Shane left the cab and stretched, approaching Frank as Jag rolled out of the vehicle on the other side, eager to hide in his den, to lick each invisible wound. He needed to be alone. Alone. Far away from everyone else!
“Where’s Dex?” Frank asked as Shane faced him with hands on his hips.
“Ah… you know him, he decided to stay in town for the night.”
Frank uttered a silent curse, but as Jag tried to rush past him, the thick hand closed on Jag’s shoulder. “How did it go?”
Jag huffed, too ashamed to look into Frank’s eyes. “He didn’t like me,” he said, because Shane would have told Frank as much anyway.
Frank’s broad, dark face twisted in sympathy, but he let Jag go. “Dating’s hard. But you’ll find the right person if you persist,” he said in his low voice.
“You didn’t,” Jag said though he regretted being disrespectful the moment he closed his mouth.
Shane groaned. “Jesus, Jag! No need to be rude because your date walked out on you.”
Frank rolled his eyes and pushed back his thick black braid. “I’m on a dating break. I’ll get back to it if I feel like it. We’ve got more pressing shit to deal with anyway.”
Shane frowned. “Like what?”
Frank exhaled the cigarette smoke and threw the butt to the porch before stepping on it. “Just got a body to dispose of. No one we know though.” When he pointed toward an elongated shape resting in the small, unkempt garden, both Jag’s and Shane’s gazes followed his fingertip. “Since you’re back early, would you take care of this?”
Shane grunted, surely eager to return to his own mate, but he nodded, meeting Frank’s gaze. “Aren’t we out of the chemicals?
“Let’s just bury him.”
“I’ll take care of it,” Jag said, wanting to prove he wasn’t useless even though his pride had taken a massive blow tonight.
Some days, he wondered about the identities of the people who ended up disappearing in the vastness of the junkyard, but Frank had told him he only worked with men whose victims were involved with violence, mostly the biker gang Jag had seen on their territory many times.
Frank sighed, playing with one of his many signets. “You don’t drive, Jag.”
“We’ll deal with it together,” Shane muttered.
Jag was about to protest, but the junkyard was vast, and dragging the body on a tarp, or in the carpet it was wrapped in would take far too much time and effort. So they picked up the body together, and packed it into the back of Frank’s pickup. The corpse was of significant weight, which made Jag grateful he hadn’t been stubborn about it.
Jag didn’t care who it was or how he got there, since he’d help Frank out regardless. Their arrangement required the trust and discretion of all involved. Such jobs didn’t happen every day, but to Jag’s understanding, they were very lucrative, and handling this task made him feel like he had a purpose and earned his keep.
The unfinished home Shane shared with his mate, Rosen, was on the way to the site chosen for burial, and everything inside Jag burned when his friend longingly peeked at the bright windows as they passed. It was dark, and the night hid most of the scenery of rusted metal and rubber, but the bright blue wall in the living room was like a jewel glinting from afar.
“Let’s be quick with it,” Shane muttered, taking a turn into a winding road between mounds of scrap.
“Just drop me off and I’ll deal with it,” Jag grumbled, keeping his arms crossed.
Shane raised his hand in a helpless gesture and drove off the asphalt, going farther into the junkyard, where no one would ever look for whatever missing person occupied the truck bed behind them. “I can’t leave you with this. You’re gonna end up working way past midnight.”
“So? I’m clearly so undesirable to any man, that there’s nothing better for me to do.”
“Bit dramatic.” Shane snorted.
“Easy for you to say when you have a pretty boy doting on you every day!”
Shane stopped the car in front of the bit of dirt that had been cleared in case something, or someone, needed to disappear six feet under. “I had to work for it. And for the record, ‘getting’ a man is only half the job. A relationship goes both ways and has to be—”
Jag waved him off and got out. “Spare me the lesson. You can go.”
Shane left the car as well. “Fine. Have it your way. But if you bury him in a shallow grave and a police dog ever senses the corpse, you’ll be the one going down,” he said and climbed onto the truck bed.
Jag shrugged and got on with the job of moving the carpet-wrapped corpse to the ground. “I heard men get desperate in prison. Maybe even I’d stand a chance,” he grumbled.