Getaway (Restless Motorcycle Club Romance) (4 page)

“Where are we going, Marshall?”

I waited impatiently, fingers tapping the wheel of the black Lexus, ready to be off.

“Easy, Shane. I just got you out of the clubhouse from underneath a dozen FBI agents without them being the wiser. One step at a time.”

I gritted my teeth. It was best not to get on Marshall’s bad side – he had way too many methods of killing a man to ever want to help him test out another. “I just know that Jackie’s out there, and the government has put her in danger without even realizing it, the fucking idiots.”

Whatever Marshall was doing over there with the screen lighting his face up with pale blue light, he was doing it too slow. I started the engine and started to drive out of the garage just to put some distance between us and the plain industrial building wedged between a factory and a warehouse.

“Hold up,” Marshall said, and I stopped as he pulled out another device and waved it around us. It beeped a couple times and a red LED came on, but he stared at it intently before waving me forward. “Okay, we’re good to go. I’m glad you took my advice about the tunnel when you picked out the clubhouse. It made this downright simple.”

“Well it just seemed like a good idea. Maybe it was a little tough to pull off without alerting anyone who might have been snooping around – like the FBI. But worth it.”

The Restless Motorcycle Club’s warehouse and base of operations was located in the middle of a bustling industrial district, and it wasn’t an accident. The warehouse had been leased legally under the club name, but at the same time a small building had gone for sale a block over that I purchased secretly, under a false name, through several layers of protections meant to conceal the identity of the true owner. Marshall had uncovered a few contractors who were trustworthy and stealthy – not to mention skilled – enough to tunnel underneath the two properties and build a hidden passageway.

The logistics had been headache-inducing – worming through the sewer system, the buried utilities, and hidden outcroppings of bedrock, all without striking anything and alerting anybody. It had been more expensive than I’d wanted to admit to the others in the club, and something that looked like it would never pay off.

Until tonight. Tonight had made it all worthwhile.

“Okay, she’s up north, a ways out of downtown,” Marshall said. “Take the highway.”

We drove in a terse silence aside from the odd direction given from the man in the passenger seat. Marshall was an incredibly useful acquaintance to have, but he was not comfortable to be around. He had seen and done far too many things for that to ever be the case. I knew enough not to bother asking him how he got the information he did.

At his direction, I pulled the car to the side of a street in a shabby neighborhood, next to a house displaying a couple of graffiti tags. The houses would have been nice when they were first built back when this was prime commuter real estate. As the city limits expanded and the buildings grew older, the wealthier middle class kept moving further outside of the city bounds, and this became a forgotten community, kind of like the occupants.

Another one of Marshall’s devices was out in his steady hands, scanning slowly around a house a few doors down.

“There are only two people in there,” he said. “One man and one woman. I can’t believe they’ve made things this easy on us. They really thought that we wouldn’t be able to find her.”

“We can take one man,” I replied. “I’m going in there. Where should I enter?”

Marshall squinted out the car and shrugged. “Looks like they’re just through the front door, so we should loop around back. You want the lead?”

I nodded. “Like Kuwait?”

He smiled; the vicious grin of a fellow predator.

The lawn was lumpy and there were patches of dirt under my feet as we crouched and ran towards the side of our target building as quietly as possible, a distinct contrast to the green carpet that perfectly filled my own yard.

With a concentrated effort and the benefit of countless mornings spent running through a posh neighborhood, I kept my breathing slow and quiet, drawing each breath carefully through my nose and expelling it the same way to make sure it didn’t tip off our opponent.

Marshall used hand signals to point towards the back of the house. I nodded.

There was a door just around the corner, a swinging one with just a small window. It looked like it might make some noise when opened.

I looked back at Marshall and grimaced; he pointed over my shoulder at a window that was cracked open to the warm night.

“I don’t know why you’re doing this, but isn’t there anything I can do so that you won’t?” I asked, my voice growing desperate even to my own ears. “I don’t know what I’ve done wrong.
Please!”

There was no response. This guy did not want to give me anything. There was no hope.

I was going to die here. On the floor of this crappy house, far from anyone I knew, having betrayed the man I had barely had the time to start to fall in love with.

This is bullshit. I can’t fucking believe—

A man’s yell interrupted my thought, drowning it out with its volume and intensity.

A thud beside me made me flinch and instinctively roll away.

Two men were rolling on the floor, struggling and grappling to gain an advantage over the other. One was my guard-turned-executioner, and the other was—

Oh my god.

“Shane!”

It was him. It was really him. His muscles bulged as he secured his position on top of the FBI agent, and started to punch him in the face.

My shout made him look over, and the agent took advantage. With a quick flip of his lower body and a shove low on Shane’ side, the biker was rolled off and onto the floor, and all of a sudden he was the victim of an onslaught of blows.

“Oh my god!” My stomach flipped. He had been winning until I opened my big fucking mouth.

The agent still had his gun in his hands, but hadn’t been able to bring it to bear against Shane, who outweighed him by at least a couple dozen pounds. Now that he was on top, he gained some ground and pointed it at Shane’ head.

“No!”

I lunged from the awkward position I was kneeling in. My body, wielded less with grace and more like a blunt instrument, slammed into the man just as he pulled the trigger, and my soul flinched as the sound of the shot reverberated around the small living room. The gun, the target of my attack, flew from the agent’s hand but not before the bullet had left the muzzle.

Was I too late?

It was too easy for the agent to bodily push me aside, taking my breath away as his arm swept into my sensitive stomach. I fell to the ground and stared helplessly as the agent got to his feet.

A second
bang
rang out, and the agent slumped to the ground, first falling to his knees before landing on his face.

Shane lay on the ground, one hand raised and holding a small gun. A wisp of smoke curled from the tip.

“Shane!” I rushed over on my hands and knees, not wasting the time to stand up. “Are you okay?”

He didn’t move as I got closer, and I feared the worst.

When I got over top of him, his eyes found mine. I searched them for the pain I didn’t want to find. He smiled.

“That was close.”

An inch to the right of his head, the old hardwood floor had a slug buried in the wood, splintering the grain.

“You saved me.”

I couldn’t believe he was here. It didn’t seem possible. It was surreal.

There was no avoiding it – my lips dropped of their own accord and met his as I pulled his head gently towards me. Even from below he controlled things as we moved at his pace. His teeth playfully nipped at mine, deepening the kiss and bringing the heat forth from my loins. The combination of almost dying, Shane’ rescue, and my own small involvement in the fight had my body completely keyed up.

Just as Shane’ hands started to creep up my shirt – reminding me and my hard nipples that I had left my bra at the clubhouse earlier that day, not to mention my panties – someone cleared their throat behind me.

“Who’s there?” I shouted, but felt like an idiot when Shane barely moved beneath me. He must have known that there was someone else around and just hadn’t cared.

“Where the hell were you, Marshall?” Shane said. “I could have died there; I thought you were right behind me!”

A tall man leaned against the doorway back into the kitchen. His eyes were cool and had a certain hardness to them that I had never seen before. There was a definite vibe that this was a man I never wanted to piss off. “You had it covered.”

Shane sat up, incredulous. “Covered? I was an inch away from being ended, man! I swear to you, I would not have been upset at you saving my ass there.”

“Ah, the lady was up to the task. I was watching the whole thing from right here, and if I thought he was going to kill you then I would have stepped in.”

The biker just shook his head. I had the impression that there had been many conversations like this one between these two.

“Whatever. Let’s get out of here. I can’t believe they only had one man here. Then again, maybe it’s not that big of a surprise if this is the work of the people we think it is, that way they could off Jackie without too much fuss.”

I had been so grateful to see Shane that I had almost forgotten the circumstances.

“You,” I said, poking him in the chest, “have a lot of explaining to do. What the hell is going on here?”

I didn’t want to leave the house before getting my explanation, but Shane and Marshall didn’t want to stick around where the FBI knew I had last been. Considering that the agency’s man had been seconds away from killing me, I hesitated only momentarily before following them out to the black sedan and climbing into the passenger seat while Shane drove and Marshall sat in the back seat.

“It’s a long story,” Shane said. “And it’s probably going to sound pretty fantastical at times, but I swear that I wouldn’t lie to you.”

I reserved judgment on that front, but since I was the one who had stolen from the motorcycle club and fled, there wasn’t a whole lot of high ground for me to stand on.

“Okay, well you have to start somewhere. Maybe you can tell me about those files that I saw. Why did you have men killed? Were they bad men? And if so then why was the FBI so upset about it?”

He sighed. “There’s a lot more to it than you could possibly guess, but I suppose it’s as good a place to get going as any. The first thing you should know is that I used to be in the marines before I retired from active duty. I served my country, and I did everything they asked me to do. Once I got discharged, I helped out a couple of friends in the Bureau from time to time.

“A couple of old friends of mine had this little motorcycle club, and there were a number of other ex-military men in there. The FBI wanted me to go in and keep an eye on things, make sure they weren’t up to anything illegal.”

Shane paused and laughed. “Turns out they were keeping busy fooling around with some little bullshit. Instead of turning them in, I joined them. It was a natural fit, and after you see and commit some of the atrocities of war, a little petty crime doesn’t seem like as big of a deal as it’s made out to be.”

“You were in the marines?” I looked at him with new eyes. The muscles arms, the strong hands on the steering wheel, and the way he carried himself; suddenly I could see it. It was a wonder I never had before.

“I was,” he nodded. “I was proud as hell about it, too. But that all changed with the war. I saw too much shit, did too many things that I could never forgive myself. When I realized that it was all a sham, all a way for some politicians to do favors to their lobbyists, I lost all faith in what we were doing. It was all for nothing, and definitely not for our country’s freedom.

“We got involved with progressively darker and more intense crimes, but still not the sort of thing that would seriously harm anyone. I always cautioned against going deeper, but I was a lone voice of reason and would get dragged along with whatever schemes my friends hatched.”

“Why are you still with the club?” I asked. He seemed conflicted about what they were doing, and it didn’t make any sense that he would stay involved. “You had an easy out, you could have just gone to the FBI.”

“Because the club is my family now,” Shane said. He looked at me and shrugged. “I would rather be with them taking delivery of a shipment of coke than sitting at home with memories of the war and a bottle of Jack Daniels.”

I thought about how few actual friends I had. There were none that I would be willing to risk my life for. 
I wish I had some of that.
The comradery that Shane had with his biker gang was somehow more human and wholesome than my lonely existence to this point.

“Why did the FBI come after me?” I asked. “They already had their man on the inside, what use could I be to them?”