One
Shooter
My dad was dead.
'Least that was what my meema was on the other end of the phone tellin' me. Now, I was browbeat in my respect for elders growing up, but it was takin' everything in me not to tell my grandmother to get a grip on the blubbering as if my father was a sainted human being, like he was up in Heaven getting fitted for his shiny halo and downy wings. The man was the biggest piece of shit I had ever met in my life. And given that I spent my life dealing with criminals, that was really saying something.
He was down in hell getting beat to shit if there was any kind of justice in the afterlife.
"Don't ya'll worry about the money," I said, wincing as the drawl slipped back into my voice. Took me a fuckin' year to lose the damn thing and five minutes on the phone with her and it was slipping back. "I'll overnight more than enough to you for the arrangements."
Then she said six words I never wanted to hear: You need to come home, Johnnie.
It had been years since I heard that name.
I hadn't adopted the name Shooter because I was good with a gun, though I was. I didn't even adopt it because I was a sniper for hire, though that was definitely the case.
I did it because I never wanted to be that Al'bama redneck with the shitty dad in the trailer park anymore.
I never wanted to be Johnnie Walker Allen ever fucking again.
Johnnie Walker. Yes, like the god damn scotch whiskey.
I did mention that my dad was an asshole, right? It wasn't bad enough that everyone knew growing up that my dad was a boozer; he had to go and name me after his favorite kind of poison.
"I can't come back, ma'am," I said, squeezing the bridge of my nose, slumping forward in my chair. If I knew anything about my grandmother, it was that the woman was five feet of concrete and butting my head up against her never got me anything other than a headache.
And then she launched into a thirty minute crying rant about how she was too old, her heart too broken, her blood pressure too high, and her arthritis too bad to do something as strenuous as sit inside the funeral home and look through a book of caskets and flowers.
"You don't see any reason it shouldn't be me making the plans?" Like, say the fact that I would be just tickled if they stuck him in a pine box in the city plot beneath three John Does with an unmarked grave. "Yes, ma'am, I know he's my father." I sighed. I was losing; that meant I was going back there. It meant I had to bury my fucking father. "Right, okay. Yes. Yes, ma'am..."
I looked up when I heard footsteps and saw the blond I had brought home the night before- on the short side with impossibly thick thighs, trim waist, and just a bit more than a handful-sized breasts. Curvy, that was how I liked them. This one also had the advantage of a delicate little doll face and huge blue eyes that made her look sweet and innocent. Though, I had learned the night before when she rode me hard and fast while reciting a running monologue of dirty talk that'd make a porn star blush, that she was anything but sweet and innocent.
I brought my hand to my lips in a shushing motion and crooked a finger at her. She gave me a small smile and climbed up on my lap wearing nothing but the sheet she had draped around herself. I ducked my face into her neck and listened to my grandmother for another minute.
"Yes ma'am. Yeah... I'll be there. Right... tomorrow."
I hung up feeling an unusual heaviness weighing on me.
"You have an accent," Molly, the girl sitting her sweet round ass on my lap said with a big smile, revealing one overly pointed eye tooth that gave her perfect face a little bit of character.
"You like that?" I drawled into her neck, running my nose down the soft skin.
"Mmmhmm," she whimpered, already breathless.
"Well, let's see how much you like it when it's drawlin' dirty things in your ear while I'm inside you, babygirl," I suggested, lifting her up and walking her back to my bedroom. Maybe it wasn't the healthiest way to deal with a death in the family, but well, a little slap and tickle seemed to lift the heaviness for a few minutes and that seemed like the best kind of therapy to me.
–
"The fuck you mean, you're going home?" Breaker, my best friend, my mentor, one of the few people in the world (along with his girl, Alex and our friend and my tattoo artist Paine) who meant much of anything to me.
Breaker was tall and a giant wall of muscle with blond hair and a blond beard. Everything about him screamed intimidation which was good in a job where he pretty much busted faces for a living.
Alex was perched on the couch, a giant laptop sitting open on her lap. She was gorgeous in her tall, thin, dark-haired, classic kind of way and the best thing that ever happened to Bryan fuckin' Breaker, even if he did have to go toe-to-toe with the worst crime lord in the area to get her. Along with, ya' know... having to kidnap her while I rotted in said crime lord's basement for a spell. Good times.
"Dad died and my grandma is being too hysterical to deal with the arrangements."
"You have other family," Breaker reasoned, knowing better than anyone how much I did not want to go back. Breaker found me sleeping against his building when I was fifteen and had finally had enough of the hunger, the beatings, and the bullying from the hicks in town and ran the fuck away. I never went back. I never planned to.
"No one is stepping up."
"You don't owe him shit," he shrugged, getting up and getting us each another beer. "You don't owe any of them shit."