“Can I have the rest of this, Mommy?” she asked with a full mouth.
“Of course. Why don’t you go get settled on the couch, and we’ll find something to enjoy on television?” I asked.
“Mommy, why aren’t you wearing pants?”
I sputtered as I buried my face in my hand. It was a logical question, especially for a six-year-old girl, but Hawk took the reigns with that one before I could find an answer to dole out.
“Because grown-ups can do that sometimes. But, I’m sure she’ll put some on soon, all right?”
“Okay. I thought maybe Mommy’s legs hurt.”
“I’m not sure. Do Mommy’s legs hurt?”
I panned my gaze slowly over to Hawk as his eyes connected with him. His stark green eyes pierced my soul, fluttering something within my gut I hadn’t felt in years. I stood there studying him while Emery continued to eat her apple, and I decided to play his little game as I drew a breath in through my nose.
“They do. A bit less than I would’ve expected with how long the ride was, but then again the body can surprise you.”
I saw a spark ricochet behind his eyes before I panned my gaze back down to Emery.
“Adults are weird,” she said, sighing.
“Don’t worry. You’re weird, too”
“In all the best ways,” she said, grinning.
“I like the confidence,” Hawk said.
“Wonder who she gets that from,” I murmured.
The smile that beamed across his face told me everything I needed to know. With them bonding the way they were and how proud he already was to have a daughter, I knew I had to tell Emery at some point in time. I watched her hunker down onto the couch while she finished her apple, and my mind began to reel with all the ways I could tell her just as Hawk planted his hand into the small of my back.
And then, I felt him press a light kiss on my cheek.
“We’ll figure all this out, all right?” he asked.
“Thank you,” I said as I turned towards him. “For everything.”
“Anytime,” he said, winking. “Anytime.”
I shook my head and pushed him as the two of us giggled alongside one another. He walked over to Emery and bent down, pressing a kiss to her head as laughter peeled from between her lips again. He walked over and grabbed his leather coat as he slung it over his shoulders, and I grabbed my pants from the pile in the corner and quickly hopped my ass into them.
“Such a beautiful sight,” Hawk said.
“Can it, bud. You’re headed to church. Such unclean thoughts aren’t welcome in those areas,” I said.
“I’ll be back as soon as I can. Any requests for the store?” he asked.
“Beer,” I said.
“Besides the obvious?”
“Chips and salsa?” I asked.
“Always been a tried and true with you,” he said as he opened the door. “I’ll make sure to double up.”
I watched him walk out to his motorcycle, and all the memories came flooding back. I remembered when Hawk got his first cycle. I remembered the lessons my father gave him on it. I remembered the tricks he half-killed himself trying to accomplish in order to impress everyone. I remembered the first time I’d ridden on the back of it. How my arms snaked around his waist, and the wind blew in my short-cut hair. I remembered how free I felt hanging onto him while we zoomed down the road, dodging cars and outrunning policemen so we wouldn’t have to deal with our father’s wraths if we got speeding tickets.
He situated himself on the bike before he looked back up at me, and I could’ve sworn I saw the ghost of a grin on his cheeks before he pulled his helmet down onto his head.
I stood in the doorway and watched as he drove off down the road. Many emotions began to dawn upon my mind, but the biggest one was uncertainty. How was all of this going to pan out? How in the world had yesterday come about? How could a man I’d abandoned all those years ago just simply welcome me back into his life with the massive surprise I had clutched alongside my body.
But as my eyes continued to drift along down the road, that uncertainty slowly morphed to fear.
I watched as a black sedan pulled off the corner of the street. It turned around in the middle of the road and began exiting the neighborhood, following the same path that Hawk just took. I watched it slow down, the brake lights flashing their neon red as the sedan slowed down, and for a moment I held my breath. It stopped in the middle of the road as it slowly bobbed and weaved on its platform, then it sped off into the distance with its tinted windows and solid black frame.
I didn’t spend all those years riding with The Road Rebels to turn out an idiot.
Someone had followed me all the way to Hawk’s, and I had no idea what to do about it.
Chapter 5
Hawk
I cruised down the road and bypassed the church. I had no intentions of stopping there, nor had I ever stepped foot into one. With Sydney being in trouble like she was, the less she knew about where I was going, the better off she would be. I cruised down the road with the wind whipping against my body as I headed for the mechanic shop. It sat out front of the lodge mine, and Sydney’s father had built. When you passed it on the main stretch of highway, it was nothing but a mechanic shop. But around back, it had a nice lodge with a few offices where The Road Rebels held their meetings and shit.
Down the street, a half mile from the mechanic shop was the bar we owned. Gearbox, it was called. We got it up and running about a year after The Devil Saints tore through town and mowed us all down. We dedicated each table to a fallen rider and used the proceeds from the bar to pay the families back for their burial expenses. There were two things The Road Rebels always placed above everything else: we took care of our own, and we never hurt women and children.
We lived and died by those two rules.
Every Sunday, the core of the group would meet at the mechanic shop to talk. We’d work on overflow cars and take inventory while discussing things that pertained to the club. Our current president was Mac, and he’d been headin’ us up since The Devil Saints roared into town six years ago. He was the one that single-handedly pieced the entire group back together during their anger and grief, and every year it was always unanimous who would stay our President. Mac was headstrong, took no shit, and had a new tattoo every fucking time I turned around. He was close to my father’s age, but he would never let any of us admit that.
“Glad you finally showed,” Mac said.
“Had some shit drop at my door yesterday,” I said.
“You good?” Fox asked.
“Yeah. Gettin’ it situated.”
Fox was our Vice President. A hard position for him to take over since my father did such a damn good job with it. I had to help him out after he came under scrutiny for never doing things the way my father had done them for years. I just kept telling him to tell everyone to piss off. Everyone did the job a little differently when they were elected, and he had to simply understand that the group was grieving in their own way.
Fox had a stable head on his shoulders until he got to drinking. He loved going on all the road trips we would set up for the group, and if there was ever a get together at the bar he was the first one there and the last one out. He let the good times roll when they happened, but he was also the best in a time of crisis. He balanced out Mac well. Not because Mac panicked, but because Mac wasn’t emotionally rooted. Mac was stoic and dead-eyed, but Fox could empathize when necessary.
It was a good dynamic with the group.
“Got a bitch you couldn’t get outta your bed?” Snake asked.
“You’d love that problem, wouldn’t you?” I asked as I grabbed the inventory clipboard.
“If that sweet pussy didn’t wanna get outta my bed, I’d just tie her to the headboard and tell her to keep her legs spread. I’d dip in whenever I wanted to, and she’d never want for nothing,” Snake said.
You could always count on Snake to be crude as fuck. He was rough around
the edges and loved the trashiest of women. Put the biggest girl in some daisy dukes and a shirt three sizes too small and you could practically see the imprint of his dick in his pants. He was a weird one, but oddly enough numbers his thing. It took us awhile to find someone to fill the position of Treasurer after Sydney’s father had been gunned down, but Snake stepped up and had held the position ever since.
Then, there was Talon-- our road captain. Unapologetically protective and oddly silent, he only spoke when it was necessary. He was a pro with cars and was the only reason our mechanic’s shop could take on the schedule it did.
He was also the one that did inventory on the drugs we pushed through the shop once the money filtered through the bar and wiped itself clean a bit.
“Talon. This inventory sheet’s already filled out. You do this?” I asked.
“Yep.”
“Looks like we’re three short on the crates of oil,” I said. The crates of oil were weed. Even though recreational and medicinal marijuana were legal in Nevada, we did not own a dispensary. We didn’t want the government getting involved in our shit. So we always bought specific strains in large quantities from Colorado.
“Looking into it,” Talon said.
Mondays were used for actual inventory of the bar and the shop. Sundays inventory was for the guns. We shipped them in and cleaned the money by distributing it through the bar. Investing it and placing it into as many different avenues as we could was the quickest way to clean money trails we left, and Snake was a pro with that shit. He could take half a million dollars of profit and make any trace of it routed back to us disappear within forty-eight hours. It was fucking magnificent.
Talon was anal about making sure we got the guns we’d paid for, so I knew he would take care of the discrepancy. If there was one thing you could count on him for besides protection, it was accuracy. He was the one in charge of teaching newcomers and the children of the club to shoot in order to defend themselves because he wasn’t just accurate, but he was also safe. He was the enforcer of our group when he needed to be, so I wasn’t worried about the inventory we seemed to be missing. Talon would comb through every last person, corner, and connection we had to figure out what the fuck had happened.
Even if it got a bit messy.
“Wanna tell us what your hold up was?” Mac asked.
“When I got enough alcohol in me, sure,” I said.
“Shit. That bad, huh?” Fox asked.
“Not bad. Just surprising,” I said.
“You good?” Talon asked.
I looked over to my comrade who was staring me right in my eyes. Even though Snake and Mac were the ones that read people the best, it was moments like this with Talon that I questioned that part of his character. Talon had this stare about him. It was unwavering and intense. Like a fire was brewing behind them and all he needed was a direction to cast his anger. He was distant until he felt there was something that had to be corrected. He was nonchalant about his life until there was someone that professed to need him.
He was absent until there was something he could heal.
“Yeah. I’m good,” I said.
“Then we need to talk about our next inventory run,” Mac said.
“Two weeks from today, right?” I asked.
“Yep,” Fox said. “Comin’ in by transfer truck.”
“We’ll need some hands on deck in order to get it over with quickly. We won’t have much time to get it stocked before everyone’s gonna wanna go be with their families,” Snake said.
What he meant was we needed as many people to help us unload before we got caught doing what we were doing. The quicker we could unload, the quicker we could line up people through the lodge in the back to get their shit. We fucking ran this joint like a line factory. Drugs came right through the front door to eliminate any sort of idea that we were hiding something and were taken right back into the lodge. Then, people drove up to the lodge, made it look like they were checking in their cars to get serviced, picked up their shit, then paid us on the spot.
Then, we’d send that money right on over with Snake to the bar where he could process the payments, do the first clean, and work his magic from there for the next two days. All this meant we could get paid quicker, which meant we could divvy up funds necessary for our accounts, which meant we could talk about expanding our operations and possibly taking on another business.
Right now, however, the trip to Redding, California was on everyone’s minds, and this shipment would allow us to pay off the rest of the trip so no one would have to pay shit out of pocket to go enjoy themselves.
“That means the trip to Redding is on?” Talon asked.
“Yep. Just confirmed the inventory shipment,” Mac said.
“Good. Everyone’s excited to get back to Redding,” Talon said.
“Don’t blame them,” I said. “Got a decent slice of pussy the last time we were there.”
“I still can’t believe you didn’t take her number. She was drooling all over you,” Snake said.
“It’s just pussy. I can get that shit anywhere,” I said.
“Wow. A pompous statement. Didn’t think you had it in you anymore, Hawk,” Snake said.
“He’ll always be hooked on Syd. You know that,” Fox said.
He wasn’t wrong, but I tried to not to react. I wasn’t ready to tell them that Sydney had rolled up on my doorstep with a six-year-old daughter that was mine. I wasn’t ready to tell them that I was actually considering taking her in and keeping her here. I needed to respect Syd’s wishes on keeping Emery sheltered from this type of lifestyle. On the one hand, as I sat here talking about shipping in guns, I could see what she meant. But, Emery had an entire family that would be itching to protect her and love her.
I felt Sydney was robbing her of that time and time again.
Not only that, though. The group would be hounding my house trying to see her and induct her back into the group, and the only thing that would serve to do was give her an excuse to run again. She ran out of fear and grief the first time, so there wasn’t anything that signaled to me that she wouldn’t run again. If she felt an entire group of people would go against her wishes on how to raise her child, she’d flee and tell herself she was protecting Emery.
And I wasn’t going to lose her a second time just because The Road Rebels didn’t understand how to fucking cool their jets.
“We got the auto part crates coming in this time, right?” Fox asked.
“Yep,” Mac said. “Which’ll make unloading everything a bit easier since those jugs aren’t quite as big.”
All of our drugs were shipped in through auto part crates. With the mechanic shop, we had so many parts constantly coming in, that it just made sense to hide the drugs in the crates as well. We took precautions just in case one of our shipments ever got busted. They never came just sitting in the crates. The drugs were packed tightly within the frame of the crate. Our club dealing in cocaine and weed. We never got into the harder shit. It was too risky, and we wanted to draw some sort of moral line.
None of our members were allowed to sample the product for their own use. My father had made that rule back in his time, and I was happy that Mac was enforcing it as harshly as my father did.
And so far, it had kept us all clean.
We knew dealing drugs was one of riskiest businesses we could divulge in as a club. Our supplier was associated with the Columbian drug cartel. If we fucked shit up, things would get serious real quick for us. But our club had voted it as our best business when my father was alive, and it has been that way ever since. It supplied us the money to keep everyone happy and operations moving.
“You guys will be in charge of this shipment,” Mac said. “I’ve got some business to attend to around the time this shipment comes in.”
“Any particular people you want us to enlist to help with it?” I asked.
“Where the hell you goin’?” Snake asked.
“Gotta be with my mother that w
eekend. Chemo and shit Friday. She’ll be sick as hell through the weekend,” Mac said.
“Shit, I forgot about that. How’s she doin’?” Snake asked.
“Holding up,” was all Mac offered.
“You’re good. We’ll find some people to fill in, then we’ll fill you in on how it all went down that Monday,” I said.
“It’ll have to be that Monday evening,” Talon said. “That’s when we all hit the road for Redding.”
“Won’t be coming to that, either. In case something happens,” Mac said.
“I’m staying behind on this one, too.”
“Yeah, ‘cause you got the clap on the last one,” Fox said as he snickered.
“Thanks for that reminder, dick,” I said.
“Oh, you’re never living that one down. Not a fucking chance,” Snake said, chuckling.
“Fuck you all,” I said.
We worked together for a couple of hours to finish up the weekend overflow before I headed off to the grocery store. I hadn’t forgotten about the things I promised my daughter I’d pick up, and I thought about what I could possibly make us all for dinner. I walked up and down the aisles looking around, picking up shit like macaroni and cheese and stuff to make tacos with. I figured those two things would be a hit, and if they weren’t then, I could cook up the hamburger meat in burger form. I grabbed some last minute breakfast foods to shove in with the snacks I’d promised, then quickly checked out and stacked it all on the back of my bike. I’d been gone for about three hours now, and I didn’t want Sydney to start panicking.
Plus, I was ready to get back and see my daughter.
It made me nervous, being away from them. With Sydney being on the run from the DEA, I knew she posed a threat to our entire operation. We’d be dodging DEA for years, and I wanted to keep it that way. If even one person followed her here and started studying me, they’d quickly get to know my movements. They’d follow me in order to learn more about Sydney, and in the process they would most certainly piece together what we were doing. I knew I needed to get her somewhere else… kick her and Emery out if I wanted to preserve the secrecy of the operation The Road Rebels had built.
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