by Evelyn Glass
***
“How you holding up?” Dix sighed as he sat down in a chair beside Daisy and stretched out his legs. Toyota always made comfortable seats. His turn on guard duty was over and he was looking forward to a few minutes alone with her.
Daisy sighed, listening to the patter of the rain on the roof of the shop. “Okay, I guess. Tired. All the old ladies are really nice. So much different than the old ladies and club girls of the Firechrome. Except for Leeda, I didn’t care much for any of them, especially after Riley was born. All they were interested in was partying, but everyone here seems so…normal. They told me a few stories, like Randel and…” she paused, trying to remember the woman’s name.
“Michelle,” he supplied.
“Yeah, Michelle. Like Randel and Michelle getting arrested for having sex out in Dunes, or you getting drunk and pissing on the police car, but—”
“I didn’t piss on a police car!” he protested. “I pissed in the bushes beside the police car.”
“That’s not how it was told to me,” she grinned. “But as I was saying, it sounds like everyone has a good time, but you also have families and friends outside the club who you care about, and people seem to like and respect you. I couldn’t believe we all didn’t get arrested at the diner. If that had been the Firechrome, assuming they didn’t end up shooting everyone, there’s no way they wouldn’t have been arrested. But the people in the diner stood up for you.”
He shrugged. “We don’t cause trouble and we help the police with the motorcyclists. Sometimes they’ll listen to us when they won’t listen to the cops. It works for everyone.”
“See! That’s what I’m talking about. The Cutthroats care about more than their club.”
“Why wouldn’t we?”
She shrugged. “You should. But it is so different than my experience with the Firechrome. I thought all clubs where like them, but yours isn’t. I’m glad.”
He looked around but nobody was close. “It’s too bad there are so many people around,” he said softly.
“Why?”
“Because it’s raining outside and it’s been a while.”
She flushed. “I know. I’m sorry I’ve been such a bitch. I had no right taking out my fear and anger on you and treating you like I did. You’ve been nothing but wonderful, kind and caring.”
“Don’t forget studly. Oh, wait, that’s me,” Thad deadpanned as he walked by, picked up a sandwich, and wandered away again.
She broke into giggles then held her ribs. “Damn that hurts.” She sighed. “Even if we were the only two people on earth, I couldn’t do anything tonight. I hurt too much.”
“I know, and I was just kidding.”
She reached out and gave his face a tender caress. “I wish we could,” she said as her lips tugged down. “I hate all those nights I wasted because—”
“Shhhh,” he said, touching her lips as lightly as possible. “That’s past.”
“I know, but—”
“No buts. It’s not important now. If I had to bear up under what you’ve had to deal with, I would be a little bitchy, too.”
Her lips tugged down a little more. “Kiss me? But not too hard,” she amended.
He leaned over, placed a hand behind her head, and gently brought her lips to his. He kissed her with the barest brush in deference to her sore lips before he let her go.
“Hey you two! Get a room!” Thad called loudly, grinning with mischief, causing the other people in the room that had seen them to break into snickers.
***
CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN
“You sure you don’t want a bite?” Dix asked, offering Daisy his sandwich.
It had been three days since the Cutthroats had gone to ground in McGhee Recycling and nothing had happened. It was probably too much to hope the Firechrome had given up and gone away, but things were peaceful. It was now six days until race day, and the Cutthroats were getting nervous. At two days before race day, they were going to have to start getting set up and the consensus was that would be when the Firechrome would hit them.
Dix didn’t agree, being of the opinion if the Firechrome didn’t hit them before, they would let the race proceed. His reasoning was if they screwed the race, they stood the chance to lose the very thing they wanted, but he was a lone voice.
Because nothing had happened, the Cutthroats were getting sloppy. People were being ground down by the hours and the stress, and they could only stay hyper-vigilant for so long. Even though he thought the attack would come before the race, he also, sometimes, found his mind wandering rather than focusing on the task as hand.
It was about nine, two hours until the end of their watch, and Daisy had brought sandwiches and drinks out to those on guard duty. Dix was her last stop. They were sitting in the back of a Chrysler minivan, the open hatch keeping them dry and giving them a place to sit. The bumper and edge wasn’t the most comfortable spot to sit, but it was better than standing.
“No,” she replied. “But you can have a bite of mine if you want.”
He chuckled. They were both turkey with Swiss. “No. That’s okay. You eat it.”
“If the Chromes don’t show in the next few days, I can’t stay.”
“I know.”
“I have to find Leo and Riley.” She looked down. She had really bonded with the club in the past three days. Nothing like being thrown into a crisis together to forge friendships, but her son had to be her primary goal.
“I know.”
She wanted Dix to ask her to stay, or come back. She didn’t love him, but she desperately wanted a chance to fall in love with him, and she wondered if he felt the same way about her. She remembered James’s words, about how he could see something, but Dix had made no mention, given no indication, he felt anything other than sympathy for her and Riley.
It was the damned situation. They, Dix, the Cutthroats, and herself, had been in crisis mode since she arrived. There had been no chance to see if they had anything. Not enough time and certainly not enough normalcy.
She swallowed hard, and decided to swing for the fences. “After I get him back and things get back to normal I would…like to come back.” She waited but he sat stiff, saying nothing, staring into space. She could feel her eyes welling up. “Dix?”
“Shhh…” he said waving her quite. “Get in there,” he said as he rose slowly to his feet.
“What?” she whispered.
He waved his hand at her again, indicating silence. “Get in the van and get down in the floor, between the seats. Don’t move, and keep your head down no matter what,” he said as he reached up and silently eased the hatch closed.
She stared out of the window and watched as he moved off in a crouch, his pistol in his hand. “Oh shit, of shit, oh shit,” she muttered as she scrambled over the rear seats and settled to the floor between the two middle seats, sore ribs completely forgotten. “Please, please, please,” she muttered, rocking softly, not even sure what she was begging for.
He crept along, keeping his eyes on the target. It was almost impossible to see with no moon and the drizzle, but there was clearly someone moving among the cars. He didn’t want to challenge and alert the man, or open fire in case it was one his brothers.
After the first scare, when a member of the club had been mistaken for a Firechrome and nearly shot, everyone agreed the Cutthroats would stay out of the boneyard after dark unless they announced their presence clearly and often. This person hadn’t, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t a guard who had gotten turned around in the dark and wandered into his area. That had happened once before, too, when two brothers each thought the other was a Firechrome and had nearly shot each other.
He was slowly creeping up on the man when a shot rang out. There was a brief pause, then a flurry of shots from multiple directions.
“We’re under attack,” Palmer’s voice roared as another burst of gunfire rang out and men began to cry out in pain.
He rose from his crouch and fired twic
e, the man screaming as he fell. Dix ran to him, praying it wasn’t a brother. The wounded man was clawing his way into the cars as he arrived. The intruder rolled over and pointed his gun at him, but Dix was quicker and finished him with a shot to the head. He breathed a sigh of relief as he didn’t recognize the man.
Daisy covered her ears as shots popped all around her. She wanted to rise up and peek out of the window to see if Dix was okay, but the rear window in the van shattered. She squeaked in terror, covering her head with her arms and kept her head down.
The fighting was hopelessly confused. Dix ducked as a shot pinged off the car next to him, turned and fired his weapon once. Four he said to himself, trying to keep track of the number of rounds he’d fired. He heard James’s shotgun bellow once, twice, then a third time, and he prayed James’s aim had been true.
“Dix!” he bellowed as he cowered behind a car.
“Todd!” the voice in the general direction from where the shot came from answered.
Suddenly, voices of the Cutthroats began to ring out all around the yard.
“Palmer!”
“Thad!”
“Dean!”
“Jacob!”
“Cale!”
“Chuck!”
Each voice was often followed by a shot or two. The voices rang out again and again as the Cutthroats began to get organized.
“Dixon!” Dix roared as he spotted another man.
“Thad!” the voice replied as he spun, but the voice was wrong and Dix pulled the trigger twice, dropping him. Dix dropped his mag, fished one out of his pocket, and slammed it home. He had one more magazine after this one then he’d be out.
He began to move toward the shop when James’s shotgun roared, then again. “Dix!” he cried as he spotted another moving shadow.
“Thad!” the figured called, spinning toward him before both men jerked their weapons to high ready. Dix sighed in relief, knowing how close he’d come to dying.
They moved together toward the shop. There were three bodies in the open ground between the cars and the shop.
“Thad and Dix!” Thad called before they stepped out from between the cars.
James whirled out from behind the shop door, his shotgun leveled before he pointed it skyward. “I’ve got this! Go!” he yelled.
They plunged back into the cars. There were several more calls, a few answers, and a few more shots, but soon it was quiet, with only calls and answers.
“Cutthroats!” Cale bellowed. “To the shop!”
Thad and Dix hurried to the shop, Cutthroats pouring out of the boneyard, most dressed, a few wearing only underwear and shoes, but all armed.
“Anyone hurt? Who’s missing?” Cale asked. There were only a murmur of Nos as the men looked around, seeing if everyone was present.
“Where’s Jacob?” Palmer asked.
“Over here,” Jacob replied, raising his hand. He was wearing only a pair of shorts and was covered in mud.
“What happened to you?” Thad asked.
Jacob grinned and shuffled his feet. “Fell getting out of the trailer. Hey! Let’s see how well you do when you’re woken up by a fucking war!” he complained when everyone began to laugh, which only made everyone laugh harder.
“We need to fan out, find out if anyone is still alive or if someone is still hiding,” Cale said, calling everyone attention back to the task at hand.
“Two man teams,” Thad added. “If you see two men, make damn sure it’s not a brother before you shoot. We were lucky tonight we didn’t end up shooting each other.”
“Good idea. Let’s get this done before the cops get here.”
“Dix, you’re with me,” Thad said.
“James, you better open the gates or the cops are libel to run it down,” Dix said as he followed Thad.
***
The Cutthroats had covered only half the yard when the cops arrived in force, ten cruisers on the charge with lights and sirens as they skidded to a stop in the yard. James and the women met them and got the officers calmed down as they bailed out of their cars with weapons drawn.
With the police help, the search went much faster. At the end of the hour-long search, they found twenty-one dead and thirteen wounded, one of the dead killed by an officer when the wounded man trained a gun on him. The wounded were quickly sent to Douglas Regional Medical Center, two hanging to life by the thinnest of threads, but the other eleven were expected to live.
“What the hell is going on here, James?” Police Chief Buckley growled as he stepped out of his personal Explorer in civilian clothes.
“Don’t you know? Hasn’t Cale been telling you?” James said in annoyance.
“Yeah, but I didn’t know Douglas was going to be in the middle of a gang war.”
Cale grit his teeth. “We’re not a gang. We’re not doing this. We’re not out in the middle of the night breaking into places with guns,” he said, his voice becoming louder and harder. He paused, trying to get control of aggravation. “We warned you about this but you didn’t do shit! If Firechrome move into town, you’re going to have a lot more shit like this happening.”
“I can’t go around arresting people for no reason, Cale. Just because a couple of gang members break into a junk yard, or make veiled threats, doesn’t mean I can start arresting people just because they happen to be in the same gang.”
“So basically, what you’re telling me is, we’re on our own.”
Buckley watched as another body was loaded into the corner’s van. “No. Mills!”
“Yes, Chief?” Officer Mills said as he stepped up.
“Get on the horn and tell all units I want the Firechrome found and brought in for questioning. This has gone far enough.” When Mills stepped away, Buckley turned his attention back to Cale. “If this doesn’t stop, we’ll shut you down.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” Cale replied.
“Don’t give me that shit, Johnson. You know exactly what I mean. You think we don’t know about your little parties out in the woods? We do. But you keep it out of town and, I’ll admit, help us with the bikers that come into town even when you’re not racing. So we have sort of overlooked it. But if this doesn’t stop, we’ll remove the reason the Firechrome want to move in. No racing, no Firechrome problem. Do I make myself clear?”
“I still don’t know what you mean, but I can understand why you might say that.”
Buckley watched as another bagged body arrived and was placed in the van. “This shit isn’t supposed to happen in Douglas. Twenty-six dead in the last two weeks. Twenty-eight if those other two die. That’s more people dead from gunshots in two weeks than in the past fifty-years combined.” Buckley shook his head again and started toward his vehicle, but then turned to face Cale and James. “If something like this happens again, I’m going to expect you to close down…or we’ll close you down. Don’t mistake my willful blindness as ignorance.”
Cale watched as Buckley turned around and drove out of the yard, then looked at James. “Well, it was good while it lasted.”
James smiled and nodded, but didn’t know what to say.
CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT
“I have to hand it to you, Johnson,” Alex said. “You’ve almost made this more trouble than you’re worth. I had intended to push you out and have the Eugene chapter run the race, but that hasn’t gone the way I intended. I can use people like you. Why don’t you let us patch you over and you become the President of our newest chapter? It’ll be a pleasant change to have someone I can trust and you can show these stupid shits in Eugene how to get things done.”
Cale, Dix and Thad were meeting with Alex Pye, Ted Helton, President of the Eugene chapter, and Leo. Alex had called and requested another meeting two days after the slaughter of his brothers. Cale was nervous about the meeting, but Alex has assured him it would just be him, Ted and Leo. No threats, just a friendly conversation.
Cale shook his head. “Can’t do it, Alex. The cultures of the two clubs are just to
different.”
Alex nodded. “I figured you would say that. That’s a pretty neat trick, you having the cops in your pocket and doing your work for you.”
“They’re trying to protect Douglas, just like we are.”
“We’re not going to let this drop, so here’s the deal. Because I don’t want to fight you and the cops, I’m willing to take your deal to end this peaceably, but with some conditions.”
“What conditions?”
“First, no crotch rockets. We ride Harleys and we’re not going to compete against some squid. The second is, we race against him,” Alex said with a nod at Dix, “because he rides the Harley.”
