But if you got it bad for one of ours, you got to at least be honest about it, do the right thing, and get your biker brother’s blessing before making your move. Terry didn’t do this—and that was part of the reason I let him have it on his twenty-fifth birthday, and part of the reason I harbored ill feelings toward him.
All right, I might have said that I wanted to kill him for touching her, and for doing so without my permission, but you have to understand, that’s just talk. Of course, I never actually wanted to kill Terry—and like I said earlier, I never wanted to see him dead. But now, he was dead. He was in that casket… and it was closed.
I’ll do you a big favor and spare you the vivid details—but suffice it to say, Terry’s death was absolutely fucking brutal. The official story is that he was killed during a yard fight when about ten guys got into a scuff. Some yard fight! Terry was shanked in the gut, right near his pelvis, and his head was beaten in so badly that the back of his skull cracked, his jaw was dislocated, and one of his eyes basically exploded in its socket. He was still alive, but obviously unconscious when the guards peeled him off of the ground, and he slowly bled out, over the next hour, waiting for the prison medical staff to work on him.
And believe it or not, my friends, that’s the PG-13 version.
That poor kid. He didn’t deserve to die—especially not in such a disgusting, degrading fashion. He deserved better—as a Wolf and as a person. His face was so fucked up from the incident that he had to be laid out in a closed casket. That poor kid.
I guess what I felt was grief—maybe guilt—and it kept me kneeling there, at Terry’s coffin, for what felt like forever. And then out of nowhere, I felt a light touch on my shoulder and turned to see two huge tits staring back at me.
It was Thing-1—or maybe Thing-2, Thing-3, or Thing-4; I didn’t know for sure and can’t remember. I didn’t know her name, but I knew her type and figured I must’ve met her (maybe banged her) before.
“Hi, Hammer,” she said, curling her lips into an unnecessarily sexy smile.
“Hi,” I replied. Her curves were a sight for sore eyes. They were much more pleasing than the images I’d just had in my head of Terry’s bashed-in face. But pleasing as they were, I didn’t really need—or want—the distraction. I had more important things on my mind.
The prison guards who broke up the fight were unable to identify who did what to Terry, and naturally, none of the men involved fessed up to anything or ratted on anyone else. What’s more, the ensuing investigation concluded that the yard fight was instigated by conflict between two competing prison clans, and Terry’s death was random and incidental… But come on, that’s bullshit. It was murder. It was a hit. No one affiliated with the Seraphs was involved with the fight—but anyone who knows the Seraphs knows they were behind it.
Even the prison guards had to know that, I’m sure… And saying the fight happened because of a “clan conflict” is a cheap, cop-out excuse. It’s about as legitimate as saying ya killed someone because they keyed your bike. It’s nothing more than a cover-up, and only a fool would buy it.
“Sure is a shame what happened to Terry,” my huge-titted companion said from beside me. She gently massaged my shoulder with her long, slender fingers. “I’m just so upset about it.”
I glanced up at the girl and examined her face more thoroughly. I still couldn’t place her, and I wondered if she’d actually ever met Terry. Did she have any idea what that poor kid in the closed coffin looked like (or was supposed to look like)? Or was she just willing to go this far to try and bag a bad boy?
I may not be the world’s most considerate person, but as I was kneeling there with Tits Magee hitting on me in front of Terry’s casket, I realized that there was something wrong with the scenario. It simply wasn’t right to stay there and let it happen, not right there in front of the casket with a roomful of mourners as an audience.
I stood up and faced my suitor, despite the heaviness in my body and heart. The girl sure was tall—very tall, almost as tall is me, in fact—and I vaguely remembered standing behind her in the backroom of Pinky’s Bar, after hours, and bending her over a broken pinball machine.
I inched my way to the side until I was a few feet away from the casket. Of course, Thing-whichever followed me like a lost puppy, or better yet, like a starving dog chasing a big, meaty bone. We made it to a less conspicuous part of the room, and in a matter of seconds, another one of those women walked over and joined us.
“Hey, Hammer,” she said.
“Hey.” I smiled back, as she reached her hand out toward me. She rubbed it up and down my forearm.
I couldn’t remember her name either, and she looked a lot like the first girl. Both had bottle-blonde hair and wore a lot of makeup, and they probably bought their skimpy black dresses at the same off-the-rack discount store. The only discernable difference between them was their height—that, and their tits. The new girl’s were kinda pear-shaped, whereas the first’s were much fuller and rounder.
About a minute later, two more girls were standing there with us. They were more or less indistinguishable from the first two (except that one of them had a perfect ass, like a heart), and they eased their way into the conversation rather smoothly. Apparently, the four of them all knew each other, and they were all fine with coming at me in a group effort.
I’m used to these kind of women, and I’ve been hit on by more than one girl at once many a time. But having four girls collected around me in a funeral home like this? That was a little out of the ordinary, even for me—and even I knew it was a wee bit excessive.
We were taking up a lot of space in the room and had attracted a lot of disapproving glances. So I recessed our group a little further back, to the far right corner of the room, where I stood against the wall, and Thing-1, Thing-2, Thing-3, and Thing-4 lined up in front of me like hot plates on a buffet table. If it had been any other time or place, I would have dug right in and devoured them. But I’m a Wolf, not an animal. I had more restraint than that… and my mind was elsewhere.
“What happens next, Hammer?”
“Are you gonna try to find the guy who did this to Terry?”
“Are you gonna kill him?”
“What are you guys gonna do to get even with the Seraphs now?”
I couldn’t tell you which one of the Things asked which question, and I didn’t answer any of them.
“Ladies,” I said instead, “we’re at a funeral home, not a rally. We’re supposed to be paying our respects to Terry and celebrating his memory, not talking about revenge or violence.”
My stable of Things didn’t seem to care too much for my answer. And, really, I don’t blame them. It was another one of those cheap, cop-out excuses. It was illegitimate, nothing more than a cover-up. Only a fool would buy it.
I would have loved to have talked about violence and revenge with someone qualified to have such a discussion. But these chicks—these Things, these things—weren’t that someone. They lacked the necessary qualifications. They weren’t really a part of our world; they just hung around on the outskirts of it, waiting to get in.
Poor Things. There was a better chance of Terry coming back to life and popping up, fresh-faced from his casket.
“But you guys have got to do something,” one of them said. It was the one with pear-shaped tits. I shot her a cutting look, and she recoiled a little.
I was about to say something else that the Things wouldn’t have liked, when all of a sudden, one of them turned, and then all of them stepped aside, making way for my sister.
Hannah walked over to me, leaned into my chest, and whispered something in my ear. Apparently, while the Things had been up to their old tricks, so, too, had Rachel.
“She’s saying that stuff again,” Hannah whispered, “about finding justice. She’s asking questions. She wants answers… I can’t do this right now. I wanna leave.”
When my sister pulled away from me, I smiled at her so as not to reveal my real emotions. T
hen, I told the Things some lie about how we had to go so that Hannah could get some rest and I could get some business done. The Things looked a little sad to see me leave, and part of me hated passing on so much willing and ready pussy. But given what my sister had just said, I figured it was the perfect time to leave. We’d already long worn out our welcome.
Chapter 6
~ Sam ~
“What did she say, exactly?” I asked Hannah, as soon as we were both in the car.
When word spread that Hannah was pregnant, one of the older brothers in our pack insisted that I “borrow” his old Chrysler so that I had a safe way to get her around. Out of concern for her, and respect for his offer, I couldn’t turn him down—and the old sedan has actually proved pretty damn useful. I still preferred my Harley, of course. But, Hannah and her baby were much better served sitting next to me than behind me.
“I don’t know,” Hannah answered. “I can’t remember what she said exactly.”
“Well, think!” I instructed.
Hannah shifted in her seat a little. She looked uncomfortable. I felt bad yelling at a pregnant woman, but this was pretty damn important.
“The same shit she always says,” Hannah eventually replied. “The same shit she’s been saying for months… She said she knows Terry didn’t kill Jake—and that I should know it, too. And she said she wants answers. She wants to know the truth, what really happened.”
Ever since Terry turned himself in for killing that Seraph, Rachel has been both a pain in the ass and a problem. From the get-go, she just couldn’t believe that her brother committed the crime. And even though he confessed to it—to her, the police, and anyone who’d listen—she challenged what others, including me, had come to wholeheartedly accept as fact.
Now don’t get me wrong. Rachel had good reason to challenge what others accepted as fact. But, unfortunately, she was asking the wrong questions.
She couldn’t believe that her brother killed that Seraph over a vandalized bike. She didn’t believe he was capable of murder, so she wanted to know if someone else did it, or if someone else had put him up to it.
But, really, she shouldn’t have been asking who. She should have been asking why.
Terry said he killed that Seraph over a vandalized bike, but as I said earlier, that’s a cheap, cop-out excuse, a cover-up.
“When in doubt, go with your bike.” That’s one of the first rules they teach us. When a biker gets caught up in trouble, he never says or does anything to reveal his gang’s true business or agenda. He never says or does anything to incriminate his band or its individual brothers, and he always takes the fall for any and all shit he gets into without mentioning another name. When someone asks him why he did what he did, he blames his bike if he can’t think of a better excuse.
When a biker blames his bike, other bikers know what that means—and they also know not to ask any more questions or challenge what’s been said. No brother worth his salt would answer them anyway. We’re more protective than that. When you answer questions, you share information. Sharing information puts you at risk, as well as the person whom you tell. So…it’s better to just not share it.
Terry didn’t kill that Seraph over his bike. And I didn’t have to ask who, what, when, where, or why. I already knew the answers to those questions, and I’d moved on to the next one.
“She said she won’t rest until she figures it out,” Hannah went on, rolling down the window. A cool breeze swept into the car though it was nothing like the gust of air I’d have gotten if I’d been on my Harley.
“She said I shouldn’t raise T.J. thinking his dad’s a killer,” she added.
“And what did you say?” I asked, turning to look at my sister. We were stopped at a red light, and I wanted to see her face when she answered.
“The same thing I always say,” she replied. “Just like you told me.”
Terry wasn’t even in custody for a day when Rachel started poking her nose where it didn’t belong, searching for “answers” and “the truth” about her brother. She went to known Wolf hangouts to talk to Wolves or ask other people about us. Like I said, she wasn’t asking the right questions—but she was telling enough people her opinion, and word was spreading rapidly about her ad hoc “investigation.”
As soon as I heard Rachel was hunting for info, I put Hannah on lockdown. I’d known about her and Terry secretly dating for a while, and I figured that once Rachel found out she’d come after Hannah hardcore—and I certainly didn’t want that to happen. Like me, Hannah knew more than she claimed to on the surface. But unlike me, she posed a huge risk of talking. She wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed to begin with, and given her emotional connection to Terry, and hormones from the pregnancy, there was a grave danger that she might let something slip—so I did everything I could to prevent that.
I did my best to keep Hannah away from wherever Rachel would be at the same time Rachel would probably be there—and I made sure that Hannah was “unreachable” in any usual way. To anyone looking in from the outside, I’m sure it just appeared that I was protecting her from further retaliation against the Wolves—and sure, maybe that was a nice byproduct of what I did, though it was not my primary motivation.
Of course, running into Rachel was inevitable, especially once Terry was killed. So…I schooled Hannah on what she should say to Rachel when that inevitably happened. I basically gave her a script and told her, no matter what, to stick to it.
“I told her that it was cut and dry,” Hannah elaborated, “and that she should come to peace with everything… I repeated the facts, about how Terry turned himself in, confessed, and plead guilty. I said everything you said I should say—but it didn’t satisfy her. She didn’t buy it. She wants the truth… and I’m afraid she’ll find it.”
“She won’t find anything,” I snapped back at my sister. I said it loud and aggressively, as if saying it that way would make it true.
“I wouldn’t be so sure of that,” Hannah responded. “She’s committed and deeply invested. Terry was her flesh and blood… If it was me in that casket, would you stop looking for answers?”
Hannah had a point, but I wanted to think the one I had was better. If it had been Hannah in that casket, of course, I would stop at nothing until I got answers. But getting answers ain’t easy—and even I would have had a hard time finding them. I was having a hard time finding them as it was, so I figured it had to be at least twice as hard for Rachel.
You see, just as Rachel was doing her “investigation,” I was doing my own as well. Only I was investigating something else. I was investigating what actually mattered. I wasn’t looking into the death Terry was supposedly responsible for; I was looking into who was responsible for Terry’s death.
What went down at the prison was clearly a hit. Even Rachel must have known that—and she was fine believing that that hit was an act of revenge or retaliation. But I knew it couldn’t be. That Seraph that Terry killed was just a street thug. He had no real value to his organization, and there was no way they’d put their necks, and name, on the line to vindicate him.
Terry’s death was about something more, and I had my suspicions about what that “more” was. I just needed to ask around to confirm it, find out who was behind the order, and get to the bottom of the real mess behind all these meaningless deaths.
“Don’t worry about Rachel right now,” I told my sister, shifting gears as the traffic light turned green. At least the Chrysler was a stick shift, so I didn’t feel completely detached from it. “Let her keep doing whatever she’s doing. If it seems like she’s getting too close, I’ll take care of it… You just stick to the script. Just keep telling her the same shit if she confronts you.”
“Okay,” Hannah said, rolling her eyes and rubbing her belly. “But I’m getting sick of all this. I just want it to be over.”
I didn’t have the heart to tell my sister that “this” was far from over, so I just smiled at her and lied. “It’ll all be over soon,�
� I said. “In the meantime, just keep calm. You’ve got to take care of yourself—and your baby.”
Hannah nodded her head and smiled at me. Then, she convinced me to take her through a drive-thru on our way back to her apartment. She ordered three cheeseburgers, a large carton of French fries, and a medium strawberry milkshake, and she took straight to eating them before we even left the parking lot.
By the time we pulled up outside of her building, she’d nearly eaten the whole greasy feast. I asked her if she needed help getting into her place, but she declined—and I watched from the car as she meandered up to the door, carrying what was left of her fast-food lunch.
When she reached the door, Hannah turned to me and waved goodbye, and as soon as she stepped into the building, I immediately picked up my cellphone. I dialed a familiar number and waited for an answer.
“What’s up, Hammer?” my biker brother said, picking up on the third ring.
“Hey, Gator,” I replied. “You still at the funeral home?”
“Sure am,” Gator answered. “Why?”
“I need you to do me a favor,” I said.
“You name it,” Gator chimed back without pause.
As I went on to explain my request to Gator, I turned the car around and headed back to Bradley’s. It took about ten minutes to make the trip, and I thought about Rachel the entire time. She was smart, sophisticated, and sexy—and maybe there was a chance that she could get the answers she was looking for… which meant I had to search for the answers I needed even harder. If she found her answers first, it could kill my entire investigation or bring other unsavory things to light, and I needed to make sure nothing like that happened.
When I arrived back at Bradley’s, I pulled into the parking lot and idled the car. I picked up my phone and called Gator again.
“I’m here,” I said as soon as he answered.
“Okay,” he replied. “Just a minute.”
I had a lot of work cut out for me over the next few days and weeks, and I needed to get to it as soon as possible… but first, there was something else that I needed to take care of.
HAMMER: Wolves MC (Riding With Wolves Book 1) Page 3