Total pages in book: 73
Estimated words: 73311 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 367(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 244(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 73311 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 367(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 244(@300wpm)
Because the police officer who’d just died was none other than our president, Stone Conner.
The bikes were the first thing we heard before ambulances. Being in a small town means that the ambulances have further to go.
Hearing nothing but bikes from all angles is an odd experience.
It’s an eerie sound.
One that not many people would think to recognize.
But I did.
Truth and Tommy Tom did.
It was the sound of desperation.
The fight for men to get to an area where they knew one of their own was hurt.
And we’d not even had a chance to call.
But as I looked around at the storefronts, I realized that the town’s occupants had.
They were all plastered to the windows, staring with tears coursing down their cheeks. Men. Women. Children. There wasn’t a dry eye that I could see.
My heart was breaking right along with theirs.
Stone had changed my life. He’d pulled me back from the dark hole I’d been in when I’d arrived here a year and a half ago.
He’d done so much for me, that I trusted him as one of the few men who I could count on for anything.
Truth walked up, his face mutinous, and I did the only thing I could do at the time.
I surrendered the poor stupid man to the wrath of Truth.
***
It was only when, much later, as the man’s hoodie was taken away, his mugshot plastered on the TV in the bar, that I realized that the ‘man’ was someone I knew. Someone I’d seen daily for the last couple of months.
Kevin Turner.
The drug dealing, gang motherfucker who worked the street outside of my apartment.
“Saw that guy every fucking day. Knew he was no good,” I murmured to the men who were drinking around me. With me. “I told Stone about him. Stone was going to look into him.”
The bar around me grew quiet as I gained not just the ones closest to me, but also the entire fucking bar’s attention.
“Stone would’ve done it anyway,” Seanshine murmured quietly. “Even if he knew this was going to be the end result, he didn’t like that kind of shit in his town.”
No, he didn’t.
Which was why I’d told him in the first place.
Not to mention his little brother was turning into him. The same little brother who was having a very odd conversation with Davis just this morning. Which had prompted me to remind Stone, yet again, that there was still something going on that made me uncomfortable.
“It’s convenient that every time Stone talked to him, something bad happened,” Truth murmured. “Didn’t he talk to him the same day that car was sitting on the side of the road? The one that had the bomb in it?”
I thought back and squeezed my eyes tightly shut.
“Fuck yeah,” Ghost rumbled. “That was the day, because I was working when I saw Stone talking to the kid in the bullpen.”
Fire started to burn through my veins as my blood boiled.
“We need to see if he’s working alone,” I found myself saying.
“Agreed,” Big Papa rumbled. “But we have to go see Memphis. She has to know.”
Memphis was Stone’s daughter and she lived over six hours away in Kilgore.
“We gotta go tell his girl,” Truth agreed. “This isn’t something we can do in a telephone call. But when we get back…well, let’s just say that little fucker will no longer have a reprieve.”
Ghost’s face was blank.
“Yeah,” Ghost agreed. “We’ll have to go by Mei’s house, see if she wants to go.”
Mei was Stone’s wife. A five foot nothing woman who loved everyone. She was feisty. Crazy. And one of the best old ladies I’d ever had a pleasure of meeting.
But right now, after tonight…well, I’d never seen someone so devastated before. Never.
And it was heartbreaking. To see her there, staring blankly as tears coursed down her cheeks in silent rivulets, I knew that we’d have to watch her. We’d have to be careful.
“I’ll stay with her,” Big Papa, now the acting president of our chapter, murmured. “She won’t be getting on the back of anyone’s bike ever again. That I can guarantee you.”
I believed him.
A woman loyal to her man would do that.
Though I didn’t have one of my own, I knew what one looked like, and Mei was it.
“Y’all ride in an hour. Go home. Pack enough for a day. Eat. Then head out,” Big Papa stood. “I gotta go check on Mei.”
I went home, changed, and then headed to the diner to grab a bite to eat from my mom.
Forty minutes later, I’d just mounted my bike with the rest of the club when my phone rang.
Pulling it out and answering it without reading who it was, I pressed it to my ear and said, “Hello?”
“Aaron!” Booth’s frantic voice boomed through the receiver. “Masen had the baby. I’m sorry I didn’t call you, but fuck it was quick. By the time she realized it was happening, it’d already happened. You know what I mean?”