by A. J. Downey
Wind Therapy
Sacred Hearts PNW Chapter - Book II
A.J. Downey
Contents
BOOK TWO
COPYRIGHT
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Epilogue
Also by A.J. Downey
About the Author
BOOK TWO
Published 2020 by Second Circle Press
Text Copyright © 2020 A.J. Downey
All Rights Reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by an electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. The names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner and are not to be construed as real except where noted and authorized. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events are purely coincidental. Any trademarks, service marks, product names, or names featured are assumed to be the property of their respective owners, and are used only for reference. There is no implied endorsement if any of these terms are used.
The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with or sponsored by the trademark owners.
Editing & book design by Maggie Kern @ Ms.K Edits
Cover art by Dar Albert at Wicked Smart Designs
Dedication
To the survivors. You made it; it was awful. Now it’s time to move on and instead of just surviving, it’s time to start thriving. You can do it.
Chapter One
Maverick…
The ride was long and dusty; the sun punishing and the wind hot. I hated Eastern Washington in the summer. Everything was rolling golden-brown hills and scree, sun-scorched grass and baked rock. Inhospitable, barren, and it happened almost immediately as you got through the pass and it never let up.
I was much happier on the other side of the Cascades where it was green, blue, and the mountainside was a cool and inviting gray. The rock on this side of the mountain range was darker somehow, more like an iron gray; the color difference enough that it even looked hot to the touch. In the summertime, you could see the heat distortion rising from the rock and shale, the shimmer persisting from the asphalt of the interstate as you redirected your attention back to the roadway.
I wanted back on the other side of the mountains something fierce, but that wouldn’t go down until tomorrow at the earliest.
There weren’t enough men left of the Eastern Washington chapter of the SHMC to run it. Almost all of them had been locked up on charges stemming from some dirty dealings unrelated and unbeknownst to the club at large. Personal greed had overwhelmed their loyalties and the price would be steep even though, as of yet, it was undecided what that price would be. I did know some motherfuckers would be out bad before it was all over.
That would come in a few weeks’ time when the club at large made the run out to the annual National Meet at Lake Eversong. It happened once a year, and wasn’t something that was required to attend yearly, but this year – we had to be there. All of us. From Western Washington, Idaho, and Western and Eastern Oregon.
The Eastern Washington chapter had put the entire region of clubs in jeopardy and needed to answer for it. Worse, they needed to answer for what they’d done to the people we were on our way to help now. As far as I was concerned, the pigs could deal with the rest.
We were loaded with all kinds of prescription drugs from up north over the Canadian border. Lifesaving drugs such as insulin and a variety of cardiac meds and even antibiotics. The only thing we didn’t run was narcotic painkillers. There was plenty of that shit flooding the market down here in the states as it was readily available without our help.
We were riding for the Gregson Family Orchard and Farms outside Yakima. There was a permanent camp there for migrant workers and their families. Some of them weren’t even migrants anymore. The permanent structures became permanent residence to a few families that weathered things out year-round on the farms. Those few families sticking around maintained the greenhouses on the property when the orchards weren’t going anymore.
It was a sad sort of place, reminiscent of the old Japanese internment camps, only on a slightly nicer scale. While drab and a little shabby, the buildings that comprised the homes were in good repair for the most part.
We rode carefully down the dirt and gravel track to what we affectionately called the ‘town square’ which was comprised of a ring of some of the original homes. More a cul-de-sac with squared off edges, if you’d like. There was no pavement, just gravel, and the homes here were essentially all mobile homes – rundown and rudimentary but again, kept in as best repair as could be afforded; which considering how hardcore these people relied on us said something about affordability.
Visually, it was appealing; usually kept freshly painted, which was honestly just a lot like putting lipstick on a pig. It was when you got up close that you realized just how badly some of their shit was falling apart. Gutters held up in places with zip ties and penny nails. Washing lines strung up between units while the busted old dryer sat out front rusting with flowers planted in it, growing out the front.
I mean, at least they tried to keep it pretty and looking nice, but there was only so much you could do out here with so very little to do it with.
The residents, mostly older women, and young kids, came out of the mobile homes onto the rough plywood front porches and steps when they heard the bikes approach. Some of the men who were injured would come around. Sometimes, a truck would come from the field with more – but the one we needed to talk to was the camp doctor and the one who held the purse strings.
She was a formidable old lady for sure. We considered her the camp matriarch. The queen of them all, she was respected enough, revered enough, that whatever she said went. I couldn’t help but think that she ruled this place and its people with a modicum of fear because while the respect was there, so too was something else. An inability or unwillingness for some of them to look at her directly, which was sort of a riot.
She couldn’t be more than five foot. Obese, probably with diabetes herself, she was by far not exactly the healthiest among them. Yet even the strongest of the fieldworkers bowed to her will. They called her Abuela, or grandmother, and I got the impression she was just that. Some sort of grandmother to them all, a strange dichotomy of good will – willing to feed everyone and giving the occasional sweet to the kids, while simultaneously containing a hardcore iron will. A woman who shouldn’t be trifled with and who held a ruthlessness to her unmatched by any man here.
That included me and my guys, in her eyes
– but if she only knew. Still, she held the purse strings and hadn’t crossed us yet. So, we let her illusion live and thrive that she had any kind of clout over us. No reason to destroy a perfectly good symbiotic relationship over what would end up tantamount to a dick-measuring contest.
After we’d ironed out the mess that Rebel and the majority of his crew had made of things with these people, we’d been good to go since, and now it’d grown apparent exactly how much fuckery that Rebel and the officers of his chapter had been up to. Some of the members, too. It was only a few of them that’d tried to reach out from behind bars or who were still out and hadn’t let themselves be swept up in his bullshit.
It was giving me headaches. Headaches I didn’t need, but that were on my mind being the closest chapter with the wherewithal to deal with it. Idaho was no help, even though their territory bordered on Eastern Washington’s. They were a smaller outfit than even mine and were fending off an encroaching club from Montana. Idaho was holding their own with that just fine but didn’t have it in them to stretch themselves any thinner and I understood how that went.
So, it was up to me and mine. Eastern Oregon was doing what it could to alleviate things from the southern border, but the truth of the matter was, there wasn’t enough chapter left in Eastern Washington and there weren’t enough members outside of cabinet members in the rest of the Pacific Northwest territories’ chapters to make migration enough of a thing to bulk or recreate Eastern Washington on even a temporary basis until shit could get sorted out.
Eastern Washington was on the verge of collapse and truth be told; Western Washington was ready for that eventuality. We were ready to absorb what members were left in good standing and to make this taking up of the slack a permanent thing if need be. We’d just have to see how the proverbial cookie out here continued to crumble.
Besides, it wasn’t up to me. It was up to the mother chapter. Hence, why the upcoming Lake Eversong Run was a run the remaining chapters of the Pacific Northwest territory were all going to make. We just had to hold out for a couple more weeks now. Labor Day weekend was the traditional date and this year was no exception. Now it was just a matter of figuring out who all was able to make it versus who would stay behind. We didn’t all need to go, but that was for church in the next week – no decisions needed to be made right now.
Right now, it was what had become business as usual. I cut the motor to my bike and the rest of my guys did likewise.
“Welcome.” Abuela sat in an aluminum framed folding lawn chair up on her little front deck, to the side of her open front door. To the other side was one of the only reasons I enjoyed coming here. Her granddaughter was a sight for sore and road-weary eyes.
Slender yet still shapely, she had long straight hair, black as a crow’s wing and falling to her slim waist. She wasn’t always shy about showing that body, either. Today it was a pair of form-fitting jeans. A crop top Mexican peasant blouse showed off her flat stomach, the elastic hugging her ribs, the ruffle of material off her slender shoulders making her collarbones kissable and visible begging for my lips. The white of the blouse made her dusky-tanned skin glow, and the rich red embroidery along the ruffle from shoulder to shoulder added just that little something.
The girl always watched us keenly, something moving just behind her beautiful brown eyes framed in thick, dark lashes. The irises kissed with a honey-golden hue in their depths when the sunlight hit them just right. I loved the glimpse of gold and was always vaguely disappointed when she put up her hand to shade them and that special golden light was snuffed out by shadow.
She was beautiful and there were more than a few times I ended up kicking myself because she was also so fresh faced and young – as in probably close to if not just barely eighteen.
Of course, I was still just barely away from the ripe old age of thirty, so it wasn’t like I was in ‘dirty old pervert’ territory by lusting after a barely legal teen. Although, if she were legal and as interested as her divine stare told me she was, all bets were off. Still, it didn’t do to mix business with pleasure so as I always did on arrival, I put a stranglehold on my fantasies by picturing the fat old bitch that was her grandmother buck-ass naked.
That was enough, usually, to curb my dick’s enthusiasm.
“Marisol,” Abuela said permissively and her granddaughter smiled at me and came down with a glazed earthenware pitcher and a stack of red Solo cups in her other hand.
Lemonade. Marisol had started the tradition our second time out, and it’d become almost a ritual by now. Every time we showed up, we were served lemonade, a short exchange was made, and we took our cash and rode off into the proverbial sunset.
“Many thanks, Abuela,” I said, taking a drink of the cool, sweet but tart and totally refreshing beverage. It seriously hit the spot in the summertime.
Abuela tapped her cane twice on the plywood stoop and one of the men down here on ground level scurried forward with an envelope full of cash, handing it over to me. I tossed back the rest of my lemonade while he tracked across the dusty packed earth and handed him the cup in exchange for the cash.
I sat and counted it while my boys behind me started working the month’s order out of their saddlebags and packs with the good doctor.
“Whoa, hold up boys!” I called and looked up. “You’re short.”
Abuela pursed her lips and her shoulders sank slightly. She looked like an angry toad sitting up there and I raised my eyebrows. We’d worked things out, the price had dropped significantly from what Rebel had been charging, we’d even given over a month and half’s share of the scripts for fuckin’ free to earn back trust but trust went both fuckin’ ways here.
“My grandson, he had to go to the hospital,” she said, and I nodded sagely.
“That’s not my problem,” I answered, and it wasn’t. If I let it slide for every fuckin’ sob story we’d come across, all our asses would be on the line right quick. We had bills to pay back home, too. Our coffers were still suffering from helping Dump Truck and his ol’ lady, Little Bird, last September. This run was supposed to be the run to put us flush again.
“So, unless you plan on comin’ with us and washin’ some dishes or some shit – you’d best make some calls and find that cash.” I was only half joking, but Marisol who was going back up the steps paused and turned halfway, a desperate look in those honey-kissed brown eyes of hers as she said.
“I’ll go, if that’s what you want.”
Chapter Two
Marisol…
The words were out of my mouth before I even knew I had uttered them. Silence rang out as everyone looked at me and I tried to do the opposite of what I wanted to do which was shrink. I straightened my back and lifted my chin.
“I can do whatever you want me to do,” I said. “Work off the debt. Just please, my brother needs that medicine.”
My little brother was seven, going on eight, and he was on an insulin pump. He needed that medicine. He would die without it, and he was the only thing I had left in this world that I cared about.
The wretched old woman who cared for us after my dad, then my mother, had died was indeed our grandmother – my father’s mother, but she certainly wasn’t any familia of mine.
“How old are you?” their leader demanded, and I raised my chin, defiantly.
“Twenty,” I answered, and it was almost true. Just a couple more months.
He looked me up and down with those dark blue eyes of his, his gaze electric and raising the fine hairs on the backs of my arms and behind my neck. I didn’t flinch.
“Oh, yeah? Let’s see some ID,” he said, and I cursed silently but produced the rectangle of laminated tough material out of my back pocket and went to him with it. His eyes connected with mine and I tried to keep the desperation out of my eyes, my heart crying out, Please! Please take me with you!
He gave me a sharp look, and my heart squeezed painfully in my chest. I was scared he would call me out on my age, that he would spit on the ground a
nd call me a liar and that would be it. I could see the cold calculation in his eyes and I just wanted him to please, please say yes. Take me away from this place and these people to someplace populated where I could find something, anything, to do other than live under Abuela’s thumb.
I wanted a better life, away from here, where I could get a place, a life of my own and eventually bring my little brother to live with me.
“I could use an extra set of hands for something for the next month,” he said. “She wants to go; I can bring her back on the next run – we’ll see if she can square the debt in that time.”
Something in my chest loosened and I tried not to sag with relief.
“No,” Abuela said, and I turned.
“Why not?” I snarled in Spanish. “Why not sell me to the Gringos? It’s not like I have a use for you anyway!”
She opened her mouth. “I said, no.” Her tone held the sharp edge of finality and I turned my face so I wouldn’t have to look at her for whatever cruelty was about to come out of her fat mouth next. “You don’t want this girl. She is nothing but trouble. You could pick any girl here for whatever you want—”
Maverick’s calm, cool voice cut her off, “I did. I picked her.” To me, he said, “Go pack some shit, put on some better shoes, and make it fuckin’ quick, we got someplace to be.”
