Page 9 of Sleeper

I wanted to choke the life out of his fucking body, but even if no one else knew it, as far as I could tell, Monty was being honest. My dad had a notorious track record for leaving the state for weeks and months at a time as long as I was able to remember. I wasn’t sure if he did it when Mom was alive or not, but I didn’t recall him being as shitty of a dad back then.

Sledge growled, “I should drop you where you stand. Because of you we might be too late. If we don’t get our shit back, I’m coming back here. You got it?”

“My door is always open to the Bastards.” Monty proudly waved his hand in front of his body as if he was showcasing the Ritz, not a sticky, rundown strip club.

“Can you look up Kenzi’s full name for us, Monty?” I sighed.

“Absolutely.” He dashed down the hallway, but it didn’t take long for him to return. “Mackenzie Guinyard, used to be a beautiful woman. That was until she got hooked on drugs.”

“Does she have any family that you know of?” I questioned him, keeping my tone level.

“Never married and no kids.”

“Who is Vera Wang?”

“A young thing, barely legal. She’s Kenzi’s best friend, not really sure why, though. As far as I could tell she was clean and pretty damned levelheaded.”

“Thanks, Monty.” I nodded, certain there wasn’t much more info he could tell us. If we found out otherwise, we’d be back.

6

SLEEPER

“Her name is Mackenzie Guinyard,” I reported, taking a drag off of my cigarette, the gray smoke from the end swirling in the air.

“That’s her or at the very least the same name that’s on the application in front of me,” Opry replied in his southern drawl from the speakerphone of Spider’s phone.

“What the fuck are the odds of that?” Sac wondered mostly to himself, but looked around the room, waiting for a reply. “How’d you connect the dots?”

“She listed Cat Call as her most recent job, figured I’d holler at someone I trusted for a reference, so I called up old Spider. Little did I know she had a lot more to offer than shakin’ ass and bouncing titties.”

Shit was never this easy in our lives, something had to be off about all of it. Maybe we hadn’t given Vera and Kenzi enough credit, and the call to blackmail us would come any minute now. Of course, it might have been two different women with the same exact name. We had to be certain. Leave no stone unturned. If I didn’t get our guns back, Ghoul would have my head when he returned. If I didn’t find Mom’s necklace, Belle would be heartbroken. That was if all of the above hadn’t already been sold for a score. After all these were junkies we were talking about.

“Opry, do you mind offering her an in-person interview? Bitch might have our guns and my little sister’s necklace.”

“Ain’t that some shit! Not at all, brother. It’s what I do. Y’all want me to wait until you get to Royal Road or vet her ahead of time?”

“Would you let us help with the interview?” Sac’s eyes lit up at the idea of going back to Kingpin’s palace like a kid’s on Christmas morning would. The fucker really looked like tears were going to spring free at any moment, he was so happy. It’d been around a year since the last time my brothers visited our Nashville, Tennessee chapter. I didn’t ride with them as I was in West Virginia with Belle. We went to visit Mom’s grave, but I told the guys we were visiting family. I didn’t want them to pity me. However, not long after they returned, I rode down to check Royal Road out for myself. Kingpin had a nice set up going for him.

The ride took a little over seven hours, so the fact that Kenzi applied specifically to a club ran by our Royal Bastard brothers right after leaving one we frequently did business in didn’t go unnoticed. There were too damn many strip clubs between Cleveland and Nashville for that to be a coincidence in my opinion. This reeked of a set up. Opry and our Nashville brothers wouldn’t do that to us, though. Their involvement in a dirty deal against us wasn’t happening, so if this led to extortion, the Nashville chapter wasn’t part of it.

Truthfully, they would handle our whole situation now that it was in their territory if we asked, but this was too personal to hand them over like lambs headed to slaughter. I wanted to look the person in the face that came into my house and stole from Baby Belle and my fucking club. My dad’s name wasn’t on the fucking deed to the place, mine was. For peace of mind, I had to know if my dad was behind all of this. If he was, I’d jab a dirty needle so fucking far into his carotid that he’d beg for me to push the plunger and put him out of his misery. It’d been a little while since I dosed anyone, didn’t get the chance with the last piece of shit Wiley and I killed, so I was itchy to use some of my mixtures before they lost their shelf life. Medicine lost its strength if you used it past the expiration date, but the shit usually still did the job. Every bit of that was an excuse, but even if my dad wasn’t behind this, whoever was, would pay with their fucking soul.

“You’d be doing us a solid by waiting on us, Opry,” I told him, none of us answering Sac’s overeager ass. “You don’t happen to have another applicant by the name of Guinevere Potasnik do ya?”

“Nah, sorry.” It was a long shot, but I had to ask. I wasn’t that damned lucky, though.

“My dad?”

“That’s another negative.” Dad was well-known for his love of drugs and strippers, not his kids. Kingpin offered to ban his ass the last time Dad visited Royal Road. I told him to do as he saw fit, but my two cents was Kingpin should take all of the fucker’s money. More than likely, it came straight out of my bank account anyway, so if it was going to anybody, I’d rather it be one of my brothers.

“We’ll be there by morning,” Tin Man decreed with a nod of his head. “Thanks again, Opry.”

“Don’t mention it. Y’all are welcome anytime. I’ll let Kingpin and the rest of the brothers know you’re comin’.”

“Opry, this could be a trap,” I warned, hating that my shit had landed in his backyard.

“We’ll be ready. We always are.”

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