Page 17 of Cutter's Hope
“Anybody else got any bright ideas about doing something so monumentally stupid?” Marlin asked. As expected no one spoke up.
“Way I see it, we can lie to her and send her chasing her tail, which I do not recommend because all she’s going to do is come back here pissed off with the fucking cops… Jesus Christ what has he gotten us into? This is a capital offense man!” Atlas scrubbed his face with his hands and sat back in his seat.
“We tell the truth? She goes to the cops, we lie? She goes to the cops… What the fuck are we going to do?” Pyro asked no one in particular.
“We do a little of both,” I said with a heavy heart, this sucked man. This was not what we were about. We weren’t into drugs, and we sure as fuck weren’t into killing people. Our illegal activity was more along the lines of tomb raiding some of the wrecks around here, of smuggling Cuban cigars, and if we were really strapped? Smuggling some fucking Cubans. We didnotkill people, that hadn’t done any fucking thing to us, let alone young girls.
“Captain?” someone said snapping me out of wherever I’d been.
“Yeah?”
“How are we going to do that?” Stoker asked.
“We tell her we dropped the girl off in Tallahassee and I call in a favor to the SHMC.” I said. Some looks were traded.
“I need a vote boys. Is this an amenable compromise?” I asked.
We voted, it was decided. I texted Hossler to see where she and Hope were at and nodded. I had a place to start.
9
Hope…
Hossler wasn’t bad company, in fact, she was pretty kick ass. I’d asked her what her function was within the club and she’d laughed.
“I don’t know,” she’d said with a gusty sigh, “I had an Ol’ Man but he skipped town and left me taking care of our kids all on my own. I guess I was liked enough by the club. Cutter helps out when my business is down and I fool around with the guys some, I mean I’m a mother – I’m not dead!” We laughed and she went on, “The club is like a family. They look out for their own and I was a patched member’s Ol’ Lady. They ever catch up to him they’re gonna beat his ass and take his patch but they aren’t bad guys. The sins of my man didn’t rub off on me or my kids. Cutter made things clear,” she sniffed.
“What about you? You got any kids?” she inquired. I leaned back in the passenger seat and sighed.
“No! No, no, no. I had a tubal last year. No kids are happening here,” I said and stared out the window.
“Why not?” It was the natural evolution of the conversation but I didn’t want to answer it so I changed the subject.
“You said when your business was slow, Cutter helps you; what do you do?”
Hossler laughed, “I breed snakes.”
I gave her a flat look, the kind that said ‘please tell me you’re joking’ and she laughed a little more.
“What kind of snakes?”
“Constricters, Pythons and a few Boa’s. Rats too, gotta feed them somehow,” she gave an indelicate one shouldered shrug.
“Holy crap, you’re serious,” I said.
“As a heart attack, Baby,” she said with a wink.
“That’s so… cool,” I said surprised. Snakes didn’t affect me one way or the other. I didn’t hate them, but I didn’t like them either. I guess I was just sort of meh about them.
We spent the ride laughing and talking about the general retardation of the male half of our species, the rest of the way back to Ft. Royal. The whole way, my mind kept whirring and clicking away, wondering what had put Cutter’s panties in such a bunch and shot him out of the bowling alley like he’d gone out of a cannon. He fucking knew something about Tonya. I knew that much, saw the lie in his eyes every time he denied it. Felt it in his stiff posture every time his lips met mine. The fierce attraction we felt for one another wouldn’t sway him from protecting his club, but what did they need protection from?
The implications laid in front of me by his actions weren’t good. I didn’t figure Cutter for a killer, he felt more like a lover than a fighter, but looks could be deceiving. Oh, I knew he could kill, that he had killed, I still had my military connections and read what I could out of his jacket. There had been a lot of redacted shit in there but there had also been a lot left readable and what had been left was almost as useful as what hadn’t been; all of it spelled out clearly that Cutter was one dangerous SOB that I shouldn’t try to tangle with, and who I wouldn’t ordinarily take on but,Faith.
“I’m sorry, what?” I asked. Hossler was looking at me, blue eyes wide with that look that screamed,weren’t you listening to a thing I just said?
“Can I ask you a pretty personal question?” she asked.
“Sorry, yeah go ahead.”
