31

Stored Like Spare Cheese

Jack did not care for Nebraska.

Part of the reason was his black eye. He hadn’t had one in years, and he didn’t remember them hurting this bad. Probably he was getting soft in his old age, as his brother had helpfully suggested several times.

Since it was Leroy’s fault they’d gotten jumped, he’d blacked his brother’s eye, too, just so the dickhead could see how it felt. Wasn’t his finest moment, punching a guy who had one arm in a sling, but Leroy wasn’t exactly on his good side at the moment. If it weren’t for his poor life choices, Jack’s eye wouldn’t be all swelled up. His bike wouldn’t have a bullet hole in it, and they sure as shit wouldn’t be living in a Cheesy Charlie’s pizza warehouse.

Jack knew how to fix a lot of things on a bike, but not a bullet hole.

He shifted on the concrete floor, fighting not to itch his head. That was another thing he’d forgotten since leaving Leroy’s trailer and Alabama behind—how itchy his hair got when he couldn’t wash it. This time, it wasn’t an unpaid water bill that was the culprit, though.

He tossed a glare at his brother in the dim light of their one flashlight and clicked on his phone. The battery was down to 8 percent. It’d probably die before the workers in the front of the warehouse left for the day and he could get to an outlet to charge it. Leroy knew a guy who worked in the warehouse, who’d snuck them into this far back room where they’d be safe from the assholes who were after him.

It had a bathroom—well, a drain, which was about as good as it got when you were on the run. But they had to be quiet as hell so the other workers didn’t figure out there was more living in this warehouse than roaches and pizza yeast. Unfortunately, quiet and Leroy never had seemed to exist in the same place for long.

Jack thumbed his phone again, staring at the battery icon and trying to remember how long 8 percent might last.

If Mari called this afternoon, he’d miss it.

Not that it mattered. She’d had four days to call, and she had chosen not to. He’d fucked up something fierce when he stuck his oar in about her being on Junior’s crew.

“Stop checking that phone like a girl that just got her first training bra,” Leroy said. “We’ve got nothing to do but sit here with our thumbs up our asses. You think we wouldn’t have heard it ring?”

“Guess you can shut the hell up, since you’re the reason we ain’t got nothing to do,” Jack said. “If you’d paid those pricks back, we’d be waiting on your trial in your apartment right now. Eating real food, not that gas station shit.” He jerked his chin at their two shopping bags of canned hams and Slim Jims, a few bags of jalapeño Doritos thrown in for “the vegetable group,” as Leroy put it.

“I would have paid them back all nice and square if the coke hadn’t gotten stolen before I could turn around and sell it.”

Jack scoffed, looking away.

“What? Not my fault I got robbed, could happen to the best of us. Even angelic little you, Jackie-O.”

“You robbed your own junkie ass,” he bit off. “And the guys you owe aren’t dumb enough to buy that story, either, or they wouldn’t have shot up my bike.”

“You oughta be thanking me for helping teach you a valuable lesson,” Leroy said. “Don’t drive a getaway truck with a motorcycle in the back. Too recognizable and it makes a bigger target.”

“Blocked a bullet meant for your thick head, so maybe you can shut the shit up about what I drive when I’m saving your ass.”

Jack was really thinking that of the two, he would rather have the bike. Especially since his phone battery was down to 7 percent and he was looking at another ten days before he could deliver his brother to his court date. Ten more rounds of this glorified closet all day and sleeping out in the warehouse at night, using bags of powdered pizza dough mix for pillows.

“Aww, your panties are just in a pinch because of this girl. I’m sure she’ll call, kid. Prize like you? What woman wouldn’t want you?” Leroy said it with a straight face, but he couldn’t keep the chuckle out of his voice.

Jack turned the phone over in his hand, nearly dropping it because the case had gotten oily with days of sweat. He rubbed it against his jeans.

Maybe for Mari, this was the best thing that could have happened. Leroy could mock all he wanted, but the kind of man Mari deserved wouldn’t be trespassing on Cheesy Charlie’s property to hide from drug dealers. What was he going to tell her about the bullet hole through the back of his motorcycle?

Decent guys didn’t have bullet holes in their stuff.

His shoulders hunched as he tried to block out whatever Leroy was rambling on about. She’d smiled all the time when they were together. It had been her idea to have sex. Her idea to . . . do what she’d done with him in that motel room last week. Surely she wouldn’t have done all that if she had just been biding her time before they could break up.

Maybe she was still pissed at him and hadn’t listened to his voicemail, so she didn’t know why he hadn’t come to work. Maybe if he called her and got her to pick up, he could apologize and explain in person.

It wasn’t like this was his mess, anyway. He wasn’t the one who owed money to a gang. Though it would probably be his money paying them off, once they could figure out a way to contact them without fighting their way through another ambush like the one blocking the street between the town and the prison.

Jack chewed the inside of his lip. Until their argument, Mari had liked him. He was pretty damn sure. He could still remember the soft glow she’d get in her eyes when she looked at him. Fuck Leroy, and all his “real men don’t have to call, let the ladies come to you” shit.

He hit the button for her number and turned his back on his brother.

Three electronic tones sounded in his ear. “I’m sorry. This number has been disconnected or is no longer in service.”

He pulled it away from his ear and frowned at it, but no, he’d dialed directly from his contacts, so he couldn’t have put in a number wrong.

“Hey, when a phone’s battery goes dead or it’s shut off, do you get the out-of-service message?”

“Nah.” Leroy bit off a black-ringed fingernail and spat it across the closet. “Goes to voicemail. That your first phone, or what? Let me give you a little tutorial: you push the buttons with the numbers on them, then you talk into the bottom, and the phone sex lady talks out the top end.”

Jack didn’t even hear him, pushing to his feet to pace around the racks of cleaning supplies.

Her phone hadn’t given that message before, when he’d called to leave a voicemail.

His stomach twisted sickly. She’d never answered, and she’d never called him back. He could picture her staring at her phone screen and sighing when his name popped up again, hitting “Ignore.”

He was the guy blowing up her phone who couldn’t take a hint. Harassed her enough she changed her number. Probably that’s how she had to get rid of her ex, too. She’d said he would never give up and leave her alone.

“What you PMS’ing about over there? Did she yell at you and hang up, or just plain old change her number?”

He glanced over at his brother, really looked at him for the first time since he’d picked him up at the jail. He was gaunt except for a little pooch of a belly straining a wifebeater undershirt that had a swipe of jalapeño-flavored powder at the hem. All the lines in Leroy’s battered face lifted as he chuckled, because of course he knew what Mari had done. That’s what women always did to shitbag guys like the Wyatt brothers.

And would Jack want it any other way? Would he want her wiring him money to pay off drug dealers, or straining to hear him whisper into the phone because he was hiding in a storage closet?

Would he want her to take a guy back who’d made her cry the way he had?

Jack shut off his phone.