by Lucas, Helen
I saw her arms were covered with track marks. My heart broke for the girl.
“Misty, you know that there are… Agencies… People… Lots of people who could help you.”
Mistry shook her head.
“I already went through the system and they didn’t give a fuck about me. Why should they care about me now?”
I didn’t have a good answer for that, I suppose. I pressed on, though.
“Misty, what Fatman is doing… It’s not right.”
Mistry just shrugged.
“This is what I’m doing. I’ll just keep doing it. So long as I can keep getting high.”
She paused and looked off at the group of bikers, at Fatman in particular, who stood in the middle—no, actually, he was sitting on a tree stump—laughing and knocking back a can of Miller High Life. And at eight in the morning, no less. He chased it with a fistful of bacon and I damn near threw up in my mouth.
“But you know it’s not right, Misty. You should be in school. You should be… Somewhere else. What he’s doing isn’t right.”
She just shrugged.
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
I couldn’t force her, I supposed. I stalked away from her and back to the group.
Fang noticed me and broke off.
“Everything all right?”
“No, obviously not. But Misty—did you know she’s sixteen?”
Fang shrugged.
“So? Lots of us got involved when we were sixteen or even younger.”
“She’s a minor and Fatman is keeping her as a sex slave. I need to call protective services.”
Fang grabbed me by the shoulders.
“Claire, don’t you fucking dare. Don’t shut this operation down like that. If you do, we’re dead.”
I closed my eyes.
“I don’t like this, Fang. I don’t like lying to myself like this. I don’t like playing this biker girl persona.”
“You don’t have to do it for much longer. We’re setting out for Atlanta tomorrow. They’ve got guns and C-4 ready to go back at the clubhouse. Selling it to some right-wing terrorist cell.”
My eyes widened.
“Jesus Christ. This is it.”
“Right. This could be our chance to take everything down. And then protective services can get Misty under their wing.”
I took a deep breath.
“Fine. I’ll wait till after the sting. But if anything fucking goes wrong, I’ll kill you on her behalf.”
“That’s fine. We’ll probably both be dead anyway.”
As one of the old ladies, I was assigned to clean up after the bonfire. It was a filthy, disgusting, thankless job but the other girls seemed happy with it. I couldn’t bring myself to talk to them. I just kept thinking about Misty’s sad, dull eyes.
A few minutes into the job, I felt a presence behind me. I glanced over my shoulder and saw Fatman, chest heaving, sweaty and leering, peering down at me as I picked up bits of broken glass.
“Well, aren’t you a little fucking girl scout…” he murmured.
“I don’t want anyone to get cut on the glass,” I said lamely, unwilling to look up at him. I focused on my task, collecting as much as I could of the shattered glass in my hand without cutting myself.
“Girl scout,” Fatman murmured. “You can do a whole lot more good down there.”
And he began to unzip his pants. I glanced over at the other Damned. They were leaning on their bikes, chatting, none of them looking over at us. And the other old ladies were ignoring completely what was going on.
“Listen,” Fatman whispered. “I know the truth about Fang.”
“What truth?” I growled back.
“He’s a Fed mole. I’ve known it for months. And if you don’t want me to stick a bowie knife in his kidneys this very minute, you had better close your eyes and open your mouth. Because daddy’s got a lollipop for you.”
I wanted to puke on him right then and there, and I very nearly did. I couldn’t believe that he knew Fang was a mole. I couldn’t believe he was trying to blackmail me into doing this.
“You’ve got till the count of three,” Fatman sneered, his voice like searing oil being poured all over my face. “One… Two…”
I reached up and began to slide his jeans down. But before I could get any farther, a voice interrupted us.
“Daddy, I want to get high.”
It was Misty. Fatman grinned.
“Baby doll, daddy’s busy.”
“I wanna’ get high and I want daddy to do the no-no thing to me,” Misty said, affecting a saccharine little girl impression that made my blood run cold. “Daddy doesn’t even need to use lube on his baby girl. Just kept me high first, daddy.”
Fatman cackled.
“All these bitches can’t keep their hands off me,” he said, waddling over to Misty. He glanced back at me.
“Remember what I said. Remember what lives underground, what’s blind, what gets eaten up by snakes…”
What the hell was he talking about?
Right. A mole.
FANG
After a stop at the clubhouse, we set off upstate, riding like hell through Florida. Claire was on the back of my bike the entire time, but neither of us spoke—not that we could have really communicated over the roar of the air rushing past us on the highway.
We stopped in a few little towns along the way and did the usual hell-raising—running roughshod all over little bars, drinking up all their booze, eating up all their food, leaving a soiled bra as payment.
Even while the chaos took its course, Claire avoided me, wouldn’t speak to me. Did she feel my betrayal of Fred as acutely as I did? I couldn’t justify it to myself and I couldn’t blame her if she didn’t want to talk to me.
Finally, though, we came out of Florida and into Georgia. The terrorist group who were supposed to meet up with, the White Dawn, was mostly a bunch of right-wing nut jobs—the kind who can’t go five minutes without talking about how the Jews are running the world banking system so they can destroy America or some shit like that. It definitely chilled my blood to be selling them not just weapons—they can mostly get that shit anywhere—but explosives.
But money is money. And hopefully, once the Feds took the Damned down, they’d take these assholes down too.
The only time Claire spoke to me the entire time we were in Florida was when she pulled me aside to tell me that she had spoken to Doug.
“He’s getting things ready for the sting. Atlanta knows everything we do now. It should be ready by the time we get there—we just have to keep our shit together and not give anything away until the deal goes down.”
I nodded.
“Really? Just like that?”
She shrugged.
“We’ve done the hard part already. I’ve got plenty of evidence to point to in court. I could have arrested damn near everyone here at this point. But this way, we’ll be able to seize assets, send Fatman to jail for the rest of his natural life…”
I knew the spiel. I knew how it worked.
“I just have a bad feeling about this,” I said, shaking my head.
“You should,” Claire said simply, before turning and walking off.
We were to meet the White Dawn at an abandoned industrial park fourteen miles outside of Atlanta proper. As we rolled in, with factory buildings and smoke stacks looming overhead like medieval castles, I felt my stomach tie itself up in knots—it wasn’t unlike how I would feel rolling into some dusty little village in Afghanistan. It was the feeling of knowing damned well that I could die any moment.
And I didn’t want to die now. I wanted to live.
I remembered getting that feeling right before Fred died—right before the sniper blew his skull into a thousand million pieces all over that dusty road in Kabul, some of it splattering onto the wall behind him. I still remembered the way it sparkled crimson in the unforgiving Asian sun.
“This is going to be some killer shit,” Dog murmured to m
e as we came to a stop in the middle of the industrial compound. We were all there, old ladies and everyone, which was unusual for a deal but everyone wanted to part, wanted to raise some hell once it went down—once we had fresh cash in our pockets and an outsized sense of importance—better than being drunk.
Four SUVs drove up. It was getting near evening and their headlights were already on. We had come out in force and the White Dawn had too. They climbed out of their cars already armed to the teeth, clad all in body armor and some wearing ski masks. A few had knitted swastika patches into their jackets or masks.
“Fucking Nazis,” Manuel scowled. “Don’t let them see me. They’ll send me back to Mexico. And I ain’t even from Mexico.”
“Fang, you’re on my right,” Fatman barked as he glided forward on his bike (he never walked when he could ride—one of the reasons he was so obese at this point). I nodded. Fatman liked to have someone he could rely on, right there with him. At least that meant he still trusted me—he wouldn’t dare have me next to him during a deal if he weren’t sure of me, if he didn’t trust me to protect him.
“Right, boss,” I barked in reply, climbing off my bike. Claire grabbed my arm.
“Be careful,” she mouthed. I leaned in and kissed her.
“I won’t,” I whispered.
“I love you,” she replied. A non-sequitur. I liked it.
“I know.”
“What a nice girl scout you’ve got there…” Fatman murmured to me as we approached the skin-heads.
“She’s a keeper,” I muttered.
“That’s a girl you can trust to be loyal. That’s the best, you know.” He leaned his neck from side to side, eliciting sickening cracks from his joints. “Loyalty.”
What the hell was he getting at? I didn’t like this at all. I was getting more and more concerned with each passing second.
“Are you Fatman?” one of the skin-heads demanded.
Fatman looked down at his enormous belly and then back at his customers.
“I prefer the term rubenesque.”
“Cut the crap, asshole. Do you have what we want?”
I had a block of C-4 on me. I tossed it to the closest skinhead to me, who caught it almost effortlessly. He held it up to the light, peering closely at it.
“Looks good,” he declared.
“Five-thousand blocks just like that,” Fatman announced. “Plus sixty Glock-17s, eighteen Hoch USPs, and forty Ingram Mac-10s. And, as if that weren’t enough, we’ve got a cool fifty-thousand rounds of nine-millimeter for you.”
Fatman looked real fucking pleased with himself.
“If that’s not enough to start a race war, I don’t know what is. You could level an entire city block with that stuff and then gun down anyone who tries to get away. Not to mention the cops, the army…”
The skinheads were obviously pleased.
“You came through, Fatman.”
“I always do. Do you have what I want?”
I knew what the agreed upon payment was. Two tons of cocaine. Not kilos—tons. Metric tons. The skinheads weren’t in the business of dealing drugs and we had no idea how they’d gotten ahold of it, but they did.
The skinhead I had tossed the C4 to produced a block of cocaine. He tossed it to me and I handed it to Fatman, who produced a knife from his immense waist and sliced open the block. He licked the powder off the blade and nodded, smiling wide.
“Not bad. Not bad at all. Looks like we’ve got a deal.”
That would be the cue—once the deal was agreed upon.
Suddenly, the industrial park, by now mostly dark, was bathed in light.
“This is the Federal Bureau of Investigation…” a voice over a loud speaker was saying. “You are all under arrest. Put your hands on the top of your head.”
I don’t remember anything after that, because Fatman sank his knife into my left kidney, jabbing it in deep, and I immediately blacked out.
CLAIRE
“This is the Federal Bureau of Investigation…” a voice over a loud speaker was saying, as floodlights lit up the entire industrial park. “You are all under arrest. Put your hands on the top of your head. This is the Federal Bureau of Investigation…”
I found my pistol in the waist band of my tight shorts and drew it.
“FBI!” I cried. “All of you, hands up!”
The Damned were taken completely by surprise. They had expected a threat to come from the skinheads—not from me. As in a daze, they raised their hands as I took a few steps back, leveling my pistol on them, switching from target to target.
But that was when I saw Fatman stab Fang. It was a quick, sudden, brutal movement—the knife seemed to fly out of his belt, and then slice through the air, right into Fang’s back. Into his left kidney. Just like the bastard had promised.
I watched Fang crumple from the shock. Helicopters were overhead, beating steadily at the air, circling us.
“This is the Federal Bureau of Investigation…” the loud speakers continued.
Throwing his limp body over his bike, Fatman took off, gunshots ringing behind him. The Damned started to scatter, but only managed to run into the waiting teeth of federal agents.
I took aim at Fatman’s huge, fleeing frame and fired off two rounds, which went wild. I watched him knock down an armored SWAT team officer and disappear into the industrial park.
“Goddammit!” I cried and set off running as the cops and agents around me began to arrest and handcuff the Damned and the skinheads. My eyes searched the dark, ripped up factories, aching to find Fang, aching to find the fat monster who had captured him.
I don’t know how long I ran for. I charged, angry, headlong into the darkness, my ears straining for the sounds of a motorcycle—but to no avail.
“Damn it… Damn it… Damn it…” I whispered as I finally fell to my knees, exhausted. I still hadn’t totally recovered from my beating-in and now, crushed by emotion, my body wracked with adrenaline, I found myself unable to go on.
I waited in the darkness. I hoped they would return somehow, some way. But they never did.
I had lost him. I lost Fang, just like I had lost Fred.
The tears started coming and I let out a chest crushing sob. It hurt. It hurt bad.
I walked slowly, achingly back to the clearing in the middle of the industrial park where the sting was just ending. Doug was there, his BMW parked extravagantly in the middle of the scene.
“Fucking cunt…” someone yelled at me. One of the old ladies who had beat me in. So. They’d all figured it out by now.
“You didn’t find them?” asked Doug as soon as he saw me. I shook my head. He scowled, reaching into his pocket for a cigarette.
“I don’t want to think about what Fatman might be able to get out of Fang…” he started to murmur.
“You’re just thinking about information? About intelligence?” I exclaimed. “Fang was kidnapped! Fatman is gonna’ torture him, if he doesn’t outright kill him…”
“We’ll do everything we can to get him back, Claire…” Doug started, reaching out to touch my arm.
“No, we’ll never get him back. He’s already dead. He’s already fucking dead. Just like Fred. Just like Winston. I can’t take it anymore, Doug… I can’t fucking take it…” I wailed, pounding against his chest as he tried to pull me close.
I couldn’t believe it. Fang was gone. Fred was gone. Fang was gone. Fred was gone. Was this what was doomed to happen to the men in my life? They were damned forever, forever to be taken away from me.
And here I was, truly one of the damned—truly cursed. I let out a throat-scorching sob as I buried my face in the collar of my boss’s coat.
FANG
There were reports of gunshots on Al-Jinnah Street that afternoon, so our squad was sent out to see what was going on. This was back during the chaotic days in Kabul when lone snipers stalked the city, trying to sow chaos among the invading Americans, picking them off at random. A patrol earlier that week had taken fi
re on the same street and we thought maybe we had found one of the snipers’ favorite hunting spots.
The Humvee lumbered through the dusty, bombed out streets like a turtle, cautious and slow-moving, knowing full well that it could be destroyed at any time, that its inhabitants—six fully-armed American Marines—were more fragile that their body armor and weapons would suggest.
