Page 201 of American Hellhound
Finally, though, she was able to call Ghost, and she went outside to wait for him.
At this rate, she’d never get her diploma.
She leaned against the grill of her car, arms folded. The morning had been sharp and frosty, but now that the sun was up, it was rapidly warming. “You’re just gonna squat in the bushes?” she asked Roman.
He was smoking a cigarette, and looking like some sort of goblin hunkered down in the foliage. “Yup.”
“Suuuper attractive.”
He rubbed at one of his knees and made a face. No doubt his legs were going numb.
“Arthritis acting up?” she asked sweetly.
He grumbled something that sounded like “bite me.”
Ghost pulled up with a low growl of bike engine, joining them a moment later. “Jesus Christ,” he said on a sigh, leaning over to kiss the top of Maggie’s head. “You’re some kinda stupid showing your face, man.”
“Just let me explain,” Roman said, again with the pleading eyes, fingers hooked in the fence.
“Jesus,” Ghost said again, closing his eyes like he was in pain. “Shit. Alright. Get in the car.”
~*~
He should have known. That’s what he kept thinking the entire ride out to the country. He watched the shapes of Roman and Maggie’s head through the back window of the Monte Carlo and kicked himself mentally, over and over, for not preparing for this eventuality.
Roman was human herpes: just when you thought everything was okay, he turned back up, ill-timed, annoying, unseemly. Caught up in the garage, lulled by the false sense of peace, Ghost had allowed himself to forget about the man. And now he was turning up at his old lady’s school, harassing her.
Not that Maggie had looked all that harassed, he’d noticed with pleasure. While losing none of her softness with Ghost, she was hardening externally every day, adding new layers to her solid candy shell, as stalwart as an older, more experienced woman. Ghost already thought she had a leg-up on Bonita, who’d always struck him as frivolous and unbothered. Maggie had all the makings of a club wife, the kind the Knoxville chapter hadn’t seen in a long, long time.
They parked in front of the house when they reached the farm, and Ghost got his first good look at Roman.
He looked terrible, thin and bedraggled. Back at Halloween, he’d been as fit and muscular as Ghost – well, almost, he’d never been the boxer that Ghost was – but now he seemed almost gaunt, a scarecrow draped in filthy clothes. And he smelled. Like spilled beer, and BO, and cigarettes.
He patted his jeans pocket. “You got a smoke?” he asked Ghost. “I smoked my last one at the school.”
Ghost gave him one, and his lighter. He was pissed to see him again, to see the trouble he’d brought with him, but he found he couldn’t hate him, not when he looked so pitiful. “What’s going on, Roman?” he asked, with less heat than he’d intended to use.
Maggie leaned against the side of her car, arms folded, not even pretending not to listen. They were a team now; she knew what he knew, and damn club etiquette.
“Why are you here, Roman?” Ghost asked.
Roman took short, hard puffs on the cigarette, working it down to the filter and flicking it away.
Ghost walked over to ground it out with his boot. “Tryin’ to set my field on fire?”
“Okay, it’s bad,” Roman said on a gusty sigh.
“What is?” Maggie asked.
“The whole underworld’s gone crazy. The Ryders. The Gonzales brothers. Every dealer within two-hundred miles. All of ‘em want Duane’s head on a pike.”
“I haven’t heard that.”
“Because you don’t hear shit that Duane doesn’t want you to! Don’t you get it? The club’s not plugged in. It’s out of the loop.”
Ghost frowned. He didn’t doubt for a second that Duane was withholding intel from the rest of the club – he spent long hours locked away in his office, poring over ledgers, snapping them shut when anyone poked their head in the door. Couple that with Roman’s shaking hands and stained shirt and wild eyes, and it was a very believable story. But Ghost hated to let Roman think he was so easily swayed.
“How would you know that?”
