Page 86 of Bourbon & Blood

“Not if she keeps her mouth shut!” he cried. “We already paid someone, some low-level street scum, but he’s dead!”

I raised my eyebrow at that and glanced at Saint who nodded and took off to head right on back to the city. He knew what I expected – head to the Quarter and sit on my little Alina’s pad an’ watch for trouble.

I got every bit of information there was to get out of the son of a bitch on Maya’s killer. Axe nodded from behind his mask and goggles that he was gettin’ it all. That man had a brain like an iron trap – I could bet he had it alright.

“Run it down when we get out of here,” I said, and he nodded.

“You need to go. I’ll finish this off.”

I took my knee up off the weeping broken man.

“Hamstring him, leave him out there for the gators or the heat to finish him off. He don’t deserve to go quick,” I told Axe.

“You got it, boss.”

I went out into the daylight and the heat, taking myself down to the dock with my bar of Ivory soap. I washed up, rage flowin’ through my veins, albeit sluggish at the moment.

I took my time cleanin’ myself up and went on back in to get myself dressed. Axe was talkin’ to the stripped and bloody, half-drowned man sweatin’ in the heat of the Smokehouse. Yeah, this hog was properly smoked and ready for market, but I didn’t much care how long Axe took with it. I let the man have his fun. Kenny sure fuckin’ deserved it, followin’ through like he did after knowing the why of Maya’s ways.

The knowledge of it stuck in my craw something fierce as I left Axe to it and went out to my bike. I rode a ways away from the Smokehouse before pulling over and takin’ up my phone, turning it on.

It immediately started blowing up with messages and shit, the first from Saint sayin’ he was headin’ home – that Hex had shown up to my little Alina’s in his truck, had her in hand, scooping her up and taking off with her somewhere. The way Saint described it? They lit outta there like their ass was on fire.

I didn’t look at anything else. I was just about to call Hex directly when my phone lit up and started buzzing in my mitt with his name on the screen.

“What?” I grunted by way of greeting, my brain going faster than my mouth and just condensing my “what the fuck is going down” into the single word. I could hear road noise in the background as he filled me in.

“Yeah, where you at bro?” he asked me.

“Smokehouse,” I said, keepin’ it short.

“I got Lina with me. We on our way out to St. Mary’s medical examiners – they want her to ID a body,” he told me.

I was closer than they were to Saint Mary’s Parish by a fair bit, bein’ out the way I was. I lowered my phone and searched the medical examiner’s office address in the navigation pane.

“I’m on my way.” I ended the call and started my bike back up, pointing myself up north toward St. Mary’s Parish. I was closer bein’ out at the edge of the Atchafalaya Swamp like I was, but there was no tellin’ how far Hex was into the drive from the city.

I had a sinking feeling in my gut that bein’ along the basin, that Maya’s body had been found. Not by our people, but by somebody.

Fuck.

My only thought and concern was about either beating my woman and my VP to the morgue or at the very least, narrowly making it there just in time.

Damnit to hell,I thought to myself. I didn’t realize I’d started to share so hard in my woman’s eternal optimism and I’d found myself hoping against better sense that Maya was somehow alive.

I knew how much this kind of shit didn’t have a happy ending. I lived it every day. Yet still my woman made me want to believe in happy endings enough that I nearly had myself fooled.

Now she was about to get one of the roughest lessons life ever had to serve up… I mean, I hoped not, butdamn. I just had this sinking feeling in my gut that told me she was just in for it… and no, it wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair by half.

It was all so much fucking bullshit. Another ballad on how the rich fucked with the lives of the ordinary and the poor – of how they thought they were above the law, and they were if I was being honest. They absolutely were.

What no one was above? Not even a rich and powerful fucker like Bashaw and his cronies?

Good ol’ fashioned street justice. If I was late, if my little Alina wound up hurt in any way by that rich bastard’s machinations? Well, I aimed to deliver some of that justice sure and swift.

CHAPTERTHIRTY-ONE

Alina…

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