by Hazel Parker
The only question was how long this would last.
If Jose Gonzalez found out about us, she was dead. It was that simple. There was no getting around it, even if Megan had a strong reputation in the business world and marketing circles. The Mercs didn’t give two fucks who wronged them; if it were a Hollywood actor or just some local drug junkie, they would ax them all the same. It was what made them so dangerous and so wicked—they had seemingly no moral code, no sense of rationality. They only went for the pleasures of life without knowing or caring how to earn and balance them.
Even if he didn’t find out, we would always have to remain a secret so he never would. We had to make sure any outsiders who knew both of us didn’t know about us. We had to keep it a secret from her work, and while maybe I didn’t have to keep it a secret from the club—especially with Splitter and Trace finding their old ladies recently—it still would have been ideal to keep it hush hush.
But for right now, I did my best not to worry about what would happen. I just tried to pay attention to what was going on, and following the greatest sex of my life, that was just lying on the pillow, my arm wrapped around Megan, my heart beating slowly, elevating ever so slightly when I considered the best case scenario.
And then I heard a loud knock on my door.
“The fuck?” I said.
Megan shot up quickly.
“Stay here,” I said, putting the blankets back over her.
I didn’t bother to put any clothes on as I headed for the door, only to see a prospect standing there.
“Oh, wow, um, hi, BK,” he said.
I just crossed my arms. This was not what I needed to see.
“What,” I said.
It wasn’t a question. It was a statement meant to get him to hurry the fuck up.
“Trace is calling an emergency club meeting right now,” he said. “Apparently, the Mercs have upped their game.”
Shit.
“Be there in five.”
I slammed the door on the prospect’s face before he could say anything else and pushed my back into the door. “Upped their game” didn’t tell of anything promising—they’d either murdered someone or robbed someone.
“Everything OK?” Megan asked.
“No,” I said. “Stay where you are. I’m going into the hall to meet with the rest of the club. Something happened.”
“Burke—”
“Please,” I said, going over to kiss her once I’d put my boxers on. “This is club business. You don’t want to know what happens behind those doors.”
Megan looked like she wanted to argue the point, but she bit her lip. She gave me one more kiss.
“Stay here?” she asked as I got my jeans on.
“Yes,” I said. “No one else is going to use this room right now. If something happens, you scream. Got it?”
Megan nodded.
“Thanks, baby.”
I hadn’t even meant to say “baby.” The word had just come out of my mouth as easily as the word “thanks” had. I supposed that said a lot about how I felt about Megan, but it wasn’t something I had the time to deliberate.
I put on my shirt and my cut, shut the door behind me, and stormed into the hall meeting. Everyone else was already there, and boy, did they look pissed as hell.
“Everyone’s here,” Trace said, a serious edge to his voice. He had already killed one cigarette and was now on his second. “We just got a call from a news reporter saying that a woman from the North Hollywood town hall has been brutally murdered and left out in the streets. The reporter said that whoever did it had carved ‘SS’ into her cheeks.”
You have got to be fucking kidding me. They’re seriously going that far?
Calm, Burke. You make emotional decisions…
Fuck that! They killed a woman! This needs to get taken care of now!
“The press all thinks that we did this. They don’t give a fuck that we have never murdered anyone then carved ‘SS’ into their cheeks. It’s a sloppy ass move that the Mercs made to try and frame us, but the press is being even sloppier with their reporting. This is far more sensational than what has happened to date.”
“Told you we should have fucking attacked!” Krispy roared. “This is all your fucking fault, BK!”
“Mine?” I said.
There was no better way to piss me off than to blame me for something I didn’t deserve the blame for.
“Yes, you! You’re the one who fucking said ‘oh, no, let’s all be peaceful hippies and sing kumbaya while the world burns.’ And now look what happened! All of California thinks we murdered a fucking politician!”
“I made the best choice I could!” I roared, slamming my fists into the table with enough force that I felt them cave a little bit below me. “You want to murder Jose? That’ll get a dozen more like this! We can stop this, but if we go—”
“No, fuck this! No buts!” Mafia yelled. “We all leave on our bikes right now, fucking kill them all, and go back to our day jobs the next day!”
“You say that like we can just walk up to whoever we want, slice their throats, and there’ll be no consequences,” Sensei said, making me mighty relieved I wasn’t fighting a one-man war. “We’re going to prove the DMs did this.”
“It doesn’t fucking matter what the DMs did; if everyone thinks we did it, it doesn’t matter what the courts fucking say!” Splitter added.
This went on like this for another five minutes, Sensei and I digging our heels in on needing to make the rational choice, with Splitter, Krispy, and Mafia making the strongest arguments for going forward and attacking. Sword kept silent, while Trace sat back and let the bickering unfold.
Then I decided something drastic needed to be done.
“Jesus fucking Christ, you all are goddamn stupid! I’m goddamn stupid!”
I roared loudly enough that no one dared speak over me. Sometimes, it helped to be the biggest person in the room by a mile.
“We have a fucking expert in the clubhouse right now in the guest room who can help us! We get her to give us her input; maybe it’ll help! Why don’t we ask the person who has made millions of dollars on marketing plans?”
An intense silence fell over the room. All eyes went to Trace—the only person who had the power to let an outsider into the club hall.
“You know the rules, BK,” he said, his voice deliberately calm and even-keeled. “We don’t let outsiders into the hall.”
“So then we fucking go to her and listen to her thoughts,” I said. “I don’t care how the fuck or where the fuck you want to do it. Fine, she doesn’t come into the hall. But that doesn’t mean we can’t hold a meeting elsewhere.”
Trace sighed. He knew I wasn’t going to give this one up. But he also knew none of us were going to give up our positions either.
“All in favor of going to the guest room and getting Megan’s input?”
“Yea,” I said harshly.
“Yea,” Sensei said.
All eyes turned to Sword. We needed at least four people to say yay. If he said nay, it was over since Mafia, Krispy, and Splitter were all going to say nay.
“Yea,” he finally said, much to my relief. “Outside counsel can always be ignored. But it won’t hurt to hear it.”
“Nay,” Mafia said almost the second Sword drew his last breath.
“Nay,” Krispy added. “I don’t need a fucking marketing expert to tell me I need to kill a bunch of fucking Mercs.”
“Nay,” Splitter said. “We need to get revenge, not peace.”
All eyes turned to Trace. So, it would come down to the president to decide. Maybe we needed more members, but split votes rarely happened like this. In fact, this was one of the most intense votes I could remember in my time with the club, even dating back to when Paul Peters ran the joint.
“Goddamnit,” he said. “I’m going to take partial responsibility here. I had thought that killing Diablo would have ended this whole fucking mess. Instead, it turns out that I just kicked a
hornet’s nest awake.”
He sighed.
“I don’t think brute force is going to work. If it had, the Mercs would’ve gotten wiped out after we killed Diablo. I don’t know if Megan knows the answer. Fuck, I don’t know if anyone knows the answer. But she’s going to know something. Yea. Let’s go.”
“Fuck that,” Splitter growled.
Trace paused everyone right there.
“You got a fucking problem?”
I didn’t move, but I was prepared to break up the scuffle at any moment. And it wasn’t hard to see whose side I was going to take.
“Splitter—and all of you—you know I love you like a brother. But this is the goddamn decision. We all elected me president, and I do my best not to abuse that power. But right now, I’m fucking enforcing it. So if you don’t like it, if you’re willing to stand up for it, give me your goddamn VP badge and get the fuck off these grounds.”
Splitter stared the coldest of glares toward Trace, but the president didn’t budge. He was young, but he wasn’t going to give in.
“Let’s go fucking see her.”
Smart man.
* * *
The poor girl probably had no idea what she had gotten into.
One moment, she was comfortably naked in bed, waiting for me to come by and escort her out to her car or make love to her again. The next, she was hurrying to get dressed before seven very big, very ornery dudes walked into her room for advice.
Yeah, shit can get weird when you associate yourself with the club.
“Here’s the deal,” Trace said. “Megan, you said you would give us an hour of your time. We need it now.”
He gulped.
“The Mercs killed a council member in North Hollywood,” he said, to which Megan covered her mouth in horror. “They carved ‘SS’ on her cheek, as if that would somehow implicate us. In the history of our club, we have never done anything like that. Never, ever. We don’t disrespect the dead, even when the dead are our opponents. Unfortunately, the press isn’t thinking that—I found out about this because I had a news reporter calling me, asking me if I was aware of what happened.”
“Did you answer him?”
Trace shook his head.
“I just said ‘no comment’ and hung up.”
Megan sighed.
“That was probably the right move, but now people are going to think you’re guilty,” she said. “At this point, it’s pretty clear that the Mercs are playing an aggressive game with you. They sense your public image is weak—not that that’s the truth, but that’s just the reality of the public perception—and are doing whatever they can to take advantage of it. I know you said you’ve never done that, but I don’t know that. I’m not someone who followed motorcycle club activity until, well, until Burke showed up.”
The looks on the others were kind of amusing. I’m not sure they’d ever get used to hearing my full name.
“Look, it doesn’t matter what the truth is; it matters what the perception is. And at this point, with your image as it is, the only way you’re going to make it better is by aggressively fighting it. You have to control the narrative. All of you.”
Though there was a healthy dose of nervousness on Megan’s face, I couldn’t begin to express my appreciation for how she was providing us real help right now.
“The first thing you need to do is recognize what part of you is going to draw awe from the average American and which part is going to draw fear. You want my honest opinion? Cover up your tattoos. Remove the earrings. Get haircuts.”
“Bullshit,” Krispy said.
Trace immediately quelled any further action.
“I said that we would listen to her,” he snapped. “I did not say we were under any obligation to follow any of it. We’re going to let her say everything she has to say. If any one of you snaps, BK has my permission to drag your ass outside and teach you a lesson or two.”
No one else would dare to say a word after that. I was too strong and too big for any of them to win, and with my Marine training, it would have been a cinch to kick any of their asses. Maybe even two pairs of asses at once.
“Your jackets? You could probably wear those. Actually, now that I think about it, you should wear those. You want something to identify yourselves as Savage Saints. That’s step one. Step two? You have to put yourselves out there. Not just get involved in the community, but video yourselves. Post on social media. Take videos with Sheriff Wiggins. Do whatever you can to show that while you may be misunderstood, you are not criminals.”
I looked to the rest of the club members. They seemed to be recognizing that that had some value.
“You do that,” Megan said. “And even if you don’t convince the city that you are good people, you’ll confuse them. Who are the Saints? Are they the guys who supposedly killed politicians and put scars on their cheeks? Or are they the people that volunteered to clean up a highway on a Sunday morning? That confusion leaves open the possibility for people to like you. People like you, they want you around. They want you around, governmental pressure weakens. You see what I’m saying?”
“We do, thank you so much, Megan,” Trace said. “Please remain here while we finish our meeting. Gentlemen, back to the hall.”
With that, everyone went forward. I held the door, so I was the last to leave. Before I did, I smiled at Megan.
“Thank you.”
* * *
“That still doesn’t fucking solve the problem that the Mercs killed a woman tonight and need to suffer for it!”
Splitter, naturally, was the first to speak up. And he made a point that I couldn’t argue with—Megan’s strategy was great for the long-term, but in the short-term, a murder with our name on it had to be addressed.
But how?
“I know, Splitter, I do,” Trace said, now on his third cigarette of the night. “But the overall point remains. We’re going to have to put on a better image. The Mercs are harder to find now. They’re better hidden.”
“That goddamn Jose Gonzalez,” I said. “He’s funneling them money and resources. Stop him, stop the club.”
Trace nodded. The rest of the club looked like bloodhounds, looking to be released and freed.
“Can we get a hit on him that looks like it was an accident?” Trace said, staring right at me. “I don’t like getting into this game, especially since we’re on the good side of Wiggins. But at this point, BK, I don’t see any way around it. All these charity drives and parades aren’t going to mean shit if we have to explain a murder made in our name every other week.”
That was all too true. I had wanted to rely so long on Megan’s advice, had wanted so badly to believe in everything that she said, that I had failed to realize there was a balance I needed to recognize. Yes, in the long run, Megan’s strategy didn’t just make sense; it was mandatory. We were all going to have to trim our facial hair, get haircuts, and maybe cover up our tattoos a bit. Presumably. That’s going to be a hell of a fight. We had to get out onto the streets.
But for every ten good deeds that we did, it would only take one incident to erase all of that—and that was being optimistic. The public truly didn’t care if what happened wasn’t us; so long as it looked on a very surface level like it was us, we were in a world of hurt.
“I can make it happen, yes,” I said. “But…”
Splitter rolled his eyes.
“Fucking let me talk!”
Splitter leaped back in surprise at the force of my voice.
“No one do anything for now,” I said. “I will have him dead by the end of the week. But we act now, we inflame everything. We need to make the Mercs think we are being passive.”
“Goddamnit, I don’t fucking like this!” Krispy said.
“I’ll make a deal with you,” I snapped. “Give this to me. If the Mercs so much as run through a red light between now and then and the news reaches us, you do whatever the hell you want. But you give me the chance to work on this.”
Befor
e anyone could say a word, Trace grabbed everyone’s attention by slamming his gavel.
“That’s the best we’re going to get,” he said. “It’s BK’s job to keep up our appearances. Going forward, yes, that means that we will have to be more conscious about what we are. But keeping up appearances also means doing the dirty work. If anyone is going to kill Jose Gonzalez, it’s got to be BK. However…”
He then turned his attention to me.
“No more waiting. If the Mercs do anything more, we react. No bullshitting. No waiting. I’ve got a bunch of hungry dogs here that are waiting to break free, and I’m going to have a goddamn mutiny on my hands if I hold them back beyond this.”
“Yes,” I said, nodding in agreement.
“Put it to a vote,” Trace said. “The plan is this: BK will execute Jose Gonzalez by Friday night. He will make it look like an accident. If the Mercs kill anyone or vandalize anything between now and then, it’s open season on the Mercs. Otherwise, we fucking. Wait. Once this is all done, we come up with a plan to be more visible in the area. BK?”
“Yea,” I said immediately.
“Yea,” Sensei said.
“Yea,” Sword added.
Eyes shifted to the end of the table toward Mafia.
“A woman is lying dead in the streets, and you want to tell me we give the Mercs one more chance. I can’t do that. Can’t fucking do that. Nay.”
Damnit. I hate that he’s not unjustified in acting this way.
“Krispy?”
“Nay,” he said. “I wanted to attack these assholes when they hit the barbershop. You think it’s any different now?”
All eyes then shifted to Splitter. If Trace really wanted to avoid a mutiny, then it would have been best for Splitter to just say yea so that it wouldn’t become the equivalent of a dictatorial order. Splitter leaned back in his chair, took a deep breath, and sighed.
“You know, BK,” he said, “I admit that I’m goddamn emotional about this. I don’t like waiting. I don’t. But…”