Page 6 of Race With The Devil

CHAPTER THREE

Tanner

“So you’re not married?”

“Ah, no.” Man, Unity was bold. I had to hand that to her. Well, of course she was. Look at how she chose to decorate—and desecrate—her own body.

She shrugged, her fork dangling from her fingers. We sat at a table at The Bum Steer downtown, apparently a bar and grill owned by the club. The public was free to eat there, but it looked as though only other bikers or lookie-loos did. “I just ask because of your job. Must be hard to maintain a relationship when you’re flying dogs around all day.”

Oh. So she wasn’t interested in me at all. My face grew hot, and I looked down at my uneaten baby back rib. My embarrassment must have caused me to lash out, because I heard myself saying, “And your job, grooming. Don’t clients ever find it creepy that you’re beautifying their dogs, yet you cut yourself in an unartistic way?”

Unity stopped chewing. She narrowed her heavily-lined eyes at me. “Unartistic,” she stated flatly. “What’s that supposed to mean.”

I pointed with my sauced-up fingers and licked them to show I didn’t care. “Your uninked arm. It’s like you couldn’t bear having an arm with no pictures on it, so you started cutting in a very boring way. What are you keeping track of?” I assumed each cut on her tally was counting something, an event that she had now racked up fifteen of.

“Sexual assaults.”

Oh, man. Her glare turned even darker. I actually shrank down in my chair and looked to that moron Wolf Glaser for help. He was no help.

He shrugged, chasing seven French fries down with a few hearty chugs of Bud Lite. He even smacked his lips before saying, “Yeah, I heard about that, Unity. Rough life. Seems like everyone associated with this club or town has been through some wringer or other.”

“What’s your backstory, Tanner? You have no ink. What’d you do before you flew dogs around?”

I reached down and scrunched my fingers into Beetle’s thick fur. He really was fucking adorable. What a wingman. Everyone within a mile radius had stopped by to pet him. People had even heard of his fame and come in from the street to view him in person. “Master Sergeant in the Air Force. Where I learned to fly. Bigger planes, of course.”

Wolf kept on. “You were only a sergeant? You seem kind of old to have only advanced that far.” Unity giggled. “Unless you’ve been doing the dog thing for a long time. Oh, I didn’t mean to imply you’re all wrinkled and shit. But you look about as old as Knoxie. Man, talk about going through the wringer. Did you know he was a porn star before he opened his ink studio? Then I guess he got too old for that.”

Unity said, “He did an amazing job of taking down that twisted Swami Shakti in Merry-Go-Round Canyon. Saved a lot of peoples’ lives.”

Wolf’s eyes were alight with the dramatic memory. “Yeah. The swami had a kielbasa wrapped to his leg with plastic tubing. Knoxie ripped it off and strangled the guy with it.”

“With the sausage?” I asked, idiotically.

“With the tubing,” Wolf said, as though my question wasn’t idiotic.

“Wolf’s right,” said Unity. “You’re too old for this shit. How long were you in the Air Force?”

“Four years. I’m still in the Inactive Ready Reserve.” I knew what she’d ask next. Almost to spite her, to match her tit for tat on the sexual assault quip, I barreled ahead. “I did ten years in the Tucker Unit, Arkansas, on a bum charge. That’s how I got to know Slushy. He worked for the Innocence Project. For me.”

Unity screwed up her lovely face. “You were innocent.” Disbelief dripped from her shapely, pierced lips.

Wolf gestured at me with a fry. “Of course he was, Unity! Aren’t we all?”

I didn’t need to prove anything to these people. Why had Ford insisted Wolf Glaser tag along with us anyway? He was a supply master in the airplane hangar, not a vital part of the club or a master interrogator as far as I could tell. Maybe Ford wanted to give Wolf more experience. That must’ve been it.

“That your man?” I mumbled, finally bringing a rib to my mouth.

That had to be Tutti Morgan. Man, if there was ever a fentanyl king, he was it. He couldn’t have been more than five foot seven, and he walked with that side-to-side motion of the vertically challenged. His silver-blue hair was tossed to one side, framing sable, silken brows. The lavender suit matched his hair, and the tie looked to be made of satin rope. If he was trying to blend into the crowd, he was failing grossly.

But did he care? I’d googled him, and he routinely gave interviews to the press. They called him the Walter White of Flagstaff. He bragged about how pure his shit was. Tutti Morgan was the original chemist to crack the recipe of the designer drug that killed Prince, and lately bodies had been showing up, some with needles still in their arms.

He began making illegal narcotics in his parent’s basement in Oshkosh, Wisconsin in the early eighties. He used ancient chemistry manuals printed in Italian, riding to the buyer with crack cocaine on his Schwinn bicycle. Reading all this, it seemed like he could’ve won a Nobel prize, but something had steered him in the wrong direction. In ’93 when the DEA raided his lab he showed them his process, like Mister Rogers welcoming them to his neighborhood with baking soda experiments.

He claimed to have leaned right now, running paintball and video arcades in Flagstaff. But he was obviously still channeling fentanyl through the Bare Bones and the nightly sideshows in the mall parking lots.

He held his little hands out in the shape of Unity’s boobs. “My girl!” he said knowingly, twinkle in his eye. As he kissed her on both cheeks, Wolf Glaser looked on in awe. This loser was going to be of no help getting to the bottom of anything if he admired this chemist.

The dog wasn’t so star-struck, though. Diesel cringed from Tutti Morgan when Unity tried to hand him the leash. “Diesel, my man!” Tutti cried, grabbing a chair and trying to pet the cowering dog on the head. I took Diesel’s leash instead because he looked about to bolt out the door. Pure little Beetle just perked up his ears. He didn’t know evil yet.