“A hot one, ain’t she, boy,” his dad said with a lecherous chuckle.
“Yeah.”
Thank God he didn’t have to lie.
CHAPTER ONE
“HEY, BROTHER, TALK to you a second?”
A heavy kick to the bottom of Gumby’s foot had him grunting and rolling the creeper out from under the vintage Mustang he’d been fighting with for the past few hours. He stared up into the laughing face of Acer, one of his brothers in the No Prisoners MC.
“What’s up, brother?”
“Jesus, you’re a fucking mess. What the hell happened?” Acer asked with a raised eyebrow. He folded his arms across his chest and took a step back as though the grease would magically jump off Gumby’s coveralls and onto Acer’s ninety-dollar Ralph Lauren shirt. The boujee fucker.
“Let’s just say squirters aren’t good in all instances.”
“Take your word for it,” Acer said with a wink.
“You do that.” Gumby dropped his feet to either side of the creeper and curled to a sit. Using a rag almost as dirty as his skin, he massaged his left hand. An old injury made the damn thing ache from time to time. “So what’s going on? You need me for something?”
Acer studied him for a moment before fishing a piece of paper out of his pocket. Slipping it between his index and middle fingers, he held the slip out. “I found her.”
Gumby’s stomach dropped straight to the floor. “Come again?”
“Found her, brother. She’s in Tennessee. That’s the address where she works.”
Unable to formulate a response, Gumby unfolded the paper and stared at the written address as though he’d somehow know how to get there.
Tennessee.
Tenne-fucking-see. A good chunk of the way across the goddammed country.
Why?
“A diner?” he finally said, looking up at Acer.
His brother shrugged. “Looks like it.”
With a slow nod, as his brain tried to process the information, he said, “You sure it’s her?”
“Yeah, brother, I’m sure. She’s been using her father’s last name.”
That news had Gumby’s spine straightening. “Her father?”
Being a Sunday afternoon, the club-owned auto garage was deserted except for Gumby, who’d decided to get a jump on this impossible project he was working on for a buddy.
Another shrug from Acer. “Yeah. That’s why it took so long to find her. No hits trying her last name, or her stepfather’s. I figured she musta made something up. Then last weekend, I tracked down her stepbrother. Remember that fucker?”
Gumby nodded. Jazz’s mother remarried when Jazz was just a kid. The guy had a son who had to be a good ten plus years older than Jazz. He popped up from time to time, usually got in some trouble with the law, misdemeanors mainly, then jetted back out of town not to resurface again for a year, sometimes more. Usually he came around when he needed his daddy to fork over some money. “Has to be two years since I’ve heard he was around. Weird motherfucker.”
“Yeah, that hasn’t changed. He’s in lock up.” Acer pushed away from the cabinet.
“No shit?”
“Yep. Some kinda psych institute for criminals. Apparently, he attacked some girl in Chicago about six months ago. Fucked her up good. He’ll be locked up for a good few years. Anyway, I asked if he knew anything about where Jazz might be. The guy laughed and said, and I quote, ‘That fucking bitch wouldn’t call me if she was on fire. But she should. I’m the only one who can help her.’”
What the fuck? “Seriously?” Was that why she left? Was she in some kind of trouble the club hadn’t known about?
“Told you. Still weird as fuck. But he did say if I was looking for her, I should check under Jazmine Barnes. Apparently, her sperm donor’s last name was Barnes.”
“How did we not know that?”
Acer lifted a shoulder. “It’s not on her birth certificate. Not anywhere on paper. I’d have found it if it was.”
“Huh,” Gumby said, staring back down at the scrap of paper. Went to show how much he’d still had to learn about her before she left town.
“You gonna call her?”
It was Gumby’s turn to shrug. Resting his forearms on his knees, he let the scribbled note dangle between his legs. “Don’t know.”
“Seriously? You’ve had me looking for her for over a year and now that I finally found her, you don’t know if you want to call her.”
“Clearly, she doesn’t want to talk to any of us.”
“Well, you got a point there.”
They fell silent until Acer walked over, clapped him on the shoulder then said, “I’ll leave you to it, brother.”
Gumby nodded but didn’t bother to glance up as his brother walked out of the garage. Instead he stayed where he was in the quiet garage, staring at the paper as guilt and uncertainty pricked his skin.
It’d been this way for more than a year. This unexplainable feeling that somehow Jazz’s leaving had been his fault. His brother’s wife, Marcie, had rolled her eyes and called him egocentric when he’d voiced the concern to her, but still, he couldn’t shake the feeling that he’d somehow been responsible for her fleeing Arizona.