Great.
“I just know in dealin’ with you women, there’s always the time, the right time when you can do somethin’ that’ll get through the walls, seed, bud and grow, and that’s when you plant the wisdom. So we just gotta wait for the right time to plant that seed.”
I nodded because this was sage. He was right and I’d watched him do it time and again with the Rock Chicks so I also knew it worked.
It sucked. I was losing patience with this and didn’t want to have to exercise more.
But he was right.
“Thanks, Duke.”
He jerked up his chin before he looked across the yard and muttered, “Best get back to Dolores.”
“Okay.”
He looked back at me. “You’re a good kid, Ally.”
I smiled at him but warned, “Thanks. But if you make me want to cry again, I’m kicking you in the shin.”
He shook his head, mouth twitching, and sauntered away.
I was about to hightail my ass to the bar and order a tequila shooter from Willie when I was suddenly set upon by Roam and Sniff.
I looked at the two teenagers.
Roam and Sniff had been runaways that Jules talked into her shelter. She then grew close to them. So close, Roam took a bullet for her in an attempt to save her life.
After that, Shirleen took them under her wing and they’d been living with her since. And when I said “took them under her wing,” I meant she treated them like they were her own. In other words, she mothered them as only Shirleen would do. With sassy tough love.
But the operative word in that was love.
Roam was a tall African American kid who’d always been good-looking. So it wasn’t a surprise that as the months passed, he got a might taller, bulked out, the boy started leaking out of his features and they were becoming all man, and he was hitting downright handsome.
What was a surprise was that Sniff, always small, skinny with a face riddled with acne, bloomed late. With Shirleen feeding him and getting him to a dermatologist, he was no longer skinny and his face had cleared up. But he’d hit a growth spurt and shot up five inches. Not only that, his features were also maturing and doing it well. Very well. So a kid that was always clever and funny now was giving his best bud a run for his money in the looks department.
Seriously.
They still hung with Jules often, but they got their male influence by hanging with Vance as well as the Hot Bunch. They spent a lot of time at Nightingale Investigations, worked the surveillance room, did ride alongs and worked out with the guys.
They loved it, totally got off on it in a way that it was not hard to predict their future careers, and this would be proved irrevocably with what would happen next.
“Got a minute, Ally?” Roam asked as both boy-men affected a huddle with me.
“Yep,” I answered, examining them closely.
Total badasses-in-training. Their faces gave nothing away.
“We heard you’re workin’ the Smithie gig,” Sniff stated.
Oh man.
I tensed and repeated, “Yep.”
“The guys were talkin’ at the offices,” Sniff went on. “Overheard them sayin’ you’re workin’ the bouncer angle.”
I wasn’t working anything just yet. But I didn’t tell them that. I just nodded.
“So we’re lookin’ at the girls,” Roam declared.
I fought rolling my eyes. They were both seventeen, nearly eighteen. So I was not shocked that they’d take this stripper job opportunity to “look at” a bunch of strippers.
“Boys—” I started.
“Just listen, Ally, yeah?” Sniff coaxed.
I studied him a beat and nodded.
“We still got school so we can’t do much, but Sniff took some, I took others, and after school we followed them,” Roam told me.
I didn’t know if this was good or bad. I just knew they’d been around the Hot Bunch not a little but a lot, so they probably weren’t doing stupid shit.
I also wanted to know what they saw.
So I prompted, “And?”
“And, I saw one hand over an envelope to your bouncer guy,” Roam stated. “Had binoculars, saw the guy look through the envelope. Lots of bills. Ones, fives, tens.”
“Tip money,” I said quietly.
