Page 13 of Thug

He tugged the frayed hem of his denim micro-shorts out of his crotch while alternating glances between Carp and me. “Mornin’, fellas.”

I was speechless. He was wearing embroidered cowboy boots, his kutte, and a pair of cut-off jean shorts that were barely long enough to cover his dick. A backward flat-bill cap topped off his chosen outfit of the day.

Carp began laughing, but I couldn’t do anything but stare in disbelief.

“Don’t even start,” Brisco warned. He turned his cap around and tugged it low on his brow. “I swear, these fuckers didn’t used to be this small.”

“What possessed you to ride here in cut-off jean shorts, no matter what size they were?” I asked. “You look like a complete fucking idiot.”

“What’s your inseam?” Carp asked dryly. He scanned Brisco from the tips of his boots to his waist. “Those legs of yours go on for fucking ever.”

Carp was right. Brisco’s legs seemed twice as long as normal, and they were normally twice as long as anyone else’s. I shook my head in disbelief.

Brisco glared. “Fuck you.” He looked at me. “Fuck you, too, Price.”

“I’m serious,” I said, trying my best not to burst into a laughing fit. “What would ever possess you to leave the house looking like that? Hell, I can’t understand why you’d even wear those little fuckers in private. You look like that Jessica Simpson chick in The Dukes of Hazard, if she shaved her head and was two feet taller.”

“Listen, motherfucker. I didn’t just wake up and say, ‘hey, I want to wear a pair of little cut-offs’,” he said. “There’s a reason behind it.”

I raised my brows. “I’m dying to hear it.”

“Well, I needed to dig up a box of money, and all my jeans were in the laundry,” he explained. “I put on a pair of sweats to start off with, but the fuckers didn’t have a draw string. Every time I stomped on the shovel the sons-of-bitches came crashing down, leaving me standing there with my cock swinging in the breeze.” He looked at Carp and then at me. “So, I dug through my dresser and found these little bastards. Made ‘em back in the day, and when I was cuttin’ ‘em, I kept getting’ one of the legs shorter than the other, and I’d have to cut a little of the other leg to try and get ‘em even. When I got done, this is what I ended up with.”

I stared like I was witnessing a giraffe roller-skate through the produce aisle of the local Safeway. I blinked a few times, just to make sure it was as bad as it seemed.

All it did was get worse.

Still in sheer disbelief that he left home in shorts that weren’t long enough for a fifteen-year-old girl, I raked my eyes up and down his lengthy frame. “No man should ever wear shorts that produce the possibility of his dick dangling out the leg hole, and the tip of yours has peeked out of there twice since you got here,” I said, trying not to laugh. “If you end up within 1500 feet of a school, you’ll be arrested for exposing yourself to children.”

“I don’t give a fuck what anybody thinks, including you,” he snarled. “Nobody’s going to say shit to me, anyway. Other’n you two fuckers.”

He was probably right. Brisco was every bit of 6’7”, although he claimed he was 6’-4”. He weighed a little over three hundred pounds, all of which was muscle. With his permanent tan, bald head, and occasional graying stubble of a beard, he looked like Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s much bigger brother.

“Why didn’t you wait for your laundry to dry?” I asked. “Or ride to Cortaro and buy a pair of pants?”

“Because.” He tugged against the legs of his shorts. “I needed to tell you something.”

“Right now?”

“Yep.”

“Why didn’t you call?”

He glared. “You never have your phone.”

“I’ve always got my phone.”

“You’ve always got it close, but you’ve never have it on you,” he argued. “Hell, half the time you leave here without it.”

“Bullshit.”

His brows raised. “Where is it?”

I hated relying on, using, or even carrying a phone. Although I knew I didn’t have it, I felt the front pockets of my jeans, and then the back. After coming up empty-handed, I shrugged. “Probably in the office.”

He pressed his hands against his faded denim hips. “In the office with two voicemails and a half-dozen texts from me.”

“What’s the emergency?”