I shook my head. “No,” I said. “Just . . .” Just the driver, I was going to say, but I amended it at the last minute. “Just a friend.” Amber shot me a look I couldn’t read.
“Will you stick around to give her a ride home?” the lady asked. I nodded.
“Okay,” she said. “You can wait in there.” She gestured toward a small waiting room with a row of brightly colored hard plastic chairs bolted to the wall. Amber had disappeared.
I took a seat, leaned back, and closed my eyes. A long time ago when I wore a chocolate chip camo suit to work every day and more than a few nights, I learned to grab sleep anywhere, anytime you got the chance, because you never knew when you were going to get it again. I’d gotten pretty good at that. This time, however, sleep wouldn’t come when I called. After a while I got up and went to the door. I glanced back and caught the receptionist’s sharp eyes on me. “Just going out to smoke a cigarette,” I said.
“Uh-huh,” she said.
I stepped out and looked at the Suburban. Still there, but so were the kids on the corner, and this time they had friends. I ambled over to the big car, more to show that I was watching than anything else. As I passed by, I glanced in the rear cargo compartment. I saw something there that gave me an idea. I opened the rear driver’s side door and climbed in. When I climbed out, I was holding a leather jacket with the symbol and colors of the Brotherhood stitched to the back. I wasn’t a member, and getting caught flying the colors would get my ass kicked if any of the brothers saw me, but I figured that was a long shot here. I walked back toward the clinic, shrugging the jacket onto my shoulders and hoping they wouldn’t notice it was too big for me. The jacket was probably Nathan Trent’s; he only wore it on ceremonial occasions now. When I reached the door I looked back. The watchers on the curb had vanished. I smiled. Nobody wanted to fuck with any vehicle belonging to the Brotherhood, even this far from their usual stomping grounds.
The lady behind the desk looked surprised to see me come back in. Then her face hardened again as she saw the jacket. It just wasn’t going to be my day to make new friends. This time, when I slumped into the chair, I did fall asleep.
I came to when Amber touched my shoulder. She barely laid her hand on me when I was on my feet. She shrank back, looking startled. “Hey,” she said.
“Hey,” I replied. I looked her over. Her face was pale and her eyes were red, as if she’d been crying. She clutched a wad of papers in one hand.
“You ready to go?” I said. She just nodded.
“Will you be able to stay with her tonight?” a voice said. I turned. A short, broad woman in a white lab coat was standing there. She had a stethoscope looped around her neck.
I looked at Amber. “I guess,” I mumbled.
“In case there are any complications,” the doctor said. “Any unusual blood loss. Things like that. I like to know somebody’s there to keep an eye on her.”
“Okay,” I said. The doctor nodded abruptly and walked away.
YOU DON’T have to stay with me,” Amber said as we walked to the car. “I’ll be okay.”
“I said I’d stay,” I answered. “It’s not a problem.”
She nodded, her eyes still downcast. “I can’t do nothin’ tonight,” she said. “I’m sore. But I could give you a blow job in the mornin’, maybe.”
I gritted my teeth. It had probably been so long since anyone had done anything for her without expecting something in return that she’d forgotten there was such a thing. “You don’t owe me anything, Amber,” I said. Then, more in character, I said, “I’m just doin’ my job.”
“What’s the matter?” she said. “You afraid of Furry?” “You ask that after last night?”
She opened the passenger door and got in. “I’m ugly, is that it?” “No,” I said as I got into the driver’s seat. “You’re not ugly.” That bright cruel smile was back again. “You’re a faggot, is that it? Well, close your eyes and think of Brad Pitt or something.”
I was getting fed up with her yanking me around. “Maybe I don’t like the idea of taking Furry’s sloppy seconds.” The minute the words were out of my mouth, I regretted them. A look of shock crossed her face, exactly like that of a child who’s just fallen on its ass and is too stunned at first to cry. Then her face crumpled, she buried her face in her hands, and she started bawling again. I felt like a complete shit. I tried to console myself with the fact that Axel McCabe was supposed to be a mean bastard. When you looked at it that way, it was the right thing to say. It just didn’t make me feel any better.
After a while, she ran out of tears, but she didn’t speak again until we reached home and I pulled up in the dirt driveway of the single-wide trailer where she lived. “Don’t get out,” she said. “I don’t want you here.”
I stared straight ahead as she got out. “Hey,” I said as she started to close the door. She stopped and looked at me, her face blank and dead. “You want me to call somebody else?” She just shook her head and slammed the door. It was starting to rain again.
“HEAR you turned Khandi down,” Johnny Trent said. He was sitting at the bar, drinking a Heineken. Another member of the Brotherhood sat at his right, a bearded guy named Florida Bob. He was drinking rum, straight up. It was an hour after closing, and I was finishing up with the cleaning.
I stopped wiping down the bar. “Where’d you hear that?” “Around.” He smiled nastily. “Your loss, man,” he said. “She’s good. I mean, really good.” I must have looked surprised, because his smile got wider and meaner. “How you think she got a job here?”
I went back to cleaning. “I thought your uncle did all the hiring.” “Sure,” said Johnny. “But he’s always willing to share the wealth. Right, Bob?” Florida Bob just nodded and stared into his glass.
Johnny took a rolled-up plastic bag out of his jacket pocket. “Feel like a little toot?” There was an undertone in his voice, almost challenging. Without waiting for my response, he took a plastic change tray from behind the bar and shook a pile of the white powder out. Florida Bob was looking more interested. Johnny took out a razor blade and chopped the coke into six neat lines. “Get a bill from the register,” he ordered. I handed him a twenty. He rolled it into a tight tube and handed it to me. “After you,” he said.
No one’s ever come up with a real solution to one of the biggest problems of working undercover: how to pass among people who do illegal things without doing those same things yourself. In training, you’re told to “simulate” drug use, but the trainers weren’t all that helpful when it came to exactly how you’re supposed to do that convincingly with a pair of experienced users sitting two feet away. Eventually, you come to realize that “simulating” drug use is just what you tell your bosses and the jury. If I tried that trick in front of these two, I didn’t have much chance of seeing the dawn.
I didn’t know Johnny Trent then as well as I got to know him later, but I knew of his reputation. Two years before, the rumor went, one of the Brotherhood had gotten busted with at least three pounds of high-quality coke in Georgia. Looking at serious federal time for trafficking, the guy was reported to be warming up to the idea of cooperating with the Feds. The next time the guy’s mother visited him in jail, however, she had her hand wrapped in a heavy bandage. When the guy asked what was wrong, she didn’t speak, just unwrapped the hand to show where her ring and pinky fingers had been. “Johnny” was all she said. At least that was the rumor. She told the people at the hospital she’d lost the fingers trying to fix a stuck lawn mower. Whatever really happened, the guy apparently decided that hard federal time looked like the lesser of two evils. Long story short, I didn’t think much of my chances if Johnny Trent thought I was “simulating.”
I took the bill and hoovered up first one line, then the other. It was good coke. It shot through me like a white jolt of electric light. I shoved the tray over to Florida Bob and handed him the bill. “Thanks,” I said to Johnny, looking him in the eye.
He seemed to relax slightly
. I’d passed the test. “You feel like makin’ a little extra cash,” he said, “I got some work for you.”
“Everyone needs cash,” I said noncommittally.
He bent down and sucked up the coke slowly. When he was through, he threw the twenty on the bar. “When you get done here,” he said, “Bob’ll tell you what to do.” He got up and walked out. I looked at Bob. He grinned, showing off his missing teeth.
I FINISHED up and met Florida Bob in the parking lot. He was standing by a battered Ford pickup. As I walked up, he opened the door and reached behind the seat. He pulled out a stubby little machine gun. “You ever use one of these?” he said.
I took it from him. It was a Heckler and Koch MP5. I worked the bolt and checked the selector. As I suspected, it was the fullauto version. “Nice,” I said.
“I guess you have used one before, then,” he said. He reached out for the weapon. I handed it back to him. The message struck me loud and clear. They wanted to know how much I knew about the hardware, but they didn’t trust me with it. Not yet.
“Once or twice,” I said. I felt something in my right leg, like a series of electrical shocks. Some instinct made me fight the urge to look down. I realized after a moment that the toe of my right boot was tapping against the pavement. It was a perfectly normal reaction, but it was one that could get me killed. If Florida Bob reported back that I was acting nervous on this run, the least disastrous outcome I could expect was that I’d fail to get inside the Trent organization.
Bob didn’t seem to notice the foot tapping before I choked it to a stop. “We’re like the Boy Scouts, man.” He grinned. “Always prepared.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Naw, man,” he said. “Ain’t nothin’ serious. But it pays to be careful, right?”
“Right,” I said. “Especially at three in the morning.”
“Hey,” he said, “we ain’t workin’ banker’s hours. But I’ll bet we have more fun than bankers.” I forced out a laugh and got in the truck.
We didn’t talk as we drove; what Bob had saved by not getting the dings and dents in the truck fixed had apparently gone into the sound system, which he kept cranked up to a level that sounded like Molly Hatchet was playing at full concert volume in the truck bed.
I’m travelin’ down the road and I’m flirtin’ with disaster . . .
I was seeing omens everywhere those days, but that seemed particularly ominous.
We drove out of town and into the sticks. After a while, we got off the hard road and onto a rutted gravel track that bounced us around in the truck. Finally, the road widened into a clearing with a beat-up trailer and shed at the far end. Bob killed the engine and got out. I followed. Before we got to the door, it opened. A guy with long hair and a mustache stood there. Bob waved. “What up, Eugene?”
Eugene waved back weakly and stepped aside. Inside, the trailer was a mess, with food-caked dishes piled in the sink and a coffee table whose surface was entirely taken up with mostly empty beer bottles. On the couch behind the table were two duffel bags. Bob walked over, picked up one, and gestured at the other. I picked it up. It was heavy.
“Pleasure doin’ business with you, Eugene,” Bob said as he walked to the door. “You keep it between the ditches, now.”
“Ah,” Eugene spoke up. “What about . . .”
Bob stopped and looked expressionlessly at him. “Yeah?” Eugene looked down. “I guess Johnny’ll settle up later.” “Yeah,” Bob said. “Count on it.”
We walked to the truck and tossed the duffels into the back of the king cab. Bob looked at me shrewdly as we got in. “Don’t you want to know what’s in the bags?” he said.
I shrugged. “Figure if anyone wants me to know they’ll tell me.” He just grinned and started the engine.
On the way back we didn’t talk to the sound of the Marshall Tucker Band.
I MADE another half dozen or so runs like that, to various places. I rode with different members of the club: Stoney, Fergie, Little Joe, Cherokee Phil. I never asked what was in the bags that we picked up: duffel bags, gym bags, old suitcases. I was just a grunt, going where I was told, doing the jobs they gave me to do. I reported those back to Steadman as often as I could, but the intel I was getting really wasn’t worth much. Steadman would occasionally press me to ask more questions. I put him off. There was a rhythm to this kind of undercover work. You had to wait for the right time, not push too hard, develop a feel for when to get closer and when to back off. It was almost like seduction.
Once in a while I got to talk to my wife. It always left me feeling off-kilter and disconnected. She grounded me too much in being Tony Wolf—the me I couldn’t afford to be right then. I tried to avoid people after those conversations until I could get my head back in Axel McCabe’s skull.
All in all, it was a very weird six months.
After a few runs, I started getting invited to parties “hosted” by the Brotherhood. There was plenty of booze and drugs around, but the things were usually so crowded, dark, and chaotic that I could get away with only partaking slightly. It wasn’t any sense of propriety; I just didn’t want to get fucked up and make a mistake that could get me killed. My old pal Furry attended a few of those, with Amber back on his big hairy arm. I avoided them as best I could, but I got more than a couple of hard looks from both of them. Once or twice, I also noticed Johnny or Nathan Trent staring at me from across the room. I was being sized up, I could tell, which was another reason to keep my head straight.
Early one morning, as I was closing up, Clay Trent came out of the back office. He was stoned out of his gourd, as usual. His clothes reeked, his eyes were glassy, and he had a big stupid grin on his face.
“Uncle Nathan wants to see you,” he said.
“Be right there,” I promised as I moved beers from a pallet into one of the big coolers.
“Now,” Clay said flatly.
I didn’t argue. I’d seen Clay go from merry to psychotically vicious in a flash.
Back in the office, Nathan was again behind the desk. His nephew Johnny stood to one side, arms crossed. He looked serious. Clay took up a position on the other side, crossing his arms like his cousin. It looked vaguely ridiculous, but my stomach knotted with apprehension anyway. They all looked at me for what seemed like hours. Then Nathan spoke.
“Some of the brothers have talked it over, McCabe. I hope you realize the honor you’re being offered here.”
“What’s that?” I replied.
Clay spoke next. “You’re being offered the chance to join the
Brotherhood.”
I kept my face expressionless and was still for a moment, then nodded. “Thanks.”
Clay looked upset. He started to say something, but Nathan cut him off with a laugh. “You just don’t get very worked up about anything, do you, McCabe? You’re like the great stone face.”
“Just the way I am, I guess.”
“Well, it means you keep your mouth shut. That’s good.” He wrote an address on the back of one of the club’s business cards and shoved it across the desk at me. “Be at this address, midnight Sunday,” he said. “We’ll have your colors ready for you.”
I took the card. “That’s it?”
Johnny spoke up. “Oh, there’s a ceremony,” he said. “Wouldn’t be right if there wasn’t a ceremony.” The way he said it made me uneasy, but there was no going back now. This was what I was there for.
I nodded. “I need to finish closing,” I said. Nathan waved. “See you Sunday night.”
I FINISHED closing and drove home, where I pulled out the cell phone and called Steadman. “I’m in,” I said.
“Good news,” he replied. “I thought you were just going to be an errand boy for good.”
I told him about the upcoming “ceremony,” and his voice grew concerned. “I don’t like the sound of this, either. I want you wearing a wire. And we’ll have backup handy.”
It was an attractive idea, but I told him no. “I can handle it. If they think
I’m being tailed or if they find a wire on me, I’m toast, backup or no backup. And I’ve worked too hard getting here to blow it.”
“I still don’t like it.”
“If they wanted to kill me, they’d have just done it. Worst I’ll probably get is beaten in. And I can handle that. Just don’t tell Kendra.”
“Yeah. Okay. I mean, I won’t.” He paused. “Be careful, Tony.” “I always am.” He didn’t answer, so I broke the connection.
I went through the next day trying not to think about what lay ahead. Initiation ceremonies for groups like the Brotherhood usually involve something unpleasant. A lot require the new initiate to be “beaten in”—subjected to a beating by the entire club, usually for a specified limited time period. Knowing you’re going to get the shit beaten out of you at midnight—if you’re lucky—tends to throw a cloud over the whole day.
Finally, eleven thirty rolled around. I followed the directions I’d been given. It was a place I’d never been to before, a crumbling brick warehouse that looked a hundred years old. There were large loading dock doors and a smaller door off to one side. I knocked on that one.
Clay answered. He had a beer in his hand and a joint dangling from one side of his mouth. He had that loopy grin on his face that generally meant some kind of fun was in the making. Only problem was, fun for Clay usually wasn’t all that much fun for everyone else in the room. “C’mon in.” He motioned me through the vestibule, past the old office space. It opened into a large high-ceilinged room. The only illumination came from candles stuck in bottles. There were at least a dozen bikers in the middle of the space, standing around in a circle. They didn’t look at me, just stood there with their arms crossed. In the gloom I picked out Johnny Trent, Florida Bob, Stoney . . . and Furry.
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