by Zahra Girard
“I don’t expect you to understand right away. You’re still young. But I know, in time, you’ll get it, Roxy. And I still love you.”
He breaks my heart. With his stubborn commitment to the shit he’s involved in.
I wish my dad were the man I always thought him to be.
I take a deep breath, try to still the wildfire of emotions inside me. I came here for a reason: to try and save him. I cling to the hope that, if I give him a glimpse of the consequences he’s facing, maybe he’ll come to his senses. Death and violence is right on the horizon and I will do anything to keep it from my family.
“Dad, you need to listen to me: something bad is about to happen.”
“What’s that, Roxy?”
“Some really, really violent men are coming for you. They know what you’re involved in. The Wayward Kings, the motorcycle club the Iron Devils are feuding with, is going to raid the sheriff’s impound lot tonight. People are going to die, and the Kings aren’t going to stop with just that. They know what you’ve done. That you’ve taken the daughter of one of their members. This is real, dad. They’re going to find you, and they are going to hurt you.”
He hugs me again. He doesn’t seem the slightest bit concerned. “I’m sorry you’re mixed up in all this.”
This hug doesn’t loosen; it tightens until dots of color swim in my vision. “Dad?”
“I’m glad you told me. Thank you, Roxy.”
My throat clenches, his hug tightens. “Dad?”
I try and move, struggle myself free, get some room to breathe.
“You’re mixed up in something you don’t understand. You might not agree with what I’m doing, but I’m doing it to keep you safe,” he says.
And then he hurls me to the floor. It’s so abrupt, I don’t even think to scream; I blink, and suffer the bruising thud of my body crashing into the floor of my father’s office.
My father’s hands knot in my hair, tight, inescapable, and he drags me across the hardwood until we’re behind his desk. Handcuffs come out of his desk drawer — solid steel, law-enforcement handcuffs — and he cuffs me.
His necktie comes off — silk, expensive, a present I gave him for his fiftieth birthday — and he gags me with it.
I’m dumped in the closet. Hands bound, feet tied, gagged. Helpless.
“This is for your own good. You don’t see it now, but you will. If I go away, your mother will lose everything, and I’m sure you’d lose your internship, too. I won’t let that happen.”
The door shuts. I’m left in the crushing darkness.
“Fuck you,” I scream into the gag.
It’s the first time I’ve cursed at my dad, and he can’t even hear it.
My mind scrambles to make sense of my situation. I’ve lost my father — that’s for certain — and the Kings are just hours away from making their raid.
I calm my breathing. I’ve got to think.
Out in his office, I hear my father’s voice again.
“It’s Judge Pierce,” he says. I listen, straining my ears for every word. “I wish this was under better circumstances, but that impound lot of yours is about to get hit. I don’t know how long you have; maybe an hour, maybe two, maybe more, but the point is, those Kings are pissed. You need to move that cargo.”
There’s silence.
“Where?” my dad says. “I don’t know. Hell, take it to my cabin — the one past Carbonado on the way to Mt. Rainier.” He pauses, I hear him pacing, feet thumping a rhythm of nerves against the floor. “No, no, it’ll be fine. No one goes up there. Just leave the crates behind the wood shed, throw a tarp over them, it should be fine.”
It’s quiet.
Quiet for long enough that I know that whoever is on the other end of the line is no longer there.
The phone rings again.
“He said to do what? Tonight?”
More silence. Heavier, now. I can feel my father’s weighted mood from here.
“And you’re going to get all of them? Fine. Listen, keep my daughter out of this — she was kidnapped, remember? I’ll handle her. You can kill the rest, I don’t give a damn, and hell, burn their clubhouse down when you’re done with them. Just don’t call me again tonight — I’ve got dinner with the wife and I don’t want to be interrupted,” he says. “I’ll put in the paperwork in the morning, have that little girl’s foster situation made permanent. Fuck, we’ll send her somewhere else — somewhere far away. Shame we couldn’t get paid on that one. Maybe next time.”
My heart shrinks to some inconsequentially small thing. My muscles scream against the confines of my handcuffs, against the bindings around my feet, and my teeth gnaw against the tie gagging me.
I need to get free.
He hangs up. The door to his office opens and closes with a slam.
I’m alone.
And in a few hours, it’ll be permanent. My old family burned in my father’s betrayal; my new family dead in a hail of bullets.
I need to get out of here.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Nash
Smothering night overtakes us. Dark, heavy, full of the forboding certainty that whatever uncertain shit we’re mixed up in is about to get much, much worse.
The ride back is an exercise in tension, full of the gnawing, gnarled sensation that things are spinning out of control, a sensation propelled forward by the pistoning growl of our bikes. It’s alien. It makes threats appear in the shadows.
It makes my trigger-finger itchy.
Death, or, even worse, prison is just around the corner.
I’d rather die than spend years in the joint, knowing that the suffering that my daughter and my family will be going through.
Church is in session the moment we get back to the clubhouse. Worn wooden chairs clustered around the hand-carved table in the back room of our clubhouse. Doors shut, mouths open, hearts on fire, each and every one of us adding our opinions to the pandemonium.
Gunney stays quiet. He watches each of us while we argue, while we state our case, while we vent our rage.
The future of our club hangs in the balance.
I know I should stay quiet — I didn’t join the Marines to be an undisciplined dipshit — but I can’t keep my opinions to myself. I did not survive nearly four years of prison just to get out and see my family pushed to the brink.
I did not survive prison to see my daughter taken away.
I stand and I state my case. It’s obvious what we need to do. We’re soldiers; we fight. Whether we want it or not, this is a war, and if we’re going to just lay down and give up, we might as well cut our own cocks off and save everyone else the trouble.
Each of my brothers gives his opinion. Grease, our VP, wants to lay low, figure things out; Rog agrees. Jynx and Preacher are both for getting bloody and figuring shit out later. A new guy, Shiner, patched in while I was in the joint, wants to hit the Devils but leave the sheriffs out of it.
Ozzy says something, no one ever understands what the fuck comes out of his mouth. Everyone just looks confused afterward, but we nod to at least seem polite.
When we’ve all said our piece, Gunney stands.
“Brothers, pull your fucking heads out of your asses,” he barks, the natural command in his voice making us all sit up straighter. “Most of you’ve served, some of you didn’t have that distinction, but I know all of you have the common sense to understand the simple fucking fact that losing your head in a time like this is a sure way to wind up fucked seven ways from Sunday.”
Each and every one of us would ride with this man into the mouth of hell.
“Someone’s got us figured out. Some son of a bitch wants to get the drop on us,” he says, his words snap with outrage and every single one of us nods. “We can’t let that happen.”
A few of us shout our agreement, and even the more cautious ones like Rog and Grease nod their heads. The thought of some drug-pushing Iron Devil cocksucker forcing us from our home so they can sell smack to our neigh
bors and run drugs down our stretch of highway is enough to make my blood boil.
“My experience is, if someone’s trying to fuck you over, you do the opposite of what they’d expect. They want to take us off our footing. They stole our cargo, they knew we were coming to that impound lot tonight, they want to put us on the defensive. But we’re not going to sit around and let them pick us off,” he looks at each and every one of us, steady, square in the eyes. “We’ll put this to a vote, but, I fucking guarantee you, if we were on deployment and this shit was happening, our mission would be to forget about looking for this cargo for the time being and focus on cutting the fucking head off these Iron Devil snakes. So let’s fucking vote. For or against making corpses out of these Devils. VP, where do you stand?”
The gavel cracks the table.
“So we vote. Fine,” Grease says, looking at each of us. “I think it’s a mistake to run out there, half-cocked, and looking for blood. We’re out-numbered, out-gunned. It’s reckless. I vote no.”
“No,” Rog says, simply.
“Yes,” says Preacher.
“Yeah,” says Jynx.
“Yes,” Shiner says.
“Fuck. Yes,” Ozzy says.
Gunney turns to me. The vote’s already sealed, but I’m ready to add my voice to the “yea’s”. I want these threats to my family done with; I want to raise my daughter, surrounded by my family, without having to worry about the smack-pushing Devils and every other piece of shit that threatens our way of life here in Stony Shores.
“Let’s kill them all.”
Gunney nods. “Yea. Vote passes. We put these sons of bitches in the ground. We hit them fast, hard, and then we can focus on making our family whole. I don’t want us looking over our shoulders any more. I want us looking forward to getting Bear his daughter back. Or the next fucking time we’ll be able to get Jynx there dressed in drag — the important shit.”
His gavel cracks again.
It’s as if we exhale at once. I feel lighter, more certain. We’re going to fight through this shit as a family, protect our future as a club, and finally get on with the business of getting my daughter back. There’s not a bit of doubt in my mind.
A smile breaks my face. My thoughts drift to cartoons, lazy mornings with my little girl, making her breakfast introducing her to her family at the club. It’s going to be worth every spilled drop of blood just to get her back.
But, as happy as I am thinking about it, I can’t fight off the feelings of regret. The coming victory would be so much sweeter with Roxanna by my side… and in my bed. I want that firecracker with me when I wrap my arms around my daughter for my first time. I want my daughter to meet her, to know that she grow up to be gritty and beautiful, smart and fierce, just like Roxanna.
Another crack tears through the night. Sharp, piercing.
Wood splinters into a thousand shards and I fall back to reality from the high, heavenly fantasy I have of a future with my Abigail.
Something wet hits my face.
Someone shouts.
Gunney falls face-first into the table, gushing gouts of blood erupting from his shoulder.
Rooms away, the front door to our clubhouse shudders beneath the force of a battering ram. Another window shatters, broken by sniper-fire, bullets impacting the table in front of me.
We don’t shout.
We don’t startle.
We’re soldiers. We’ve seen this before. And we’re not afraid to die.
Rog moves quicker than a fat man like him should, picking up Gunney and heaving him from the table to a safe spot in the corner, putting pressure on his wounds. Ozzy and Grease hurl the table on it’s side and barricade the door to church. Three hundred pounds of solid lumber shuts off the only entrance to the room.
“Keep your heads, brothers,” Gunney shouts. “And give ‘em fucking hell.”
I motion for my brothers to get in formation.
Calmly, we step away from the windows, each man with a gun in his hands and ready for action.
I glare through the shattered glass, keeping low to keep out of sniper fire. Five sheriff squad cars, their lights off but their shapes unmistakable, and at least a dozen bikes. Devils and sheriffs here to finish us off.
The door to church shudders, steel battering ram crashing into oak. Oak splinters, the table quakes at the force, but it holds. For now.
I motion to Preacher. Return fire out these windows. Keep the snipers off our backs.
I motion to Grease. Grab the table. Get ready to move it.
I motion to Ozzy, to Jynx, to Shiner. Guns out, get ready.
We take our places silently. We’re soldiers. We’re brothers. This is what we do.
From his place on the floor, Gunney pulls his own sidearm free, bloody fingers clutched around the handle of his gun.
Grease times it just right, waiting for that brief moment between swings of the ram to rip the table away. The door flies open, and so do the eyes of the three sheriffs and six Devils waiting on the other side.
They don’t know what’s about to hit them.
I smile. Heart singing with the heat of combat.
We attack.
We’re soldiers and this is war.
“Let’s show ‘em what we got, brothers,” I scream.
I pull the trigger. There’s a flash and a crack as bullets tear through the air, a lead rebuke that buries itself in Devil flesh.
Blood puffs in a cloud from some Devil’s face. His head whips sideways and he lets out a pathetic cry before he hits the ground.
Fuck him. That hole in his face is an improvement over his ugly mug.
“There’s so many of these fucking cunts,” Ozzy screams.
I get half a second of satisfaction before the room erupts in blood and bullets. That crazy Kiwi, Ozzy, impresses the hell out of me, unleashing hate from his gun less than a breath after mine, hitting a sheriff in the chest.
From behind tables, desks, from every corner of the room, we shoot back.
Windows shatter behind me.
More snipers.
“Watch yourselves,” Rog shouts as bullets fly through the room.
A pinching heat lights up my shoulder. A through-and-through. Blood flows down the front and back of my shirt. Wet and hot.
My vision goes blurry. I hardly feel the pain through the haze of adrenaline and the urgent need beating through my chest to plant a bullet in every Devil and sheriff pig that I see.
Fuck them all.
Fuck them for keeping me from my daughter.
Fuck them for thinking they have the balls to challenge my family.
“Suck my cock, you Devil bitches,” I yell, fury and rage clawing their way out of my throat as I raise my gun and hit another Devil in the face.
Another bullet rips into me.
“Jesus, Bear, get down, will ya?” Preacher shouts.
“I’m having too much fun, brother,” I reply.
The last thing I feel is a grin lift the corners of my mouth as I return fire at the bitch who shot me and punch a hole in his neck with lead.
He slumps to the ground. Dead.
Lights flash — red and bright — and sirens light up the night air outside our clubhouse. My heart is pumping hard, as hard as I’ve ever felt, but all it’s doing is evacuating my veins onto the floor.
I drop to my knees, waver, fall sideways into the thickening pool of my own crimson.
There’s more shouting. Screams to drop weapons and surrender.
I fight to hold on.
I won’t go. I can’t.
On the backs of my eyelids, I see them both: the woman who believed in the good in me, and the little girl that brought it out in me. Their disappointed eyes stare back at me, as opportunity and life slips through my fingers. I could’ve done better, I should’ve done better, but I’m going to die in a shower of bullets, in a congealing pool of my blood.
Still, I fight – it’s all that I know, maybe all that I’m good for. My hands grip my wound
s, squeezing, trying to stem the tide of crimson flowing between my fingers like the ocean through a sieve.
I need to survive, to live as the kind of man they believed me to be.
But I’m cold. So cold.
And so fucking tired.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Roxanna
Think, I scream at myself. You need to get out of here.
I know how to do it. But it’s a long time before I have the courage to do it.
It’s going to hurt.
I grit my teeth. Wrench my body in wrong ways, until joints pop and I’m face-to-face with my handcuffs.
With a dislocated shoulder, I wiggle and squirm until I work a bobby pin free. I struggle with the pin in the lock.
Time is slipping through my fingers. Time I don’t have to spare.
Freedom.
An agonizing few more minutes — with hyperventilating gasps to work up the courage to reset my shoulder and then one boneshakingly painful burst of movement as I slam my shoulder against my father’s desk and ram it back into place.
There’s a wet pop. Joints slide over one another as the ball of my shoulder wrenches itself back into it’s home.
I hear myself scream in the distance.
A staggering walk to my mother’s bathroom to steal a handful of painkillers from her medicine cabinet.
I want to give in, to sit down, to get my thoughts together, but there’s no time.
My feet take me to my old room. Surrounded by my childhood, I fashion a sling from from an old N*Sync sweatshirt. The first concert I ever went to. A birthday present from my dad.
I stagger outside.
It’s not until I’m back behind the wheel of Nash’s truck that everything hits me.
My father’s cut me loose.
That selfish prick.
The weight of that comes down on my shoulders, pressing me until I feel I can’t breathe. The man who stood behind me my whole life, the man who supported my ambitions, who would study across from me each day — me with my textbooks, he with his case files — is too interested in himself and his own preservation to do the right thing.