Rider: An MC Club Alpha Male Romance Page 3

  Others take a more structured approach. I fall into that camp. I was strong when I got out of the service, and lean, but the months of immobility as a result of my injuries, plus the addiction, started to make me soft, skinny, but flabby. Once I joined the Damned, I tried to stem the tide of addiction by adopting the most rigorous of physical training schedules: an hour of hitting the heavy bag in the morning, every morning, with two hours of weight lifting in the evening four times a week, plus regular pick up basketball and football games with the guys.

  Now, it was an addiction as much as the heroin had ever been. Maybe even more so, because I couldn’t have the blessed smack anymore. I kept hideously, absurdly detailed notebooks tracking every aspect of my progress, how much I was lifting, how I was feeling as I lifted, how strong I was getting. Focusing on that helped keep the desire for smack out of my mind, if only for a few hours a day.

  So, there’s the workshop, and then the other shack is the clubhouse proper—where you go to lounge, to sleep, to eat, to drink, to fuck, to fight—though, an update to our charter last month specified that all fighting was to be done outside as much as possible, since we were tired of smashed TVs and broken glass littering the couches.

  It’s like a fraternity house inside, but a fraternity house on steroids. A bar adorns the living room, with faded and jaded couches surrounding a coffee table, and a handful of pool tables in the corner. The bar is always well-stocked with whatever you’d like to drink—beer, run, tequila, whiskey, gin, vodka, even wine for the ladies, on the off chance you bring in a lady or (more likely) a hooker who doesn’t want straight whiskey.

  Though, we by and large prefer our women to be the types who drink bourbon straight, no chaser.

  Off of the living room is a staircase leading up to the second floor, with bedrooms, “offices” (really, just empty rooms, to be used for whatever), bathrooms, and a small kitchen. A few of the Damned live here full time, but most of us have other apartments, even other jobs. It’s only a few that can make a full time living as a biker.

  It’s not much—but it’s home, or a home, of sorts.

  I sat at the bar one Saturday afternoon after meeting with Doug. Some of the Damned stood around, shooting pool, while others were piled onto the couch, watching the FSU game. Upstairs, we could hear the tell-tale creek of a bed as someone got lucky, showing his old lady a good time.

  “Making too much fucking noise up there…” Dog muttered from the other side of the bar. Jim “Dog” Tiller. He’s a scrawny shrimp of a bastard, with a ratty looking beard and goatee. A real mutt. He’s an ex-Navy man too and, as a Marine myself, you’d think we wouldn’t get along. But we were Damned now, and even though I made jibes about the Marines being the Men’s Department of the Navy, I would trust Dog with my life.

  “Then stop fucking listening,” I muttered, sipping at my whiskey. I shouldn’t be drinking but damned if I cared. I knew where I had to steer the conversation and I wasn’t looking forward to it, but here it went.

  “When I bring my newest bitch around, you’d best not listen,” I growled, continuing the train of the conversation. “If you do, so help me god, I will break a fifth over your stupid skull.”

  “Man, Fang, when you gonna’ bring this new girl?” Manuel demanded from the couch. Having gone to FSU once upon a time, Manuel Lopez was loath to miss a Seminoles game. Nonetheless, it didn’t stop him from interrogating me about my hypothetical new squeeze.

  “When she’s good and fucking ready and I’m sure that you jokers aren’t going to scare her off,” I snapped.

  “How’d you meet that bitch again?” Dog asked, sniffing at a bottle of mostly empty tequila. He was a cheap asshole and he insisted that we finish our bottles of booze before opening new ones. Yeah. One of those. He was going through his weekend ritual of finishing off any almost-empty bottles, and he defined almost empty as being less than one-third full—so by this point, he was already pretty far gone.

  “A club,” I replied immediately. “I’ve got that gig working security for the Zombie Hut.”

  This was true. I had been working on and off at the Zombie Hut, a horror-theme tiki bar that catered to slobbish tourists just off of South Beach, for the past six months. I bounced for them, but the job could hardly be called security. It was some of the easiest money I had ever made. Hardly anyone started trouble and if they did, one quick look at me was enough for them to calm their shit down. Once in a while, some drunken frat boy would start throwing punches, but a quick joint lock was all I needed to drive him toward the door, and then out onto the hard pavement outside.

  “Is she some sort of hot little college girl? Are you afraid we’re gonna’ offend her politically correct sensibilities?” Dog asked, through a series of burps. The awkwardness with which he pronounced those last few words hinted at the fact that he didn’t really know what they meant.

  “Nah, I’m not a cradle-robber like you,” I muttered. “Or Fatman.”

  As if on cue, we heard the tell-tale lumbering footsteps of the leader of the Damned, a physically massive former Green Beret that we all called Fatman. His gasps guided him down the stairs as he staggered into the living room.

  One look at him was all you needed to know that he wasn’t well—not by a long shot. He worked up a sweat just going up and down the stairs and he found himself panting if he just walked across the room without his cane.

  Oh, and did I mention that he weighed about three-hundred and seventy-five pounds on a good day? At well over six-and-a-half feet tall, he carries it well, but it was hard not to be disgusted by his girth, all heavily tattooed with crosses, Viking runes, celtic knots, swastikas, tribal designs, and Japanese koi. He looked a bit like a more intimidating, more terrifying, more real version of Jabba the Hut, but with the threatening gravitas of a heavy metal rock star.

  “Fang, what in the fuck are you talking about?” he barked at me, his plump lips rippling into a scowl. “I ain’t no cradle robber.”

  Soft footsteps followed behind Fatman. A girl, deathly pale as wilted lilies, with washed out blonde hair almost turned gray, looked at us with wide, confused eyes. She was clad only in one of Fatman’s t-shirts, a sweat-stained monstrosity that looked more like a circus tent on her.

  “Tell ‘em, Misty. Tell them how old you are.”

  Misty flushed as she stole behind the bar, grabbing a bottle of rum and draining a fifth of it into her pale lips.

  “Tell ‘em, Misty.”

  She gasped, licking her rum-soaked lips.

  “Jesus fucking Christ, don’t act as retarded as you look. Tell these fuckers how old you are.”

  Misty’s booze-and-sex addled eyes regarded us without any sort of understanding or caring.

  “Old enough,” she said softly, her voice like wine glasses shattering on pillows.

  “That’s right,” Fatman roared, a triumphant note sounding in his voice like trumpets. “That’s fucking right. Old enough. I’ve taught this little bitch well.”

  Misty closed her eyes and seemed to drift back upstairs, practically asleep. I felt bad for her, but not bad enough to break her out of this life. At least… Not yet.

  Fact was, as much as I found myself completely disgusted by Fatman, I respected the bastard. He had taken me in when I was a mess, given me an opportunity to prove myself. All I had back then was a bike—a heavily customized chopper that I had worked on during every single period of leave I was given while in the service, putting most of my paycheck into improving that beast of a machine—and a revolver, my dad’s old Colt Python that he had carried for twenty-five years as a member of the Miami Police Department (ironically).

  I barely had any cash to my name, nowhere to live, no future. But Fatman saw something in me. He let me, an addict, deal for him, and when he was sure that I wasn’t going to rat, he let me stay at the clubhouse while I looked for an apartment. He even put himself down as my employer on the application, since he owns a small empire of hot dog stands along South Beach—that’s
how we launder our money, and also one of the hot spots of dealing to kids looking for a good time at the beach.

  But that wasn’t going to stop me from burying Fatman if I got a chance. The things that had given me a thrill about this life back when I was getting high every chance I got—the drugs, the women, the fast bikes and sweet slow booze, the feeling of my fist, gripping a roll of quarters, cracking into some motherfucker’s skull in a filthy, down and out barroom brawl—those things didn’t do it for me anymore.

  They left me cold.

  It was time to go. I could either go… Or I could die.

  Because… Did I mention that once you’re Damned, you’re Damned for life? It’s either stay in the gang, or die. No compromise.

  I don’t want to stay. And dying doesn’t sound too bad, but I can’t help but feel like it’s not my style.

  So I’m going to live. And I’m going to send all of these sons of bitches into the furnace in my stead.

  “Fang, you son of a cunt, come with me. I’ve got something to show you.”

  “I’m busy, you fat fuck,” I grunted, inclining my head at my glass of whiskey.

  “Jesus Christ, you cocksucker, it’s too fucking hot for that Scottish swill. We drink rum down here, boy! Now get your ass out into the backyard—I’ve got a new toy and for once, she don’t have no pussy.”

  “Did you finally make up with your parish priest for all the times he stuck his fingers up your butt when you were in first grade?” I muttered as I followed Fatman out into the field behind the clubhouse.

  Once upon a time, there was an ice cream factory on this land, and there are still a few old, derelict factory buildings left, with their walls falling in, windows all smashed, and dead grass adorning their pathways. Most of this space we use for riding, for fighting, or fucking if you can’t find an empty room—a not uncommon phenomenon on Friday and Saturday nights.

  Once outside, I found Fatman dragging a huge, black package, bound in a leather case.

  “Did you take up the cello? Finally fulfilling your dreams of playing at Carnegie Hall?” I asked Fatman, a pit of dread rising in my belly. I didn’t want to see what this thing was.

  I had a bad fucking feeling about this. It was as long as a fishing rod but by the way the package clattered to the ground when Fatman dropped it in front of me, it weighed at least a hundred times what a rod and reel should weigh.

  Besides. Fatman isn’t the fishing type.

  More the hunting type.

  He unzipped the case and I had to bite my tongue to keep from cursing. I knew exactly what it was. They had issued them to us in Afghanistan.

  A Barrett .50 caliber sniper rifle. Scope. Ten round magazine. The kind of gun that can practically disintegrate a man with one shot, shattering skeletons and vaporizing whatever was left. But that’s overkill. We used them for long range missions, where the fifty’s power would stand up over several kilometers. Or for taking out jeeps and trucks. Or…

  “Helicopter killer. You heard about Bolo, didn’t you?”

  I shrugged. I had. I knew Bolo—a son of a bitch, just as bad as Fatman, but Haitian, focused more on the housing projects. We ran different parts of the city, different parts of the county—Bolo’s guys didn’t cross us much and I think we all preferred it that way.

  Still, I couldn’t help but feel a sense of simultaneous dread and satisfaction, knowing that Bolo’s entire operation had been demolished in a single night and that he was being held without the possibility of bail in some federal penitentiary hellhole, his lawyers trying to figure out how they could explain away his seized cellphone records, not to mention the tons of cocaine and guns.

  Satisfaction because it made me feel like I had hitched my horse to the winning cart. Good to know that bad guys like Bolo still get what’s coming to them.

  Bad guys like me, a little voice in the back of my head couldn’t help but remind me.

  But there was dread too because I knew we would expand to fill the void left by Bolo’s boys. There would be violence. There would be bloodshed. And Fatman had started rattling his saber.

  “The FBI fucked him up. Helicopters, troop carriers, the whole nine fucking yards. I tell you what, I’m not going down like that. One shot from this sucker and BOOM—no more flying Feds.”

  “Do you even know how to use that thing?” I asked absently, knowing the answer already.

  Fatman pointed to a chimney sticking up from one of the half demolished factory buildings.

  “You see that? That smoke stack?”

  “Sure I do. I’m not as blind as your last wife was.”

  “Just watch, you clever son of a bitch.”

  He clacked a round into the chamber, cocked the rifle, and, sweating and grunting like a diabetic hog on its last legs before the slaughter house, lay prone, cradling the rifle. But once it was in his hands, it came alive. He aimed it easily, with relaxation and confidence.

  A single round cracked out of the rifle, a small cloud of smoke bursting from the barrel. Less than a moment later, the smoke stack shattered, bursting into a miasma of finely ground steel dust.

  “Not bad. You just have to see them before they see you,” I said with a shrug, trying to give the impression that I was unimpressed, trying to keep him from getting too confident.

  “Oh, I will, Fang. I will,” Fatman said, wiping the sweat from his brow and cackling. He sat back up and squinted at me in the sunlight, looking like some sort of demonic Buddha.

  “I know the Feds are coming for me,” he said with a snarl. “And I’m not going down without a fight.”

  Why was he telling me this? Did he… Did he know?

  I was tempted to kill him right then and there. I had my gun on me. I’d be able to draw it and execute him, one single round to the skull, before he could turn the rifle on me. Even if he had handgun hiding somewhere beneath that blubber, my reflexes were still faster than his, no longer dulled by drug addiction.

  But no. Stick to the plan. Stick to the fucking plan. Hold off. If I killed him, they’d hunt me down. I figured I had no chance of evading them, not in the long run.

  The only way, the only way to survive, the only way to get out of this gang alive… Was to take them all down.

  And so, I held my fire. I just shook my head.

  “You paranoid old son of a bitch…” I muttered, stalking back into the clubhouse.

  “Hey, Fang… Can’t wait to meet that new lady of yours. When you gonna’ bring her by?”

  “When I’ve fucked her so many times that I don’t care if any of these cocksuckers stick their dicks in her too,” I shot back, not even looking over my shoulder.

  “I wanna’ meet her. Gotta’ make sure she’s good enough for my boy Fang,” Fatman declared, staggering to his feet. Was there a note of threat in his voice? What did he mean?

  No. I was the one being paranoid now. This was just the usual banter.

  “I’ll tell her to dress real nice for when I bring her home to meet the folks,” I scowled. Back in the clubhouse, someone had already drunk my whiskey and I had to pour myself another glass. The Seminoles were losing and Manuel had smashed the coffee table. And Misty was passed out behind the bar, barely breathing.

  Oh yeah. I was sure as hell ready to leave this life.

  Loyalty be damned.

  CLAIRE

  This was to be the pow-wow. The first time I met Fang, or rather, James MacKinnon, the man to be my partner on this operation. A full member of the Damned MC. And one scary asshole.

  Doug picked a filthy, seedy as all get out motel just off the highway for our meeting. It was the kind of place where everyone was transitory, where no one paid any attention to anyone else. The kind of place everyone just wanted to get away from as soon as possible without looking back.

  Funny. For some people, that’s what their entire lives are like.

  The motel’s parking lot was almost totally empty when I pulled up. I knew which room to go to. Number seventeen. Each motel room d
oor had a different number, but all were painted the same garish red, now faded to a hideous pink. The smell of something dying hung in the hot hair as I parked and strode towards the door.

  I knocked twice, and then three more times in rapid succession, and then kicked the door gently. This was the code, what I had been instructed to use to let Doug and Fang know that I was who I was supposed to be.

  The door cracked open and Doug’s familiar face greeted me, as did a wall of smoky, stuffy air.

  “Jesus, you couldn’t have gotten a non-smoking room,” I muttered as I ducked in.

  “No air conditioning either,” Doug said with a sheepish grin. I saw a cigarette smoldering in an ash tray on the table and I wondered if he had gotten the smoking room on purpose.