Butch

by Trent Jordan

  What I said next was, I genuinely believed, not an understatement in the slightest.

  “Because if you don’t? Everything we’ve fought for in the last several months? All of the love that everyone in this room has found? All of the progress we’ve made as men and a club? It will die. It will all die. And the Fallen Saints will win.”

  I sighed.

  “Without reconciliation, it is inevitable.”

  Preview of “Phoenix”

  Phoenix and Jess

  Austin “Phoenix” Smith Jr.

  The only person I loved in this world was dead.

  Imagine waking up every morning and learning that your father, the man who had given you everything, even after Mom died of a drug overdose, even after you’d gone through everything, wasn’t there to greet you. Imagine that the man who had given you not just all of the lessons of this world but an opportunity at a career and a lifestyle wasn’t there.

  And now imagine that the reason he wasn’t there was because your so-called brothers had murdered him in cold blood.

  How the hell do you think you’d feel?

  I can tell you how I feel. I had a lot of bitter resentment to the world. I already felt that the Black Reapers were, at best, ineffective in their leadership, incompetent at worst. Now, though, they had gone from a group that I liked but had reservations about to the group that I considered my sworn enemy. There was no one, and I mean no one, that I hated in this world more than the Black Reapers.

  And that was a hell of a fucking thing, considering that for the longest time, the Fallen Saints were my sworn enemy.

  A knock came at the door. It startled me so much, I jumped. I muttered fuck under my breath as I put on my tie, something that I hadn’t done in ages.

  “Yeah,” I shouted. “What?”

  “Mind if I enter?”

  I shook my head, collecting my breath. Just because he’d scared the shit out of me didn’t mean he needed the same venom I had for his brother.

  “No.”

  Cole Carter proceeded to open the door very slowly. The president of the Gray Reapers, a man who treated his men like, well, men, and a man who actually involved himself in his club activities, Cole had a presence to him that suggested a certain ease and cheerfulness to him that Lane had never had.

  But he had also become a lot harder of a man since I had last seen him, just before the shootout that took the life of Lane’s fiance the night the patriarch of the Carter family had perished. Speaking of people who are probably rolling over in their grave at what this club has turned into. Jesus fucking Christ.

  “How are you doing?” Cole said as he shut the door behind me.

  Cole’s shift to someone tougher and harder hadn’t just come in the form of his actions. He’d shaved his head and grown a bit of stubble—not a full-on beard, but enough to make him look rugged. He also didn’t smile as much as he used to, but he was still easily the warmest and most gregarious biker that I knew.

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  It didn’t take a psychiatrist to see I was full of shit. But it also didn’t take one to see that pushing back on me would be a huge fucking mistake.

  “It’s OK not to be,” Cole said. “No one in the club expects you to be perfect today. They know what the Black Reapers did. They know it’s your father. They know—”

  “I get it, Cole,” I snapped.

  But in truth, I appreciated the words. That didn’t mean I was going to cry or even show emotion. That could not fucking happen, and my father would’ve been ashamed of me if I had.

  “My father would have wanted me to be strong,” I said. “I am going to give a good eulogy for the man. I am going to lay him to rest. And then I am going to kill every last one of those motherfuckers to avenge his death.”

  Cole didn’t flinch. I knew he still, somehow, for some retarded reason, held out hope that he could make amends with his brother, Lane. I didn’t know why—it’s not like Lane ever treated him well, not even in the supposed couple of months of peace when the Gray Reapers had come to help us…

  Us? No, them.

  “I understand,” Cole said, patting my shoulder. “We’ll let you lead the procession to the funeral. For today, you’re the president.”

  And that, right there, was exactly why Cole Carter was ten times the president that Lane ever could be. Actually, no, that implied that one could measure how much better Cole was; Cole was infinitely better than Lane. It was like asking who could be a better leader, a Navy SEAL or a newborn kitten. They weren’t even on the same fucking scale.

  “We’ll leave on your cue.”

  Without another word, Cole ducked out of the room.

  And as soon as the door shut, all those heavy feelings, all the weight from what happened, all the anger came out in full force.

  “God fucking damnit!” I roared as I punched my hand through the mirror in front of me.

  I screamed both in frustration and in pain. My knuckles were bloodied, but that was nothing. That would heal, maybe even create a good story at some point.

  But the scars of my father’s loss?

  I can see it now.

  I’m right outside Lane’s house.

  Dad’s going up to tell him the news.

  Suddenly, Butch and Axle intercept him, and Patriot comes over to tell me that they just want to make sure everything is fine. He’s using his fucking fake-ass charm.

  And then…

  Butch kills him.

  Some people preferred to black out a memory like that, for fear that it would cripple them forever.

  Me? I replayed that exact moment when Butch raised his gun, pointed it between my father’s temples, fired, and blood spurted off his forehead. I remembered the sickening way my father just fell to the ground in a thud, dead before his head collided with the concrete.

  Even if he was the fucking rat… even if he had somehow, someway betrayed the club… did he really fucking deserve a death like that?

  He was not Red Raven, secretary of the Black Reapers to me. He was not Red Raven, wise sage and trusted adviser of Roger Carter.

  He was just Dad.

  In more formal settings, he was Austin Smith Sr. He had passed down his name to me, wanting me to pick up in areas that he felt he had failed. He was a man that gave everything of himself to me under circumstances that would have broken anyone else.

  And how did the Black Reapers handle such a serious accusation?

  With an impromptu bullet to the fucking skull.

  I collapsed to the floor and began to sob. Punching the mirror wasn’t going to bring my father back. Murdering Butch and the rest of the Black Reaper officer corp, save for Father Marcellus, the one man I had a genuinely good relationship with, wouldn’t bring my father back.

  But I wanted desperately to believe that it would give me some measure of peace. Some said eye for an eye didn’t work, but that was only for those who believed forgiveness and compassion were possible. For the average man, sure.

  I was no average man.

  I was raised in a household without a mother. I was kicked out of multiple schools. I went to jail at fifteen years old. I had learned to trust no one, save my father, a lesson I had forgotten terribly in the last weeks of my father’s life. Or perhaps he forgot it.

  Forgiveness? Compassion? I could recognize them when I got them, and I would always appreciate them.

  But I could never give them to my enemies. The most I could give was a cold shoulder instead of a fired bullet. That was the extent of my “forgiveness.”

  You’ve got to be strong, Phoenix. Get your ass off the floor, get to it, and be the man your father needs you to be.

  I let out my last sniffle and rose. I looked at myself in the broken mirror, the shards in the mirror cutting through the image of my limbs and my heart. I told myself that it was time to stop crying. I’d had a private moment. I could not have a public moment.

  I turned and grabbed the door handle.

  “Let’
s go honor a hero.”

  Provided the Black Reapers were wrong. And if they weren’t?

  It was a question I refused to entertain. Anything of that nature had no upside. If the Reapers were wrong, it would confirm what I already knew.

  And if they were right?

  Losing my father was devastating. Losing my father’s legacy…

  Some things were just too unfathomable to even ponder.

  Jess Walters

  Maybe this will be the bar where I won’t get shot at.

  It was an inauspicious beginning to the start of my new job in a town far, far away from the place where the last bar I’d tended to had burned down. If I never went back to Springsville, it wouldn’t have been at a moment too soon. The place had its share of stories, but I was tired of feeling like I was about to be in the middle of a shootout that the police would never get involved with.

  In a lot of ways, the bar I now worked at, Tom’s Billiards, was very similar to the one before, Brewskis. This one had multiple pool tables, dartboards, and a full bar; it was the kind of place that very few people attended. No one would ever think to take a date here for a formal Saturday night or even a casual one; it was the definition of dive bar where the gangsters and the bikers came to play.

  But here in Ashton, though I had seen some motorcyclists, the sight didn’t worry me. Bikers were a dime a dozen in California; seeing a bike and freaking out was akin to seeing a taxi in New York City and freaking out. It made no sense.

  What did make sense in Ashton was the low crime rate, the older population, and the lack of modern technology. There were a couple of tube TVs in here and only one credit card processing machine; it looked like a place that had been built in 1975 and had just never been renovated in the years since.

  The door swung open, and I assumed my normal pose—leaning forward, a slight smile on my face, my arms spread on the table. It was the kind of look that was a little flirtatious, but not so much so that it gave customers too much of the wrong idea.

  And then I laughed when the owner of the bar, an elder gentleman by the name of, not surprisingly, Tom, walked in.

  “You changed your hair!” he said in surprise.

  “I told you, I like to mix it up a lot!” I said.

  That was true. At Brewskis, I just liked to change it as much as I could as a way of relieving stress; it was sort of my way of having an activity to take my mind off the hell of the job I was about to take.

  But here, the flattening of my hair and the return to the natural dirty blonde color was my attempt to return my life to normalcy—or, at least, my idea of normalcy, since I couldn’t exactly say that I had ever had a “normal” life.

  “Well, it’s a good look,” Tom said. “You’re the type of girl I hope to see when I walk into my bar.”

  “Thanks,” I said, trying not to show that I was a little unsettled by his words.

  Tom had struck me as nothing more than a man from a different era in the interview, and I wanted to believe that was the case here. I still had my guard up just in case, though.

  “I just wanted to come in here and give you a heads up,” he said. “Got a call from a friend of mine here. They’re coming here after a funeral, probably about a dozen of ‘em. So you may get slammed at an hour you’re not used to.”

  “Oh, that’s fine,” I said. “Not like you have a unique setup to your bar here. I know where things are.”

  Tom smiled and patted the bar.

  “You know, small town like this, it’s pretty rare that we get someone as experienced as you,” he said. “How did you wind up in Ashton?”

  I chuckled to myself, trying to think of the best way to answer it. Did I tell the truth? That I had runaway from home since the age of fourteen years old, trying to make it on my own, and only recently had opened communication with my father—a decision that I sometimes regretted to an enormous degree?

  Or did I just tell a small lie?

  “The last place I worked at burned down,” I said.

  That wasn’t a small lie by any means. It was true, in fact. But it was a deflection, a statement so outrageous and so bold that anyone hearing it would immediately lose interest in knowing anything else and want to know about that.

  “Wait, what?” Tom said. “You didn’t say that in the interview!”

  “You never asked,” I said with a sly smile, the kind of smile that I knew would make Tom laugh.

  “Well, I sure am now! What happened?”

  “You didn’t hear what happened at Brewskis? Up in Springsville?”

  It took a second for that to click with Tom, but I could tell the instant he remembered it.

  “Oh right!” he said. “You bartended there? I hope you weren’t there when it happened.”

  “Yeah, well, actually, I was,” I said. “But I managed to get it.”

  It wasn’t a very difficult or dramatic escape, actually. I’d been behind the bar, with no patrons inside, when someone—I presumed a member of the Fallen Saints, since they were always the more difficult group by far—threw a Molotov cocktail inside. It was easy to escape out the back, and my car wasn’t damaged. The Fallen Saints either didn’t care that I had escaped or didn’t notice, but nothing had happened since.

  The biggest surprise, really, was that the owner of the bar paid out my last paycheck. I expected a small town place like that to not do anything, but even after I told him I’d sooner work in a literal graveyard than return to a rebuilt Brewskis, I got what little pay I was owed left.

  “Bunch of bikers, right?”

  I nodded.

  “Well, then, maybe you shouldn’t be bartending tonight.”

  Don’t tell me…

  “The group that’s coming is called the Gray Reapers.”

  “You mean Black Reapers?” I said, hopeful.

  “What? No, the Gray Reapers. I know, similar colors, but I’m almost certain it’s gray. Unless I’m so old I can’t even tell my colors apart.”

  Tom sounded too sure and wasn’t that old, anyways, for me to doubt him. The Gray Reapers… was this a rival to the Black Reapers? A spin-off? A charter? Something else?

  “I can handle bikers,” I said. “It’s all I did the last few years. I’m more concerned about one specific biker group, and as long as it’s not the one I’m thinking of—not the Gray Reapers—then it should be fine.”

  “Hmm, OK then, if you say so,” Tom said. “They’re a bunch of fine young men, anyways. I know the leader of them, uh, Carter, I think his name is.”

  Like… Lane Carter?

  Or is it the other one? Haven’t seen the other one in a while. Can’t even remember his name right no.

  “Anyways, call me if anything comes up. Just wanted to drop by and inform you of that.”

  “Thanks, Tom.”

  Tom left without another word. I sat down at a stool near the back, taking a second to process this.

  Maybe I hadn’t left the crazy, insane world of the MCs. Maybe it was impossible to escape. Maybe it would be different this time.

  Either way, I was actually curious to see what this new group looked like. To date, all of the MCs had taken the approach of maintaining a respectful distance from me—I served drinks and spoke to them when spoken to, but otherwise, I was more than happy to avoid the drama and chaos that usually followed.

  But in a town like this, where there didn’t seem to be a rival of any sort, maybe things would be just a little bit different.

  “Phoenix” is now available on Amazon. Click here to read:

  https://amzn.to/3iWUwUD

  Free Prequel

  Learn how the Black Reapers story begins. Click here to read the free prequel:

  https://dl.bookfunnel.com/6te1n6yfc4

  Also by Trent Jordan

  Black Reapers MC

  Season 1

  Lane (June 2020)

  Patriot (June 2020)

  Axle (July 2020)

  Butch (July 2020)

  Phoenix (July 2020
)

  Cole (July 2020)

  More to Come…

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2020 by Trent Jordan

  Cover art copyright © 2020 by Talia RedhotInk

  Editing by Full Bloom Editorial

  All rights reserved. Published by TJ Creations.