“You are confusing the Death Dealers with the Sons of Satan, my friend,” Steve looked angry again. “I’m a Son of Satan. I went through all that bullshit; but I am president of the Death Dealers—we play by my rules.” He stood up again, as he delivered his homily. “If I say you are a member, then you are a member.” Then he smiled and looked at all the other men in the room. “Okay, fine, we’ll have it his way,” he said. “Gentlemen, I put it to a vote—do you accept Lover Boy Aiken as the newest member of the Death Dealers?” Steve interrupted himself. “Wait, I don’t like the handle ‘Lover Boy;’ he should put all that shit behind him,” he mused, grinning. “Gentlemen, do you accept Ned ‘Crash’ Aiken as a Death Dealers member?”
Gagliano shook a can of beer and opened it in Ned’s face, covering him in a shower of foam. There was a huge roar as the other men joined in. Johansson, who was already profoundly drunk, picked Ned up, put him on his massive shoulders and spun him around a few times, before tottering and almost falling down. After regaining his balance, he placed Ned as gently as he could on Steve’s pool table.
“Tonight, gentlemen,” Steve announced. “We party.”
At about the same time Ned showed up at Foxes, Vladimir went to his locker at the blast furnace and grabbed the knapsack. It raised no eyebrows when Vladimir took the bag into the steel factory. Not only was he a very large man who consumed enormous amounts of food and often brought big bags full of bread and sausages into work, but Vladimir was also well known as someone who was not to be messed with. Such was his reputation that he could bring a herd of school children into the factory, and nobody would have the courage to say anything about it.
When his dinner break rolled around, Vladimir went back to his locker. He waited a good ten minutes until the other guys retrieved their lunches before he went into the room. He grabbed two bags—the knapsack Ned had given him and a plastic shopping bag he had stuffed full of kielbasa and crusty bread. He wolfed down the meal and carried the knapsack to his work station. He noticed that Gordon, the guy who worked next to him, saw him. Vladimir stared him down.
Once he was sure the shift had gotten back up to speed again, Vladimir heaved the knapsack into the furnace full of molten metal. Tyler Heath’s head, hands, and every part of the mostly nylon knapsack other than the metal pulltabs on its zippers disintegrated in midair just before they would have hit the molten metal.
Vladimir looked over at Gordon and saw fear in his eyes. Vladimir grinned and knew it was all over and done with. He’d made $1,100 for just five seconds’ work.
Chapter 2
You could say that Ned Aiken’s road to Steve Schultz and the Death Dealers began with his twelfth grade English teacher, Mr. Lambert.
“I’m not supposed to say this—no teacher is—but I really, honestly don’t think you will ever amount to anything,” Ned’s English teacher shouted at him in the hall. “I really don’t think you ever will.”
Ned thought Mr. Lambert had had it in for him since Ned had corrected him on some detail in geography class in ninth grade and all the kids laughed at him. Three years later, Lambert was getting his long-simmering licks in. He had been trying his hardest to impart to the class what his teacher’s guide told him was the enduring influence of T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland,” when Ned and his crew erupted into gales of laughter. Lambert knew Ned was the ringleader, so he pulled him out of class for a discussion.
“Seriously, I don’t think you ever, ever will amount to anything unless you straighten up and fly right,” Lambert spouted as he turned bright red.
Ned looked at Lambert long and hard. He was short—maybe five-foot-six—and bald, with a shoulder-length fringe of hair surrounding his big, freckly scalp. He wore thick, dark blue worsted slacks—which had that day’s brown paper lunch bag in the back pocket every afternoon—and a checkered, western-style shirt he thought made him look cool.
Lambert lived two blocks away from Ned, so Ned knew that he’d been through two failed marriages and was living with a borderline obese woman whose children wouldn’t speak to him. He drove a seventeen-year-old Subaru that sounded like it was farting every time he pressed the gas, and he had a hobby of flying radio-controlled airplanes.
Ned normally zoned out when the teachers criticized or scolded him. But this time, he hung on Lambert’s every word. And as he listened, Ned realized that Lambert’s advice—at its very best—would land Ned exactly where Lambert himself was; if he worked hard, applied himself—straightened up and flew right—he could be just like Lambert.
The realization made him laugh out loud, and Lambert exploded with anger. “I’m gonna expel you!” he shouted.
Ned just stared at him with a smirk. “You can’t do that,” he said. “I know you can’t do that.”
Lambert stammered. “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, tough guy, I can’t expel you, but I can fail you,” he taunted and grinned broadly.
It wasn’t much of a threat: Ned was already failing every course except Phys Ed and Calculus. He thought hard on what he should do next. Punching Lambert would have gotten him expelled for sure—exactly what Lambert wanted. So Ned did what he thought would bother the teacher most. He walked away, more determined than ever to use everything in his power to not end up like Mr. Lambert.
Ned gravitated to the unofficial smoking area just outside the school fence. He was surprised to see none of his friends there yet, so he just sat there, thinking.
Eventually, two of his best friends, Gareth and Cameron, came out laughing. “Mr. Aiken . . . you’re never the first one out here,” said Cameron. “What’s up?”
“Kicked out of Lambert’s . . . again.”
“Yeah, he’s such a dick,” Gareth said.
“This time’s permanent.”
“What’d you do?”
“Same ol’, same ol’.”
“Yup,” Cameron and Gareth both nodded.
“So . . . got any weed?” Cameron asked.
“Nope, just hash,” Ned told him.
“Fuck! You know I can’t smoke hash,” Cameron said. “Makes me cough like I’m hocking up a lung.”
“Too bad, it’s all I got.”
“Can’t you go talk to André?”
“Quiet,” Gareth interrupted. “The cops.” He was actually referring to a group of “good” girls, ones they could not trust not to tell on them if they knew what was going on.
“Ladies,” Gareth said as they approached. “Can I interest you in a few moments of indescribable pleasure?”
“Gareth, you are so gross,” Lily Hogenboom sneered at him.
“Aw, don’t be that way,” Gareth continued. “I’ll go easy on you. You’ll hardly feel a thing.”
Lily started laughing, even though she didn’t want to. The group of girls with Lily included Kelli Johnson. Ned had harbored a crush on Kelli for years. Even when he had steady girlfriends throughout high school, it was obvious from how he looked at her, how he got quiet whenever she was around, and how often her name came up when he was drunk or stoned, that he was really interested in Kelli.
But there were complications. Although Ned was generally seen as a relatively popular guy around school, he was also considered something of a loser when it came to academics and a future after high school. Kelli, on the other hand, was the daughter of Augie Johnson, a math teacher at their school, and she was one of the school’s hardest-working and most gifted students. She was a regular winner of academic awards and was likely to be the graduating class’s valedictorian. She was everyone’s most-likely-to-succeed girl and not exactly in the same social circles as Ned.
And, the opinion that Ned was at least a part-time provider of weed and hash had filtered throughout the school. Kelli and many of her friends generally considered contact with him to be tantamount to aiding and abetting a felon.
As Gareth and Cameron continued their clumsy but amusing flirtation with the girls, Ned joined the conversation. But, as usual when Kelli was around, he found himself unable to be ve
ry assertive. Clumsily, Ned made a stab at asking her out.
“I don’t think my boyfriend would like that very much,” she told him politely.
“You don’t have a boyfriend, Kelli,” said Lily, grinning broadly.
Kelli’s eyes widened. “Yes I do!”
“No you don’t; you haven’t even been on a date in months,” Lily continued, giggling a little.
“Shut UP!” Kelli’s face was turning red.
Ned was too dumbfounded to react, but Cameron assessed the situation pretty succinctly. “Weak,” he said, then took his friend back to where they were sitting in the smoking area.
Getting shot down always hurts, but Ned was in a bad way after his run-in with Lambert, and Kelli—the girl everyone knew he’d always wanted—turned him down in front of his best friends. Cameron and Gareth, in an attempt to make their friend feel better, started talking about whatever came to mind—from Cameron’s dog’s fight with a raccoon to Mr. Ditmar’s need for a new toupee.
It didn’t help Ned’s mood any. After a few minutes of sulking, he left for the one place he knew would make him feel better.
André’s townhouse was a cool place. Ned liked how simple and straight-to-the-point it was. In the living room, there was nothing but a huge flat-screen TV, a video-game console and a long, low, white leather couch. Nothing on the walls, nothing in the way, just pure simplicity. And André was always happy to see him. They’d hang out, spark up a couple of joints or have a couple of beers and talk.
André was twelve years older than Ned. They met when André was dating Brianna, Ned’s youngest aunt. Brianna had just divorced her insurance agent husband and was going through what Ned’s mom called her “wild phase.” And André was a very big part of that. Born and raised in the mountains of northern Maine, André had long, wild hair, tons of tattoos, and he rode an insanely loud Harley-Davidson. He never told anyone what he actually did for a living.
Ned was fifteen at the time, in tenth grade, and he thought André was the epitome of cool. He followed him around and aped his mannerisms. But when André took him aside at a party, Ned was cautious, even afraid, at first. André took him into an empty bedroom, but Ned calmed down when his new friend showed him a huge spliff which he called the “universal joint.” They sat and smoked and talked and—like many people who smoke up together—found out they had a lot in common.
The bond lasted long after that first joint. Whenever the family got together, André and Ned would often greet each other, find a place far away from the rest of the crowd and spend their time talking and laughing, usually oblivious to what was going on around them.
A little more than a year after they started dating, Brianna caught André in her bed with another woman. When she told him she never wanted to see him again, he just shrugged and left.
But André and Ned stayed in touch. André lived about four blocks away from Ned’s school, and Ned would frequently drop by to talk or smoke. As Ned brought more and more friends over, André realized he could make a few bucks by selling them weed or hash instead of supplying it for free. So he told Ned that his friends weren’t welcome at his house anymore, but that he could front him some hash and weed to sell to them. At first, Ned didn’t like it—he felt like he’d been cut off—but he eventually came around when he realized he could make a few bucks off his friends at school and still smoke for free at André’s.
On this particular afternoon, Ned felt he could use a pick-me-up at André’s. He was stinging from the brush-off he’d gotten from Kelli, and, to his surprise,the confrontation with Lambert was still bothering him. André could tell something was up.
After they started smoking, André stared hard at Ned, making him feel uncomfortable.
“What?” Ned asked.
“What ‘what?’”
“What do you want?”
“One thing,” André asked. “To know what’s up with you.”
Ned sighed loudly. “It’s that fuckin’ English teacher,” he said. “He’s gonna fail me, even though I’m doing okay in his class.”
“What? You’re good in English?”
“Okay, I suck. I could be good at it, but I find that all the other stuff—skipping class, getting in late, talking with my friends, y’know, all the stuff that pisses teachers off—is making it tough.”
“So why do you do that stuff ?”
Ned didn’t hesitate. “The teacher, he’s a total asshole; it’s always gotta be his way—like we all owe him something and we have to please him—the work seems totally secondary, not just to us, but mostly to him.”
Now it was André’s turn to sigh. But unlike Ned’s sigh of frustration, André’s was that of world-weary boredom. “Y ’know what?” he said. “That’s the way it will always be.”
“What do you mean?”
“Every teacher, every boss you will ever have will be like that.”
“What?”
“You’re a naturally smart kid, but you aren’t prepared to play the game.”
“What?”
“The game, man,” André shouted. “You don’t know about the game?”
“What game?”
“Yeah, I hate to be the one to tell you this, but it doesn’t matter how good you are at English,” André said. “It matters how well you behave.”
“Behave?”
“Yeah, you gotta act the way they want you to for them to accept you,” André told him. “You gotta walk their walk, talk their talk if you want a job from them; and even if you get that job, they will make your life miserable, no matter how much you try to please them.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“Okay, who’s the biggest fuckin’ suck-up in your class?”
“Danny Forte.”
“Does your teacher treat him with respect? Does he seem happy?”
“No, but he’s got a lot of reasons to be unhappy, and a lot of reasons to be treated without respect.”
“But does he get good marks?”
“Yeah, why?”
“Okay, I’m not getting through to you; let’s go to the garage.”
Without questioning, Ned followed André to his garage and then into his truck.
Ned really, really, really liked André’s truck. Like most things André owned, the truck was bright white. And inside, it had an outstanding stereo and the softest leather seats that Ned had ever felt. He would have loved the truck even if it didn’t have the dirt bikes, jet-skis, or snowmobiles that were usually in the back.
André pressed the button that moved his seat all the way back and put his feet up on the steering wheel and encouraged Ned to do the same. He put the key in the ignition and turned on the stereo. Led Zeppelin’s “Misty Mountain Hop” filled the cabin, and Ned (who had never heard the song from such a high-quality stereo before) marveled at its depth, texture, and complexity.
As the song ended, André turned the volume down a little and asked Ned: “So, what do you want to be when you grow up?”
Ned giggled.
André pressed on. “No, really.”
“I guess I could be a pretty good accountant,” he said. “Good steady job, decent money.”
André moved his seat back into driving position, opened the garage door and the big GMC crept onto the road. André didn’t tell Ned where they were going and Ned didn’t ask. They turned left.
André turned the stereo off. “So you are telling me that what you’d like to do is to graduate from high school—which is actually not looking all that likely—then follow that Herculean effort with four more years of absolute misery at some college you have to pay for, just to count some other motherfucker’s money?”
“What?”
“Yeah, you know all that shit you hate about your English teacher’s class?” he said. “You just told me that’s how you want to spend every waking second of the rest of your natural life.”
“No, no, it’s not like that.”
“Sure it is,” André said, grinning. “Y
ou can be as good as you want at English, but what matters is how well you please the boss—‘ya-suh, no-suh, whatever-you-say-suh.’”
Ned just sighed.
André continued. “What did you want to be when you were seven years old?”
Ned didn’t hesitate. “An astronaut,” he said.
“You wanted to travel thousands, even millions of miles into the unknown to discover new worlds . . . and now you want to count other people’s money,” André said. “Do everything they say, then get a tiny, tiny bit of it for yourself.” Ned could hear him sneering. “Like a fuckin’ rat, begging at the table for scraps.”
Ned didn’t know what to say.
André told him to pull down his sun visor. On it, there was a video monitor playing hardcore porn. André pressed a few buttons. Suddenly, AC/DC’s Brian Johnson was screeching “You Shook Me” so loud it shook Ned’s innards. As he was enjoying the show, he was pleasantly surprised when André turned on the massager in his seat.
“You can be an accountant, or a teacher if you go to college,” said André. “And live ‘the good life’—or you could consider an alternate route.”
Ned waited for him to continue, but he didn’t. Instead, they drove into the parking lot of a brown low-rise commercial building with a few, dark-tinted windows. It had no name, but had a sign indicating which business was in which unit. Ned noticed that many of the businesses were just numbers or nonsensical acronyms and the few that had real names sounded either Chinese or Arabic. André hit the button for No. 14, or GTMA Financial LLC. “Seymour!” he shouted into the intercom. “Let me in!”
Ned heard a buzz as the aluminum door unlocked. André bounded up the stairs and opened a windowless door with the letters GTMA stuck on it.
“Seymour! How’s it goin’, buddy,” André said as he slumped into a chair facing a desk with a small man behind it and put his feet up on the desk. “I want you to meet my good friend Ned.”
The small man stood up.
Jerry Langton Three-Book Biker Bundle Page 4