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Lion
A horn blows back from my little walk down memory lane, and I see Bones in his baby, a fully restored midnight blue 1970 Chevy Nova SS. It is a gorgeous machine. I stalk over to the car, open the door, and slide in the seat. No sooner than I close the door, then he has the car in motion.
“What’s going on? Why did I have to bring Rage & Fury with me?” He asks all valid questions since I only pull the .50 cal Desert Eagle guns when there is business to handle.
“Someone stole Black Reaper,” I tell him, still so pissed off that I have to look out the window to try to calm my nerves.
“You’re shitting me! Who the fuck would sign their death warrant like that?” he asks incredulously.
“According to Zydeco, a woman,” I grit out, grinding my teeth until I am not sure I heard a crack from the pressure. Bones’ laugh definitely has me trying to grind my teeth to smithereens.
“A woman!? A woman stole Dad’s bike?”
“Shut the fuck up!” I growl out.
“And you needed both of your Desert Eagles to deal with one woman? Yeah, your ass is old as hell if you need all that firepower to deal with a woman,”
“I hate you,”
“You love me. But all jokes aside, you gotta get Dad’s bike back.”
“Don’t you think I know that?”
“Don’t get pissy with me. Do you have any idea where she went? I mean, you asked me to bring your guns like you knew where to go,” he says, and I realize he’s right. I was so angry that I couldn’t think clearly. I have no idea who took my bike or where to begin looking for her, but I do know where to start.
“Whatever, just get me home so I can pull the GPS on it. When I get the location of my bike, I am going to wring the neck of the woman who dared touch it.”
I lean back into the plush leather of the chair, feeling its cool embrace as I shut my eyes, trying to block out the world. Bones maneuvers the car with effortless precision through the tangled mess of traffic, the rhythmic purr of the engine a distant murmur against my growing tension. After what feels like a lifetime, the car turns onto our street. The headlights sweep over the three houses lined up in a quiet row, their windows waiting to glow with life again. Except for the one in the middle—it looms in the darkness, untouched and hollow, its silence echoing the emptiness inside me and my brother. It sits there, like a forgotten memory, as lost as we are.
“You know he’s most likely…”
“Don’t say it,” I ruthlessly cut him off. I know what he is saying is the truth, but tonight, right now, I don’t want to hear the words. I was missing him tonight more than I normally do, so I pulled his motorcycle out for a ride as a way to feel closer to him. He learned how to ride on this bike, he taught us to ride on that bike, and according to him, I was conceived because of thatbike. My mom always had a weakness for bad boys—big shocker. One minute, I was gripping the handlebars of my father’s prized bike, feeling the hum of the engine beneath me as flashes of old memories played in my head, each twist of the throttle bringing me closer to him. The next, anger boiled in my chest, the thought of someone daring to steal it sending heat through my veins, the sheer nerve of it making my hands clench tight.
“Not saying doesn’t change anything, Lion, he would never just leave us. You know it, and I do, too. He’s dead, and we have to find the person who took him from us.”
“I will find him. You took an oath, remember,” I reminded him.
“Fuck that oath! Nothing is more important than finding out who killed Dad and terminating that mother fucker!”
“Calm down,”
“Says the man that has damn near broken my ‘oh shit’ handle off the car,” he says, and I snatch my hand down, not even realizing I had gripped it and was indeed on the verge of ripping off the car.
“Fine. It’s clear he’s dead. It’s been clear that he is dead. Hell, if we are being honest, the moment he went missing, I think we both knew he was dead,” I say, and Bones shakes his head in agreement.
“What was the last venture he was into?”
“Something in DC, I think?”
“Do you think it had something to do with Uncle Len’s niece?”
“I mean, I don’t know much about her or her mother, but from what Dad used to say, the niece and her mother weren’t involved in any of Uncle Len’s life or dealings,”
“So that pretty much eliminates her, but I still think we should find her and question her just to be sure.”
“Find her how? We don’t even know her name,”
“Dad had to have had a secret hidey-hole somewhere,” he says, and I know he is right, but what he doesn’t know is I have been looking for one since he came up missing and have come up empty. “You’ve looked, haven’t you,” he asks, and I swing my eyes back over to him in answer. “Fuck,” he says, scrubbing a hand down his face. “Maybe we need to look together,” he suggests. After all of these years, what's the worse that can happen?
