She was marrying Jacob Weitzmann, a prosperous local real estate investor. He had—as far as Clegg, Tate, and her other contacts knew (Delvecchio refused to help her)—no organized-crime connections other than his illustrious father-in-law-to-be.
As Lara stood in line outside the gates of Leonardo’s Banquet Center, she gave the rest of the crowd a once-over. It was an older group than you’d expect for a twenty-four-year-old marrying a twenty-six-year-old, but there are always lots of relatives at weddings. It was all dark suits and evening gowns, a lot of gold and plenty of fur, despite the eighty-degree heat.
The exceptions to the dress code were a bunch of young men wearing T-shirts, jeans, and leather jackets. She could tell that some of them were Death Dealers from their patches, but most had no patches at all. A few of them had a patch from another gang. It was Black-somethings, but she couldn’t read the second word because the old gothic typeface made it illegible to her.
When she got to the front of the line, a well-muscled guy in a tuxedo asked her for her invitation.
“I don’t have one . . .”
He interrupted. “You alone?”
“Yes.”
“You got a boyfriend in there?”
Her first instinct was to say yes to justify her presence, but his body language told her to say no. She did.
“Go right ahead, miss, and have a great time.”
Once inside, she approached a big-haired group of women about her age. She correctly guessed they were Siobhan’s friends. She stood near them, pretending not to listen to what they were saying. It was mostly about gifts.
Eventually, one of them broke off from the crowd, so Lara said “hi.” The young woman smiled and introduced herself as Maria Mascarello. She asked where Lara was from, because she didn’t seem like she was from Springfield. Lara told her, truthfully, that she was from the West Coast.
As they began to get along, Maria gave Lara a tour of the facility and pointed out some of the young and single men. None of them were bikers. Lara pointed out one biker she thought was pretty good looking, and Maria made a face. “You like that sort of thing?” she said. “Not for me, thanks.”
Then Lara asked her about a group of casually dressed people just outside the fence.
“Them? Ugh, those are what my dad calls ‘the bloodsuckers’; you know, like reporters, the media,” she said. “Every time anyone who is anyone tries to do anything anymore, they show up and try to ruin it. Fuckin’ paparazzi.”
“Is Siobhan famous?”
“Not yet, but she has an awesome demo tape—it’ll blow you away,” said Maria. “It’s her dad who’s famous. He’s a big-time businessman.”
“Oh, what business is he in?”
“I dunno. Business.”
Just then, Lara saw the only person she recognized at the party. It was Marvin “Big Mamma” Bouchard, holding court in full Sons of Satan colors. He was surrounded by four or five other men, mostly in their forties and fifties. They were wearing expensive suits.
Lara took a deep breath and walked up to him. She could smell his leather jacket. “Hello, Mr. Bouchard.”
Bouchard smiled and returned the greeting. The other men left without a word.
“What can I do for you, turtle dove?” he asked as they sat at a table. A waiter brought two glasses of champagne without being asked.
“My name is Lara Quinn . . .”
“You look like you are a friend of the groom’s, but your name sounds like you are a friend of the bride’s.”
“Actually, I’m neither . . . I’m a reporter from the Silhouette . . .”
“A reporter? Really?” he was grinning very widely, almost laughing. “And they let you in?”
“Yes.”
“And you just walked up to me and started talking?’
“Yes.”
“This is indeed a strange, strange world,” he chuckled. “Okay, Scoop, what do you want to know? Consider me your source on the inside.”
Lara stammered.
“Okay, you can tell your paper that the notorious Marvin Bouchard is happy to attend the wedding of these two fine young people,” he said. “And wishes them the utmost in health, happiness, and prosperity.”
While they were talking, another man approached. He was short and stocky and walked with a slight limp. Although he was wearing an impeccably tailored Armani suit, he ruined the effect by matching it with a black shirt with no collar and about a half-dozen gold chains. His face was marred with a strange scar on his left cheek that looked like his mouth extended back and upwards. Lara tried not to stare.
He sat down beside Bouchard, facing Lara. He was not smiling. Though his eyes never left Lara, he asked Bouchard: “Who’s your little friend, Marv?”
“This is Lara Quinn . . .”
“I know who she is.”
“. . . and may I present . . .”
“You won’t present anything,” Mehelnechuk interrupted. “I don’t think it’s a very wise idea for you to be speaking with such a pretty young girl when your wife is here. Come with me, Marv.”
They both stood up. Bouchard excused himself.
Seconds after the two men left, two others—much younger and much bigger—stood on each side of Lara. “Miss, we’re gonna have to ask you to leave,” one of them said. “And it would be better for everyone if you didn’t make a scene.”
Lara got up and left. She thought about talking to the other reporters, but decided against it.
Ned walked into Steve’s office at the Strip. “You get the job done?” he asked.
“Yeah, it was easy,” Ned replied. “No problem really; didn’t even need Leo—in fact, I wish I hadn’t brought him.”
“Why?”
“Well . . . can we talk in front of him?” he said, motioning at Bradley Myers, who was sitting on a nearby couch.
“We can only talk in front of him,” Steve chuckled. “See, Bradley here is my lawyer, and if the cops or some other smart-ass tapes me or bugs me or even overhears me, it’s inadmissible in court because of attorney-client privilege—I can say I killed Jimmy Hoffa and they couldn’t do shit.”
Ned laughed. “Okay . . . well, he stole something on the way out . . .”
“Aw, c’mon, you can’t begrudge him a little extra; he doesn’t make much and he does everything you say. ‘Course I don’t condone stealing, but that’s his problem.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. So why did we have to do that job anyway?
“Well, a couple of our guys fucked her, and now she’s pressing charges.”
“Pressing charges? Do you mean they raped her?”
“That’s what she says, but my boys say it was all consensual, so I have to believe them,” Steve said. “Besides, that’s up to the courts to decide.”
“And if she doesn’t testify . . .”
“Our two friends don’t go to jail.”
Ned rubbed his face in frustration, then sighed.
Chapter 7
Mehelnechuk had been grooming Sean Feeney for a while. He liked the kid. He wasn’t very big, but he had presence. In fact, he reminded him a little of himself.
Feeney attracted the attention of the Sons of Satan when he was selling drugs for the Screaming Eagles, a New Devon-based gang controlled by the Martinsville Sons of Satan. They’d seen him sell drugs, seen him intimidate witnesses, and even seen him set fire to a Lawbreakers bar. But what really impressed Mehelnechuk was the fact that Feeney had gone to prison, done hard time, for something that wasn’t his fault. He very easily could have gotten off if he talked, but he decided to take one for the team. Mehelnechuk was aware that not too many twenty-three-year-olds with two young children at home would have done that. Mehelnechuk wanted to reward him.
That desire dovetailed perfectly with another one of Mehelnechuk’s plans. The Lawbreakers were no longer invincible in his hometown, and he wanted to take advantage of it. So he decided to start a new gang in Hagerstown, on the other side of Springfield—deeper into Lawb
reakers’ territory.
Feeney, he decided, would be the one to lead it. He was a tough kid, dedicated to the cause and a proven earner.
Mehelnechuk wanted to organize the effort himself, but he was too busy with other pressing expansion operations, so he recruited his old and trusted friend, Ray “Toots” Vandersloot. Toots did the organizational work, then collected some nonessential members and prospects from the many regional gangs that the Sons of Satan controlled, and assigned them to Feeney.
Ned noticed that Kelli had been acting differently lately. She’d cut off all contact with her parents and saw few of her old friends once she moved in with Ned. Since her parents refused to pay for college, she was growing increasingly bored and restless on the many nights Ned was out selling, collecting, negotiating, and performing other duties for the Death Dealers. He had what amounted to a full-time job with night-shift hours and she was afraid she was turning into a housewife.
So she made new friends. Steve had come to tolerate her presence and had started bringing Connie along, so the pair could talk while he and Ned did business. Kelli was surprised at how much she liked Connie, who was very articulate and even a bit erudite, despite her profession.
Eventually, Connie started inviting Kelli along on her girls’ nights out, which usually consisted of a nice meal, a lot of talking, and then getting smashed, followed by a lot of laughing. Kelli had come to appreciate the company of many of Connie’s other friends. She became close to one in particular, June O’Malley (who went by the stage name Pepper).
On one drunken night out, June introduced Kelli to the joys of cocaine. Kelli was reluctant at first, but when she saw that June wasn’t crazy or suicidal or any of the other things they tell you drugs make you, she thought she’d give it a try—just this once. Besides, Connie said, it helped you lose weight.
Vandersloot’s meeting with Feeney went exceedingly well. Not only did Feeney want the job, he couldn’t hide his boyish enthusiasm. He even asked if he could name the gang. They became the Satan’s Favorites after his own initials. Feeney also told Vandersloot to make sure he thanked Mehelnechuk for the opportunity and to tell him he wouldn’t let him down.
Vandersloot, a veteran of too many wars and operations to get very excited about this kind of operation, assured him he would do well. Then he introduced him to some of his new gang. Feeney had never met any of them before, but they seemed like a big, tough lot, so he was impressed.
The plan was for Feeney to drive into Hagerstown. He would get his hair cut and wear a suit to rent a clubhouse. Then the rest of the gang would ride in on Harleys in full colors.
But there were problems from the start. Instead of an obscure and easily defended industrial or commercial space, Feeney rented a luxurious three-bedroom apartment in Hagerstown’s fashionable Ironworks district. While the Satan’s Favorites wanted to be noticed, their target market was hardly well represented by the young couples, families, and seniors they rode up and down with in the elevator.
And the Satan’s Favorites found very little success on the ground. The Lawbreakers had been firmly entrenched in Hagerstown for more than a decade, and between them and their associated brokers, they had the drug and vice markets pretty well cornered.
That would have been a tough situation for even the best bikers to crack, but Feeney didn’t have the best bikers. The men he got were expendable from other clubs because they weren’t much good at anything. Their clumsy attempts at making contacts with those likely to buy product from them were met with laughter or scorn.
And Feeney himself wasn’t much help. He spent a lot of time in Hagerstown’s small but thriving gay village because, he said, it was an affluent, drug-using crowd, which the Lawbreakers avoided out of prejudice. If he could establish a beachhead in the gay community, he maintained, he could get cash and connections to make inroads into the rest of the town.
But his actual motives were quite different. A brief fling with a transvestite in prison had proven to him that he liked sex with men even more than sex with women. And while he was doing his best Mehelnechuk imitation in Hagerstown’s gay village by buying drinks and showing off his wealth to make lots of friends, he really hadn’t sold any drugs.
Lara was a little bit miffed when Clegg asked her to wait outside the police station for him. She thought it was rude of him not to invite her in. She was even less impressed when five minutes had passed their appointed time and he still hadn’t shown up. Then she heard a car horn.
It came from a Suburban, painted in police colors. When she stood up, she could see Clegg was inside. “C’mon, kid,” he shouted. “I don’t have all day.”
She climbed into the Suburban and was surprised at how cluttered the front seat was. Besides Clegg himself—a former college football player who had gotten no smaller over the years—the seat held his utility belt, two computers, and two shotguns.
As soon as she was in, he sped off. “Sorry we had to do it this way,” he said, “but this is the only time I had. Besides you’ll learn more this way.” When he saw from her face that she needed an explanation, he continued. “Union rules state that every staff sergeant has to go out into the field and supervise his or her officers at least once a month.”
She seemed satisfied, so he continued. “Okay, this is downtown, where most of the drug sales happen,” he said. “You see any?”
“No.”
“You won’t. This isn’t like TV, where there’s a dealer on the corner—I’m sure some places are like that, but not Springfield,” he said. “The drug sales happen inside—in bars, in nightclubs, in discos . . .”
“Who’s behind it, the mafia?”
“To some extent, but less and less every year,” he said. “That was the way it worked in the old days, but the mafia has fallen apart these days, most people think it’s the arrests and the FBI, but it’s not.”
“No?”
“No, you met Siobhan, didn’t you?”
“Not really.”
“Well, you know who she is, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, her dad is in the mob, her grandfather was in the mob, and three of her five uncles were, but she ain’t and neither are her two brothers, and only one fucked-up waste case of the sixteen or so cousins that I know of.”
“Why not?”
“Organized crime is a dirty, dangerous business. These kids, they don’t want that kind of life. They’re happy to take Daddy’s dirty money and use it to start legitimate businesses. The only ones who stay in are the idiots and the psychos, and they’re pretty easy to catch.”
“So who is running all this? The Jamaicans? The Asians? The Hispanics? The Russians?”
Clegg chuckled. “You sound like you’re from outta town.”
“I am. I’m from . . .”
“Los Gatos, California, I know,” he said. “Anyway, as far as the Blacks are concerned, there’s just too few of them—there are a few black kids and just as many Whites who call themselves Bloods and Crips, but they generally just steal chains and iPods from one another, nothing major. Sometimes they’ll deal, but nothing better than street level.”
“It’s basically the same story with all the others—the few of them that are here will mostly fight among themselves and won’t talk to us,” he said. “Sometimes the Southeast Asians can get pretty fuckin’ violent—sick fucks, some of them—but they keep it all in-house.”
“So who is it?”
“Well, think about why you thought of all of those groups; what do they all have in common?”
“They’re tight-knit ethnic groups who are generally poor and feel locked out of mainstream society.”
“And in a cold, ugly, beat-up industrial town where the favorite sport is getting wasted, who does that describe?”
“Everybody?”
He laughed. “You’ve got a point, but the correct answer is white trash,” he said. “They’re poor, they’re angry, they feel left out . . .”
“So they band t
ogether and start committing crimes to get ahead . . .”
“Yeah, I guess you could say it’s a cycle.”
“In their own strange way, they’re trying to make life better for their children.”
“I wouldn’t go that far,” Clegg sneered. “These guys get a girl pregnant and leave ASAP; I’ve never seen one who was good to his kids.”
“I guess there’s no shortage of potential recruits.”
He laughed. “What else are they gonna do?”
“They become bikers, why?”
“Mostly because it’s the established way white trash bond in these parts—lots of people here who aren’t involved with crime at all think the Sons of Satan are heroes, you know, rebel outlaws—and the bikes give them some legitimacy as an organization.”
As he toured her around the downtown and industrial areas the bikers and their associates frequented—pointing out bars and other hotspots—he explained how the gangs worked, how the war against the Lawbreakers was proceeding, and how he saw the gangs’ org charts shaping up. He put Bouchard at the top of the Sons’ organization.
Eventually, she asked him. “Do you know a small, funny-looking man with a scar like this?” She traced a line up her left cheek.
“Sure, li’l Ivan, he’s from here. I used to give him a boot to the ass every once in a while.”
“Li’l Ivan?”
“Ivan Mehelnechuk used to ride with some stupid-ass gangs around here until I—that is, we—cleaned ’em all up,” he said. “He was sharp, but nobody paid him much mind. I hear he’s in the Sons over at Martinsville now, maybe a full patch, even.”
“What if I told you he was giving Bouchard orders at Siobhan’s wedding?”
“I’d say you were nuts.”
“I’m saying it.”
“I still say you’re nuts, but it’s worth looking into.”
Chapter 8
Ned was pissed off and a little bit drunk when he came home from his meeting at the Strip. Steve wanted him to talk with these two El Salvadorean guys he’d heard were trying to make a name for themselves as independent dealers. Unlike many other big-time bikers, Steve made a habit of working with illegal immigrants: they worked hard, he said; they had their own built-in and otherwise impenetrable markets; and they adhered to a very strict code of silence. But Ned didn’t like these two little pricks and their affected machismo. At the meeting, he got what he wanted out of them—they would sell drugs to the growing number of Central Americans coming to the area in search of work—but it had taken forever and Ned felt like he had just sat through a bad, low-budget gangster movie.
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