Jerry Langton Three-Book Biker Bundle

by Jerry Langton

  “That’s why we’re in here,” Clegg told him. “I was afraid something like this would happen.”

  There were no cars around Steve’s mansion when Ned drove up this time. No buzz of activity in the air. Ned correctly assumed it wasn’t a filming day. After he got out of the car he was greeted by a couple of guys he knew to be prospects. They didn’t recognize him, but the guy at the door did. He laughed at the outfit he was wearing. Ned had forgotten to take off his new work clothes, and suddenly felt foreign and strange in his khakis and pressed, blue, button-down shirt. “I’m working undercover,” Ned told him, and they both laughed.

  Steve was sitting on his couch in his now-familiar white bath-robe and staring blankly at the TV. SpongeBob was on, but the sound was off. Steve didn’t seem to be watching anyway, just staring. He looked awful. Big bags were under his eyes, his skin was a pale yellow, and his lips were dry and cracked. He looked gaunt, as though he had lost at least twenty pounds.

  He brightened up a little when he saw Ned, but Ned had a feeling it was contrived—a form of bravado. “Hey, you old son of a whore,” Steve said, smiling. “How’s it going?”

  “Great, and you?”

  “Good, good,” Steve nodded. “Got a great new product . . . yeah . . . it’s Viagra—I get a guy in Thailand to make it for me; then he ships it over in bags of candy. All I have to do is hire some girl to pick the purple ones out. It really works too.”

  “Sounds great; what do you think of the new setup?”

  “Well, I don’t like sharing the town with the fuckin’ Lawbreakers, but I guess I always kind of did anyway.”

  “Hey, we’re all brothers now, right? At least they’re not shooting at us anymore.”

  “Always the company man, Aiken,” said Steve. “What’s with the getup, anyway?”

  “So Ivan didn’t tell you?” Ned said. “I mean, he said he wouldn’t, but I wasn’t sure whether or not to believe him.”

  “Tell me what?”

  “I’m not with you anymore.”

  “They call you up to Martinsville? Getting a chance in the bigs?”

  “No, I’m running a new group out of Hamner.”

  “Hamner? From my bar?”

  “Ivan says it’s not your bar anymore.”

  “I guess it’s yours?”

  “Yeah.”

  Steve put on a brave face, but Ned could tell he was crestfallen. “That’s cool. I never got out there anyway. Besides, my focus should be here in Springfield.”

  “Yeah.” Ned didn’t have the heart to tell him that under the new deal, he was now essentially Steve’s boss. He figured that he’d find out soon enough.

  “So if you’re not with the Death Dealers—oh, sorry, Sons of Satan Springfield East—anymore, you’re gonna have to give back all the stuff I gave you.”

  “Well, I haven’t lived in the house for a while, and I never used the vehicles,” Ned said. “Except the Harley. I rode it here. I can leave it if you can get me a ride back to Hamner.”

  “Sure, sure thing, ask one of the assholes outside.”

  “Thanks.”

  Steve grinned. “Why’re you is such a hurry? Why don’t we have a little fun for old time’s sake?”

  Ned instantly wondered what would happen if Steve were to die. Would Mehelnechuk give him Springfield? Would he be boss of the city, or at least half of it? There’s no fuckin’ way he’d hand over his own hometown to the former Lawbreakers. Would the man who killed Steve get punished or rewarded? What if they never found out who it was?

  Steve could tell Ned was deep in thought, so he snapped his fingers in front of his face. “Hate to wake you up there, buddy. You gotta stay out of the product,” Steve said. “I thought you might want to have a little party with old Steve-O.”

  Ned just looked at him without speaking. He was alone in his thoughts and wondering what his old boss could tell from the look on his face.

  “Yeah, yeah, I could call up Kelli—she goes by the name Courtnee now, workin’ outta Heaven’s Angels—I’m sure she’d be happy to see you,” Steve said. “And I got plenty of Viagra, so we could go all day and all night.”

  Ned laughed. “That’s okay, Steve. I’m pretty sure I don’t need either of them.” He said good-bye, turned, and left.

  Clegg was sitting at his desk listening to Jimmy Lewis’s theory about bikers. It differed from his own philosophy that bikers were basically guys who either couldn’t or didn’t want to participate in what most considered to be mainstream society. Lewis disagreed. He explained that he had been talking to Kaz, a psychoanalyst friend of his, who said that—aside from psychopaths and sociopaths—when people commit crimes, it was a form of self-sabotage. He explained it at length, but in essence, he believed that bikers and other criminals were people who wanted to get caught. They were people who deep down felt that they needed to be punished.

  Clegg was just about to tell him what he thought of psychoanalysts when a uniform said someone wanted to see him. That it was important.

  Neither he nor Lewis had to be told who Yolanda Kreig was. She and Scott were known throughout the region for their wealth, style and philanthropy. Since his murder, she had gone into semi-seclusion, but her face had been all over the newspapers and local television.

  The two cops introduced themselves. Yolanda didn’t waste any time. “I have some very valuable information about organized crime in Martinsville, Springfield, and other places,” she told them. “But I will not share any of it, unless I am guaranteed full and unconditional immunity.”

  Clegg was stunned. When he finally summoned the wherewithal to answer, he said, “I can’t make you any promises, but I think you can rest assured you’ll be okay if you talk. We’ll need the DA’s office to sign off. Don’t you want a lawyer? Shouldn’t you be talking to the authorities in Martinsville?”

  “My lawyer is a crook. I can make my own deals,” she snorted. “And I don’t trust the Martinsville police. I’ve seen my husband and his associates deal with them too many times—that’s why I came here. The men I know, the gangsters, they hate you, Clegg. So you must be honest.”

  Clegg thanked her and asked Lewis to make her comfortable. Back at his desk, Clegg was halfway through dialing Hamilton’s number when he hung up. Instead of Hamilton, he called his boss—District Attorney Maria Tsafaras. It was not the way things were normally done, but he couldn’t risk losing another one like he had Carter. It would be harder for Hamilton to find a way to turn down a deal with Yolanda—after all, she wasn’t a murderer or, from the look of her, an addict—but if his life or livelihood was in danger, he couldn’t be trusted.

  Clegg did not know Tsafaras well, but hoped she could help. He explained the situation and took a personal risk by telling her what he thought was going on with Hamilton. Reluctant at first, she eventually agreed to meet with him and Yolanda.

  Yolanda was surprised when the cops asked her not to speak. They wanted her to wait until Tsafaras arrived. Lewis asked Clegg if perhaps they were risking her changing her mind, but Clegg disagreed. He insisted that this was a big decision for her, that she had weighed all the options, and that there was no going back for her. Instead, he instructed Lewis to get her coffee and anything else she wanted. He sent a uniform out to get her a crossword puzzle and a pen.

  Upon her arrival, Tsafaras—short, dark-haired, and dressed in a well-tailored suit—strode up to Clegg and said, “This had better be worth it.”

  “If you’re talking about me,” Yolanda said from where she was waiting, “it will be.”

  Inside the interrogation room, Yolanda sat behind the desk and waited politely until Clegg turned on the video camera. Over the next thirty minutes, Yolanda confessed to everything she knew about her husband’s business (but avoided mentioning her uncle). She gave names, places, and dates.

  After she was done, Tsafaras asked her if she had any documentation, if she had kept a diary, or had any other written record of what she described.

  “I di
d have,” she said. “I had all the papers—I was the book-keeper—but they broke in and stole everything the night Scott was killed.”

  Tsafaras took Clegg out of the interrogation room. “I dunno,” she said. “It’ll be her word against theirs.”

  “It’ll give us a chance to bring ’em all in,” he countered. “One of them will slip up.”

  “And what if none of them do?” she said. “Then we look like idiots—hell, Bouchard’s gotten off so many raps he looks like a god to these assholes. I’m not sure we can risk it at this point.”

  “Hang on.” Clegg went back to his desk. He pulled out the papers he had gotten from Duncan. He walked into the interrogation room and motioned for Tsafaras to follow him. He turned the video camera back on. He handed them to Yolanda and asked her if she recognized them.

  “Of course I do,” she said, surprised. “These are my records.”

  “And what does ‘Honey’ here mean,” Clegg asked, pointing at one of the listings.

  “Oh, that’s Vandersloot,” she smiled. “I called him that because that’s what he always called me.”

  “What about ‘Dirty’?”

  “That’s Bouchard, he always struck me as a dirty fellow—and that’s Rose, and that’s O’Donnell.”

  “What about this big one here, the one named ‘Buttercup?’”

  “That’s Ivan . . . Ivan Mehelnechuk.”

  Chapter 17

  Every cop involved had been waiting months for this. They planned for the confrontation with the bikers the way the Cold War military prepared for a nuclear attack. The Joint Task Force was made up of officers from thirteen different municipal police forces, along with state troopers, FBI, and ATF agents. Two officers from both the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Mexican Federales were invited to observe. They had been training and waiting for months. And it was Yolanda’s confession and subsequent deal with Tsafaras that made it happen.

  It started with a conference call. The FBI had put Clegg in charge of all the local cops, and he chaired the meeting. He assured them everything would go down as they had practiced, and that they had been faxed all the names and addresses of the men they were after and the charges against them.

  Dubbed “Operation Clean Sweep,” the raid involved more than six hundred officers arresting two-hundred-and-twelve bikers and their associates. Images of police breaking down doors and leading bikers out of their houses, apartments, offices, clubhouses, and bars flooded regional TV screens. The suspects ranged from an eighty-two-year-old accountant who was roused from bed and allowed to attach his oxygen tank and nasal canula before performing the “perp walk” for TV cameras to a fifteen-year-old drug runner who was taken from her math class by plainclothes officers.

  Most went easily. There were a few struggles, but no shots fired. Bouchard mugged for the cameras and told the throngs of reporters who watched him that he’d done nothing wrong and expected “to have this all cleared up in an hour or so.”

  There were no reporters at Mehelnechuk’s. He surrendered wordlessly to the three officers assigned to him. The only sound he made was an affirmative grunt after they asked if he understood when he was read the Miranda warning, advising him of his rights.

  Ned and Daniela woke up late. The hotel bed was just so comfortable, so welcoming that neither of them wanted to leave it. When they finally did start getting dressed for brunch, Ned’s phone began to beep. He chose to ignore it.

  “You should answer your phone,” Daniela said. “It might be important.”

  “It’s just a text, probably spam.”

  “Who is Spam?”

  Ned chuckled. “Nobody,” he said. “Look, we’re having a great time here; why ruin it with business?”

  “Because good business is how we can afford such good times,” she said. “Answer your phone, or it will bother us both all week.”

  He sighed and told her: “I will, but if this isn’t important, I’m shutting my phone off until we get back to the bar.”

  She smiled in agreement.

  Ned looked at the text: “Mass arrests, evrybdy dwn, cps lkng 4 U, get outta dodge.” It was from Stockton’s phone.

  “Get some clothes and some cash,” he told Daniela soberly.

  She started packing without asking why. She didn’t need to be told what was going on; she knew her days at the bar were over.

  Once packed, they took the stairs down to the first floor and outside. Ned took Daniela to a car rental franchise about a block away. Fearing the bright yellow SSR was too obvious, he rented a silver Toyota Corolla—“just for the day.”

  He parked Daniela and the car outside an ATM. Inside he got the maximum cash advance he could from all six of his credit cards. He left his gun and all the drugs he had had taken from the hotel room and the SSR and put them in the bank’s garbage can.

  Obeying all traffic signs and speed limits, he got the Corolla onto the Interstate as quickly as he could. He was just passing the North Beach city limits when a trooper went past him in the other direction. Ned looked into his mirror and saw the dark blue Crown Victoria U-turn behind him. The cop was clearly following him, but his lights and siren were off.

  Ned noticed that the cop stayed about a hundred yards or so behind him, neither gaining nor losing ground, and that he changed lanes whenever Ned did. Taking a risk, Ned took the off-ramp to the next town. Not far from the highway, he spotted a McDonald’s.

  He parked as close to the door as he could. Daniela, who had been silent since Ned asked her to pack, asked him why they were stopping.

  “Don’t pretend you don’t know what’s going on,” he said. “Look, they’re after me, they don’t even know who you are—get lost, enjoy your life.”

  Daniela sighed. Then she smiled. “Okay, I will run. That’s a smart idea. I will run to McDonald’s and save myself. Good-bye, Ned.”

  She didn’t budge. After a few moments, Ned said, “You’re not moving.”

  “Of course I’m not moving. I was joking,” Daniela shot back. “Where would I go? Since I have been very young, you are the only man I have met who has acted like a man; I’m stuck with you whether I like it or not—where else would I go?”

  Ned sighed, and smiled. “Last chance,” he said.

  “Even if the cops don’t get me, there is no life for me on this side,” she said. “Let’s go. I don’t like McDonald’s anyway—too greasy.”

  Ned shifted the Corolla into drive and got back onto the interstate. The trooper was still behind him. At the next on-ramp, he was joined by another trooper and, a few minutes later, two local cop cars. After they had all collected, the first trooper put his lights and siren on.

  Ned knew what he had to do. He floored it. He was just a few miles away from Ondasheeken. If he could make it onto the reservation, the cops would stop chasing him. They couldn’t go onto the reservation. Willie told him that. It was like another country.

  And once he was on the reservation, Willie could sneak him into Canada. He could get him papers. Willie owed him $21,000. That and the cash he had should be more than enough to take care of things and set them up on the other side of the border.

  Ned could see the cops gaining on him. The Corolla was no match for the V8-powered Crown Victorias the cops were driving. But he knew something they didn’t. He knew where he was going. There was a little dirt road off the highway that led to Ondasheeken. Generations of moonshiners, rumrunners, and other gangsters had used it for decades. He slammed on the car’s brakes and it slid to a ninety-degree angle where the road met the interstate. The first cop car sped right past him. The others slammed on their brakes and spun around the Corolla.

  Ned stomped on the accelerator. He sped down the deeply rutted road, leaving a huge cloud of dust behind him until it hit a stone that had been exposed after a recent storm. The right front wheel of the Corolla leapt into the air and the car rolled over, sliding to a stop no more than a football field away from the reservation.

  Ned’s head hit
the car’s doorframe as it slid, but he managed to regain his senses and crawl through the shattered window. He could hear the cops screaming at him, telling him to stop or they would shoot. But he could see Willie’s house. He got up and kept running until he was tackled from behind. Flat on his stomach, his face in the gravel, a cop’s knee in his back, he was cuffed, then hauled to his feet.

  Chapter 18

  The first six hours were pretty easy. Ned called his lawyer three times, but didn’t get anything but an answering machine. It was pretty obvious to him that the lawyer was busy with bigger fish. He regretted not taking Mehelnechuk’s advice about getting his own lawyer instead of relying on Steve’s.

  But he was already on his third shift of interrogators and hadn’t given up a thing. All three sets tried the same tack.

  “What if we told you we knew you were a drug dealer?”

  “I’d say you were wrong.”

  “How do you know Steve Schultz?”

  “He was a friend of my aunt’s boyfriend. I met him once.”

  “How long have you been a Death Dealer?”

  “What’s a Death Dealer?”

  “What do you do for a living?”

  “I run a bar.”

  “Why did you flee when the police attempted to apprehend you?”

  “I was once assaulted by a police officer and have since developed trust issues.”

  Ned stuck by his plan: defer, delay, and deny. It was something Mehelnechuk had taught him, and it was working. He could see the frustration on the cops’ faces and hear it in their voices. They had hundreds of guys to question, Ned figured. The dumb guys, the weak guys, the addicted guys—that’s who’d crack. All he had to do was stay strong, keep it together, and he’d be fine.

  They offered him coffee. He said no. Something about the idea of a stimulant made him nervous. Instead he drank water. They gave him a vending machine sandwich for dinner. He ate it and later wished he hadn’t.