FILLED: Berserkers MC Page 7

  Just because I liked cheeseburgers with bacon didn’t mean I was uncultured.

  While we were looking through the menu, Santos casually spoke to me. “I heard you had a visitor yesterday.”

  I froze. I was incredibly grateful for that menu all of a sudden, because I was sure that my eyes had gotten wide and that my face had flushed a deep, deep shade of red that was most definitely not natural.

  Santos knows, I thought, panic slowly rising up from my gut like a coiled snake just waking up, uncoiling itself inside me. Santos knows that Nester came to see me. What else does he know?

  I wasn't sure how to respond. Did I tell him, yes, of course I had a visitor? And if I did, did I tell him it was Nester? Or did I try to deny the whole thing and that I had spent the day alone? I chose to remain silent, banking on Santos to have more to say before he really got to his point, which I assumed was catching me at something.

  “Old friend?” he asked, his voice still calm and casual as though we were still in the car discussing something stupid and unimportant like the weather. Except that I knew there was an edge lying just beneath the surface, a blade as sharp as anything, even if I couldn’t see or hear it.

  I swallowed. I could say it was a woman. I could say that it was one of my friends from the diner, but I quickly dismissed the idea. He hadn’t given my “visitor” a gender yet, but that was beside the point. The fact that he knew I had a visitor at all told me more than enough. If Santos knew that someone had come to see me yesterday, then he knew that someone wasn’t a woman. All I could hope was that he didn’t know that that man was Nester.

  I wasn’t stupid enough to think that wouldn’t get me into a ton of trouble.

  Smoothing out my facial features until I looked just as calm as Santos spoke, I finally answered him. “It was. From school. I don’t suppose you ever met Charlie, but we were very good friends.”

  There, I thought, feeling a spark of pride and triumph. Charlie could be a guy or a girl. Make what you want of that!

  “School,” he repeated, turning to look at the next page of the menu as though he weren’t really invested in my answer or the conversation at all, though I most definitely knew that wasn’t true. “I didn’t realize you kept in touch with anyone from high school.”

  I don’t, I thought. I’d met Nester while I was in high school still, though we didn’t date until we’d both graduated. He was the only one I’d clung to after getting out of there, and even then, we hadn’t gone to the same school. I’d gone to an all-girls school, a very expensive one that I’d managed to get into through sheer force of will and a scholarship. Obviously, he hadn’t gone there.

  “I don’t,” I said, voicing my thoughts. “I meant from nursing school.”

  Which sounded much more believable. Santos probably wouldn’t like it, but he’d like it more than the truth. In all honesty, it didn’t really matter anyway. It was most definitely still a lie. I didn’t keep I touch with people from nursing school either. At first, I’d tried to, but it was hard. Hard because Santos didn’t like the idea of me being influenced by “people like that,” but also because every time I saw them, I knew how close they were to finishing. I knew that had I stuck with it, I would have been so close, too.

  It was a terrible thought.

  Before we could continue with the conversation, the waiter appeared and took our orders. I got the salad. Santos got a rare steak. The waiter poured us each a glass of the chardonnay, asking us if there was anything else we might need, before moving off to the kitchen for our orders. I thought maybe I had gotten lucky and the conversation was over altogether and that we’d have a normal date after that, which consisted mostly of silence, eating, and a few polite words here and there, but then Santos leveled me with an intense stare.

  I was startled by the sudden spark in his eyes, and it wasn’t a tender or passionate spark of love. No, there was danger laced there. I sensed it long before he said anything.

  “Friends are important, Zelda, my dear,” Santos told me, smiling despite that obvious and malicious glint of danger lurking in his cool eyes.

  I swallowed, not sure how to answer. After a moment, I nodded and offered him a smile, hoping that would be the end of it. Of course, it wasn’t.

  “I know it’s hard for you sometimes,” he continued, maybe trying to sound contrite but really coming off as condescending and even pompous. “You don’t have a lot of friends, you never really have, have you? Always a bit of a loner, an outcast. It’s alright; I understand. I used to be like that, too. Did you know that?”

  I frowned. No, honestly, I didn’t really know that. When it came right down to it, I knew quite a bit about the Santos today—he had his dirty fingers into several construction companies, his “up to code” front companies, as well as his illegal dealings with firearms, drugs, and god knew what else—but I didn’t know much of him before. Most of my information came from Nester, and I wasn’t sure how reliable that was. Not that I thought Nester had done a lot of lying to me, but rather his impression of Santos was skewed by years of hatred. That sort of thing could warp how you viewed someone until you were saying things about them whether you knew they were true or not.

  “I didn’t,” I told him finally when it became clear he actually expected a verbal answer from me.

  He smiled at me, somewhere between a shark-like grin and a serene, angelic smile, which made it all the scarier. “No, of course not. No one does. Why? Because I’ve made myself into the kind of man I want to be, you understand?”

  I didn’t really, but that wasn’t the point. I nodded just to get him to continue, because that look in his eye and the smile on his face was unnerving me tremendously. I could feel myself sweat, my heart beating so fast and loud that I was sure it was echoing in the silent, museum-like atmosphere of the restaurant. All I wanted to do was go home. Screw the dinner and the small talk and the goodnight kiss. I just wanted to be away from Santos.

  Of course that wasn’t an option, so I tried to make it go as quickly as possible.

  Reaching for his glass, he swirled the liquid around in it for a moment before taking a careful sip. “Good,” he told me, indicating that I should try my own. I reached for it only for the sake of keeping him calm, if that was even possible now. He continued. “You know why I’m telling you this, Zelda?” he asked, but didn’t wait for an answer this time. “I’m telling you this because I’ve made myself into the kind of man who has a lot of friends. I’ve made myself into the kind of man who has those friends because he is a force to be reckoned with. I’m proud of that man and I want you to know that, as a prideful man, there are certain things that I simply cannot allow.”

  I was doing my best not to shake, but I wasn’t quite hacking it. The glass in my hand trembled, causing the liquid to ripple and swirl, so I put it down before I did something stupid like spill it.

  Santos’s smile widened; he’d noticed my shaking. “Do you know what I cannot allow, Zelda?”

  I shook my head, knowing that even if I had something to say, an answer, my voice would come out as a tiny squeak of a thing, trembling and terrified.

  “Another man,” he said in a low voice, the threat no longer veiled, even though his smile stayed strangely in place as though it were painted there. “I don’t share well, Zelda, and if I find out I’m sharing you, well, you may just not have to regret it.”

  I paled.

  You may just not have to regret it. It sounded almost…forgiving, but I knew better. The words were thrown together almost haphazardly, twisted strangely until they sounded almost sweet. But that wasn’t what they meant at all.

  Santos was telling me that if I ever cheated on him, then I wouldn’t regret it because I wouldn’t live long enough to.

  If I cheated on him, Santos DeArma would kill me.

  Chapter Six

  Nester

  I’d spent the last day going over planning with Jackson and some of the others. If we were going to nail Santos DeArma to the wal
l—which was my new mission in life—then we were going to have to be smart and well prepared. Which meant making sure that Santos wasn’t on to us and didn’t start covering his tracks. It wasn’t going to be easy, since Santos was unfortunately not a complete fucking moron, but if we were careful and diligent, I was confident he would eventually slip up.

  Just like I was confident that the construction companies that he was invested in weren’t as squeaky clean as he claimed. Sure, they were his “front” so that he could continue doing his illegal businesses—drugs and arms primarily—while remaining under the radar, but I knew Santos. He was incapable of just leaving things be. Why settle for enough when you could have ten times that? Why play it safe when you could risk it for a little more?

  On some level, I appreciated taking the risk. I was all about risk. We all were, which was why we were part of the Berserkers to begin with, but I also wasn’t stupid. I knew that there were times when you just took the safe road because it just wasn’t worth the damn risk.

  “I’ll get us in,” Bob, Jr. was saying. He was leaning against the wall near the couch, turned so that he was facing me and Jackson. Bob, Sr. was at his job, a gas station attendant the poor bastard, so he wasn’t there at the moment.

  I quirked an eyebrow at Bob, Jr. “How’s that?”

  He shrugged casually, but I could tell that he was pleased. Not because he had something over us or anything but more because he was contributing in a big way. He was savoring the moment. “I know a guy who works for the Big Works Construction, Co.,” he explained. “I helped him out with something back when and he still owes me for it. I’ve been sitting on his favor and I think it’s about time to call it in.”

  I nodded at him. “Good. Do that. I want dirt on Santos in a big way, so whatever he can find out, I want the details on.”

  “You got it, boss.”

  I turned my attention to Jackson. He’d been slightly distracted—Angel, his little girl, was staying even longer with her mom this round it seemed and I was beginning to wonder if there wasn’t something more serious going on that he hadn’t mentioned yet. He was sitting across from me in that same ratty chair that he loved so damn much, only half paying attention.

  “Jackson,” I said, snapping my fingers to bring him back to the present.

  He blinked at me, wide-eyed and a little disoriented, as though he’d been far, far away and coming back tagging along with a snapping rubber band. “Huh? What?”

  I didn’t linger on his distance, instead choosing to focus on what was going on. If Jackson wanted to tell me what was going on that had him so out of whack, that was up to him, but I wouldn’t press it. I had enough on my own plate to deal with it as it was. “Where are we with the bust?”

  “Shit, boss, sorry,” he apologized, then launched into what he’d been looking into.

  Five years ago, I’d been busted for selling drugs. Which, I had been. It was true the club dealt in distributing illegal drugs, though I told everyone in my group that if I caught them doing that shit they were out. It seemed like a strange thing, but I knew that drugs just caused more trouble than anything else. Selling them was as valid as anything else in my opinion, since it was merely providing a service. What people did with that service was on them. People were going to get high whether I supplied them with the right drugs to do it or not, and in the end, they’d come searching me out. Why not make a profit?

  Zelda and I had always disagreed on that fact, causing more than a couple of fights between us over the years, but she could never completely win and I could never completely justify it.

  “It’s shitty to take advantage of people’s problems,” she told me angrily, folding her arms beneath her ample chest, making it more noticeable.

  I never thought that was fair, seeing as how she did it mostly when we were fighting and she had to know how damn distracting I found her body. Pushing my less than noble thoughts aside, I focused on the fight at hand. “Hey, I don’t sell to kids. I don’t sell to pregnant women—well, if I know they’re pregnant. I don’t talk to first time users.” It was a code I’d set up for myself and one that I forced the rest of the group to live by, though some of them maybe thought it was a little stupid.

  Zelda rolled her eyes at me. “Oh, well, in that case you’re a saint, right?”

  I glared at her. “Don’t be stupid. Ain’t none of us saints, not even you.” I deliberately let my gaze drag over her body, insinuating that the clash of our naked bodies in fierce, passionate battle was anything but virtuous.

  She was a dirty girl for me and I fucking loved it.

  Her cheeks flushed a bright pink that made me want to do things for her, but she held her ground. She wouldn’t let me off the hook so easily. “And that makes it okay? So long as no one else is perfect, we’ve got no reason to even try to do the right thing?”

  I let out a sigh. I hated this damn argument. “The right thing is tricky, okay? Is it wrong to make money, even though you need money to live? And if people are coming to you with that money, is it wrong to take it just because you’re providing them something that maybe they can’t get a lot of at other places? Besides, what if I didn’t sell it? Someone else would. And they’d probably be a hell of a lot more dangerous than I am. They probably wouldn’t care about who they sold to or what they sold or anything like that.”

  “So you’re the lesser of two evils?” Zelda countered readily.

  I ran a hand through my hair. “No. I’m not an evil. I’m just making a living. And the assholes who come to me have already decided what the fuck they’re going to do. I didn’t make them that way.”

  “They’re addicts Nester! They can’t just walk away!”

  And on we went. Until we were red faced and halfway to screaming at each other. Zelda took the nursing student thing very seriously, and as a result, she learned a few things about pharmaceuticals, addiction, and how drugs affected a person. I appreciated her passion, but it annoyed the shit out of me on this particular topic because we could never quite see eye to eye. In the end, I wasn’t the devil who forced them into doing drugs. But I did supply them with those same drugs.

  But did that make a liquor store owner the devil, too? What about the bartender? Or the waiter? What about the convenience store that sells cigarettes or the smoke shops that teach you to roll your own tobacco?

  Who has the right to determine which of these damn things should be free range and which shouldn’t and how does one make you the devil and the other not?

  All of that came out over the course of the night and Zelda countered as much as she could, but in the end I had to concede that it was sort of shitty that I was taking advantage of a group of people that were so hooked they couldn’t fucking walk away, and Zelda had to admit that I was no more evil than the guy who sold booze to legal adults at the liquor store.

  By the time we reached that point, our angers had risen to a breaking point. We were too worked up to push the feelings aside—and I didn’t want to. She didn’t either based on the way she was looking at me. So when I shoved my hand down the front of her jeans, she didn’t protest. Instead, she clawed at my shirt to get it off, and by the time my finger was buried to the knuckle inside of her and her tongue was in my mouth, it was all over.

  I was hard enough to be a damn rock and Zelda’s wetness was pooling in her panties. I barely got her pants half down before I plunged inside her.

  It took everything I had and then some to tear my mind away from the memory. Our fights went like that more often than not. Anger, shouting, passion building until it culminated in a fierce fucking that was so good it was almost worth it to pick a fight with her.

  “There’s no direct link to Santos,” Jackson continued. I’d missed a couple of pieces in the middle of what he’d said, but it seemed like he’d only just gotten to the important stuff anyway. “But there is a trail of money exchanging hands, some guys being involved in a regular bust that maybe aren’t normally, and there was a tip off. An anony
mous caller.”

  I pressed my lips together tightly until they formed a line so thin my lips nearly disappeared completely from my face. “Santos.”

  Jackson nodded. “I don’t have proof, but I’m working on getting a recording of the call. If I can, maybe we can recognize if it’s his voice or not.”

  It was about the best any of us could do and it was a long shot at that. I didn’t know what kind of wheels Jackson was going to have to grease to get that tape—probably the same ones Santos had greased to get me busted—but I knew that it would take a lot of time. In the end, it didn’t matter all that much to me. I was already convinced that it was Santos who had called in the tip that got me busted by the cops. What I was more interested in was the inner workings of it.

  Was it just a tip? Had that been the extent of Santos’s involvement? Or was there more? I couldn’t help but wonder if maybe Santos had done a little more than that when it was all said and done.