by Hazel Parker
Trace especially loved me, because I had managed to negotiate a nice payment plan through Amber thanks to my life-saving efforts at her office. Admittedly, she was having a tough time because of what had happened with that; countless documents were lost in the fire, and it would take quite some time to build up the firm and find a replacement. Insurance would give the company a nice check that they could use, but that would take some time to process.
Still, on a personal level, the week had only served to show us how great of a pairing we made. The rules that she established did wonders for helping us maintain some privacy, and though a few news outlets tried to make the connection, they were more of the far-reaching ones, which meant we could still keep our privacy for some time. That day would come when it faded, but for now, we just enjoyed each other at nights and on the weekends, retreating from the crazy California nightlife in favor of something much calmer.
It was wild to think that just over a week before, I was sitting in a jail cell on the verge of going to a trial in which I’d be found guilty of first-degree murder.
Funny how quickly things can change.
However, our work with the Savage Saints never changed.
And some group work and groupthink was needed now more than ever.
The rest of the club’s officers headed in and took their seats, waiting for Trace to begin. He cleared his throat and smiled.
“Gentlemen,” he said. “It’s nice to have a meeting where we don’t have to worry about who’s going to get arrested, huh?”
Some laughter and cheers went up, and even I got a chuckle out of that.
“It truly is better than it was before,” he said. “Splitter’s plea deal is all but resolved, the DMs are on the run, and things are looking almost perfect.”
The implication was obvious by the second to last word.
“However, the public shootout that happened near Amber Reynold’s office is one that created quite a bad rep for us, even though we were the ones who saved the day. You know how it is. One MC is bad. Therefore, all MCs are bad. I’m not especially happy about it, but that’s the world we live in.”
He took another puff of his cigarette.
“We’re going to need to do something of a PR campaign. I’m not saying we’re going to need to buy ads on the television or anything silly like that. But we are going to, ironically, be putting ourselves out there more. We’re going to get more involved with the community. Because if we don’t, we’re going to let that image fester, and things are going to get worse in the long run.”
“Makes sense,” Krispy said. “Are you leading the charge?”
To my surprise, Trace said no.
“Believe it or not, we have someone here who studied marketing in college and has some connections and is also quietly involved in the community.”
Wait… I don’t know who this is?
Then BK tilted his chin up.
“I’m the fixer in the club,” he growled. “And same for here.”
So BK is going to be the one to set our image up, huh? The big, burly one who looks like he belongs more in a WWE showdown?
“Exactly right,” Trace said. “We may use outside connections to help spruce up our community image. But for now, BK is going to lead the charge to make things right.”
Well.
This should be really fucking interesting.
Just hopefully the right kind of interesting and not the insanity Amber and I just had.
Protect Hard
Caught between a Saint and a Devil …
Life couldn’t be better.
Between running two high profile marketing campaigns,
my star is on the rise.
As a bonus, I’m excited about them both.
After the motorcycle gang shootout,
I’m happy to help the city let everyone know
how they’re getting tough on crime.
The other campaign is for a high end whiskey,
which gets me out to stores and meeting people,
which is my favorite part of the job.
What I don’t expect is to meet BK,
a high ranking member in one of the motorcycle clubs involved in the shootout.
And I definitely don’t expect the instant sizzle of attraction.
Or the way that the two unrelated campaigns
turn out to be indelibly intertwined.
When I find myself in danger,
will BK ride to my rescue in time?
And if he does, will my career end up as collateral damage?
Prologue
One month after saving the town of North Hollywood and many innocent civilians, the Savage Saints had a problem.
We’d become the villains of Los Angeles.
In the immediate aftermath, rather than discern what had happened and recognize that guys like Splitter and myself had come in to prevent the Devil’s Mercenaries from doing more damage, the press and public simply saw a shootout with a bunch of people on bikes and simply assumed that the MCs had turned into MGs—motorcycle gangs. They didn’t bother to investigate why we had shown up; they just saw the external facts: that we all rode bikes, we all wore cuts, and many of us were covered in tattoos.
We only resorted to violence to prevent more gruesome violence. Contrary to what my size and my demeanor suggested, I didn’t like war. I had seen real war up close and personal, and there was no goddamn way I ever wanted anyone in the club to have to experience war. War was what mankind did when communication failed. It was my job, with my background, to try and open communication grounds.
But so far, that had failed.
“What have you got for us, BK?”
All eyes turned to me in our town hall meeting. The president of the club, Trace, sat on my left, smoking a cigarette. To my right, circling back around to Trace, were Sensei, Sword, Mafia, Krispy, and Splitter—the man many held responsible for the shootout in North Hollywood. They don’t understand. They never bother to realize that the man who came in second is rarely the man who instigated things.
“Not well,” I said behind my sunglasses.
I didn’t like to talk much, especially around club members. We had serious shit that needed taking care of, and the more people beat around the bush, the more time we wasted.
“OK, well, what have we tried?” Sensei asked. “Surely, we must have done some stuff that worked, no?”
“Requested parade, requested public community service. Rejected on both counts.”
I left it at that as silence hung over the crowd. I had many ideas in my head, of course—the most notable of them being that we needed to get the authorities in North Hollywood and Green Hills directly engaged so that we could start a conversation with them. It didn’t do much good to try to reach out to the public when city council members and legislative staff members were leaking stories about how some new prospect at our club had gotten caught urinating in public in the early evening on Tuesday.
But the thing about being a Marine was that you were taught only to answer the question posed to you and nothing more. At least, that’s what I took from it. It worked quite well when I was interrogated by police and federal officials, and it worked quite well when it came to doing my duties as Sergeant-in-Arms.
What I struggled to admit, even to myself, though, was that it made things like relationships and dating extraordinarily difficult. I just couldn’t bring myself to open up and to reveal more of what was in my head in those moments. I had a terrible feeling that if anyone saw the nightmare that was constantly going on in my head, they’d want to put me out of my misery for my own sake.
Unfortunately, they wouldn’t have been alone in having that thought.
“What ideas do we have, BK?” Splitter said. “I didn’t rescue Amber just so a bunch of fucking numbskull paparazzi could mock us in the news and have that reinforced by a bunch of pussy neighbors.”
“And you didn’t,” Trace said to reassure the sometimes over-emotional Splitte
r before turning the table to me.
“Need to go to the city halls,” I said, drawing wide eyes and glares of surprise that I ignored. “We convince the government we’re alright, then the people will step in line.”
I think everyone in the club had the visual at that moment of all six-foot-six and two hundred and fifty pounds of me walking in with my cut, sunglasses, and necklace on, taking a seat in front of everyone and directing how things would go. It was an amusing visual, and it wasn’t lost on me how my size could be used to my advantage, but it also grossly underestimated me.
But truth be told, that was how I liked it. I didn’t want anyone having me sized up properly, and that was true even for members of the Savage Saints. Everyone thought I was all brawn, and I did everything I could to sell that image. But few—maybe Trace, maybe Sensei—had a full appreciation of the brains I had behind this NFL-sized body.
“I’m sorry, are you going to nuke their asses?” Krispy said with a chuckle. “You think you can convince a bunch of stuffy politicians that we’re good people? That sounds like a good way to get us even more hated!”
“It’s not the worst idea,” Trace said. “We haven’t really expanded our outreach beyond Green Hills—”
“With damn good reason!” Splitter said. “We’re a fucking motorcycle club, Trace, not the SPCA! We can’t just waltz into a new town on our bikes and think that people are going to greet us!”
Tension was building in the room, and as usual, I just sat back and let it unfold. If it got violent, no one was even close to me in size to break it up. The closest was probably Sword, but he was some fifteen years older than me. Splitter had size, too, but he wasn’t as trained in close-quarters combat as I was.
“None of us have even asked BK what he plans to do at these city hall meetings,” Trace said slowly, trying to get the room calmed down to match his tempo. “So, BK, if you could elaborate on your thinking?”
“Of course,” I said, making sure I was sitting up straight. “Convince the towns to do some joint work. Could sponsor an initiative. Could do a charity run. Could help set up a parade.”
Some snickers came, but Trace’s glare got them in line.
“Anything we do to show we like Green Hills, we like North Hollywood, would be good.”
“Indeed,” Trace said. “I have to be honest, though, BK, as much as I like the idea, Krispy makes a point. A lot of these politicians will piss themselves if they see you walk in the door. They’ll immediately judge you.”
I wanted to interrupt so badly at that moment and explain that it might be like that for the first half second, but it wouldn’t be any longer than that. But, like many other habits I had, I had learned in the Marines that you didn’t dare interrupt the leader. That was a good way to wind up on the ground or demoted.
Once I was sure that no one was going to interrupt me, though, I continued.
“Disagree, sir,” I said. “It will be more powerful if they start that way and then switch. A man who changes his mind is often more zealous than the one who always believed something.”
I saw more than a few surprised expressions and even some smiles at what I had said. I am smarter than people think. I didn’t want to give them anything, though, so I kept my facial expression neutral.
“Well, ultimately, BK, you’re in charge of our image cleanup, so if you think it’ll work, I say go for it,” Trace said. “But keep us updated if you would, please.”
“Yes,” I said.
The meeting moved to a few other topics then that were much more lighthearted, most notably about how at the rate the guys were getting girlfriends, they’d soon have to throw a memorial party for all of their single days. I snorted at one point—the closest I’d come to laughing in public—but it was the kind of thing that mostly just stung. I wasn’t incapable of love, but…
With all that I had experienced, with all that I knew about life, and with the trauma of my past, I didn’t see how I could ever love again. I could make love, sure, but being in love?
Not a chance.
Thank God everyone just assumes I’m being quiet because I’m always quiet.
A short while later, Trace banged the gavel, signaling the end of the meeting. As soon as I ensured that everyone had left and that no fights were going to break out, I headed for my massive bike, brought the engine to life, and gunned it for my next destination.
The city hall meeting in North Hollywood.
* * *
In all of my time as a marketing consultant and the owner of my company, MWM Solutions, I had never taken on a government entity as a client.
But, given everything that North Hollywood—and by extension, the city of Los Angeles—had gone through in the last month or so, I couldn’t blame them for hiring me or any marketing consultant, really. It was the kind of worst-case scenario that only a few dozen people in the world probably had any experience in, and of those few dozen, maybe ten also had the proper training and understanding of how public relations worked to handle it better.
I didn’t have the experience of dealing with a public shootout, but in my career working at a variety of companies from everything as a marketing associate to the Chief Marketing Officer, I had seen just about every other type of scenario and had confidence that I could deliver something of value to the city.
And so it was that on this day that the mayor of North Hollywood had introduced me to the council, a panel of eight people in total, to explain what they needed to do to gain the public’s trust back.
“The first thing to understand is that, like it or not, the citizens are going to believe that the city is rife with crime,” I said. “You can show them statistics all you want about how North Hollywood is more peaceful than, say, Santa Monica, but the story right now is that North Hollywood is the place where crime breaks out. As a result, all of you, regardless of where you stand on the political aisle, need to start promising that you’ll get tough on crime.”
I liked to start my meetings out with something that I knew would bother someone in the group, if for no other reason than that it got people to sit up and pay attention quickly. Some of the more liberal members of the council would hear that phrase “tough on crime” and immediately associate it with an authoritarian state, but that wasn’t my goal at all. I’d said things that pissed off all types of people before—the goal wasn’t to troll or to mock, but to get the attention of the individual.
That’s what marketing came down to, anyways—how did you create a compelling enough message that the person you wanted to have listen to you actually did so?
“This means that you’ll need to pledge to do things like raise money for the police, enforce curfews, more rigorously enforce sentencing, and so on.”
“If I may,” an older white man with a long beard, almost long enough to touch to the bottom of the table, said. “Will these proposals not raise concerns about there being too much of a ‘good thing?’”
It was obvious by the air quotes and the tone he assumed that he figured I had stepped foot into an area outside my area of expertise. He smirked at me, leaned back in his chair, and even crossed his legs, just one step removed from propping them up on the table.
Fortunately, I knew something else about a good marketing meeting—it wasn’t enough to show them why the consumer, or civilian, in this case, would appreciate and notice the marketing. I also had to present why it would benefit the marketer; otherwise, what was the point? What good was attention if attention wasn’t what the marketer wanted?
“It is entirely possible that, over a long enough period of time, when the shooting becomes less of an emotional memory and more of a historical footnote in this town, that yes, concerns will be raised,” I said calmly, keeping my hands by my side. “But in the short-term, in terms of between now and the election cycle in a year’s time?”
I didn’t need to say anything more. The expressions on everyone’s faces told me as much. A politician feared nothing more than being voted o
ut. Getting voted out because they hadn’t cracked down on crime enough, even for the more progressive types, was not something any of them were willing to face.
“Understood,” the man said, his voice so quiet I’m not sure I would have heard it if the air conditioning had been blowing.
“I understand the concern,” I said, showing some empathy in the hopes of betting connecting to the client. “But keep in mind, right now, we’re talking about a strategy for the next year. Anything beyond that is asking us to formulate a plan for events that cannot be predicted. This isn’t a movie or a product launch—this is a governmental issue.”
“I see, I just…”
But I strained to hear the bearded man because outside, a noise was filling the air that seemed almost darkly humorous given why we were in there in the first place.
The sound of a motorcycle approaching the town hall.
It got louder and louder until it was so loud that none of us even pretended to be still talking. We just waited until the sound went dead. I found the whole thing almost funny, but the politicians sure didn’t.
In fact, by the looks of it, the politicians looked like they were damn close to pissing themselves. Had I seen their faces in private, without recorders, I might have let loose a few swears to get them to shake out of their fucking stupor.
In public, though? I was determined to swear less and be more professional than the pope on Christmas.
“Anyways,” I said. “That out there, that sound you just heard? I want you to think about how the citizens now feel when they hear it.”
I was tempted to call them out on their fear; at least they wouldn’t find it hard to relate to how the citizens would feel about the motorcycle. But to do so would almost be like mocking them, taunting them for having fear. And given that we were still a bit off from actually having a professional relationship, from having something where MWM Solutions would actually have a contract with the government, I wanted to keep things as friendly and soft as possible.