Hard Rider

by Lydia Pax

  That was fine by him. He knew that she had been getting off on touching him as he rode her around on the bike, but for the first time, on the ride to the cabin, it hadn’t felt strictly sexual.

  Of course it still felt sexual—there was no way it couldn’t, with how ungodly attractive June was and how perfectly soft her body pressing against his on the open road.

  But it wasn’t only sexual.

  She held him for the warmth he provided in the high winds on the road; she held him for the way his presence made her feel safe, secure, protected. She held him because she loved him and couldn’t bear the thought of losing him—and Ram could feel all of this through touch alone.

  They stepped up into the cabin where Beretta already waited. His hunting rifle was propped up next to the door.

  “Why’d you bring her?” he said, nodding at June.

  “Don’t talk about me like I’m not here,” said June. “I’m standing right in front of you.”

  “All right,” said Beretta, shrugging. “Why’d he bring you? If I ask it entirely in the second-person, it gets confusing.”

  “She wanted to come, so she’s here,” said Ram. “She’ll stay hidden while the deal goes down. Is everybody on their way?”

  “Yeah,” said Beretta. “An hour maybe before they get here. Probably just around dark. Isn’t she the sheriff’s daughter?”

  June shifted. “How did you know that?”

  “I know all kinds of things,” said Beretta. “Maybe we can use you. You’ll get under Colt’s skin for sure.”

  “No,” said Ram. He was barely comfortable even having her in the cabin. “She’ll come out if she’s needed, but I want her hidden. In the smuggler’s box, there.”

  “You’re putting me in a box?”

  Beretta winked at her. “Trade name.”

  He knocked his hand against a wood panel in the wall between the living space and the kitchen. There was a slight hollowness to the sound in the empty cabin. She would be a tight fit inside, but she would fit.

  “Yeah,” said Ram. “She’ll have a gun trained on Acero, all right? She can look through here.” There were a series of cracks along the panel, minute but enough to let someone look through. “We’ll put Acero in front of her, so all she has to do is have the gun forward.”

  “You’re giving me a gun?” June looked surprised.

  “You wanted to come,” said Ram. “You gotta pull your weight. It’s simple. If he starts acting funny, you shoot him.”

  “To death?”

  Beretta laughed. “No, until he’s angry. Of course to death. Christ.”

  “You shoot him until he stops moving, June,” said Ram. “He’s been shot before. Hasn’t stopped him yet.”

  “He’s telling the truth,” said Beretta. “Last summer we were dealing coke and he got shot in the belly three times and still broke the neck of the guy who did it.”

  “Really?” Ram looked amazed.

  “Guy only shot him with a twenty-two. Tiny bullet,” Beretta said to June. “But yeah. It’s true. Saw it myself.”

  June swallowed. “I need a moment for that. For this. I’ve never pointed a gun at anyone before.”

  Ram started dragging the table from the small kitchen area over to the other living space where there was more room. He propped up the mattresses under the windows and presided over the space, taking a look.

  “What do you think?” he asked Beretta.

  Beretta had been watching Ram move, his face buried in thought, clearly thinking of every eventuality. “Looks good.”

  June raised her hand. “I have a question.”

  “You don’t have to raise your hand, June.”

  “Whatever. I don’t know the sneak attack rules, sorry. Explain to me why I might have to shoot someone again? You told me you were going to broker some kind of deal with him for the Wrecking Crew.”

  “Yeah,” said Ram. “But we gotta blackmail Colt to do it. If he doesn’t call off hostilities, we expose him. Ruin him.”

  “And if we threaten Colt like that,” said Beretta, “by extension, we’re threatening Acero. Or at least Ram is. I’ll be playing ignorant. Just a broker.”

  “But he’s going to turn you down,” said June. “My dad will definitely turn you down.”

  Understanding began to dawn on June’s face.

  “That’s part of why I didn’t want you to come, June.” Ram’s voice was a little sad.

  She twisted her hand against her hip, looking wistfully at the gun in her hand. “Can you try…can you try not to be violent? To not hurt him?”

  Ram knew she meant her dad, even after everything. And he understood it, too. It would give him no real pleasure to murder his wife’s father—it gave him no pleasure to murder anyone—but he’d do it if he had to.

  This war had to stop, and he had to be the one to stop it.

  “I’m going to do whatever I have to so that my club, my people, survive, June. If I can do that without violence, that’s better. The more violent it gets, the worse. But violence, you know…it’s got a way of simplifying problems.”

  Ram and Beretta gathered near the door, looking out the small windows on either side.

  “You ready for this?” asked Beretta.

  “I’m just worried about you.”

  “Don’t be. I can handle myself.”

  For several moments they glared at each other, like they wanted to say more. Their hands flexed over the guns in their belts.

  Old arguments built up in Ram like distant storms and he was a ship on the ocean. It would only take a few degrees of difference to sail far out of their way. It wasn’t easy to do, but it was possible. Part of him, though, liked to sail straight into the storm, liked to lash himself to the mast and ride out the wind and the lightning.

  But…no. He and Beretta were allies, for the moment if nothing else.

  A low, fiery din crawled up the hill, approaching them quick. The sound was like that of Ram’s bike, only darker, fuller.

  “Here’s Acero,” said Beretta, stuffing his gun behind his belt. “I better go meet him, tell him it’s all clear.”

  Ram nodded to June. “You better stuff yourself in that closet.”

  She started, removing the panel and stepping in. He pulled out a handgun for her—the smaller of the two that Ace had given him.

  “Don’t use it until you have to,” he said.

  “When’s that?”

  He winked. “You’ll know.”

  Outside, Beretta convened with Acero. The Black Flags leader was a shorter man but no less scary for it. Patches decorated his vest, the most prominent of which was a pair of bloody scalps around either shoulder. He’d developed a reputation in previous years for his brutality with men disloyal to him, scalping them readily.

  To Ram’s knowledge, the last such scalping had been years and years past, some number of Presidents ago. But to scalp someone was a simple, brutal deed—and it was enough to build a reputation on. Acero still kept a knife strapped across his chest to this day, ready to be pulled out at a moment’s notice.

  He and Beretta spoke soft enough so that Ram could not overhear them. This was to be expected, but also put him a little on edge. The country air was quiet, and the cabin did not hold out sounds very well. He’d had to learn to sleep there with the constant endless chirping of cicadas and rustling of raccoons and other varmints.

  But he sat down at the table anyway, waiting for them to come in, his gun ready at one side hidden from the doorway.

  It struck him very suddenly, like a hand around his heart, that he could die there. He could die and June would watch, and she might die today too.

  Just a few minutes after Acero arrived, he heard Colt’s squad car roll up the gravel.

  It was time to start.

  Chapter 50

  June did a very particular job of breathing as the three men sat down in front of her. She had to be quiet, had to not make even the tiniest sound—or else she would find out what her father
and the psychopathic scalper Acero thought of her listening in on their secret meeting.

  Why she was here was a little bit beyond her. She didn’t know why she had volunteered so readily—didn’t know what she was thinking would happen. Ram had told her outright that it would be violent, bloody, and still she insisted she come along.

  And now she had a gun pointed at a man’s back. A man that she would have to kill if Ram needed her to.

  That was how deep her love for him went already. June didn’t think she would run off and hunt down some random bad guy to help Ram out—but would she shoot someone if it protected Ram’s life right there in the moment?

  She hoped so.

  They sat down at the table on three different ends. Ram’s back was to the back of the cabin. Acero faced the nearby window, and Colt’s back was to the front door. Beretta positioned himself in the wide living area, standing tall, looking this way and that.

  “This isn’t such a bad spot,” said Colt. “I bet you get a lot of javelina running wild out here, though. Do you?”

  “Every so often,” said Ram. “Couple years back some broke through the door and we had to chase them off. Killed a couple. Makes for shitty eating.”

  Acero raised an eyebrow. “We? Whose ‘we?’”

  Suspicious already, and little wonder, being brought to a secluded spot without any back-up. June hoped Ram could recover.

  “The guy I brought up here with me from the Crew,” Ram said easily. “I don’t like to hunt alone. Makes for a full stomach but an empty spirit, you know?”

  Ram poured out a cup of coffee for them from a small metal pot. Acero looked at his but did not touch it. Colt took his up to his nose, sniffed, and then set it back down.

  Beretta stood in the corner, presiding over the talk. His largeness—his and Ram’s—had struck her when she saw them together at first, both of them so enormous. How had they ever gotten along in this small space?

  Their friendship must have been tight indeed to share so little with so much.

  Losing his sister must have really wrecked Ram to drop a brother like Beretta with such ease. But then she knew about that—knew about dropping people you thought you knew, people you thought were better than anyone.

  She hoped Beretta could turn Ram’s mind around. She really did.

  “I’m going to put this real simple,” said Ram. “I know y’all two are colluding.”

  “The fuck?” said Beretta, stepping up to the table. “What the fuck is he talking about, boss? I’ll put a fucking bullet in him right now.”

  “Shut up, Beretta.” Acero put up a hand.

  “Is what he’s saying true? Because I ain’t no fucking rat, I’ll tell you that, boss.’

  “We’ll talk about it later,” said Acero. “Now shut the fuck up and stand guard like you’re paid to do.”

  Beretta gathered himself up and sulked appropriately in the corner.

  Not a bad acting job, thought June. He wouldn’t win an Oscar any time soon, but this would likely be over before Acero had a chance to think too much on it.

  “I know y’all are colluding,” said Ram again. “And I want it to stop. If it doesn’t stop, I’m going public with it. That effects both of you. I don’t know if you can handle having your boys know you’re in tight with the cops, Acero. It doesn’t look like Beretta likes it very much.”

  “He’s a good boy,” said Acero. “I’ve got a lot of good boys. You’d be surprised what they do.”

  “And you, Colt?” Ram smiled and shook his head. “You know that’ll ruin you. Big mister ‘death of the biker gang.’ Ain’t that been your platform? And here are you are, working with them. Gotta say, that’s gonna look bad.”

  “Have you got proof?” asked Acero.

  “You came here together, didn’t you?”

  “We came here at the same time,” said Colt, tapping the table with one finger. “Doesn’t prove anything. And if that’s all you got, boy, you better—”

  “I’ve got proof. Tapes.”

  This stopped Colt’s words dead. His face paled and then became very flushed. His automatic response to fear was only to get angry. June had never quite put that together before.

  To follow this up, Ram pulled out the envelope and put it on the table. From inside he pulled out a couple and let Colt see them.

  Ram looked at Acero. “Did you know he tapes all his conversations?”

  The heavy biker stared death at Colt. Acero brought a hand up to the knife on his chest, twisting his fingers over the handle. The gun in June’s hands shook—if that hand started flying, so would her trigger finger.

  “This true?” asked Acero.

  Colt narrowed his eyes. “Let’s say that it was. Why don’t we just fucking kill you where you’re sitting and forget about you like the rest of the fucking world?”

  “If I don’t make a call,” said Ram, holding up his phone, “every half-hour, then I’ve got a friend ready to send a select portion of those tapes over to every news station in Texas. The worst sorta section, the kind that has you arranging for arrests of rival gang members. That has you talking about the murder of one of your cops, and your decision to pin it on me even though you knew it was one of the Flags.”

  “And let’s say we agree. What then? What happens to the tapes? You’ll give them up?”

  “No. Those’re mine, now. I think I’ll find them pretty handy.”

  “You’re putting us in an awful hard corner, boy,” said Colt. “There’s greatness that comes in magnanimity.”

  Ram’s lips pressed into a crooked smile. “If you’re in a corner, under my shoe, then I’ll know exactly where you are all the time, and that’s what I want. The Flags go back to Mexico and stay the fuck out of my country. Out of our territory.” He looked at Acero. “And if you still want a war, fine—but you don’t bring in the cops. And the cops stay out of Wrecking Crew business from now on, unless you want your face on the news for all the wrong reasons.”

  “June’ll kill you for this, you know,” said Colt. “She loves her Daddy.”

  “You’d be surprised,” said Ram. “In fact, fuck you. That’s another one of my conditions from now on. You stay the fuck out of June’s life. You don’t come by us. You don’t talk to us. You get explicit permission every time you want to text her. Speak when spoken to, and no other time.”

  Colt stood up, his hand drifting to his gun. June—unconsciously—felt her gun drift over towards him as he did.

  It was like that, for her. That simple.

  “You’re gonna set terms with me about my daughter, you son-of-a-bitch?”

  Ram stood up, not backing up by an inch. “I’m setting terms with you about my wife. And you can take them or leave them. This isn’t a negotiation. It’s a list of demands. You’re my hostages.”

  They glared at each other across the room. After a moment, Colt sat back down. The fight had left him—he had nowhere to go unless he wanted to get into a gunfight in a small cabin a hundred miles from the nearest hospital.

  Acero leaned back, looking at the one man and then the other. He shook his head and tsked soundly.

  “Tempers, boys. You both got such fucking tempers. You know,” he said, “we thought about teaming up with the Wrecking Crew instead of the cops for a while? It was a sort of fifty-fifty decision. Push one or the other out. But you, Ram, you were most of the reason why we went with the cops. Beretta, he don’t like you, and he makes a good, good damned case against you.”

  “I’m sure he does,” said Ram. “I’ll make one against him for you if you like.”

  Beretta raised an eyebrow at this, stepping forward just slightly. Acero again waved him off.

  “Do you want to know what I think?” said Acero. “About this situation? About your demands?”

  “Not particularly.”

  “I think that you’re a polarizing figure, Ram. I think you need what you’re asking more than I need anything from you. I think that, even if you came out with these tapes, pu
t it on the news, tell all the media and reporters and whoever, the Black Flags would survive. Handily, we’d survive. I think that earlier today, a little bird told me that you’re not even in the Wrecking Crew anymore. Which means you don’t have any friends anymore…and that means you’re full of shit.”

  Everything became sudden and unreal.

  Acero tossed the table over on Colt and drew on Ram. Ram, caught off-guard, pulled out his own gun but was far too late.

  Shots filled the small cabin, the sound becoming the air, becoming everything that June heard. Acero’s shot went far off-center—a torrent of lead unleashing into his body.

  June found herself pulling the trigger almost against her will—pulling it until the trigger clicked empty. The shots powered into Acero’s back, ripping through his clothes and flesh—and yet still he stood up.

  He pulled his knife down, breathing like an incoming train. “Fuckin’…fuckin’ gut you…”

  All June had done was delay him—and now her gun was empty.

  Ram was hit by Acero’s initial volley—hard in the arm, blood streaking down from his shoulder. His gun lost on the floor, slid up against the mattress near the wall.

  Beretta saved Ram. He shot his boss in the head as Acero raised his arm to fire again.

  Colt had been looking on, stunned at the proceedings, but finally cleared himself up from beneath the table. Beretta turned on him, but too slow. Three hard bangs filled the cabin; Colt shot Beretta in the gut and whipped to turn on the defenseless Ram.

  June couldn’t wait any longer.

  “Dad, no!”

  Dropping her gun, she leapt out from the small closet and between her Colt and Ram, hoping like hell her father wouldn’t shoot her too.

  Colt’s eyes were wild, calculating. He licked his lips, their surface dry and cracked from the heat.

  He didn’t shoot anymore. Instead, he grabbed her and whipped Ram over the head with his pistol. Then he grabbed the envelope full of tapes and rushed June out to his car.