by Zoey Parker
No. No. This can’t be happening. We were out! We were almost fucking gone!
The man I headbutted struggles to his feet. I try to roll over to protect myself from him, but it’s no use. He cocks his foot back and swings one steel-toed boot directly into my temple. The world goes black.
The next moments are brief flashes surrounded by darkness, like a film reel with all but a few scenes cut out.
“Tick tock,” says the Diablo standing over me. “Time for us to go.”
Black.
Rose screaming as she’s dragged out by her hair. “Shut up, cunt,” snarls the Diablo towing her out the door.
Black.
Rose and one of the men are gone. The other one is looking down at me. His face is hazy, distorted by what is without a doubt a hideously bad concussion. “I told you not to move, motherfucker.”
“Stop…” I mutter. Everything hurts.
“I should kill you right now.”
All I can do is groan in response.
“But we’ve got a job for you to do.”
A job? What the fuck is he talking about? My pain-addled brain can’t make sense of it. I can still hear Rose, though her screams are becoming faded and muffled. When they choke off suddenly, my heart freezes in place.
The Diablo pulls something from his back pocket. He drops it towards where I lay on the ground, still tangled in the sheets from the bed. The thing, whatever it is, hits my chest with a thump and a crinkle.
“Take this back to your friends in Texas,” he says. “Tell them the Diablos are coming.” He walks out the ruined door. Then he is gone.
Moaning in agony, I tilt my head up to look at the object dropped on my chest. It’s a brown paper bag. The bottom of it is sticky and wet. Trembling and sweating, I reach towards it and pull it open.
A bloody, severed hand gleams from inside. On one finger is a silver ring. There is a tiny emerald embedded in it.
It’s Cesar’s. Or, rather, it was. I’m guessing that the man this hand once belonged to is no longer among the living.
I turn my head to the side and vomit, whether from the hand, the concussion, the loss of Rose, or the war that is about to erupt in my hometown, I can’t be sure. Some combination of all of the above.
I can’t fight it anymore. The pain overwhelms me, and I pass out.
* * *
Three Weeks Later
I cut a slice of steak, spear it on my fork, and raise the meat to my mouth. The smell grows more powerful as it draws closer to my nostrils. It’s sickening. I see the juice glistening in between the marbling of the beef. Salty, briny, darkly sweet, I taste it before it ever passes my lips, and my stomach churns. I can’t handle it. I set it down, untouched.
“What the hell’s wrong with you, man?” Steezy asks.
“Nothin’,” I grunt.
“Bullshit,” he counters. “You looked at that piece of steak like it had fuckin’ syphilis on it or something. It’s delicious, man. Try it.” He snags it on his own fork and dangles it in front of my face. “C’mon, try it!”
“Get that shit out of my face, Steez.”
“You gotta try it! It’s so damn good!”
“I’m not gonna tell you again.”
“A cow died for your eating pleasure, and you’re just gonna sacrifice it like that?” He shakes his head sadly. “You should be ashamed.” He tucks the steak into his own mouth and sighs blissfully as he chews. He adds, “More for me, I guess. Thanks, cow.”
I slide out and get up from the table. The restaurant we’re at is technically closed, but the owner pays the Inked Angles protection money, so we more or less have the run of the place whenever we want. The empty joint is a little spooky, though, for some weird reason. Chairs are flipped up on the tables and the liquor bottles stand out behind the bar, shining through the darkness. Steezy and I are at a booth in the corner, the only lit light in the whole place shining down on our perch.
“Where you going?” he asks as I walk away.
“Gonna have a cigarette,” I reply over my shoulder.
I walk through the kitchen on my way out back. The industrial equipment looks vaguely threatening. High powered blenders and ovens, sharpened knives galore—it looks like a torture shop in here, something straight out of a twenty-fifth century Inquisition. It’s unsettling.
Weaving between preparation tables and big banks of stove tops, I find the back entrance and kick it open. I drop to a seat on the brick steps outside and fumble the cigarette pack and lighter from my back pocket. I tap a smoke out, bite it between my teeth, and extract it. Bringing the lighter to the tip, it takes a long, frustrating minute to make contact between the flame and the cigarette.
My hands are shaking too badly.
Steezy was right. Something is wrong with me. It’s been three weeks since I got back from El Cruce, and as much as I’m trying to deny it, I’m seriously fucked up on the inside. Food tastes like shit, my hands shake constantly, and I twitch like a madman whenever something startles me out of the corner of my eye. I’m on edge. I know why, of course, but I’m not going to think about it. I can’t. I won’t.
The smoke invades my mouth. There’s something about having that bitter flavor settling on my tongue that feels appropriately masochistic, in a ‘Fuck you, Vince, you deserve this’ kind of way. Like I’m supposed to be punishing myself. And shit, maybe I do deserve it. I fucked up big time. I let them take her.
“Shut the fuck up,” I mutter out loud. No one is around to hear me. The back alley is devoid of any signs of life. It’s just me. Nobody else. I exhale and look down towards where the street opens up. I can see a sliver of beach from here. The air is damp and foggy, with a sporadic drizzle cascading through the night at will. Beyond the sand, dark waves lash angrily onto the shore. It’s a grim scene. Well, sometimes the world knows what you’re feeling and it contorts itself to reflect that right back at you. Tonight, I’m glad for that. After all, misery loves company.
I sit and smoke in silence for a while. Inhale, exhale, ash the tip, repeat. It’s like a mantra, a meditation. No room for thought. Fuck that internal voice. It’s never said anything I ever wanted to hear. I want to tell it to get lost, to take a long walk over a short cliff. It ain’t doing me a damn bit of good.
The door creaks open. Steezy slithers out and plops himself down next to me. He spreads his knees and leans forward with a heavy sigh. “Vin…” he says.
“Don’t.”
“Vin, I got to. What’s the deal, man? You haven’t said a fucking word since you got back from that trip.”
“I don’t wanna talk about it.”
“Look, if this were any other situation, I’d let you handle shit your own way. But Lord knows that this shit with the Diablos changes everything. We’re about to be fighting for our lives here, Vince. You think you’re the only one on edge? Hell no. Look around you. Everyone’s nervous. It’s been three weeks without a peep. Guys are about to start losing their goddamn minds. I’m keyed up. Mortar’s keyed up.”
“Yeah, well, is what it is.”
“What I’m saying is, you’re more than just keyed up over the Diablos. There’s something else eating you away.”
“I’m fine.”
“No, Vince, you’re not. What about last night? You wanna explain to me what the fuck that was about?”
I think back to the night before. Mortar had decided to throw a low-key party, just a casual hangout to get guys to relax a little bit. In the wake of my return from El Cruce, we’d locked down the hatches and posted security all across town. Guns, guards, the whole nine yards. The message to every man in the club was clear: get ready for war. But since the start of the patrols, nothing had happened. There wasn’t another word from any of our sources about the Diablos. As far as we could tell, they’d simply disappeared.
That, of course, was far from reassuring. Being constantly on alert without a single fucking thing to respond to did one hell of a number on a man’s head. People were starting to
slip up, make critical mistakes. Shit, a prospect had almost put a bullet through Steezy’s head when they were changing guard duty at the warehouse by the docks one night just because he’d messed up the code words a little bit. Too much tension. If something didn’t happen soon, the whole club was liable to snap.
Thus the party. We couldn’t afford to throw a big blow-out, lest the Diablos caught wind and snuck up on us unaware. But something laidback would let all the boys blow off some steam and hopefully reduce the chance that we started shooting each other’s heads off by accident.
I didn’t want to go, but Mortar insisted that all his lieutenants be there. “We gotta show face,” he’d said. “Let everyone know that things are gonna be fine, that the top men aren’t worried, so they shouldn’t be either.” Like usual, he was right, so I’d dragged my sorry ass there, despite my reluctance.
It was the usual affair: a few kegs flowing freely, fresh bottles of liquor getting downed in heartbeats. Girls were festooned throughout the clubhouse, as eager as ever to find an Inked Angel to take them home. The atmosphere was brittle and awkward at first, but eventually most of the men in attendance settled down and started to enjoy themselves.
Not me, though. I sat in a booth and refused every shot that was offered to me. All I wanted to do was smoke. Everything else—drinking, talking, fucking—was a painful suggestion. In a characteristic move, Steezy had come stumbling over with two girls, laughing and joking around at the top of his lungs.
“Vince, which do you prefer, blondes or brunettes?” He held forward each girl in turn. “Wait, no, better question: are you an ass man or a tits guy? Go on, girls, this is a competition. Show him what you got!”
The blonde winked. The brunette mouthed, “Pick me.” By any objective measures, they were stunning as hell. Their bodies swooped like coastline in all the right places and they had that naughty twinkle in their eye that let me know they were down for just about anything. The old Vince would have taken one or both of them to the back room and done some foul shit right away, no hesitation. But I just didn’t feel the desire. I felt the opposite, actually. Repulsion. Retreating within my own head.
And those damned blue eyes. I couldn’t even tell who I was picturing anymore, whether it was Devin or Rose. It didn’t matter, I suppose. They both haunted me to the same degree, albeit in slightly different ways. Whether I was dead or alone, who gave a shit? I had ghostly memories sticking to me wherever I turned. I couldn’t get any peace of mind.
I looked at Steezy and the girls. “I’m good, Steez. Sorry, girls. Go see if Cain is interested in partying.”
The girls pouted. Steezy gave me a concerned frown before pivoting with the women under his arms. “C’mon, let’s go ask Cain to vote.” As he walked away, he threw me one more glance over his shoulder. I knew what he was thinking. I had the same thought going through my head.
What the hell is wrong with you, Vince?
I snap back to the present. “Wasn’t about nothing,” I tell him. “Just didn’t feel like partying. That’s all.”
“It’s not like you, man.” He claps a hand on my shoulder. “We need the best of you right now. The club can’t afford to have you wrestling with all this internal shit. Get rid of those demons, dude. Get back in your groove.”
I shake him off and take another drag on the cigarette. The trickle of rain has resumed. It slaps wetly against the eaves of the roof above and pours down in front of us, slicking the pavement. I see our blurry outline in the puddles. “I’ll be fine.”
I feel Steezy eyeing me, but I refuse to look up. We sit silently for a few minutes. After a while, Steezy breaks the silence hesitantly. “Was it what happened with the informant—what was his name…Cesar?”
“No,” I answer curtly. That isn’t totally dishonest. I actually haven’t thought about Cesar in a few days. The hand in the bag was a scare tactic, nothing more than the cost of doing business. Cesar knew he was in a dangerous line of work. He’d seen similar shit before, and as much as he was desperate to save his own tail, he also knew right away that he’d waded a little too deep into the muck of the underworld when he started snooping around on the Diablos. That was why he’d been so scared, why he’d no-showed, why he’d refused to divulge details. When I was down in Mexico, I’d brushed it all off as typical rat paranoia, but maybe I shouldn’t have been so quick to dismiss. He turned out to be right in the end. They really did have eyes on him. Talking to me had cost him his life.
Still, having a severed hand dropped casually on your chest isn’t exactly the easiest thing in the world to simply forget about. I haven’t been sleeping much, but when I do manage to drift off, that image is one of several that follows me into my dreams. That hand, taking on a will of its own and crawling up my chest to wrap ice-cold fingers around my throat…I shudder. Fucking cartels. Human life means nothing to them.
“You sure?” Steezy questions.
“I’m sure. Cesar was just a source. I’ve been doing this shit for a long time. Things like that don’t faze me anymore.”
“I hear you, brother. But if not him, then what else could it be that’s bothering you?”
I start to say her name, but I stop and change my mind. I haven’t told anyone about Rose, not even Steezy or Mortar. I can’t bring myself to do it. Every time I try to say her name out loud, I get this nasty wrenching feeling in my chest, like my ribs are about to bust apart. The image that features centrally in my dreams isn’t the hand, but her screaming as she’s dragged through the door of that motel room.
It took me a long time after I’d regained consciousness to process what had happened that night. Between our escape from the strip club, her panic attack, the incredibly hot sex, and the invasion of the Diablos, there was a lot of mental material to churn through. I lay on the floor for a while, still dizzy from the kick to the head, and fought with myself over what I should do.
The majority of me was determined to chase after her. Fuck the cartel, fuck the club, the only thing that mattered was getting her back. Their threats lingered in my head. She will be very fun. Until we’re bored with her. I wanted to storm wherever those fuckers were hiding and break every last one of them slowly and painfully. I wanted them to suffer for laying a finger on her.
But when I looked down again at the paper bag on my chest, I caught a glimpse of the winged skull that was tattooed on the front of my shoulder. It was the same one that every man in the club wore, the last piece of our initiation into the Inked Angels. It had layers of meaning. There was the speech they gave every prospect after they were initiated, about how the skull meant that our brotherhood lasted beyond death, that it signified the death of our enemies, the bones we all shared. Each explanation was different, even conflicting, and yet no one ever questioned them. For some reason, they were all true at the same time. It meant all of those things.
And then, in the years since it had first been inked into my chest, there were all those times I’d fought for it. I’d hurt and been hurt in the name of the club. I’d both broken the law and upheld it, all for the sake of doing right by my brothers. It became part of me, more than skin deep. I was that skull.
So when I was the only one who could give my brothers warning about the shitstorm that was about to be unleashed on our home, how could I abandon them? How could I leave them in the dark? I couldn’t. I had no choice but to go back to Galveston. I couldn’t forsake my club.
Besides, even if I’d wanted to chase down the Diablos who’d taken Rose, I had no leads. They could be anywhere inside or outside of El Cruce and I wouldn’t even know where to start. No one in the town was going to be caught dead giving a tipoff to some strange gringo. I’d get my head kicked in before I even got the questions out of my mouth. It was a suicide mission, one that didn’t make sense to gamble on. The stakes were too high. I couldn’t afford to take the risk.
That realization carried an almost physical pain. Much more than my head was throbbing when I mounted my bike and began the furio
us ride home to Texas. My heart hurt, too, for reasons I wasn’t yet ready to fathom. Those fucking blue eyes. Christ, what a ridiculous thing to fixate on. Not her kiss or her curves or that sweet pussy that felt damn near designed for my cock to slide into, just those eyes. They never blinked.
“I told you already,” I tell Steezy, “I don’t want to talk about anything.”
He falls quiet, this time for good. When I suck the cigarette down to the butt, I stub it out on the brick steps, stand up, and walk down the alley. My bike is parked at the far end. As I swing one leg over the seat and start up the engine, I look back down towards the stairs. Steezy is staring at me. Even from here, I can make out the anxious wrinkle on his forehead. I don’t need him brooding about me. I’m doing enough of that on my own.
I twist the gas and roll forward into the night. The ride home is sticky and dark, but as always, the engine is a calming vibration. I think about riding off to the west and not stopping until I hit the Pacific. The longer I’m on the back of the bike, the better I feel, so why not stay on forever? I seriously consider the thought, but as I reach the driveway of my house, I yank the handlebars with an exasperated snort and pull in. I can’t run away. I’m not the kind of man who abandons those he loves. The skull on my chest is keeping me here.
