by Allen, J. C
We still hadn’t come across the leader of this facility.
Nor had we found Falcon.
Granted, I had a hard time ever imagining Falcon having the guts to show himself on the front line, and the same applied to the leader—after all, of the two I’d gone to, the first had him hidden until the end, while the second had simply killed himself—but still, not having any visual confirmation of either was frustrating.
I frowned, looking around the room, and watched as a guy moved out from behind a large religious statue. I sneered, seeing that they really hadn’t cleaned up the inside, having kept most the interior from the church’s previous state. It was a bit repulsive, and though I wasn’t religious, I knew I owed a visit to the local priest to apologize for everything that had happened, even if this building was abandoned.
And then I saw him. Not Falcon, but the next best thing.
Narrowing my eyes, I realized that the guy who’d stepped out from the statue was the leader, recognizing him from the photo Roost had of the four men. Time to end this! I thought, a wave of hopeful victory crashing over me as I began to rush towards the leader.
“Hey!” I yelled. “Get your ass over here, fucker! It’s time—”
Then I heard Eve cry out in surprise.
Life has offered me quite a bit of low-blows and unexpected clusterfucks during my time in its grips. Seeing my father, my mother, my brother, and my pregnant wife getting systematically wiped-out by the Black Falcons sucked. Having to rescue Eve before I loved her from the Falcons’ party had been a bit of a fuck up. But…
Hearing Eve scream in the heat of battle…
Time suddenly stopped. The air seemed to drop twenty degrees. The air in my lungs and the blood in my veins suddenly felt thick and useless.
And everything changed for me.
I was nearly there, nearly close enough to reach out and touch the leader, his own face a mask of shock and fear, but Eve’s cry stopped me.
With nothing else to steer my movements but that sound, I turned towards back, helpless not to help. With time still creeping—Just as it always does in moments of death… I thought—I saw in perfect clarity a large man standing over Eve, a shotgun held over her.
And to the side, Tara lay, not moving.
“Eve!” I roared.
I looked back at the leader, threw a swift punch that stunned him long enough to not shoot my back, and then barreled over to the man who looked to have killed Tara and was about to do the same to Eve.
“You’re more trouble than you’ve ever been worth, whore!” he growled. “It will be my pleasure to fuck your corpse as—”
He didn’t have enough time to finish that statement. I was never going to let him.
I pummeled the back of his head with my fists after I tackled him to the ground. He squawked in surprised, groaned under the force of my first few punches, and finally growled. I wasn’t sure if the last sound was in response to the pain or in being interrupted, but either of those cases was enough to spur me on further.
“Fuckin’… touch… her!” I heaved between labored breaths before driving my elbow down between his shoulder blades. “And you die!”
The man howled, bucked, and worked to turn over onto his back. He made it halfway, exposed the right side of his face to me, and I promptly drove my fist into the feral-looking eye that moved to stare up at me. My fist screamed from the impact with the giant man’s skull, but his eye was already swollen shut for my effort. That was a decent enough trade.
But the fucker didn’t quit. Still, he struggled to get to his back and struggled to bring himself into the fight.
From the corner of my eye, I saw that Roost had reached the leader and was holding the man up by the throat. Deciding I’d let Roost handle that for now, I committed to showing this man just how much he’d messed with the wrong squad. I was going to kill him with my bare fucking hands and feed his corpse to our dogs.
Unfortunately, the distraction at Roost and the leader had been enough for the other man to get the upper hand on me. He’d finally gotten to his back. He bucked me forward, rolled me off him and delivered a hard hammer first to my gut as I lost my breath.
Suddenly, I was on my back, and the other guy was throwing the punches.
I was no longer seeing red from the anger at him having nearly killed my girl but literally from seeing red as one of his punches broke a blood vessel. I knew if I didn’t act quickly, I was as good as dead.
I struggled to regain the upper hand and succeeded in only dodging some of the blows to my face. I couldn’t breathe through either nostril, but I decided I had no reason notto believe that I was about to die.
“What more was you expectin,’ Knight? You went and fell for a whore—a goddam whore!?” he said, cackling. “You put yourself in this spot, Knight! And now you die here!”
I growled out, trying to kick the man off and succeeded… only in getting another punch thrown into my left shoulder as I did. As I fell back, sudden raw terror filled me at the thought that this man was about to kill me.
No, I couldn’t die right now; couldn’t let myself get beaten this way. Not before Falcon. Not before a life I could have with Eve.
Not before I could marry Eve and have a family with her.
BANG!
The man’s body suddenly seized and, a second later, slumped forward on top of me. I felt the blood beginning to course over my palms as I wrestled to push him off of me.
He’d been shot.
Finally getting a decent hold on the dead weight, I shoved him off of me and he fell in a heap at the floor. I glanced over, seeing Eve drop one of the guns I’d slid across the floor earlier. She wore a smirk on her face as she stared at me, bemused.
“How many times am I going to have to save you?” she said. “I think that makes the total at least two to one in my favor. Maybe even three to one?”
“Yeah, I’ll make it up to you later,” I said, struggling to my feet.
As I did, I noticed something strange.
The gunfire had all but ended.
A couple of remaining shots fired out, but the Falcons were defeated. In my duel with the red-headed asshole for my girlfriend’s life, the rest of the Saviors had pulled through, defeating the enemy and leaving their final base clean for us to do whatever we wanted.
“Falcon!” I shouted, trying to draw him out.
But I got no answer.
“He ain’t here, Derek,” Roost said, his voice sounding muffled. When I looked over, I saw why—he was coming forward, holding the leader of this particular area by the shoulder. “But we got ya someone who might know where he is.”
The man looked beaten down, on the verge of death with one more punch. Around us, dozens of bodies lay strewn out, the signs of a war that was finally nearing its end. Falcon might not have been here, but he was just one man, and no matter how much influence that one man had, it was difficult for any man to have an impact against an entire squadron of Saviors.
“Why’s he still breathing?” I asked.
The man seemed to grow stiff at that and I watched Roost squeeze his arm once more. Roost offered a glance at the leader before turning back to me. I hadn’t just been saying that as a scare tactic, we weren’t being soft when it came to Falcon.
Admittedly, when I detached and my anger subsided, I realized it was probably a good thing that we had a live Falcon who could give us details on Frank Young. But that took a conscious effort that was not so easy to just get rid of.
“Well, he’s got some info on Falcon,” Roost said, affirming that he had a damn good reason to keep this man alive.. “Says he’ll give it over if we take him with us and keep him safe.”
“And how can we trust him to come through?” I asked, raising an eyebrow at him.
“Ya can’t,” the leader said, spitting up blood. “But what other option ya got?”
I didn’t like his attitude. In fact, I began to cock my fist back, just to get a frustration punch out. The last
thing we needed was a goddamn sore loser.
But I also didn’t like that he spoke the truth, as well. We hadn’t gotten any intel from the last three locations and this was our last shot. We might stumble across Falcon by luck, but that seemed less and less likely by the day. We had to take whatever we could have.
I finally nodded at Roost and glanced over at Eve.
“We’re gonna have to use your car, if that’s okay, Eve,” I said and moved my hand to her shoulder before adding, “I’ll have Roost drive with…”
My voice trailed off.
“Tara?”
“You thought I was dead?!?”
Like a cockroach in a nuclear battle, I just couldn’t get rid of Tara. And, I had to admit, the sight of her alive brought me a smile. I didn’t want anyone dead.
“Hell no, ain’t no Black Falcons gonna kill me! You’re crazy if you think that’s ever going to happen! I’m practically indestructible! Tell them, fag!”
But I may have wanted her mouth shut from time to time.
“Derek,” Roost said exasperatedly, as if trying to get me to ignore her.
“Anyways, Tara, I need you to ride with Roost back to the shop. We’re taking this Falcon hostage. Says he’s got information on the real Falcon and where we can find him.”
“Ohhhhh! Can I hit him if he gets out of line?” Tara asked, her eyes glinting mischievously.
“Are you going to hit him either way?” I asked.
Tara only shrugged, and I caught myself grinning despite everything. After what I’d just seen—after seeing their side nearly kill Eve—I frankly didn’t care much one way or the other. While the guy in front of us hadn’t been the one to nearly end the life of Eve, I was certain that he’d done something to deserve it if Tara did hit him.
And as long as he wasn’t dead, why should it matter to me?
“Just don’t kill him,” I said. “The rest of you! Let’s clear out this place of anything the Falcons have and regroup at the shop. We’ll interrogate this man and find Falcon. Either way though, well done. The Black Falcons are homeless, and if they’re around past the next few days, it’ll be a goddamn miracle.”
A few cheers went up, but noticeably, none came from any of the Marines or Roost. They knew the truth. So long as Falcon remains, the threat remains.
Still, it felt nice to give the rest of the men a little bit of a bone, something to let them know their efforts had paid off.
As we finished clearing out the place of cash, drugs, guns, and everything else, I took Eve in my arms and pulled her to the side.
“You good?” I said.
“What, you think that’s the first time I’ve had a gun pointed at me?” she said, smiling back.
“Oh, no, don’t tell me you’re about to turn into Tara too.”
She just laughed sweetly and shook her head.
“Never, baby. Tara is Tara. I can’t be anyone but Eve Kellerman.”
“And I don’t want you to be anyone but Eve, OK?”
I leaned forward to kiss her.
“I suspect that this is more or less the last time you’ll be in the line of danger.”
“But Falcon—”
“Is still out there, yes. But we’ve just eliminated all of his homes. He’s on the defensive. He’s not just on his heels, he’s toppling over. At best, he’ll resort to guerrilla strikes against us, but that’ll be a clear sign of how far he’s fallen. Eventually, he’ll come out, and we’ll kill him. But it won’t require a full-scale battle like this.”
I almost followed it up with “and that means that we can have our future together. Eve, I love you, will you marry me?”
But not yet. I made a promise to myself regarding Falcon’s death and my marriage to Eve, and God help me, I wanted nothing more than to break it.
But not yet.
Not yet.
Eve and I made our way back to my bike. I waited a moment as Roost and Tara finished tying the leader, who finally had been so kind as to introduce himself as Bill, to the back seat.
“You patted him down for weapons already?”
“Nah, but he ain’t going nowhere with those ropes,” Tara said.
I looked at the ropes, sighing. It was standard procedure after the second operation, and Tara had jumped the gun.
But, too late now. It wasn’t worth the effort, especially since the one thing we had to worry about was Falcon swooping in with reinforcements on the ambush.
“Alright, well put him in the tank, Roost,” I said. “Feel free to do whatever you want. Just make sure he can talk and is in a state of mind to do so.”
“Lotta restraints ya puttin’ me under, boss,” Roost said with a wink. “I’ll see what I can do.”
“I trust you,” I said with a smile.
With that taken care of, I headed to the bike, satisfied with our work here. I turned the ignition and began to drive back to shop. Eve squeezed my waist tighter, tighter than usual. I glanced back for a moment, thinking maybe the roar of the battle had gotten her emotional in the bad sense of the word.
“You okay?” I asked over the loud roar of the engine.
“I am now, thank you!” she said, raising her own voice. “That was a little scary, I’ll admit. But I knew you’d come, so I wasn’t as scared as I might have sounded.”
Brave girl. Brave, brave girl.
“Long as you and I survive longer than the ones trying to hurt us,” I said, “then I don’t care how they manage to hurt us.”
“And I can assure you, both of us are going to outlive those assholes.”
I stared at her for a long moment, taken aback by the sheer strength she had to possess to bounce back from something like that. While I could bounce back, I also had years in the club and had grown up with a father and brother both obsessed with motorcycle clubs. Eve, not so much.
But, then again, I suppose courage was more of an individual thing than a bloodline thing. And Eve had that in spades.
I smiled, glad to hear she was okay, but the comedown meant something else.
For the first time since the fight, I finally began to feel the pain from how badly the man had beaten me earlier. I’d been so distracted with everyone else, I hadn’t had time to even react to how shitty I’d felt. And I had to say, though I had survived and was nowhere near in as much pain as Eve probably was when she got stabbed, it still hurt like a motherfucker.
I pulled into the shop and saw that Tara and Roost had already driven Eve’s car—my father’s car—it still felt weird to see that thing on the road—back, Bill in tow. I told Eve to wait in the office and headed for the tank, meeting Roost on the other side. Tara was in the office, slapping the man every few seconds.
“What’s he given us?” I said as I crossed my arms.
“Diddly squat,” he said. “And I’m afraid he ain’t lyin’. Falcon tells people on a need-to-know basis. All we gotten is some info that we already knew ‘bout him.”
“Shit,” I said, pressing my forehead against the glass. “Nothing, huh?”
“’Fraid not, and believe me, I been tryin’,” Roost said with a self-satisfied smirk. “The guy just got nothin’. Singin’ like a cock in the mornin’, but the lyrics don’t got anythin’ we need.”
I sighed, staring at Bill with frustration. The lack of information befitted the man—he had the ropes tied around him so tight and blood trickling down him so often it almost seemed like we were trying to squeeze the life out of him. I wasn’t going to say we would outright kill him, but the thought did cross my mind to just let Tara finish him off in her own way.
“How is it that Falcon has the entire club under lock and key, and yet no one knows where he is?”
“My best guess? He one lonely motherfucka. Ya can’t keep yerself that isolated and not a little mad.”
“Maybe so,” I said. “But he surely has security. Someone who follows him. He’s gotta have someone. The man isn’t a ghost. He’s not—”
My phone buzzed. I pulled it up, an
d though it wasn’t a number saved in my phone, I recognized it immediately.
It was Falcon.
I showed Roost, who grimaced, told me the answer it, and stood close to me.
“What?”
“Derek Knight, I am impressed,” Falcon said. “I watched your skirmish with my men for a little bit of time, you know. I did not think that you would survive the war of attrition, but you have more skill than I thought. I can respect the son of Dominick Knight for having the same guile and intellect the old man did.”
“Don’t you dare fucking mention my father’s name, Falcon, not after what you did to him.”
Falcon just laughed on the other end of the line. I swear, that man could not be broken. Even after we’d destroyed his neighborhood, even after we’d destroyed his four new bases, even after essentially reducing the Falcons to him and perhaps a couple dozen members, he just did not seem to care. He was either a master actor, or a genuine narcissist who believed he could not fail.
“Why not? He and I were once close, you know. I was the last person he saw before he died.”
“Before you killed him.”
“However you want to say it. In any case, Derek, while I am impressed, I also have to say that you have been a bit of a nuisance for me. You see, I was hoping to revitalize my operations, and then you had to go and destroy them all. I had hoped that perhaps you’d take the numerous, endless hints I gave you, some so overt even a child would seen them, but you never did. I even offered you a trade that anyone else in the Saviors would take in a heartbeat—one girl for an entire city. And still, you said no.”
He made a “tsk, tsk” sound on the other end of the line. Roost, able to hear it, had his face go red. I took the chance to look in on the other side of the glass to see a confused expression on Tara’s face, which didn’t make much sense—she was communicating with Bill, who seemed somehow worried and scared, but not because of Tara.
“I have a tremendous amount of patience, even for those who do not listen to me very well, Derek. However, I am not a god. My patience has limits. My patience especially has limits when you blow up and destroy my bases of operations, to say nothing of our product that you stole and have stolen. Such as the whore you call your lover.”
