The Killing Ride

by Michelle, Christine

  “I told her where he would be and when. She was able to follow him and see for herself that he was dating someone even though he was trying to hide her from the club for some reason.”

  My stomach was twisted in knots with the knowledge that he hadn’t been wrong. T-Bone had been hiding his relationship from everyone until the end. I didn’t let my little bit of distress show. Instead I moved the tip of the ice pick back into the flame and waited while Crow watched the metal heat up once more.

  He licked his dried, cracked lips, and then started talking again. I told her when he left the clubhouse that morning. She was supposed to follow and wait for him to drop the bitch off, but hell, whatever cunt he was seeing wasn’t really a big concern to me.” He shrugged his shoulders as if it truly didn’t matter.

  “That cunt was pregnant with his kid,” I seethed.

  “Didn’t know that,” he offered up. I could tell from the way he said the words that it wouldn’t have mattered to him either. While sitting here begging me to keep his own child safe, he had no qualms about taking out someone else’s. “She took him out, called me when it was done,” he gave what sounded like a mix of a laugh and cough before continuing. “Stupid whore was looking for protection because she was dumb enough to get caught.”

  That was it. He just stopped talking. “And?” I asked. Still nothing. I drove the tip of the pick into his flesh again and carved the letter ‘R” right next to the “T” that I started with.

  “Motherfucker!” He hissed out as the smell of burning flesh assaulted my nose anew. Motherfucker, indeed. Burned flesh stunk.

  “What did you do for the whore who killed a club brother?”

  “I sent her a picture of her twin sister, told her she would keep her fucking mouth shut or I’d see that her sister shared the same fate as T-Bone. Life for a life.” He chuckled at the last.

  “Never-ending cycle, huh?” I asked, disgusted by the shit he seemed to find funny. I wondered if anyone had ever really known Crow, or if something flipped inside him along the way. Maybe the death of his first kid at the hands of the baby’s momma was what did it. Not that any of it mattered. His life was over. He was a dead man sitting in front of me. He just didn’t know it yet.

  “Jacksonville?” I prompted him when, once again, he sat there contemplating whatever the fuck was going through his scrambled brain at that point.

  “Means to an end. I had plans to retire.”

  “Did your retirement revolve around burning the club as you went?” He simply winked at me. “Who else was involved with you in Jacksonville?”

  His grin grew wider. “I’m not a fuckin’ rat, J-Bird.”

  I nodded and took the ice pick from the flame once more. I carved the letter “A” next to the “R”. The howls he made rang out in the room unanswered. I didn’t stop with the “A” this time though. I also added the next letter. An “I” before I finished and took in my handy work.

  “Almost done. You might want to be a little more forthcoming before I find your kin. You know, we can keep you alive until then. I think it would be sweet if you watched what we did.”

  I didn’t need to watch for any hints that he was rattled this time. He tried to come up out of the chair. He rattled the chains and ropes that held him in place. “You little fucking prick. I get out of here; I’ll flay every little piece of skin from your body and make big brother eat it before I feed you his…”

  I didn’t allow him to finish. I stabbed the heated pick through his right eye. The shock of it shut him up. “See here,” I told him, then laughed, because I had a metal object in his eye, so he wasn’t seeing shit out of it anymore. “That was mean, wasn’t it?” I asked. He didn’t answer. Crow sat, dry mouth gaping open as I slid the pick back out and showed him the stuff that stuck to it. His good eye was able to take in that much. “Now, we’re not discussing what would happen if you were suddenly free, because that’s not reality. You can either tell me what I want to know, or I can patch you up and let you wait here while I go get…”

  “FINE!” He yelled the word out, his body starting to shake all over. I knew what that meant. We didn’t have a whole lot of time left. Shock was starting to set in. “Pres was taking money to keep his trap shut. The three you found dead were ready to rat me out, so I handled them. Pres didn’t know about that. Two others were in on it. I figured once the missing parts of the shipment caught up to Crusher and the Tallahassee crew, we’d be long gone and living large. Good riddance to the club for trying to screw over the fucking mafia they got themselves involved with.”

  I leaned forward, after heating the ice pick again, and started carving across the tattoo once more. Another “T” was added before I decided I’d heard enough anyway. I went ahead and finished the other two letters. The “O” and the “R” followed. The word spanned from elbow to wrist. “Now, that’s the ink that Ever should have put down on you to begin with. I bet that’s what she really wanted to do.”

  Crow just sat there shaking, the stench of urine disgusted me, even knowing that the way I stabbed his thigh, near his groin, had caused it. I grinned at the man before me. “I once envied you. We called you Uncle. We called you brother. We stood by and offered the same redemption we were seeking, and you spat all over all of it. For what?” He said nothing. “FOR FUCKING WHAT?” I screamed in his face. “You took the life of a brother, because he took a man who wasn’t fit to wear the kutte.” Crow bit down on his lip, as if to keep from voicing his disagreement. It didn’t matter. I was fucking done with him.

  I glanced over at Sandman. “Anyone else want a piece of this before it’s done?”

  He shook his head indicating no. “Not worth anyone’s time at this point,” he admitted.

  Crow turned in Sandman’s direction, taking in the man who had been in the club almost as long as he had, himself. He swallowed thickly and watched as Sandman turned his back on him, grabbed Crow’s kutte off the hook on the wall, and walked away without so much as a word of goodbye.

  “Traitors don’t get goodbyes. They just get gone,” I informed him before shoving the pick through his other eye and then slicing the man’s throat. The arterial spray hit me mid-chest before I stepped clear of the rest of it. I watched, engrossed by how all that blood simply pumped free of the man. I wondered if T-Bone would be able to forgive me now that I had avenged the person who sealed his fate. I fucking hoped so. I planned on meeting my brother in another life, and I didn’t want to start that shit off with a grudge.

  It didn’t take long to get inside the clubhouse and cleaned up. Crow was no longer my problem. Someone else could dispose of the mess. I only wished there was a way to wipe clean his admission that he’d been partially responsible for T-Bone’s death. When I slid back out of my room with the intention of heading home, a lump in my stomach stopped me. Instead the bar started calling to me. That was as far as I managed to get before Double-D found me. His eyes were rimmed red, chest heaving, and hair appeared as though he’d tried to tug it out with his own hands.

  “You were watching,” I stated. He tipped his head back and slid his fingers to the bridge of his nose. He held that position, staring up at the nothingness he was seeing beyond the ceiling of the clubhouse.

  “That happened to my boy…” he started but stopped when emotion made the words too thick on his tongue. Double-D shook his head. “You did good,” he finally managed to say as he glanced back down from peering off into the heavens to set his eyes on me. “You did really good. He’d be proud.” That was all the man could manage before he turned and left the clubhouse. Standing vigil in his wake, I finally turned to the prospect who was tending the bar and ordered a beer. Hell, it didn’t even matter what they had on tap back there. I just needed something to occupy my hands and give me a reason to not go home. After everything that had just come out, I wasn’t sure I could handle dealing with Lindsay’s drama queen crap. I hadn’t called or texted since leaving for Jacksonville. Never bothered to let her know I was back either.
She hadn’t crossed my mind until the moment I thought about heading home, and realized home wasn’t somewhere I wanted to be any longer.

  “You need to get on out of here while the boys take care of the mess,” my father told me as he came up and placed a hand on my shoulder. “Appreciate you doing what you did in there. It couldn’t be me or Double-D. There’s just too much damn history.”

  I glared at my father. Too much history? Fuck that. They sent me in there to deal with the man who had killed my best friend. Sure, he didn’t drop his bike or drive that pipe through his belly, but he was the mastermind behind pulling a crazy bitch’s strings so that she would. I just shook my head. I couldn’t be here either. That left me one place where I could be.

  I took off for Deck’s house knowing I wouldn’t be able to tell Ever about Crow’s part in her brother’s murder or his fucking demise at my hands. It was club business. Not for the first time in the past year, I wondered again if the club and its quiet business was worth sticking around for. I wasn’t feeling it before and now I had witnessed brother turning on brother in the worst fucking way. I’d taken part in stripping a brother of his kutte, his dignity, his truths, and then his life. The problem was that none of it bothered me. I was riding a wave of numbness and the only emotion that managed to glimpse the surface was fear. Not the typical kind either. I feared the numbness would permeate every part of me and eat me alive down to my very soul, if I still possessed one.

  The whole ride across town to Deck’s place, the woman I’d often dream about when I slept continually found her way into the forefront of my mind. It was probably because everything else I could have been thinking about to take my mind off of the shit week I’d had was a part of the shit week itself. I dreaded going home to Lindsay, so I was on my way to my brother’s house instead. I hated that I had to put a long-time brother in the ground. Hated even worse that he was the reason my best fucking friend since pre-k wasn’t around any longer. Every time I thought things might be going better, it all fell apart again. Home, being here in South Carolina, was no longer the place I dreamed of being. Lindsay had never been the girl I dreamed about. Christina, the sweet, beautiful, colorfully dark woman from the cemetery was the one my mind was always drawn to, and now there wasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that anything would ever happen with her because I dated Lindsay. Hell, I lived with Lindsay. Even thought that move had been strictly out of convenience for the both of us, it would be construed as us having a far more serious relationship than we did.

  When I pulled up outside of Deck’s place, he was sitting in a fucking rocking chair on the porch as if he’d been waiting on me. I tilted my head to the side as I got off my bike, regarding him. He simply tipped his chin up at me and invited me to come have a seat. The bastard had let Ever have her way with the house he had bought. The one she had told me about before everything fell apart when we were younger. This had been her dream home, and I’d thought she was off her rocker. Deck heard her say it was her dream home too, only he hadn’t seen the rundown piece of shit house I’d looked at when she had spoken wistfully about how she would make it perfect when it was hers. He had seen her vision, while I could never get past what it looked like then, on the outside.

  It hit me then, for the first time since Ever and Deck had gotten together, why he was the better man for her. He saw her even when no one noticed he had. The man had scooped up a dream she’d had, and he made sure she got it. He saw more than the beautiful girl I lamented losing. Deck saw her inside and out and he understood it all.

  “What has your wheels turnin’ so hard in there?”

  “Nothing,” I told him as I took a seat in the chair beside him.

  “Merc called,” he mentioned. I thought it was weird that Deck never referred to our father as Dad. He always called him Merc. I understood that when we were at the clubhouse. I tried to always call him Merc or Prez, but even away from the club, Deck refused to deviate.

  “Why do you always do that?”

  “Do what?”

  “Call him Merc, even if it ain’t club business.”

  Deck regarded me for a long while and then shrugged his shoulders. “Doesn’t really matter since I was speaking about club business. He recapped what went down and your part in it. Figured you’d be by.” He narrowed his eyes on me then. “You’re not telling her. She doesn’t have to know, and if she did, that’s up to Double-D to tell her.”

  I shook my head. The fucker was always thinking about and protecting his woman. I just didn’t get that. It was supposed to be brothers first in the club. “Hadn’t planned on it.” He put his full attention on me then. “You didn’t answer my question,” I reminded him.

  He shrugged his broad shoulders once more. Deck had filled out quite a bit since I’d been gone. He was a lean, muscular guy before I left with Phoenix two years ago. In this moment, he was about 30 pounds heavier, and all of it muscle, that left him ripped and defined while still carrying some bulk weight to smooth it all out. It looked good on him.

  Deck chuckled. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d think you were checking me out just then, little brother.”

  He was changing the subject again, and it pissed me off. “You’ve bulked up a lot since I was gone,” I muttered.

  “You’ve seen me since you’ve been back.”

  “Yea, well, I’m just now realizing it,” I insisted.

  He nodded his head and looked away, staring off into the space between the houses that were quietly sitting vigil on our conversation from across the street. “I’m betting time away gave you some clarity. You seem to be seeing a lot more than you used to.”

  I was about to ask what that was supposed to mean when he clamped his hand down on my wrist and then traced a finger up the tattoo his wife had inked there so long ago. I swallowed thickly, realizing he was telling me I wasn’t far from figuring the damn thing out. Hell, I already knew, I just wasn’t ready to acknowledge some things about myself just yet. “About Dad,” I stated again, reminding him that he still hadn’t answered me. He flinched slightly as he removed his hand from my arm.

  “Jay, are you sure you want to hear what I have to say?” I nodded while looking him in the eye. Deck sighed but started in on answering my question. “It’s complicated and easy all at the same time. Growing up, I respected the hell out of the man. Hell, I worshipped him. Thought he was the biggest, most bad-ass mother fucker around. Then I started growing up and seeing things for what they were. When I was 13 going on 14, I walked in the clubhouse one time. He never saw me there, but I saw him with a whore on his lap. She was cooing into his ear that he had never been faithful to his wife and asked why he was trying to be now.” I sat, taken aback by that. I knew my parents had a rocky start, but I thought that all ended and that they were happy when I came around.

  “He pushed her away,” Deck finally stated after watching me go to war with that idea. “Told her he’d been faithful since you came along and that it wasn’t going to change.”

  “Okay?”

  “He pushed her away from his face, Jay. He didn’t remove that woman from grinding away on his lap. Pretty sure he had a happy ending from it before he did.” Deck shook his head back and forth, the disappointment in our father dripping from his tensed shoulders. “That was the first moment I realized he wasn’t the fucking hero I’d been worshipping. It was also the defining moment in my life when I decided that any woman I found worthy of spending time with would be the only one who got near me like that. Maybe dad didn’t consider it cheating since there was no skin on skin. There were clothes between them. Still, another woman pulled him to an act of completion that only our mother should have been responsible for. It wasn’t right, and I couldn’t look at him the same after that.”

  “I thought they were happy,” I damn near whispered. He still heard me.

  “They have been, but from time to time, they weren’t. That was about the time mom lost another baby,” he informed me something else that I never kne
w about my own family.

  “What? What do you mean another baby?”

  Deck’s eyebrows drew in as he gave me an odd look. “You never knew that they were trying for a girl after you?” I shook my head in the negative. “Man,” he hissed out. “They tried for years. I think she had three miscarriages. The last one damn near killed her,” he insisted while watching me for recognition.

  “Dad told me she had a bad flu,” I said. “That time she was in the hospital.” Deck looked away and sighed. “So, he lied to me about it. I guess because he thought I was too young. What? Was I about 10-years-old at the time?”

  “Something like that.” He turned back to me. “Then I came home from the Army and found out everything that had been going on in a clubhouse he was in charge of. All the shit with some of the guys dragging the club back into illegal dealings.”

  “What?” I yelled.

  “PeeWee, he’d been running girls on the street.”

  “What the fuck?”

  “They gave him a slap on the fuckin’ wrist, had him promise not to do it any longer and turn over his stable to someone else, or cut them loose if he wanted to keep his patch."

  "Obviously, he did that. I was a fuckin’ member when you came home, though. How did I not know this?”

  Deck shrugged those giant fuckin’ shoulders of his again. “My guess?” He asked as his eyes locked onto mine. I indicated he should go on. “You didn’t want to know, man. You were just active enough in the club to be a member. The rest was about fun and riding for you.” I started to protest, but he held up a hand to keep me quiet. “Not that it’s a bad thing, Jay. You weren’t ready for the heavy stuff. Besides, it was kept quiet between the officers.”

  “Then how the fuck did you find out?”

  “Outside club source,” was all he would tell me where that was concerned. Then he continued on. “Obviously, finding that out hit a nerve. No fuckin’ way would my hero tolerate a fucker who was running women and using the club name to enforce his territory. Right? They did though. He did. Then, there was the shit with Ever. He let his men run all over that girl. He knew shit was being said to her when she was still young. Didn’t do fuck all about it. When I confronted him, he said he wasn’t her father, and that it was Double-D’s responsibility to step up and do something.”