by Jessie Cooke
His thoughts drifted way back to when they were little, playing with their toy motorcycles and pretending like they were president and vice president of the club, while other kids were in preschool learning how to get along with “normal” people in society. By the time they were six they both had bikes that looked like motorcycles and they carried little toy guns in their saddle bags. Everyone thought it was as cute as hell when they pulled those guns out and pretended to shoot at rival clubs. When they were ten they stole some of Cody’s dad’s weed and got stoned for the first time. No one found out about that, although Cody wasn’t sure that back then anyone would have cared. Keller caught them getting drunk when they were twelve. That netted them a half hour lecture on what alcoholism does to people and Keller asking them if they wanted to turn out like Cody’s dad. Cody almost smiled then at the thought of his brother. Keller was born good. Some people had just the right amount of morals from the beginning of their lives, even before they were taught them or were old enough to figure out what’s acceptable in society and what’s not. Keller was always one of those people. Cody should have followed Keller’s lead, but instead he always looked up to the men in the club who saw what they wanted and figured out how to get it, even if that meant they just took it from someone else. He learned how to be a man around a bunch of eight-year-olds in thirty-year-old bodies before going to prison and running into more of the same. When he thought about it, it was a wonder he didn’t end up in prison a lot sooner than he had. That was wholly thanks to Keller and Dax.
Dax was gone inside for about fifteen minutes when Nolan took a call and then looked at the others and said, “Prez says we can step off and stretch our legs. He just doesn’t want anyone so far from their bike that they can’t be on the back of it and in motion, like that.” He snapped his fingers and the men nodded as they all climbed off their bikes. Cody looked back toward the warehouse and wondered again what was going on inside. None of this seemed as legit as he had heard Dax was trying to make the club.
He saw Jimmy standing a few feet away from his bike under a tree, lighting a joint. He decided to kill two birds with one stone, find out if Jimmy knew anything about him and Macy and see if he could get him to tell him anything about what was going on there. Jimmy watched him walk over, expressionless and quietly toking on the joint. When he got close Cody said:
“Can I have a hit?”
Jimmy surprised him by smiling. “Of the joint or my face?” Close up, Cody could still see a shadow of a bruise on the other man’s jaw. He suppressed his own smile and said:
“The joint, for now.”
Jimmy chuckled and handed him the joint. Cody took a long hit off it and, holding the smoke in his mouth and lungs, handed it back to Jimmy. Cody got a sudden sense of déjà vu. When he and Jimmy were kids, they didn’t always get along. Cody’s hot head and Jimmy’s stubborn nature had led them to more than one fist fight over the years. Cody used to be a lot smaller and for the most part, Jimmy kicked his ass. But the one thing all their fights had in common, was that an hour, a day, or a week later, they’d be standing side by side again, acting like it had never happened. Cody knew this fight was far from over but for just a second it was nice to stand next to his best friend and not feel angry.
“So what are we doing here?” he said, keeping his eyes on the others to make sure no one else was close enough to hear.
Jimmy shook his head and handed the joint to Cody. “No idea. I’m just a prospect. They don’t tell me anything. I just do what I’m told.”
Cody nodded. “Just looks important. Makes me wonder why Dax let me come.”
Jimmy shrugged. They stood there smoking for a few minutes in silence and then he said, “Word is that the Irish Mayhem make most of their money fencing and laundering. I’ve heard they also take contract kills for outsiders, but no club worth their salt is going to hire someone else to do their killing for them.”
Cody wondered if anyone else found it funny how casually they talked about things like killing. He knew Jimmy was right about that, however. If Dax did need someone killed, he sure as hell wouldn’t hire an outsider to do it. “Fencing? Like selling stolen goods?”
“Yep. They’re from some shit-ass small town in West Virginia but they live like fucking kings. They’re one of the richest clubs in New England because they charge an arm and a leg for their services.”
“Hmm—I thought Dax was taking this club in a new direction. You have to wonder what kind of ‘laundering’ or ‘fencing’ a legitimate business would need.”
“Just don’t wonder that out loud in front of anyone but me,” Jimmy said, handing him back the joint. “Dax does what he needs to do in order to keep this club and everyone in it alive. I think sometimes what he has to do conflicts with what he promised his old lady he would do. Those are the times like today when only a handful of guys he trusts the most ride with him. I’ve seen more than one prospect lose their patch in the last year for opening their mouths about one of these rides. He takes me because I keep my mouth shut. I owe him way too much to ever be that stupid. Maybe this ride is a test for you, since he knows you’re looking to become a prospect.”
Cody handed Jimmy the joint and with a grin he said, “I owe Dax just as much as you do, if not more. Prospect or not, I’d never open my mouth and risk this club.” He chuckled then and said, “I was wondering if it was a test to see if the two of us could ride together without killing each other. At least we passed that one.”
Jimmy chuckled and dropped the butt on the ground. As he ground it into the dirt he grinned and said, “The day ain’t over yet.”
8
Macy had spent the past three days trying not to look Jimmy in the eye. She’d managed to make an excuse and somehow get out of sex with him too, but she knew full well that wasn’t going to last forever. She wasn’t sure what was going on, but Dax had something brewing and he was keeping Jimmy busy that week. But, when things calmed down, Jimmy was going to want sex. As long as she chose to live with him, saying no wasn’t really an option. She’d been relieved that morning when she woke up and Jimmy was getting ready to go on a ride with Dax. She was hoping that a day to herself, doing mundane things around the house, would be what she needed to clear her head.
Macy had grown up in the club. She knew that club girls had multiple sex partners and no one seemed to care, but she’d just never been able to wrap her head around that. As she watched her mother being passed from one man to the other and her father never having the backbone to stand up and claim her as his own, all Macy’d ever wanted was one man that loved her above all. She thought that would be Cody when she was a kid. He was never impressed with the way the men passed women around either. Then when Cody was gone and Jimmy stood by her when she felt like she had no one else, she’d thought it was going to be him. As far as she knew, Jimmy wasn’t fucking anyone else, but here she was…Miss Self-Righteous, living with one man and fucking another…and it was eating her alive. She felt so guilty about it that she had almost slipped up and told Callie, one of the club girls that she worked with at the veterinarian’s office twice a week. Callie had noticed her mood and asked about it, and it had been on the tip of her tongue. But she thought about her mother again. Nobody in the club had any respect for her. She had been thought of as just another outlet by most of the men in the club. When she overdosed, effectively taking her own life, Macy was ten years old. Her father barely batted an eye and as far as Macy knew, he never shed a tear. The thought of dying all alone with no one that cared, like her mother had, was more frightening to her than the idea of dying itself. She decided she couldn’t tell anyone. It would be another deep, dark secret that she kept to herself. She could only pray that Cody felt the same way…about everyone knowing. She also prayed for the strength to say no if he ever wanted to do it again.
She finally pulled herself out of bed and after her shower she set about straightening up the house and doing laundry. She was almost finished with the second load of la
undry when her phone rang. She didn’t recognize the number but she answered it anyways. When Jimmy went on his “rides” with Dax, she always worried. It was better now that the club wasn’t in a war with the Sinners any longer, but you still never knew what they were going to get themselves into.
“Hello?”
“Hi, is this Macy Linden?”
“Yes, who is this?”
“This is Bobbie. I’m a bartender over at Spirits.”
The mention of the bar where she had sex with Cody in the bathroom automatically caused her stomach to clench. “Um…okay…”
“I found a wallet in the bathroom when I was cleaning the day before yesterday. It had your I.D. in it, but I didn’t know how to get ahold of you until today. I’m afraid maybe someone stole your money out of it, though. There isn’t any cash in it.”
“Oh! Well, I doubt that I had much in there, if any. I probably just dropped it. Thank you. How did you know how to reach me?”
“Oh, there was a guy here that night, I remembered seeing your boyfriend talking to him.”
“My boyfriend, Jimmy?”
“Jimmy? Oh, no…I thought you were with that other guy, Cody or something.” She was quiet for a minute and Macy had a flashback of a waitress looking knowingly at her as she snuck out of the bathroom that night, right after Cody had. Shit! The waitress knew what they were doing in there, and now she also knew that Cody wasn’t Macy’s boyfriend. Shit!
“So this guy told you to call Cody?”
“No—I mean, well, he didn’t mention any names. He said the guy had given him a ride that night and given him his number. He said to call him and he’d know how to reach you. That boyfriend stuff was my assumption, I guess. I’m sorry.” Well, now, she probably assumes that I’m a slut, Macy thought. Then she thought about Jimmy. He liked Spirits when he wanted a night away from the ranch. Now that this waitress knew Macy was obviously fucking someone other than her boyfriend, how long would it be before he found out? This was exactly why Macy hated to lie. The truth always came out.
“Okay, I’ll be down to pick it up in a while. Thank you.”
She put the phone down and stood with her back to the counter with her hand over her fluttering belly. That brought back a flashback from eight years before…the day she’d gotten the call that Cody had pled guilty and he was going away, for fifteen long years. She’d stood just like that, with her hand on her belly…but that was for different reasons. She had to go and pick up her wallet and then she’d have to figure out what she was going to tell Jimmy when he got home. Her ideas about having a productive day were quickly unraveling.
Cody had forgotten about his meeting with parole. They made it back to town after Dax’s “meeting,” right before two p.m. Dax and the guys headed straight for Spirits and Cody went with them. It was only when he stepped off the bike in front of the little bar that he remembered what day it was.
“Shit!”
“What?” Dax asked him.
“I have to meet my parole officer today.”
Dax looked at his watch. “At what time?”
“In half an hour. I almost forgot.”
“You need to write it down somewhere. If you don’t show up, they’ll be coming out to the ranch looking for you.”
“I will,” Cody promised. He got back on the bike and as he was pulling away Dax yelled:
“And don’t get stopped on that bike! We’ll get you to the DMV tomorrow.” Cody gave him a thumbs up before dropping his sunglasses and pulling out onto the street. He hoped that his parole agent wasn’t a hardass. He’d heard stories while he was inside about some of the guys ending up homeless because their parole agent didn’t want them living with their club…or they kept having the cops raid it because the felon lived there, and causing shit within the club. He told himself all the way there that he had to check his temper at the door. All that was going to get him was another ticket back to that hellhole he’d grown up in.
He parked a little way away from the state building and planned on telling his PO, if they asked, that he’d been dropped off. He entered the large reception area, filled with people, and took a number like the sign told him to do. He was about to take a seat when a petite blonde with huge brown eyes stuck her head out of one of the doors and called his name.
He got up and went toward her. When he was standing in front of her he said, “I’m Cody Miller.”
The pretty young woman looked him over and then stepped back and opened the door wider. He wasn’t surprised that she was dressed in the same black polo shirt and black jeans as everyone else there, but he was surprised that the gold embroidered stitching said, “S. Hoffman, Parole.” S. Hoffman was the name on the papers his CCI had given him when he got out of prison. He’d just assumed that his parole agent was a man. He had surely not considered that she might be a drop-dead gorgeous blonde.
“Serina Hoffman,” she said. “Follow me.” She had a no-nonsense tone to her voice and she walked with a confident air, not the least bit intimidated by the fact that a convicted felon twice her size was at her back. He’d known petite correctional officers when he was locked up, but he’d never seen one turn her back on an inmate. He supposed it was different in her line of work. Everyone out here was looking for that second chance, and assaulting your parole officer sure as hell wasn’t going to get you any points.
She led him into a small office at the end of the hallway and took her seat behind the desk. She looked surprised when she noticed he was still standing. “Sit down.” He sat in the black leather chair opposite her and glanced around. The office was not only cramped, it was messy. There were books and files everywhere, and she had to move folders and envelopes off her computer keyboard to pull up his information. “Okay, so first things first,” she said, making a few clicks on the keyboard. “Where are you staying?”
“I’m in Hanover…”
“Where? Give me an address.” Cody gave her the address of the ranch and she typed it in and then made a face at the computer. “The Southside Skulls? You’re living on that compound out there?”
“Um…well, it’s not a compound really, it’s a ranch…”
“Oh, so you wrangle cattle?”
“No.”
“Grow vegetables?”
“Um, I don’t think so…”
“Slop the pigs?” She was being sarcastic, and suddenly Cody didn’t find her as attractive as he initially had.
“No. I don’t do any of that.”
“Doesn’t sound like much of a ranch, then. Let’s call it what it is, shall we? Dax Marshall has built a pretty nice setup out there for his club to hide from the world, or at least the world of law enforcement…”
“His old lady is a cop,” Cody said. He wasn’t sure why he’d said that, but his PO didn’t look impressed.
“She was a cop. She’s not a cop anymore because she fell in love with an outlaw biker. Last I heard, she was studying to be an attorney. That’s kind of fitting.”
Cody was beginning to get annoyed. His CCI knew he was planning on living on the ranch, at least for a while. He didn’t have anywhere else to go. Why this bitch was giving him a hard time was beyond him. “Is there a problem with me living on the ranch?” he asked.
“I guess that remains to be seen,” she said. She pulled open a drawer and pulled out a Ziploc baggie with a plastic cup inside. “Here,” she said, handing it to him. “Go piss for me.”
“I wasn’t in on drug charges.”
“Did I ask if you were? Every one of my inmates proves to me that they’re clean every time I see them. You have a problem with that, Miller?”
He thought about the joint he’d just shared with Jimmy earlier. He didn’t have a problem with it, but she might. He didn’t say anything however; he just took the cup and stood up. “Where at?” he asked.
“Out this door and to the right. First door on the left. Don’t turn on the water and don’t flush the toilet. Leave the sample in the bathroom. You can wash you
r hands in the hallway.”
Cody went across the hall to the bathroom, the whole way fuming about the way she talked to him. He got treated better by the guards that took care of him in prison. It was going to be hard for him to not tell this bitch to go fuck herself. He pissed in the cup, put the lid on it, and left it on the wooden counter before leaving the room and washing his hands in the hallway. When he got back into her office she was staring at the computer again. She didn’t look at him or wait for him to sit down before saying, “Do you have a job yet? And by job, I don’t mean polishing bikes for Dax Marshall or being a gofer…”
“I get it,” Cody said. “No, I don’t have a job yet.”
“What are you planning on doing?”
“I don’t know. I never had a job before I went in.” She looked up at him then and he thought he might see just a slight bit of empathy in her eyes. It was so slight as to almost be invisible or imagined.
“Well, you better start filling out some applications for flipping burgers or something. The next time I see you, I want you to have a job.”
“Okay.” Cody almost asked her what her problem was…why she was talking to him like he was a piece of shit…but it would have been redundant. Even before he went to prison, that was the way people in the community talked to him. It was one reason why he wanted so badly to ride with the MC. The Skulls demanded respect, and respect was one thing Cody had never fully achieved from anyone. When Keller was alive Cody was a full-fledged fuck-up. In prison, he was protected by the affiliates of the club, but they did that because of the respect they felt for Dax, not him. Outside, the community wasn’t making any secret of how they felt about the club and its members, and apparently his parole agent wasn’t going to either.
