Recap: The crew needs to do reconnaissance, so the core team goes into the swinger's club the night before they have to do the takedown. During the tour, Stephanie sees something another couple are doing, and says she wants to do the same thing.

Lester

I first met Bomber when she was desperate for cash and begged my cousin for a job. He broke the news to me the night before, when we were watching TV and drinking the one beer per astrological age he allowed to pollute his body. We were sharing an apartment at the time. He paid most of the expenses, but everything was in my name. Made it harder to track him.

"I invited someone to join us tomorrow." he said out of the blue.

"You need more muscle than the four of us can handle? How bad do you expect this to get?"

"Not muscle. I invited Vinnie's other bounty hunter."

"But I thought he died in that car...wait, do you mean the chick?"

Ranger stayed silent. But a very loud silent.

"I thought you said she was a disaster waiting to happen, and would get you killed someday?"

"She's getting better. And she needs the money."

"So ask her to polish your car. Hell, if she's as hot as you say, ask her to polish your dick."

And that's when he slapped me. Not a manly punch on the arm, or a noogie, but a full on slap. I spat out my beer indignantly. "What the fuck, cuz? What the actual fuck? I know you didn't just hit me over some girl just because you want to get your dick wet."

He actually looked as surprised as I felt. He didn't say anything, just went back to watching the game. I muttered to myself in English, Spanish, and Russian, then focused on the game too. But I kept looking at him out of the corner of my eye. I'd never seen Ranger protective of a woman before, not even his wife, not really. We all knew it was a one night stand gone wrong, and he wanted to do the honorable thing. But he never really cared about Rachel. Never cared about anyone aside from his brothers in arms. I couldn't help wondering what this chick bounty hunter would be like.

I was disappointed.

We picked her up at her apartment building at 0500, and she looked half dead. She was obviously not a morning person, and I doubted she'd had training on how to survive on little sleep. In the car she was overly chatty and incredibly naive. It seems Ranger had described our eviction job as 'interior decorating', and she had taken him seriously. She was dressed like it was casual Friday at a real estate office. She hadn't even brought a gun, and whined about the possibility of being arrested. Trust me, after being locked up in a South American jail for a week, American jail is just a nice chance to catch a nap. Still, this white girl from Trenton probably had never seen the inside of a cell, so I decided to cut her some slack and make a joke.

"Man, you don't like to get shot. You don't like to get arrested. You don't know how to have fun at all."

I think she tried to grin at that, but she looked like she was fighting off terror. Which in some ways made her braver than the rest of us. We were relaxed but alert, she was terrified. But she tromped up the stairs with us, though I'm pretty sure I heard her murmuring Hail Mary's under her breath.

The job went OK, though she was horrified that Tank might have thrown a guy out a third story window onto the street. She didn't realize we'd studied blueprints of the place, we knew exactly where the fire escape was. Tank had a little fun with her, making her think he hadn't known that. Might've been mean, but we get joy where we can.

I suppose she was a little helpful in cleaning up the place after we'd evacuated, though she was pretty squeamish. Still, having a pretty face around to look at beats not having a pretty face to look at any day of the week, and she was trying.

Later that night, after the explosion that put Bomber in the hospital, Ranger and I were together. He was agitated in a way that's pretty rare for him.

"Cuz, if you don't stop pacing I'm going to nail your feet to the floor."

"Fuck off, Santos."

"Look, she's fine. Just some ringing in her ears."

He glowered at me.

"You're feeling guilty that you put her in danger, right?" His look told me I was right. "Then do something about it. You're training her, train her more. Teach her how to take care of herself. Get her to carry more often. You've trained hundreds of men, how hard could one woman be?"

Little did I know.

"Running should violate the Geneva convention."

"You know it will make you a better Bounty Hunter, right? Harder for skips to get away if you're faster than them."

Bomber was on a treadmill, looking like she was about to pass out. I'd offered to bring her to a local gym while Ranger was in the wind. She had seemed reluctant, but the Santos charm can convince women to do just about anything.

"Maybe I should just stick to catching out-of-shape skips."

"No such luck, Beautiful."

"What did you call me?"

Shit. I'd given her the nickname in my head, and it had slipped out. The truth is she was beautiful. Odd, crazy, and attracted trouble like an ice cream truck attracts kids in July, but beautiful and spunky and full of life.

"Sorry, do you mind?"

She looked thoughtful for a moment.

"Not if I can get off this treadmill."

"Deal."

"You slept with her."

Ranger actually looked sheepish. "What's it to you?"

"I can't believe it." And I couldn't. He'd finally done it. After mooning over her for months, he'd slept with her. I struggled to keep the envy out of my voice and expression. "What was it like?"

"What do you think? It was sex. She had a guy sawed in half left on her couch, so she pushed it out into the hall. Claimed it had 'death cooties'. It was just the weirdest mixture of resilient and vulnerable, and I decided to cash in my voucher."

"She was into it, right? Like, she wasn't just doing it out of obligation?"

That earned me a dope-slap. "What kind of asshole do you think I am?"

Right. Time to change the subject. "So Abrutzi is leaving corpses in her living room. He's not going to stop. He's going to kill her."

"No, he's not. We're going to put a stop to it."

"Wet work? In Trenton? Are you sure?"

He looked at me. He was sure. I was too, I just needed him to say it.

"Let's go."

Bomber was standing on tip-toes, trying to see into a small window. In it I could see the couple the bouncer had mentioned, a large white woman and a black man with dreads behind her. It was the Sybian room, and I knew it well. It had a mechanical dildo in it that would vibrate, twirl around, or both. From what I could see, the woman was riding the dildo while her partner was fucking her in the ass and a dozen people were watching outside.

One of the cool things about swinger's clubs is that it's one of the rare places where women who aren't traditionally beautiful get to be sexy. How often do you ever see an American woman over 150 pounds or over 40 years old reveling in their sexuality? But here, everyone is sexy, young and old, fat and thin, if you want to let loose and be wild for a night, you can. And this woman in the Sybian room was. Her face was tight with ecstasy, her mouth open as she rode up and down. Her large breasts were pushed together by her arms and her head was arched back. Occasionally she looked straight out the window at the group staring at her and smiled. In the street you wouldn't look twice at her, but here? Here she was a porn star.

The guy behind her was hamming it up, showing off the box that controlled the speed and intensity of the dildo. He had a massive grin on his face, the grin of a guy who can't believe he got so lucky as to find a woman who was into this shit. His right arm was wrapped around her shoulders, making a dark chocolate stripe across the creamy white skin as he held her close.

An image flashed into my head of me holding Steph like that. Her writhing in my arms, cumming so often she couldn't tell where one orgasm ended and the next began. In front of me I could feel the heat radiating off her skin as I saw her hand reach back, not to clasp mine, but the man I was closer to than any in the world. Closer than a brother, bound by blood and water. And for half a moment, I was nearly sick with grief that she wasn't mine.