The last thing he needed was his past colliding with Kat’s present. At least he didn’t need the jacket zipped, since his shirt covered up everything on his chest.
He pulled off his helmet and hung it on the throttle handle, then took out a cigarette from the half-crushed pack in his jacket pocket. Lighting his smoke, Aiden leaned back on the bike, ankles and arms crossed, looking for all the world like he wasn’t about to step into the lion’s den with steaks tied around his neck.
Kat had done her best to tag along, but there was no way in hell he’d hand her over on a silver platter to these assholes. As long as she was somewhere they couldn’t find her until he could figure a way out of this mess, she’d be safe. She’d taken consolation in telling him where she kept her gun and making him promise to use it for protection.
Aiden took a deep drag on the cigarette and searched the surrounding area again as he thought about that afternoon. Keeping his distance from Kat was proving damn near impossible. In the beginning, he at least had the boyfriend standing between them and that almost hadn’t stopped him from kissing her in the kitchen. But then she’d told him she had no attachments, and it took everything he had not to pick her up and haul her off to his room. He’d fantasized about her for weeks, so the news of her single status had flipped his moral traffic light from red to green in an instant.
He shook his head as he dropped his smoke to the ground and crushed it under his heel. The best thing for both of them would be to get these goons off her back and get her to her sister so that he and she could part ways. Then she’d be safe from sharks like Sicoli, not to mention riptides like him who would suck her under the surface faster than she could swim to shore.
“Sooner I deal with these assholes, the better,” he muttered to himself as he pushed off his bike. Taking one last look around and seeing nothing out of the ordinary, Aiden headed into the alley between the tattoo joint and voodoo jewelry shop to the door that led up to Kat’s apartment.
He had no plan other than to see how serious these guys were. He needed to know how much they wanted and the latest they’d take it. If he could put them off for at least two week, then Jax could wire the money.
Using Kat’s key, he opened the alley door and walked up the dimly lit stairwell. At the top were two apartments. Kat’s on the left and another on the right, which sat over a shoe repair store.
In other words, nothing like a rowdy bar that would disguise any noise coming from across the hall. For small town cops, answering a call for “gunshots fired” would make them cream their department-issued polyester pants. They’d have the cops crawling up their asses so fast they’d have friction burns.
Aiden took a deep breath, cracked his neck, then his knuckles, and let himself into Kat’s apartment. She’d given him the layout so he had a basic idea of where things were in case he needed to know in a lights-out brawl kind of situation, but when he closed the door behind him and flipped the switch, the lights came on without a problem.
The problem was the two men standing in the center of the room holding guns with suppressors. Damn.
“Oh, good, you’re already here,” Aiden shot off. “I was worried I’d have to send smoke signals or something. By the way, how’s the Caddy? Sounded like you maybe scratched the paint.”
The goons glanced at each other, communicating in some sort of telepathic mob language, then turned their attention back on him. Goon One narrowed his eyes, giving him a strong resemblance to Christopher Walken. “Let’s get down to business, shall we?”
Whoa.The guy even sounded like Walken. Aiden half expected the guy to demand “more cowbell.”
“My name is Sully and my associate here is Vinnie. And you are?”
Aiden arched a brow. “None of your fucking business.”
“I disagree if you’re here on the girl’s behalf. However”—Sully gestured with a roll of his hands, the barrel of the gun drawing small circles in the air—“if you’re not, then you’re absolutely right; who you are doesn’t matter.”
The one called Vinnie pulled back on the slide of his gun, chambering a round, and aimed it between Aiden’s eyes.
“Smith. John Smith.”
Sully offered a smile a cat would flash to a caged canary. “Mr. Smith, as you may or may not already know, we’ve been hired by Mr. Sicoli to collect a debt owed to him.”
“Hired? You don’t work for him?” If not, their loyalty was more likely to themselves than to Sicoli. Aiden had a chunk of winnings still in a savings account back home. Maybe he could pay them to forget about Kat and tell Sicoli they’d killed her.
Sully spoke with a tinge of annoyance. “I know what you’re thinking, Mr. Smith, and the answer is no. We might only be contracted to go after runners, but Mr. Sicoli pays us handsomely for our loyalty. Plus, we get half of whatever money we collect on top of our regular fees, which is why we’re more patient than your average collectors.”
Fuck.There went that plan. At least he’d had the presence of mind to instruct Xan to get Kat out of town until Xander could reach Jax if Aiden didn’t make it out of this meeting. From the look of things, he’d give himself a fifty-fifty chance at this point. Not great odds.
Aiden planted his feet shoulder-width apart and kept his arms loose by his sides. Without the aid of Kat’s gun, the only thing he had going for him was his fighting skills. “What happens if you can’t collect?”
A sadistic glint lit up Vinnie’s eyes. The kind that said, I’ve tortured living things since kindergarten and never lost an ounce of sleep. “Why don’t you ask Lenny Marx? Oh wait, you can’t.”
Sully elaborated. “Our orders are to come back with either the money or proof of death. After meeting with Mr. Marx in prison, we determined he had no means of getting us the money. Soon after, he met with an unfortunate accident.”
