Blood Brothers

by Dusty Sharp

  Fifteen

  The 601 Posse was a small, tight-knit group of Rattlers close to the president—they were all hand-picked by him. 601 stood for “six feet under, zero witnesses, one problem solved.” It was sort of the club’s elite group of problems solvers. Only a few men were part of it—the rank and file of the club didn’t even know what the 601 patches meant that a few of the guys wore.

  Tillman had created it shortly after he became president back in the 80’s. My old man must have been one, there’s a 601 patch on his old vest that still hangs in the closet of my Riverside house. But there were only five current members that I could think of. Tillman, of course. And Sunny. A wild-eyed ex-con named Travis Bishop. And olive-skinned Tony Battaglia, who everyone called The Wop. He seemed to embrace the racial slur. That’s four.

  I looked down at the 601 patch sewn to the left breast of my own vest. Yeah, I was also a member.

  Tillman had selected me for the Posse a few years after I earned my Rattlers patches. I’d done a few things for the club by then. Things I ain’t proud of, that I’d rather not talk about right now. Maybe another time. But let’s just say my military training came in handy, and I’d started to earn my reputation as someone who could Get Shit Done.

  “It’s your destiny,” Tillman told me the day he came over to the house with a bottle of Beam and that god damned patch. We sat on my porch and drank that bottle of bourbon while he told me how much he had loved my old man, and how broken he had been over his death. “Wayne was taken too soon,” he’d said, and went on to tell me how I could continue his legacy in the club. 601 was just a tough name he’d given to his hand-picked group of fixers. “Task-masters,” he’d called them. Brothers who could be trusted with the club’s biggest secrets, take on the most important tasks, keep everyone in line.

  When we were both drunk on Jim Beam, Tillman had pulled out his knife and led me through his little initiation ceremony. He made a shallow cut on each of our right palms until the blood ran, and then he grabbed my palm in his and cupped the back of my neck with his other hand, pulling my face toward his like two lovers. He looked at me with his bloodshot eyes, the liquor strong on his breath, and slurred the words as he said “all Rattlers are brothers, son. But the 601 are blood brothers.”

  I’ve worn that fucking patch every day since.

  Of course I strutted around like the cock of the walk after that, thinking my shit smelled just a bit sweeter than most. Nobody in the Posse talked about it to the rank and file—that was part of our creed. If anyone ever asked what the “601” patch stood for we were just supposed to say it was sort of like a merit badge the boss had given a few of us for loyalty, favors and such. But our real purpose was as serious as a heart attack. “Fixing” problems meant simply removing them. And yeah, I took part in it, enthusiastically at first. I was actually a star member, of sorts. Better at the job than most. I was proficient and reliable. And it provided an outlet for the angst I’d carried with me out of the Army and hadn’t bee able to shake in the few years since. In a way, operating as 601 wasn’t much different than what I’d been doing for Uncle Sam. Stalking a target through the streets of San Bernardino or the mountains around Big Bear wasn’t so different from doing the same thing in Kabul or the high country of the Hindu Kush. A target was a target.

  Besides, anyone who ever came into our sights was “in the life.” When you’re a crook, running afoul of another crook is just part of doing business.

  But over the years the group sort of morphed from the Rattler’s secret band of problem solvers, into Tillman’s personal hit squad. More and more we were being used to settle his own scores, to carry out his own projects. That’s what started opening my eyes to Tillman, the Rattlers, the whole damned mess. It didn’t come to me as quickly and profoundly as the “awakening” I’d had in that cave in Tora Bora. It took longer to fester, this time. But in the end, it smelled the same. The rot of corruption and abused authority.

  My finger still hovered over the “enter” key. The cursor on the screen blinked after the letters “601posse”. Yeah, that was it. It had to be.

  I pressed the key.

  Sixteen

  The screen flashed red, and the login screen reappeared, this time with “INCORRECT PASSWORD” written across the top in bold letters. Below that a text notice cheerfully advised “You have entered an incorrect password. You have one attempt remaining.”

  “God dammit!” I said out loud. I got up from the stool, grabbed another beer from the fridge, and stepped outside the container. The sun was getting higher in the sky. It was going to be a warm one, even here in the coastal foothills. I unscrewed the cap off the bottle, swigged it dry, and threw the empty into the burn barrel.

  The fucking password could have been anything, if not 601posse. There were millions of possibilities, I thought as I stepped back inside the container. Everything from his favorite whore’s middle name to some random alphanumeric combination. 601posse had seemed so perfect though. Sunny and the other knuckleheads could probably remember that one without triggering an aneurysm.

  But maybe it was just too damned easy. Maybe he figured he needed to throw in a curve ball, just in case?

  I typed it in backwards: e.…s…s…o…p…1…0…6. What the hell, it was worth a shot. I had nothing else. I hit the “enter” key.

  The login screen disappeared and I was presented with the desktop. I laughed out loud at Tillman’s stupidity.

  I settled in for a quick tour of the hard drive’s file system and found what I was looking for.

  The video surveillance system kept its MPEG files in a series of folders labeled by date. It looked like they went back about four weeks, with the current folder labeled with today’s date. I opened it and saw video files for each hour of the day, for each of the four cameras in the system. I found the ones from this morning when the van had hauled the girls away, and watched again as Joy and her fellow captives were sold like livestock. I checked the files from the day before and watched as Billy and Joaquin marched those girls out of the back of the MUEBLERIAS SANTIAGO truck and into the container. Fucking cockroaches.

  I needed to see how much of this had been going on.

  But there was a metric ass-load of files—24 per camera, per day, for four weeks. There was no way I could go through them all. Sunny or some other shithead was probably on his way back here from Riverside already. So I thought back to the dates of the last few immigrant drops we had done with the coyotes. There had been eight drops, two every week. The dates were easy, since they happened every Sunday and Wednesday. So I looked at just those dates, and found that four of them showed activity around the same time of the morning.

  One day every week, on Wednesday morning like clockwork, there was a fucking slave sale here on this property, among the avocado groves of Southern California. I shook my head in disgust.

  On the four dates I checked, there were a total of 17 girls who were trafficked through there. I couldn’t even guess how long this had been going on. Possibly months, or years. The total numbers would be staggering.

  I stepped back outside for some fresh air.

  That’s when I finally made up my mind. That exact moment.

  I was done with the Rattlers.

  I was fully awake for the second time in my life.

  I needed to move quickly now. I had a sense of time getting short. I stepped back inside the container and looked around the shelf where the computer sat. There was some regular office-type crap here and there—a coffee mug holding an assortment of pens, a pad of Post-It notes, a calendar fixed to the metal wall by neodymium magnets. I picked up the coffee cup and dumped its contents out onto the shelf. There, amid a tumble of pens, paperclips and rubber bands, I found what I was looking for. Three USB thumb drives. I picked one up and inserted it into the port on the side of the computer tower.

  The thumb drive turned out to be empty but I knew it wouldn’t be big enough to hold everything, and I didn’t think I had time
to wait around too long to copy over a bunch of files anyhow. So I just grabbed the files from the camera that had the best view of the exchanges for each of the dates I had identified earlier. When the transfers were done, I slipped the thumb drive into my pocket, closed all of the open windows and put the PC back in sleep mode. I put the pens and other shit back into the coffee mug and placed it back where it had been, minus one thumb drive. Same thing with the stool, back into its cubby under the shelf. I took a final look around the inside of the container to make sure everything looked undisturbed, stepped out, closed the doors and locked it up.

  It was a little easier getting back on the roof of the container this time. Or maybe I just wasn’t thinking about it, as my mind was on other things by then. But I’d gone back up, pointed the cameras back where they had been, and re-attached the coax cables to the antennas. Then I climbed back down, slipped under the chain link fence, and started the long climb back up the hill to where my bike was parked.

  I figured I’d better take the back roads up through DeLuz to Wildomar rather than the faster route back out to I-15, on the chance there were Rattlers already heading in my direction. When I came out of the hills west of Temecula, I pulled over and checked my phone for a signal. Two bars.

  I pulled up the Gmail app and logged in to an account that had been set up with a fake identity, and opened a blank email. I left the “To” and “Subject” fields blank, went right to the message field and typed in F2F ASAFP. I closed the app without sending the email, returned the phone to my pocket, and swung back onto the highway, headed for home.

  Seventeen

  It was still early in the day when I made it back to my house—about an hour before noon. I needed a shower, something to eat, and a nap if I could afford the time. It was going to be a busy day.

  A couple of Hot Pockets were taking a carousel ride in the microwave when my phone sounded that a text message had arrived. I looked at the screen and read “hey cuz! need u in sf - shitz gitn real”. It was my cousin Hank. We’d grown up just a few streets apart here in Riverside, and had been through a few things together over the years. But there was no such thing as a quick phone call with Hank, so I answered with “call you soon,” figuring I’d do so at my next opportunity.

  I grabbed the plate of Hot Pockets and went out to the front porch to wolf them down. “AAaah!” I snarled as I bit into the first one, molten lava singing my tongue. “God damn it!” I never seem to learn.

  As I waited for the Hot Pockets to cool to something just below blast furnace temps, I thought about what I’d seen that morning. And what I intended to do about it. Of course I’d already made up my mind that my days as a Rattler were done. Fuck the club. Fuck the “brotherhood.” Tillman knew I’d have no part of something like that, so he’d intentionally kept it out of my site. 601 Posse or not.

  But I couldn’t just walk away. Whether or not the Rattlers would just “let” someone do that wasn’t the point. I couldn’t give a fuck what they might think they would let—or not let—me do. The bigger issue was that I couldn’t just walk away from what they were doing to those girls. And I didn’t intend to.

  I needed to bring the whole fucked up enterprise to its knees.

  I didn’t want to take the rest of the club down with it, but honestly if it required that, I would have. But there were some good guys in the club, despite Tillman’s iron fist and the unchecked reign of the 601 Posse. If I could take down this trafficking ring without fucking over the rest of my brothers, I’d do it.

  Going to the cops would of course bring down the whole MC and everyone in it, especially over something like this. But I ain’t no snitch. And in my experience, the cops were almost as likely to be in on something like this as the crooks.

  No, I had to take care of this myself. I just wasn’t sure how, yet.

  Time was on my side, at the moment. According to the delivery schedule I’d figured out back in that container, it would be a week before the next shipment of slaves came through. I needed to get something done before that happened, or during it, to prevent another group of girls being auctioned off. But I had a few days to figure out my next move.

  Even so, I needed to know whether anyone in the club was on to me. Whether my little B&E into the Fallbrook compound had been noticed. I picked up my phone and dialed Frosty. He wasn’t one of my trusted friends in the club—hell I barely tolerated him. But I figured I could gauge the mood down there honestly through him.

  “Yeah,” he answered, the sound of pool balls cracking and Janis Joplin moaning about her and Bobby McGee in the background. Good ol’ Frosty. Always a proper greeting.

  “What’s crackin’? You at the clubhouse?”

  “Yup. Where the fuck did you go last night? Never saw you here for the post-op.” Anytime anyone ever did anything in the Rattlers, it was an excuse to drink beer at the clubhouse afterward. Complete some big shipment…beers at the clubhouse. Shake down some weekend warriors inadvertently wearing colors…beers afterward. Somebody farted…beers at the clubhouse. It was a rhythm I was actually quite fond of. Any excuse for a few cold barleypops, right?

  “I stopped out in Woodcrest before I got into town,” I lied. “Had a couple drinks with a friend who was down from Vegas.” I always had people coming and going from Sin City. It was plausible.

  “Well ya didn’t miss much. Weren’t much goin’ on ‘round here. Just a few swingin’ dicks. No fuckin’ pussy to speak of.” Good old Frosty, classy as ever. Well, at least there was no suspicion in his voice. Or alarm.

  “Is Tillman around?”

  “Yep he’s playin’ pool. Want me put him on?”

  “Nah I’m coming in a little later, might shoot a little with him then.” That part was true—I was planing on paying the motherfucker a visit. But I could tell, from what Frosty was saying, that neither the place nor Tillman himself were riled up. If he was out in the social quarters crackin’ balls with the fellas, he wasn’t dealing with a security breach down at his little slave shop.

  “Suit yourself.”

  “Anybody needs me I got my phone on. Otherwise I’ll be down a little later.”

  “Yep.” He hung up before me.

  So I was pretty damned sure they weren’t on to me. That bought me a little time.

  I was just setting the phone down when it began to ring in my hand. I glanced at my plate of Hot Pockets, which by now had cooled to just the right temperature, before looking at the screen. It was Frankie. I forgot all about the Hot Pockets for a few minutes.

  “Hello sweetheart.”

  “Don’t sweetheart me, asshole.” It was Frankie’s standard reply to my standard greeting. Sometimes she probably really did think I was an asshole. But I’d rather just see it as a term of endearment.

  Frankie was my business partner, in a night club I owned up in Vegas. Well, maybe “night club” is being too kind. It’s a titty bar. There, I said it. But its not just your normal flesh parlor. The Patty Waggin’ is a glorious combination dive bar and burlesque show. What’s so glorious about that, you say? Well, you’ll just have to check it out some time, next time you’re in Vegas. But you won’t find us downtown or on the strip. We’re out in the industrial hinterlands of Sin City, catering mostly to locals, bikers and blue collar workers. I owned the building but Frankie and I were full partners in the business itself. She managed the place, I was more or less a silent partner. Unless certain things needed doing that were more in my wheel house than hers.

  “So what’s goin’ on?”

  “When are you coming back up?”

  “Well, I got a bit of a full plate down here at the moment. Maybe next week?”

  Silence on the other end of the line. Then I heard Frankie sigh. “We got a problem up here.”

  That usually meant something on my side of the division of labor. “What is it, sweetheart? Rowdy customer? One of the girls in trouble?”

  “Mmm…maybe a little bit of both. I’d rather not talk about it over this line t
hough. In case—”

  “Yeah, I know,” I said, not requiring her to finish that thought. Some problems required solutions that were best kept private. “Listen, on second thought I’ll head up there first thing in the morning. There’s some shit goin’ down around here but I need a few days to clear my head, figure out what to do next. I’ll flip on up there and sort things out before heading back down.”

  “Oh thank god,” she said.

  “That bad eh?”

  “Well, I’m not sure yet. It could be pretty bad though. I’m so glad you’re coming right up.”

  “It’ll be good to see you,” I said.

  “Yes. It will.”

  “Look for me in the morning, I’ll try to get an early start, get across the desert before it get’s too fucking hot to ride.”

  “My place for breakfast?”

  I grinned. “We’ll see. Until then, sweetheart.”

  Eighteen

  I was about to set the phone down and finally enjoy my Hot Pockets, but thought I’d better check my Gmail account first. I brought up the app, looked in the “Drafts” folder, and clicked on the message I had started earlier. Under where I had previously typed “F2F ASAFP,” two lines of numbers and letters had been added. The first line was a GPS waypoint, with some of the numbers re-arranged. I corrected the sequence of the digits according to a pre-arranged code, then pasted the corrected coordinates into the Maps app. This placed a pin on a Del Taco out in Jurupa.

  The second line of text added to the draft email message was “931615-C.” This one was a bit simpler. The first two digits were throw-aways. The remaining four numbers were military time, in this case, 1615 or 16:15. In civilian reckoning that’s 4:15 PM. But the “-C” is an adjustment just to throw things off for anyone who had made it that far. C is the third letter of the alphabet, and the dash represented a minus sign in this case. So 4:15 minus 3 hours was 1:15 PM.