by Hazel Parker
Except this was obviously no cop. He had on a sleeveless shirt, torn jeans, sunglasses, and a jacket without sleeves on that showed the symbol of some sort of biker… biker gang, I think. I’d heard they used a different name than that, but given what had happened here a month ago, it was hard to imagine that these biker…whatevers were anything but violent and trouble.
“Can I help you?” a woman on the council said.
The woman sounded so anxious, it was as if the devil himself had just walked in.
“This is a public meeting, right?”
Damnit. It is. Technically speaking…
“Here for the public meeting.”
I saw no reason to ignore the elephant in the room, especially when said elephant was the reason everyone was scared to death of being out on the streets. Not addressing the elephant was akin to not addressing the fear everyone had.
“What are you here for, biker?” I said.
I wasn’t caustic, but I certainly wasn’t friendly. I said biker as if that were his name.
“It’s BK,” he said in a gruff voice. “And to make things right.”
“Oh?” I said, arching an eyebrow, waiting for him to elaborate.
But instead, we just sat there in silence.
For a long time.
For a very long time.
For a very, very, very uncomfortably long time.
“And how do you propose to fix things?” I said, crossing my arms.
The man shrugged.
“Hoping to understand you first,” he said. “Then will come up with a solution.”
OK, he’s just deliberately stonewalling us. This biker guy wouldn’t have just shown up without something to say.
“You want a solution?” I said, not bothering to hide my annoyance. “Then you can get out. You’ve caused quite enough trouble as it is in this town, and I’m not going to let you come in here and intimidate anyone.”
The man, who had never bothered to take off his sunglasses, kept staring right back at me. There was a part of me that felt like I was staring at the Terminator, so cold and emotionless. It was a little terrifying, even for someone like me who didn’t get scared easily.
“If we wanted to cause trouble,” he said, “you think I’d come?”
The statement, while it had some validation, wasn’t going to sway me.
“I know how you work,” I said. “Go. You’re hated in Los Angeles. The best thing you can do, if you don’t want to cause trouble? Move to some other county. Move to some other part of California. And don’t come back.”
The man crossed his arms, sighed, and then stood—very, very slowly, as if daring us to tell him to hurry up out of the place.
“Take some time to research, learn the difference between a Saint and a Merc,” he said, words I didn’t understand. “This ain’t my last time here.”
With that, the huge man left—but not before taking the time to look at every individual in the room, as if warning them retribution was at hand.
The last person he looked at was me, and I only wished I could see him without his sunglasses.
I wanted him to know that no matter how much he stared me down, I would not be intimidated. If he wanted to hide behind sunglasses, so be it.
But I was not going to let the city’s image get run over by a bunch of biker outlaws and thugs.
Chapter 1: BK
The pressure was starting to rise.
Another month had passed since I’d made that first attempt to crash North Hollywood’s town hall meeting, and since that time, things hadn’t gotten any better. I couldn’t reuse that strategy, either, because the town had now made it so that one had to sign up and prove they had a North Hollywood residential address before attending any of their “public” meetings. It was the kind of bullshit maneuver that politicians just loved to use, especially when they didn’t have the balls to face us.
What did they think we were going to do? Kill them? Run them over with our bikes? We weren’t gangsters, no matter how much they wanted to portray us as such. We weren’t criminals, at least not with regard to our moral code. We were just normal people who liked bikes. What the hell was wrong with that?
Unfortunately, with the Devil’s Mercs having done what they did, the answer was “a lot.” And no matter how much Splitter’s girlfriend, the high-profile lawyer Amber Reynolds, said otherwise, the town just believed all motorcyclists were now gangsters and thugs.
I was failing at the duty Trace had given me. I was failing to protect the club. I was sipping on whiskey to try to spark some ideas, but they all seemed to have a major caveat on them in some fashion, something that was making my job impossible.
It reminded me of… of…
I’m back in Iraq. I’m in a military compound, in a bunker. I’m sitting on a bed now, the old bed—well, if you could call it a goddamn bed—of my tour in Iraq.
“I’m sorry, Burke, but…”
The image skips ahead several minutes. I’m taking out my frustration, punching holes in the wall as my commanding officers try and get a hold of me. Even then, when I was relatively skinny, I was a load to take down. It took about five officers in total to drag me to the ground.
Then the image flashes ahead again. I’m in front of about two dozen troops just outside Iraq. They ask me what we should do?
“Kill every last motherfucker you see,” I say.
Then I’m screaming again. I’ve lost over half my men.
“Fuck!”
“Fuck!”
I pulled myself out of my PTSD-induced flashback with a punch to the table in front of me, so hard that it produced a dent and splinters. My hand was bloodied but I barely felt any pain. A couple of the prospects were in the room at the time, cleaning up; they had all been warned about my occasional, but relatively rare in public, outbursts and were smart enough to leave the room at the moment.
These kinds of moments really only happened when I was alone; in group settings or in our hall meetings, I had enough on my mind and listened well enough that I didn’t get trapped in my own head. In fact, I was deliberately making it a point to not show such outbursts in public. The club had an idea that I suffered from PTSD, but they had never seen it in the hall or otherwise.
I didn’t know what pissed me off more: that a couple of prospects had seen me crack, or that I had cracked at all. Neither were good.
In any case, I knew it had happened because I was feeling defeated about the direction of my project to improve our image. It was going so far south, it’d be across the border in no time. Ever since I had crashed the meeting, those who were at city hall had gone on television and sworn to get tough on crime and protect the innocent from “people like those guys.” It didn’t take a middle school graduate to know who those assholes were talking about.
Curiously, that one girl who had actually had the guts to stand up to me—perhaps the one person I respected, even if she talked like the rest of them—was nowhere to be seen on camera. I kept wondering who the hell she was if she was important enough to stand before the idiot politicians but not before the cameras. Some sort of outsider?
At least she was a looker—she had tanned, almost Mediterranean skin, with brown eyes, brown hair, and a healthy balance of lithe and curves. Not that I gave a fuck—literally. I wasn’t big on the sex part of the club; I had my fair share of women, of course, but after what had happened in the past…
I wasn’t really looking for anything. Getting laid was almost like maintenance to me—a checkup to make sure I was still capable of giving it to someone and less of something to enjoy. Sure, orgasms were great, but the immediate aftermath never saw me smiling in celebration. It was akin to killing an enemy; the moment of death felt great, but there was other shit to be done.
So no, it didn’t matter that the woman was hot. It did kind of matter that she stood up to me. I craved people who did that, and at my size, that wasn’t very common. But, that was done, and so now I had to figure out how to impro
ve our image without her in my way.
Being in this clubhouse isn’t doing you any good. Maybe you’d do well to get the hell out of here. Go for a walk. It’s what you did at the compound, remember. Walk around the perimeter, clear your head.
So walk to some store nearby, walk back, and keep going until you figure it out.
Without contemplating if it was a good idea or not—once I made a decision, I fucking made it—I stood up, left my whiskey glass at the bar for a prospect to clean up, and walked outside and out of the club grounds. While Trace sometimes preferred us to stay inside, feeling like parading around in our cuts was a good way to draw the wrong kind of attention, it wasn’t like we were the private golf club where members couldn’t wear their logos outside. We just wanted to make sure that if we wore our cuts outside, they gave off the right image.
And right now, with Los Angeles associating “Savage Saints” with something slightly above “Blood and Crips” and a whole host of other actual gangs, maybe it would do some good to see a member in the flesh not shooting at a building or slamming a beer, both figuratively and metaphorically, and instead doing something much simpler.
Going to Sam’s Ice Cream for a vanilla cone.
The walk from where I was actually went for a pretty damn long time, over half an hour. It would have been much faster just to ride my bike. But this was part of what I meant by improving the image—I wanted Green Hills and North Hollywood and anywhere else to see me not as a biker who was a man, but a man who was a biker. Painfully, that meant for this task I wasn’t riding in.
Though it was long, it was pretty peaceful. I had my hands in my pockets most of the time, my head straight ahead, my ears on alert. As usual, I saw a couple of people gawking at me—at my size, it was virtually impossible to avoid that—but no one seemed annoyed or concerned at the sight of me.
When I got to Sam’s Ice Cream, the woman behind the window, upon seeing me, had a look of nervousness on her face. I didn’t recognize her, but it was still a little disconcerting. Hadn’t Sam told her about us? Sam, the owner, went all the way back to Paul Peters, the founder of the club. He was essentially an honorary member of the club, or as close as one could get to being such a thing.
But I shrugged, ignoring it.
“Hi, what can I get for you?” she said, visibly gulping.
Is it that bad? Jesus.
“Two scoops vanilla,” I said.
I suppose maybe I should be more polite with my language. That might help.
“Please.”
It came after she had already started her first scoop, and it probably made things more awkward than not. Nevertheless, the young girl, Natalie, finished my two scoops and took my cash without any more trouble. I sat down outside, taking a seat near the road, trying to make it so as many people as possible could see me.
As I sat there, I tried to think about why nothing we were doing was working. I figured part of it was just a power dynamic—politicians were out there calling us criminals and telling their citizens they were going to get tough on us. Maybe we could leverage their political alliances and speak to the other side, but the problem with that was that polarization was much higher on the national level than the local, and both sides of the aisle were condemning us.
Maybe we just had to force the issue. Maybe we just had to do things like go out to charity events; we could host a cookout and raise funds for the hospital. Surely, Amber would have a connection to a few charity events that we could do.
But for the most part, I was just silent, unable to come up with anything concrete.
Doesn’t mean I’m not working and striving to come up with something, though.
Wish the rest of the Saints would realize that. Silence and me being so expressionless don’t mean I don’t care or I’m not feeling the pressure. Fuck, I’m feeling it more than anyone.
They must think it’s a joke. Here’s the club giant, put in charge with his little marketing degree, set to fix the public image of the club after a public shootout with their rivals.
Well, fuck that. Not a joke to me. Not—
“Mommy, look, it’s the murderers!”
My eyes gazed to the left as I saw a boy who couldn’t have been older than six or seven holding hands with his mother. His mother pulled him close and hurried him into the shop, doing her best to ignore me. She could have avoided saying something, but unfortunately, children were not as good about hiding their true feelings as she was.
I bit my lip as I seriously contemplated going up to that woman and trying to start a dialogue, but she was alone; the last thing the club needed was a reputation for aggressively confronting women and children. We had to get in a spot where people could feel comfortable approaching us.
And then it happened again.
“Fucking gangsters!” someone yelled from a truck window as they drove by; this time, it looked like two young men, probably in their early twenties, who had yelled that out.
To the appearance of the little boy, his mother, and the two assholes in their pickup truck, I probably looked like I didn’t give two shits about what was said. But inside, this was only adding to my frustration.
Public distaste was one thing. Active public shaming was a much greater thing. We had to get aggressive in fighting this.
We might even… oh, damnit, we might even have to apologize for some things we had done in the past if nothing else as a way to make things better.
I knew there was one person who would give it to me straight, one person whose honesty was like that of a club officer’s in the hall meeting.
I stood up, finishing the last of my vanilla ice cream, and headed inside. I saw Natalie casually cleaning the back. When she looked at me, I nodded to her.
“Sam here?”
“Uhh…” she said, drifting. “Yeah, you want to talk to him?”
I nodded.
“One moment,” she said as she moved to the back.
Maybe I could start by speaking a little bit more friendly, being a little bit more relaxed in my words and what I say.
But that’s just not me. I’m the gruff, blunt guy. I’m not a teddy bear; I’m an angry grizzly bear that shows its affection by protecting others.
Yeah, but do you need to do that in public?
“Burke, BK, Kyle,” Sam said as he emerged.
Sam was a man who, in the time I had known him, had gone from well-groomed brown hair to fading gray hair. He always had an impeccable look to him, although it was clear that age was catching up to him.
“Did you meet my daughter, Natalie?”
“Yes,” I said with a nod.
But that news was even more disconcerting. Natalie, as Sam’s daughter, should have known what we were. We could be violent, but only for the sake of protecting Green Hills and our own. We saw ourselves as outlaw vigilantes, but in the good sense of the term, not the twisted, politician-speak sense of the term.
If the daughter of the ice cream store owner feels this way…
Are we going to last much longer?
“She’s going to be taking over the business in the next few years,” he said. “Course, poor Natalie probably wishes I’d just croak over and die!”
“Dad!” Natalie said as Sam shook his head with a laugh.
“I feel sorry for you, Nat, having to change the signage when I’m gone,” he said.
Sam certainly had a dark sense of humor.
“Anyways, BK, what can I do for you? Wanna try a new flavor? Wanna tell me it sucks and to make every cone a vanilla one?”
I snorted.
“People afraid of us now?”
Sam almost always wore a casual smirk on his face, like a teenager who had just discovered a way to prank his parents. He may have been in his sixties by now, but he always had that teenage rebellious spirit and that sense of goofiness.
Now, though? That all vanished.
“BK…” he said, his voice trailing off. “Have you turned on a goddamn TV recently? Have you
read any of the news? Every outlet, every radio station, hell, every fucking blog in the area is describing what you and the DMs did as an act of gang turf warfare.”
I flared my nostrils but said nothing. Just the word “gang” in association with the Savage Saints was enough to commit some gang-like acts to teach those who had spoken that we weren’t a goddamn gang. Would a gang host a giant cookout once a year around Labor Day? Would a gang protect not just its own, but an entire town?
“At this point, BK, everyone thinks you’re a gang,” he said. “Maybe not everyone, obviously that’s a dumb thing to say. But you got a lot of the younger crowd, especially, the ones glued to their phones and their Facebooking or whatever the hell it’s called? A lot of them think the MC is a thing of a different era. They think that because of social media, more people can be citizen police. If you asked me, honestly, BK… think a lot of them millennials or Gen Z-ers or whatever fucking thing you wanna call them, I think they were looking for a reason to push you away. An awful lot of them got this weird sense of justice.”
I let out a long sigh.
“Thanks,” I said.
“Wish I could tell you more good news, but… I think that’s a good way of putting it.”
I nodded to Sam, shook his hand, and immediately began my walk back to the club.
Two matters of concern struck me on the spot. The first was that people thought we were a gang. That had to change immediately.
The second was that the younger crowd thought we weren’t necessary.
I wasn’t sure how I could change that. I certainly couldn’t change it immediately.
* * *
“Gentlemen, it’s not getting any better.”
Trace’s words as we began our hall meeting were like getting shot.
“We’ve had a couple of reports about people yelling at us from car windows or, in one case for Splitter, having a couple of drunken guys yell at Amber that she could do better than a criminal.”