Caught by the Biker
By Roseleigh Gorge
This was looking like the easiest job I ever had, which was strange for one that promised to be my most lucrative. This one could set me up for life, I knew. No more having to risk getting arrested, no more crawling into buildings at the dead of night trying to steal whatever I could find. I could start a new life, I could start to actually have a life.
It should have been difficult, but it was easy. Way too easy.
I pulled into the parking lot at four in the morning. I got out and stood at my car for a minute, trying to control my breath and mentally rehearse my plan. The sky brooded black and crickets chirped an evening song to each other. I wondered if any of them were wishing me luck.
I popped the lock of the bar door without compromising it, so when I was done I could just knock the bolt back into place and no one would be any the wiser. I opened the door and stepped inside. The bar it was pitch black, so I felt around for the light switch. The walls were sticky from what I presumed was beer but hoped wasn’t anything else. This far out in the country you wouldn’t believe the kinds of things that people got up to, and given that my job was to enter people’s houses and business without them knowing I had seen all kinds of things going on.
Bingo. I found the switch and the bar lot up.
Normally leaving the lights on was the last thing I'd do after teaming into the building, but this was a bar and anyone driving past would just assume that the bar staff were having a few private drinks after hours. It would look normal. And it was way easier to work with some light than having to crawl around in the dark. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gotten bruises for bumping into something while trying to navigate round a building I don’t know in pitch black.
The bar was your average country whiskey-dive; neon signs plastering the walls, a few tables and chairs scattered round on a random fashion that suggested whoever had done the decoration wasn’t a dedicated practitioner of Feng Shui. At the end of the room was the bar, a small space with a counter, a bunch of bar stools, a line of liquor bottles and a horizontal mirror. The mirror seemed strange to me. IT would reflect your face back at you while you sat at the bar nursing a drink, and I didn’t think many people would want to see that side of themselves.
Past the bar was a corridor that led to the gents and ladies toilets, and past that was another door. And that was where I needed to be.
I'd heard of the score three days earlier from a guy I knew who I sold a little weed to from time to time. Sometimes I let him smoke a bit in my flat after goods and money were exchanged, because it got a little lonely in my place. I didn't have any roommates, I don't have any family and it's hard to keep friends once they know what you do for a living. Add to that the fact I’ve never really played well with others and you’ve got the recipe for a pretty lonely existence.
"What are you up to this weekend?" I asked him. It was a small-talk kind of question, but we didn't really have much in common other than the fact we had nobody else to spend our time with. I couldn’t be one hundred percent sure if you were to ask me his name.
He took a breath on the joint and breathed out a silver plume of smoke.
"Me and a guy are hitting the Jackal bar."
He offered me the joint. I shook my head. I never smoked. I sometimes drank and one time in my teens I'd dropped a tab of acid, but drugs were not really my thing.
"Getting drunk then?" I said.
He laughed. "No, I mean we're hitting it. They got a safe with a few hundred thousand in it is what I heard."
Well now he certainly had my attention. My biggest score to do date was seven thousand five hundred that I’d taken from the back of a security van after coaxing out the driver with a flash of my tits and then blasting him in the face with a homemade pepper spray. Lately my average was about five hundred a job. Doesn’t sound bad, does it? Well consider the fact that getting caught on any one of these jobs will cost me ten years of life when they lock me up, and you’ll start to understand why the prospect of a few hundred thousand almost got me wet.
I probed him about it in as natural a way as I could. It turned out the owner of the Jackal bar had taken one of his female customers into the back room the other night and apparently he'd opened a safe and showed her the cash to try and impress her into sleeping with him. It didn't impress her, but she'd gone out and told the story. Word got around.
After smoking a few and having a beer he left, and that's when my brain got to work. I had needed a big score like this for a long time. I'd looked everywhere I could for it and found nothing, and lately I'd had to settle with breaking into liqueur stores and stealing petty cash from the toll. It was barely paying the bills.
This though, this could be the big one. My weed smoking buddy was planning to go at the weekend and steal the cash. Well firstly, that was a stupid idea. Weekends are the busiest time for a bar, and they often stayed open later than usual. Call me weird, but I quite like a place to be empty when I rob it. Secondly, him going at the weekend gave me a couple of day’s head start to get there first. I could get in, steal the cash and have the job done before he'd even gotten himself a mask and crowbar. Maybe he would even take some of the heat for it; he had a big mouth and I guessed I wasn't the first person he'd told about his plan.
But no, I didn't want that to happen. We weren't close friends, but I liked him in a weird way. So I was going to steal the cash, give him a bit of it and then tell him to get the hell out of town.
Back in the bar I stood cautiously as I tried to figure out if an alarm was going to go off. I hadn't seen one outside but you never knew, and if there was an alarm it was bound to go off soon. After a few silent minutes I knew I was safe to get to work, and I let out a relieved breath.
The room had been tidied of empty beer bottles and glasses but it hadn't been cleaned. There was the bitter scent of cigarette ash in the air, and when I moved my feet stick to a floor that had been soaked in spilt beer. Over on the corner there was a jukebox that I just knew played nothing but county and western. People were so predictable around here and it would have been nice if at least one bar played a little rock, but hey, you had to pander to the crowd.
The only strange thing I noticed were a collection of black leather jackets pinned to the west wall. They were all arranged in a line as if they were an exhibition, and there was a giant picture on each of them of a Jackal drawn in dark red felt-tip pen. Above this each one had a different name written. I read some of them: Big Red, Sick Bastard, Ashcloud, Tomkins and Spit. They must have been a nice crowd.
It was obvious to me that the bar had taken its name from the Jackal drawn on the leather jackets. Maybe an old biker gang used to come here. There were a few gangs that rode through our town and I knew the names of most of them. But I'd never heard of the Jackals. If they were anything like the other gangs they were nothing more than a set of violent criminals who got off on bullying anyone who they saw as weaker than them. They probably had a small drugs business and maybe even dealt in firearms. Whatever, I didn't mix with that crowd so they weren't my problem.
I started to get focussed. I had my plan, I knew what I needed to do. I would jimmy the lock on the back door, find the safe and carry it to my car. I had a guy who could bust it open with nitro glycerine. He was an old chemist who owed me a favour after I'd broken into a local pharmacy and stolen a year’s supply of the medicine his sick wife needed.
I walked to the back door and looked at the lock. It was a simple Yale lock and it should be no sweat to pick it. If not, well in that case I had my crowbar and I would just bust open the door. Not too subtle, but I wasn't leav
ing here empty handed. And I had a little time to work in but not all the time in the world, so it was sometimes better to be a little forceful. Say a cop drove past and thought he'd see about getting himself a late night beer, what would I do then? Tell him I’m the bar maid?
Luckily I slid the bolts on my third try. Lock picking was something I was really good at. I'd bought the lock picks and then practiced on all the locks on my flat over and over again until I could actually shut my eyes and flip them open. The hairpin lock trick you see in movies is bullshit for the most part though, so don’t believe what you see. And don’t even get me started on trying to use a credit card to open a door.
With the lock taken care of I just needed to step inside and get the safe. I tensed my arms in anticipation of the heavy load I was going to have to carry. Then after taking a deep breath I turned the door knob.
It wouldn't budge.
I rattled it a few more times but there was nothing doing. I looked at the lock to see if a bolt had slid back down but sure enough none of them had. The lock was taken care of alright. So why wasn't the door opening?
I stepped back and looked over the door. I couldn't see any more locks. There definitely wasn’t a bolt or anything like that, so it must be something else. But what? I couldn’t see anything. I started to feel myself get anxious. Then something caught my eye. The "push" sign on the door, it didn't quite lay flat. It jutted out in the middle as though there were ridges running underneath it, and the corners were turned up as though it had been peeled back a few times. I pulled the sign back and saw straight away what the problem was.
"What the hell?" I said aloud.
There was a key code entry pad on the door. It was new, as if it had recently been fitted, and it looked sophisticated. This was way too expensive a security procedure for a dive bar like this, so what was going on?
I knew then that my whole situation was bleak. You couldn't crack these things, you couldn't break them. You either knew the numerical code or you didn't.
"What a waste of time," I said.
"You're telling me. You got me out of bed," said a gruff voice behind me.
I felt ice in my chest as my blood froze in my veins. I could picture a man behind me in the blue uniform of a cop, hand cuffs at his waist and gun drawn. Should I make a run for it? Maybe try to knock him over and get past him while he wondered what the hell was going on? No that was stupid. Even if I were capable of knocking a man over I’d probably get a bullet in my back as soon as he got to his feet.
I put my hands up behind my head. "Okay you got me," I said.
I turned round.
It wasn't a cop in front of me. It was a man dressed head to toe in biker leathers. He was only a foot away from being as big as the ceiling and he carried the brutish body of a professional wrestler. His hair was a dirty blonde and ran almost to his shoulders, and blonde stubble ran along a bone-straight jaw. A thick red scar ran down his right cheek. It looked like someone had taken a sharp knife to a piece of steak. Pity for him, I thought, because it was the only blemish of an otherwise pretty good face. But the look on the face now wasn’t good.
"You can relax, I'm not going to arrest you." His voice was deep and when he spoke there was a tenor in the air.
I breathed out.
"But I might kill you."
He turned his back on me and walked toward the bar. He lifted the latch and went behind the counter, then he took a glass and a bottle and poured himself a shot of amber whiskey. He acknowledge me or say anything to me, and I wondered what I should do.
Would he really kill me? Biker gangs were extremely violent and they were notoriously savage in defending their territory. And it was obvious at this point that I was in there territory - the leather jackets on the wall told me that much. Most of these gangs dealt in class A drugs and gun running, and it was extremely rare if they hadn’t seen at least five years of jail time each. And here I was trying to steal from their headquarters. How could I have been so stupid?
"You're gonna have to come out at some point."
Plans of action raced through my head but most of them amounted to one thing and that was "run". Stupid. Even if I got outside the bar he'd just run me down with his motorcycle. But maybe I could talk my way out of it? I just had to seem confident. I steeled myself for the act and walked into the barroom.
He was still behind the bar drinking whiskey.
"Take a seat," he said, gesturing at one of the stools in front of the counter.
I took a seat. I was unsure of how I should be acting in front of him. Did he want me sorry? Scared? I took a real look at his face and tried to read his intentions. It was a good looking face but it was lined with time. I didn't think he was that old, but there were wrinkles nine the less. There was a gentle look to him in a weird kind of way, but that was offset by the harshness of the scar that run from the middle of his right cheek to his neck.
He out a glass in front of me and poured whiskey into it.
"Drink."
It wasn't a time for me to argue, no matter how much I hated whiskey. I took the glass and knocked the liquid down my throat. It burnt all the way into my stomach.
He put his hands on the bar in from of me. The right one was tattooed with a red jackal that covered the whole area between fingers and wrist. The left had tattoos but they were just a row of four scratches, like tallies. He saw where my eyes were looking.
"Each one if these is a symbol of a man who is no longer breathing," he said.
I felt my throat start to close up and the air tasted as sour as the whiskey as I gulped it in. There was no doubt now that this man was capable of murder.
"I'm Big Red. Leader of the Red Jackals. You heard of us?"
I shook my head.
"That's because we don't want to be heard of. And you breaking in here don't exactly help us in that regard."
"I'm sorry," I said. Pathetic, but it was all I could think to say.
"The way I see it you've got two choices. I could call the police and have them sort this out for me. But you can probably guess that me and the law ain't a good mix."
I nodded.
"Or I could break your legs and throw you out of here myself. Which one do you think I'll pick?"
I knew full well which he'd pick. Police were a dirty word round here, for me as well as Big Red. We had that much in common at least. I didn't know which was worse, having my legs broken or going to jail, but I did know one thing; I had to come up with a solution of my own. Give him a reason to let me go.
I took another look at him. He was thickly muscled, he had a grizzled face and he had a confidence moving into arrogance that I'd always found so damn attractive in a guy. What the hell. I'd take a chance. It was my only way out.
"Maybe there's a third choice," I said. I reached forward and stroked the Jackal on his hand.
He seemed to ponder this for a second or two. Then he slammed another shot and looked at me.
"Okay, but you gotta do what I say. I can get a lay anytime I want. You gotta impress me."
I thought about it for a second. What were my choices? Get arrested, get my legs broken, or get laid? It was pretty obvious what I should do.
"You got it," I said, and stood up.
He looked pretty unimpressed for a guy about to get some action. He poured another shot, tossed it back and then wiped his mouth.
"Take off your clothes."
I unbuttoned my shirt slowly, teasing over each button. As they popped up I revealed more of my pink flesh, until finally I was down to the last one. I slipped the shirt off my shoulders and let it drop to the sticky floor. I stood in my bra and skirt feeling the cold draft of the bar form goose bumps on my skin. I could feel his eyes sweeping up and down my body, taking me in and probably rating me against the other lays he’d had in the past. I bet I ranked pretty highly.
"Now the skirt," he said.
I dropped it to the floor.
Bikers Don't Ask Twice:: (Outlaw MC Erotica) Page 1
