But what sort of life is that? I could almost hear her asking.
I let out a pained breath, let my head fall back until I was staring at the sky, and muttered something that even I couldn’t quite make out.
It sounded something like “Mister sixty-three.”
“And I don’t even have to ask what will happen to her if I don’t, do I?” I finally asked, returning my gaze to him.
Papa Raven rolled his eyes. “I think we’ve already covered that,” he said.
“Okay then…” I said with a defeated sigh. “So where’s the finish line?”
I shouldn’t have been as surprised as I was when he told me that we’d be racing to the corner of Church and Lyell.
“Provided,” he finished, “you even make it there.”
****
I should have seen this coming, I thought to myself for possibly the hundredth time in just under two minutes.
Not just the point of interest for this demented, convoluted sense of a “resolution” that Papa Raven had cooked up, no. In many ways—in almost all ways, as he’d pointed out—this had all started because of Mia and what she’d been forced to become. That the corner of Church Street and Lyell Avenue would, in some sick way, always be her corner made it an obvious, albeit sadistic, choice. But more than that, I realized, was just how obvious all of it should have been from the beginning.
Though it hurt to do so, I caught myself blaming my father for not seeing Papa Raven’s potential as a lunatic rival earlier on. If he had, maybe he’d have thought twice about bringing him on board with the Crow Gang in the first place; at the very least taken steps to limit or stifle his influence on things.
And what about my brother, Michael? When the shit hit the fan—when Papa Raven went and did what he did, killing our dad and starting up the Carrion Crew—he had been put in charge. Had he used that power to cut off Papa Raven and the Carrion Crew while they were still young, still weak? No. He had committed to the old ways—a noble enough gesture, certainly one I’d been adhering to for most of my time leading the Crows—and let himself believe that not only could he do things better than our father but that the Carrion Crew would lose momentum and crumble away before they came to represent anything of substance. And when that time came, when Papa Raven and his gang did come into enough power to pose a threat, they were already far enough along in their twisted, awful schemes to be done away by simple means. Sure, Michael had put an admirable effort into taking out a great deal of their business and cutting off a great deal of their sources. With my help he’d even managed to destroy one of T-Built’s first drug labs and set the entire Carrion Crew back a whole year-or-two while they got themselves reestablished.
But all of that had only gotten Michael in Papa Raven’s sights; gotten him killed.
And my involvement had been what had gotten Anne killed.
That was what interference with the Carrion Crew earned you.
And, much as I hated to think of her that way, I’d gone and taken a Carrion Crew whore right off her corner. I’d killed one of the biggest earners the Crew had to boast. Then, with my whore-lover in tow, we’d inspired a revolution with the rest of the Carrion Crew’s sex-workers—one that had lost them god-only-knew how much money—and, in doing so, possibly motivated even more change.
After all, if a bunch of whores can manage bail on the great and terrible Carrion Crew, how great and terrible could they truly be? What sort of business connections and associates might the Crew have lost when word of their “whore problem” hit the streets?
It would certainly explain why they’d gone as crazy over the whole ordeal as they had.
Assuming, of course, it wasn’t just Papa Raven and his arrogant self taking all of this as some sort of personal insult.
So how could I be surprised that this was what it had come down to? An impossible challenge to an obvious destination as a punishment for a clear and blatant affront to a maniacal force that had been foolishly allowed to rise to power.
I should’ve seen it coming, I thought again, beginning to lose count of how many times that made.
I was settled atop my shitty little Honda on the conveniently vacant left lane of the street. A double-yellow line divided me from Papa Raven, seeming to stretch on forever ahead of us.
Anne’s “ghost,” as she always did, stared back at me from the end of the street. She was shaking her head, wordlessly pleading with me not to go through with it.
I felt the haunting traces of Mia behind me. Her phantom grip tightening with worry; her nonexistent breath on my neck quickening. The rising fear of my non-present lover urging me to find some other way.
And I had to ignore them both. Because, after all, they weren’t really there—neither of them—and both were just a response of my crazy and terrified brain trying to tell me that this was a bad idea.
Like I had a choice.
One of Papa Raven’s tag-alongs, a former Crow who wore a beet-red blush from my initial glare, straddled the double-yellow and raised a small-caliber revolver over his head.
Then, in a truly fucked-up nod towards just how rigged this race would be, Papa Raven gave the man a nod, signaling him to fire the makeshift starting gun into the air.
But Papa Raven, of course, had already gotten a decent head-start in the half-second interval.
Shoulda seen it coming, I chastised myself as I raced after him.
Though there hadn’t been a chance to determine with any real accuracy just how far it was to the corner, I was able to roughly gauge the distance to be about three miles. Church Street bisected Main about two miles ahead, and, taking a right there, it was about a mile before one reached Lyell Avenue. Both of those were rough estimates, sure, but it was close enough to figure that the race would be decided in a matter of minutes.
Judging from the way Papa Raven practically flew from the starting line, his matter of minutes was closer to two while I—Mister Sixty-Three—was locked in nearer to three.
Papa Raven would have nearly one full minute to celebrate his victory and begin to plan out my death, the Crow Gang’s demolition, and the future of the entire city before I even got there.
But I still had to try, dammit!
Still had to…
“I don’t know why it’s always got to be a race,” I heard Mia whisper through space and time.
“Because that’s what life is,” I muttered back to the memory.
“But don’t any of those guys ever think to just, like, stop? You know, let all that chaos and nonsense just go zipping by?”
And damned if it didn’t look like the mouth of Anne’s “ghost,” waiting a short way’s ahead at the juncture of Main and Church, was moving along to Mia’s words.
“Stopping lets the people chasing you catch up,” I went on, replaying the conversation as it had happened the first time, this time with a much darker theme behind it.
“They’re gonna catch up anyway, aren’t they? Otherwise there’d be no end. Then it’s always a matter of waiting.”
I wanted to disregard the memory as being irrelevant to me and my current situation, but then it occurred to me that, while this was an ass-backwards sort of car chase—with my “pursuers” well ahead of me in that moment—I was still trying to run from them in a very real way.
“So why not just stop when the time’s right—when they’re not right behind you, I mean—and just get on to the waiting?”
Say it with me from the grave, Tom Petty:
“The waiting’s the hardest part…”
But that last part wasn’t true. I knew that, and I’d known that for a long time. Waiting wasn’t the hardest part.
The hardest part was when the waiting was over…
The hardest part was moving too slowly.
“Or is it…?” I asked myself aloud, starting to take the turn onto Church Street and immediately working to build up speed.
Because that was the point of a race, wasn’t it?
To get ther
e first…
“Yer old man was pumped full o’ bullets, kiddo, but we’ve never been too certain that that’s what really took the life out of ‘im,” Danny’s words echoed in my mind them. “He was in pretty bad shape when we found him, gunshots taken ‘pletely out of the equation. Bones busted all to shit, bruised and bloodied. Hell, his fuckin’ leathers was even mangled up something terrible. The brightest Crows we had decided he must’ve been riding when the Carrion Crew made their move. A man can survive a bullet or two, sure, but if’n that bullet yanks ya right off yer bike when ye’re rocketing along at eighty…”
But that explanation had never set right with me, had it? Because Dad was more than just an expert rider, he was a brilliant tactician. If he’d known he was being targeted by Papa Raven and the Carrion Crew, he wouldn’t be caught off guard while riding, no; he would have—
Seen it coming?
And…
And Michael?
Gunned down in the middle of the street?
A mind that had been trained and polished practically since birth to lead the Crow Gang…
Caught off guard like that?
No…
And what was it that Papa Raven had said regarding both of them?
“In the same way I gave your father a chance to settle things and the same way I gave your brother a chance to settle things, in fact.”
So I was in the middle of a race that both my father and my brother had failed; one that had left them filled with bullets and, according to Danny, left my father’s body mangled and beaten and shredded…
Because, like me, they’d take to a race with the goal of getting to their destination first.
And how did you win a race?
By going fast and never taking your eyes off of the…
The corner of Church and Lyell was coming up fast—I was surprised to see I’d actually gotten the shitty Honda all the way up to seventy since turning off of Main—but, for the first time ever, Anne’s “ghost” wasn’t waiting for me at the end of the street.
She was standing, panicked and urging—palms out in a desperate gesture to stop—only a short distance ahead.
Mia’s voice, almost clear enough to tickle my eardrums with her breath, repeated, “… let all that chaos and nonsense just go zipping by…”
And then I saw a glimmer of light travel across the nearly invisible length of something pulled taut across the full length of the street.
Because what better way to ensure your victory—shit-bike or not—than to boobytrap the street at the final mile of the race?
The Honda had peaked at an all-time best of nearly seventy-five miles-per-hour before I began throwing my all into both the front and rear brakes, sending the stink of burning rubber into the air as I worked to keep the damn thing from fishtailing and throwing me, with zero control, into Papa Raven’s waiting trap.
I felt my body, my hair—hell, even my damn skin—actually pull forward as the momentum struggled to keep me going while the bike struggled to slow beneath me.
Damn thing’s gonna fully break before it actually brakes fully, I thought to myself, only coming to appreciate the irony of that statement until well after the moment.
At that moment, however, I had more important things to busy my mind over than clever wordplay.
The bike was not going to stop in time…
I managed a half-curse of “Papa Raven, you fu—” before the Honda, now cruising at nearly thirty miles-per-hour, careened into the waiting trap.
SIXTEEN
~MIA~
~five minutes earlier~
It was the better of two evils, but, all things considered, it was the only option we had. This was not something anybody was willing to admit, though. Not out loud, anyway. Everyone—and, judging from the turnout, I truly think it was everyone—seemed to be of a unanimous mindset that this was a shitty turn of events. Certainly there didn’t seem to be anybody willing to say otherwise. That being the case, however, nobody—not a single soul—tried to argue against it. Yes, it was most certainly a shitty turn of events, but it was the better of two evils.
And, undeniably, it was really the only option any of us had left.
With all this in mind, I couldn’t help but feel I was also exactly where I was meant to be…
In a manner of speaking.
Riding on the back of Danny’s motorcycle—what he called his “Fat Boy,” which he insisted was, in fact, not just a cruel statement of self-reflection—always felt a bit strange. With Jace, riding always made me feel wild and free; it made me feel like I was flying. Riding with Danny, though, felt more like… well, it felt like I was sitting on a motorcycle with a very large man, actually.
It sounded obvious—sounded stupid—even to me, but it was strange to realize that the sensation was so very different based on the type of motorcycle I was riding on. That, however, wasn’t really what was different—it wasn’t truly what transformed the experience—for me, I knew. It was just easier to think of it that way in that moment. Because, in that moment, there was too much going on to think of riding with Jace. At that moment, there was more to the ache in my heart than just the realization that he was out there, meeting face-to-face with the monster who’d been running things since the very beginning. There was more to it than the reality that Jace’s motorcycle, his chopper—as much an image in my mind of our first encounter as he was—had been destroyed and that he was forced to go out there on something that, in no other words, was a death trap.
He’d been ready to go out there alone on such an unreliable machine to “handle things” with a man who’s most trustworthy claim was the murder of the two previous Crow Gang leaders.
It went beyond craziness. And while Jace’s mental stability—like my own, I supposed—wasn’t about to be winning any awards, I couldn’t justify letting him putter out of there on what would certainly be his last ride. But Danny’s hold had been solid, nearly impossibly strong, and I’d been unable to do much more than just hope and stare.
But then something truly crazy happened.
Jace had stopped. He’d gotten down off that busted “death trap,” and he’d come to me. And then he’d changed the plan.
We’d changed the plan.
We were certain Papa Raven would have Carrion Crew lookouts stationed all over the city. If he was seen with others, be it one or one-thousand, and word got out to their leader that he was coming with backup, there was no telling what sort of move he’d make. They still weren’t sure; Papa Raven was, by all accounts, a complete and utter psychopath. Murder, rape, arson—there wasn’t much that he hadn’t already done, and if given the incentive to do something horrible on a city-wide scale it likely wasn’t beyond his means to do so. What that might entail, nobody much cared to guess. All that was certain was that Jace, by all appearances, at least, needed to get to the meeting place alone.
But who said Jace could be the only Crow riding the city at that time?
And, Carrion lookouts or not, the focus would be entirely on Jace at that moment.
The better of two evils… I thought again, tightening my hold on Danny’s waist as he leaned the Fat Boy into a sharp turn onto another street. Behind us, maintaining a constant distance, was another Crow member. A younger, more sleek rider, he was driving an equally newer and more streamlined motorcycle. Behind him, seeming content and, judging from my occasional glances, a little on the grabby side, was Candy. Glancing back to watch him take the turn, it occurred to me that if he did mind my friend’s wandering hands he was doing nothing to show it. He certainly wasn’t stopping her. Behind them, maintaining an equal distance, was two more Crow riders.
The four of us continued on, following a predetermined path that hooked around a zig-zag route that would, eventually, convene near where Jace was supposed to meet Papa Raven. Other groups—adding up to what I imagined to be the total number of Crow members—were following a similar pattern; maintaining enough of a distance from one another to avoid arousi
ng suspicion while ultimately planning to meet in the same place.
Because, though it was a shitty situation, there was a unanimous understanding of what Papa Raven had planned for Jace, and none of us—none of us!—were willing to let that happen.
Two evils had been laid out in front of us:
The death of Jason Presley and the eventual takeover of the entire city…
Or war.
Like I said: the better of two evils.
Crazy as Jace might be, he saw the reality for what it was. He’d climbed off that bike, held me in his arms, and agreed to a better plan.
Had that plan originally included me coming along? No. No, it had not.
Did that mean I was going to allow myself to be left behind? In the immortal words of my beloved: “FUCK THAT!”
I’d talked Danny into seeing things my way by expressing an alternative interest in driving a stiletto heel into his testicles. Candy, not about to let me go in there on my own, told Danny that she, too, owned an assortment of rather furious stiletto boots, one pair in particular that she liked to call her “heat seekers.”
Fast forward to the two of us riding along towards certain warfare.
Let it never be said that a girl can’t negotiate.
****
We were among the first to get to the rendezvous point. Three of the other groups—another group like our own of four and two others with five Crow members—were already there waiting for us. I couldn’t remember how many total members there were or how many groups we’d broken the gang into, but I did know that Danny had to plan for a wide, crude “circle” for all of us to convene at. Because we knew that such a large group of motorcyclists was sure to get attention without the benefit of beings suspected allies of Jace, we’d had to set the point of focus far enough away from Jace’s meeting place with Papa Raven. This left over a hundred armed and ready members of the Crow Gang forming a haphazard circle around their leader and the leader of their rival gang.
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