- Chig
Brenna held the letter in her hand, the paper trembling slightly, as her eyes stared unfocused into the middle distance. She and Kyle had talked and argued for hours about what the letter meant for them. The two of them, usually so in sync about most things, found themselves looking at one another over a wide chasm. Brenna wanted nothing to do with the club, still nursing a lingering resentment at how they had treated Kyle as a traitor and her as a spy. Kyle at first seemed to be in agreement with her. But eventually, he began talking of redemption and healing old wounds. Listening to him talk, Brenna realized little by little that a part of him had never completely left Crystal Spring, despite the years and the miles that separated them from their home town.
Deep in the pit of her stomach, Brenna knew that she couldn’t keep Kyle from making the decision to go back. So many years after they had left, they had finally settled somewhere for good, she had thought -- had finally stopped looking over their shoulders worried that their past might catch up with them. And now, it had. What was more, Brenna knew that if Kyle was going back, she was, too. And in returning to Crystal Spring, they would be leaving everything they had built together and literally returning to their past. To a place that didn’t even know they were alive anymore.
Brenna hoped their future could withstand it.
Chapter Two
“Tallie!” Spider’s voice echoed tinnily through the unexpectedly spotty reception of her cell phone. Even so, his tone was urgent, businesslike; she could tell that much.
“What is it?” she asked guardedly. “What’s wrong?”
“Chig’s in the hospital again,” came the reply. “I guess this last round of chemo took him down pretty hard. Mom just called and said his heart was racing out of control, so she called the ambulance and had him brought in. They’re trying to stabilize his heartbeat, and they’ve got him on oxygen and a saline drip to keep him hydrated.”
Tallie could hear the tone of worry in Spider’s voice. For a moment, all the tension that had been between them for the past few days fell away, and it was just the two of them: a team. Spider’s father had been battling lung cancer for the past six months, and recently things had taken a definite turn for the worse. Though Chig was undergoing chemotherapy treatments, everyone involved – including Chig himself -- knew deep down that it was only a matter of time before he succumbed to the disease. Tallie’s heart sank for Spider as she considered that this might be the beginning of the end. She knew first-hand what it was like to lose a parent, having lost both of hers – her mother to multiple sclerosis, her father after having being hit by a car while crossing the street a few years later.
Tallie turned away from the laundry she had been folding and focused on Spider. Her voice gentle, she asked, “What can I do?”
A short silence followed, and Tallie knew that Spider was lost in thought. “Uh… Could you go down there and check on Mom for me? I got some club business to take care of. I can’t get away for a little while.”
Tallie nodded. “Sure. Of course. I’ll take off in a few minutes. Anything else?”
“No, that’s it.” Irrationally, Tallie waited for some word of tenderness or intimacy from Spider, but of course, none came. The objective of his phone call accomplished, his tone once again turned businesslike, impersonal. “Okay. I gotta go. Call me if you learn anything about Chig.”
A wave of anger and despair rose up inside Tallie, but she fought to contain it. “Okay,” she half-whispered. Then she listened as a soft click on the other end of the line signified that Spider had disconnected, without so much as a goodbye. Tallie sank down on the living room couch and set the phone down beside her. She took three or four deep breaths and fought back the tears that threatened to well up inside her and come flooding out. Don’t do it, she told herself fiercely. She had cried too much already. She knew from experience that tears didn’t change anything. If they did, everything she had wished for would have come true. Spider would be here beside her now, instead of who knows where, off on club business that she knew nothing about. Tallie thought back to three years ago, when she and Spider had first realized they were in love. They had overcome so much – so many lies, so much history – to be together. And now, it seemed like something had broken between them, and she had no idea how to fix it.
Suddenly exhausted, she nonetheless stood up, looking around for her purse and keys. And now, she thought bitterly, she was off to take up the slack for Spider on the other end. If there was one thing she’d learned in the past three years as the old lady of the Fugitives’ vice-president, it was that even now, everything always came back to the club.
* * *
Spider pressed the ‘end’ button on his phone and slipped it distractedly into his pocket. Relief mingled with a stab of guilt as he strapped on his helmet and pressed the ignition on his Harley. Spider knew his mom, Deanie, was having a really rough time with his dad’s relapse, and it would be a huge relief to her to have Tallie there. The two women got along like a house on fire. Had since the beginning. Tallie’s calm, capable manner with all sorts of difficult medical issues might have stemmed from a childhood spent with a mother gravely ill with multiple sclerosis, or it might have been because she had gone to college for veterinary science. Either way, her quiet competence exerted a soothing influence on Spider’s normally dramatic mother. Spider was extremely thankful for Tallie. She had become part of his family almost seamlessly, and Spider knew that Deanie thought of her like a daughter.
Another pang of guilt stabbed at him as he throttled up and turned left onto the highway toward the clubhouse. Tallie’s face appeared in his mind’s eye as he drove, and he pushed the image away with a frown. She deserved better than he was giving her. He knew that. For the last three years, she had been his lover, his soul mate, his constant companion. She had been more understanding about the needs of the club than he had any right to expect. And for her troubles, instead of giving her the love and support she deserved, he had grown distant with her. Hard. Emotionless. Spider wondered, with a spike of panic edged with resignation, how long it would be before she left him. He knew she wasn’t happy; any fool could see it in her eyes. Knowing that he was the one who put that look there broke Spider’s heart. But despite his constant promises to himself to do better, whenever he was face to face with her, his resolve failed him. All he could see now, when he looked at Tallie, was his best friend Gonzo’s face.
The ambush that had killed Gonzo Hendricks was almost ten years past when Spider had met Gonzo’s sister, Tallie. Of course, he hadn’t known it was Tallie at the time. The crazy girl had shown up in Crystal Spring one day all alone and had gotten a job waitressing at Teasers, the strip club owned and operated by the Fugitives motorcycle club. Tally had covered up her identity, calling herself Tina so that no one would know she was related to Gonzo -- or that she had an ulterior motive for trying to get close to the club. Though Spider hadn’t known it at the time, Tallie had come back to Crystal Spring with a half-formed idea to make the Fugitives pay for what had happened to her brother. For taking him away from her family, and letting him get killed. She had blamed the Fugitives for her brother’s abandoning his family and causing their parents so much pain. She also indirectly blamed the club for her mother’s death from pneumonia hitting her weakened lungs, and then her father’s depression and ultimately death. In Tallie’s mind, she saw the Fugitives as the reason she no longer had a family, and she planned to make them pay.
When Spider had met Tallie, she looked nothing like the gangly, coltish ten year-old she had been when he had last seen her at Gonzo’s funeral. In place of that skinny, intelligent-looking girl, Tina Andrews a.k.a. Tallie Hendricks was a stunning, natural blonde with legs that wouldn’t quit and a wide, straight smile. From the first time he saw her that night at Teasers, he wondered what she was doing in a place like Crystal Spring. She clearly was cut out for better things than waitressing at a strip club. Despite her attempts to seem ditzy and vacant, the
keen intelligence in her emerald green eyes betrayed her. In spite of himself, Spider, who generally shied away from any sort of serious, non-sexual interaction with the club whores, found himself drawn to her. He found that he wanted to tease out her thoughts -- to hear her melodious voice and her rare, tinkling laugh. He wanted it almost as much as he wanted to crush his lips down on hers and then bend her over a bar table and fuck her senseless.
Tallie was like a magnet; he couldn’t stay away. Unlike the other women who hung around the club, whenever one of the Fugitives began sniffing around Tallie, Spider couldn’t bear the thought of anyone else having her. Somehow, he always managed to coax them off her before things went too far. Thankfully, Spider had just been voted in as vice-president around the time Tallie showed up, so his authority was secure, his word a command. When Spider smilingly encouraged someone to back off, they backed off.
Almost in spite of himself, Spider had fallen for Tallie. At nearly thirty years old, he had been with hundreds of women, but had never kept one around for longer than a couple of months. Even with those he slept with the longest, he always knew they were temporary, whether they had known it or not. But with Tallie, from their first frantic, lust-fueled moments together, it was as though a road had opened up in front of him, stretching endlessly toward the horizon. As he drove along now toward the club, he remembered the explosive heat of their first time, the way their bodies seemed made for one another, hard to soft, passion for passion. Their cries of pleasure and ecstasy had mingled as they found their release together. From that moment, there was only Tallie.
Well… Tina.
When she had finally told him – confessed to him – who she really was, what her plan had really been, Spider’s world had shattered. Having never given his heart to any woman before, the pain that sliced through him at the thought that she had been lying to him -- using him -- was devastating, more painful than any actual blade could ever have been. Spider had grown up immersed in the culture of the club, where eye for an eye justice was the rule, and loyalty was expected to be unwavering. At first, all he could understand was her betrayal, which felt absolute and unforgivable. He had immediately walked away, convinced that this was his only choice. As with any bond that proved less than one-hundred percent trustworthy, he thought, the best thing to do was to kill it.
But in the weeks that followed Spider’s rupture with Tallie, he had discovered that he could not let her go in his mind. And that the more he thought about her – about who she was, what she had come from – the stronger his urge to forgive her. Spider had discovered something stronger than justice: he had discovered love.
And so, he went to her. And Tallie Hendricks, his best friend’s sister, became Spider’s old lady.
And then, just when he had believed his life was perfect – just when he had found his soul mate, and could finally put the past to rest – he found himself thinking more about Gonzo’s death than he had in years. Tallie’s face, little things she did and said, would bring back a memory of Gonzo, and Spider would think back to that time more than ten years ago. To things he had never told Tallie. About how her brother had died, and why.
The story Spider had told Tallie was that Gonzo had died in an ambush, and that he had been shot in the chest in an ambush with a rival club, the Aztecs, over a weapons haul. That much was true. He had also told her that he had been there when Gonzo died.
Why he had lied to her about that, he had no idea. Maybe because he had wanted to be there, had always blamed himself for not being able to protect his friend.
Maybe because, deep in his heart, he knew that Gonzo was gone because the club had already turned against him. They had sacrificed him because they questioned his loyalty, thought him a traitor. And Spider had, too.
Gonzo and Spider had been best friends throughout high school. Spider had been the one to introduce Gonzo to the club. The two young men prospected with the Fugitives at the same time. They had gotten patched as full club members on the same day. Spider’s father was the president and a charter member of the club going back to the 1970s. Even as a child, Spider had always hoped in the back of his mind that he would eventually be president himself someday. And once he was a prospect and then later a newly patched club member, Spider always imagined Gonzo as his VP.
And then, Gonzo had met Brenna Connor. Brenna was the daughter of Bear Connor -- the mayor of Crystal Spring, and a pompous, devious son of a bitch. It wouldn’t have been so bad, Spider thought ruefully, if Gonzo had just begun banging Brenna. Rich country club pussy did have a certain appeal, if only for a change of pace. But instead, Gonzo had made the mistake of falling in love with her. And unfortunately, at around the same time, the club had started getting heat from the local authorities.
One day, Brenna had come around to the old clubhouse on the other side of town, where the Fugitives used to own a bar called the Iron Horse. She told Gonzo that she had overheard a conversation between her father the mayor and the local police chief. According to Brenna, Bear Connor was going to get Chief Rubensen to dig up some shit to blackmail the Fugitives. The idea was to get the club to sell the bar and the land to a local real estate developer, who wanted to build a development adjacent to the lot the Iron Horse was on. Gonzo came to the club with the information Brenna had given him. But to the rest of the club, Spider included, it looked damn suspicious that Brenna Connor was all of a sudden getting cozy with a club member and giving him secrets that would betray her own father. Most of the club members didn’t buy the story. After that, everything Gonzo tried to tell them that Brenna warned him about just made the club more suspicious.
Eventually, some of the club members started wondering whether Brenna had turned Gonzo. Murmurs in dark corners of the clubhouse speculated that he was a traitor, instead of just operating with his pussy goggles on. Spider himself began to wonder whether Gonzo hadn’t begun to be pulled in a direction that would lead him to eventually betray the club. When the police did an unexpected raid on the Iron Horse and the clubhouse one day, they found a quarter kilo of crack cocaine. The club didn’t deal crack, and it was obvious someone had planted it. When tongues began to whisper about who it had been, Gonzo’s name came up more than once. Then, a day or two later, someone set fire to the bar, destroying it completely in what was clearly a deliberate act and a message.
It was around this tense and troubled time that a problem came up with a gun shipment that the Fugitives had delivered to the Vipers, another club in the area. The Vipers were pissed about something that had gone wrong with the previous shipment, and someone from the club needed to go out their way and deliver a peace offering. Gonzo volunteered for the run, and said he was willing to go alone. Chig had agreed to let Gonzo do the run by himself, which was unusual. But given the bad blood between Gonzo and many of the other club members by that point, sending Gonzo alone had probably seemed preferable to Chig than to send him with someone and risk an incident.
On the night of the run, the call went out to the Fugitives that the van Gonzo had driven to deliver the shipment to the Vipers had been ambushed, and that Gonzo was gone. The amount of blood found in and around the van was so copious that the only conclusion left to draw was that Gonzo had been shot to death on the way back. The Vipers had sworn up and down that they had nothing to do with it. The body was never recovered. Uncharacteristically for the club, Chig did not order an investigation into who had done it so that the responsible parties could be made to pay. No one had argued with his lack of action, and the memory of Gonzo had been quietly put to rest. A few days later, they heard through the grapevine that Brenna Connor had disappeared, and that despite her father’s efforts to find her, it looked like she was gone for good.
In the years since Gonzo’s death, Spider had come to regret his own actions, and especially his inaction, more than anything else he had ever done in his life. Chig had sent Gonzo out on that job without protection, and Gonzo had been killed without a brother there to fight with him. The club he
had sworn an oath to -- the brothers he had sworn to protect to the death -- had sacrificed him, even though Gonzo’s loyalty to the club had always been absolute. Gonzo had brought them information that they were in danger, and the club had brushed him off. Ultimately, they had dismissed him as a traitor, and Spider had stood by and watched it happen. And now, Gonzo was dead, his only crime having fallen in love with a woman who loved him back.
Spider had struggled with the guilt over betraying his best friend for many years. When he met Tallie, before he had known who she was, he had told her a version of the story that made Spider look like a better man than he was. He couldn’t bear to say the truth out loud. If he was honest with himself, he would admit that he couldn’t quite bear to admit to the woman whose love and respect he craved that he had betrayed and abandoned his best friend. Then, when Tallie had told him who she really was, and he had come to terms with it, it had felt as though the universe was giving him a chance to make up for his betrayal of Gonzo. To protect his friend’s sister, to do right by her.
At first.
But then, little by little, the dreams began. His sleeping mind took him back in the night to when Gonzo had still been alive, giving him the chance to symbolically make different choices from the ones he had made in real life. But he never did. Over and over again, he let Gonzo go by himself into the ambush, never to return. Sometimes, Spider was there like an invisible ghost, witnessing his friend being beaten and tortured while he looked on powerless. In other versions of the dream, Gonzo did return from the run, emerging from the van like a zombie: covered in blood but still -- Spider knew -- horribly, horribly dead.
Fugitives MC Page 18
