Now, his prevailing sentiment toward Thomas was anger. The guy just did not care about anything as much as he cared about his high. So Sherlock tried to ignore that mess and let it play out however it would, and he tried to protect their mother from it however he could. He paid her bills. He made sure her medications and healthy groceries were delivered every week. He knew that Thomas took most if not all of her disability checks, but Sherlock had had to let that go. He took care of their mother. It was all he could do.
As he walked up the driveway, pushing overgrown manzanitas out of his way, Sherlock understood that his anger toward Thomas was even greater now, since he’d known Sadie. She’d been an addict for years, too, but she hadn’t torn anything down with her, not even while she was high. And when she began her recovery, she’d stuck to it. She wanted it. She was strong. Just a little bit of a thing, with a hundred times the character and strength his brother had. Thomas was a fucking waste.
About to turn onto the front walk, Sherlock stopped. Movement in back had caught his eye. Thomas was back there. Digging. He changed course and continued down the rest of the driveway, past the tent trailer which was his actual goal today. He’d come in the truck so that he could tow the trailer off to the clubhouse. They’d need all the beds they could get starting tomorrow, when a country full of bikers converged in SoCal.
Which he’d told both his mother and Thomas—and that he was coming this afternoon. So it would have been great if his brother hadn’t blocked the driveway with his fucking rusted-out Toyota.
Thomas had dug a hole in their mother’s back yard, near the garage, that was about four feet wide and pushing three or four feet deep. Even with the big shovel, he had to bend nearly in half to shovel loose dirt from the bottom; soon, he’d need to stand in the hole itself. The mound of dirt he’d pulled out of the hole nearly came to his waist.
“What the fuck are you doing, Thomas?”
His brother turned and smiled, grimy sweat running down his face in streaks. Thomas looked like you’d expect a man embracing a decades-long meth habit to look: only a couple of inches shorter than Sherlock, he weighed maybe one-thirty. His teeth were a horror. His rheumy blue eyes had sunken deep into their sockets, and his leathery, sallow, pocked skin sagged on his skull. Long, greasy, greying hair hung in chunks around his head, and he bore a persistent grey grizzle on his cheeks. He looked like the goddamn Crypt Keeper.
“Hey-hey, little bro. How’s it hangin’, Timbo?” He wiped his right hand on a filthy t-shirt and held it out to Sherlock, who shook without any enthusiasm. Blisters had broken on Thomas’s palm; he didn’t seem to notice.
“Came for the camper. You said you’d keep the driveway clear.”
“Uh, yeah. Sorry, man. Totally forgot. The Bucket ain’t runnin’, bro. Can’t move her.”
Sherlock wasn’t leaving here without the camper, and he wasn’t giving his tweaker leech of a brother free automotive repair, either. He decided he’d hook a chain to the damn thing’s drivetrain and drag the fucker onto the street.
No point in announcing his intention, however. Instead, he repeated his question. “What’re you doing?”
Waving at a tiny twig of a bush in a plastic pot about a foot high, Thomas said, “Got Moms a present at the Home Depot. Lilac bush.” He turned back to Sherlock, beaming proudly with his black, broken teeth. His pupils were enormous. What a shock.
When he was feeling industrious, Thomas went early to the Home Depot to try to pick up work. Apparently, instead of work, he’d found a dying stick and a score.
“Dude, you could plant ten of that thing in the hole you made. Stop digging. You’re just tearing up the yard.”
Thomas looked down at his handiwork. “Ya think?”
“Yeah, bro. Put about half that dirt back, at least.”
“Cool, bro. I’m on it.” With that, Sherlock’s brother dug out another shovelful of dirt from the hole, and Sherlock gave up and went inside.
He found his mother sitting in her usual spot, a threadbare rocker-recliner that was older than he was. The television was on, as usual, but she wasn’t watching it. She was on her phone, probably playing one of the dozen or so social media games she liked.
“Hey, Moms.”
“Tim! Hi, baby boy. Did you say you were coming today?” She set her phone on her belly and smiled at him.
He crossed the room and kissed her cheek. “Yeah. I need the camper, remember?”
“Oh, that’s right. For your friends again. That’s fine. They took real good care of it last time.”
Demon and Faith had borrowed the camper for a summer a few years back, living in it while they got their house ready. It was the most use the thing had gotten in years.
Sherlock’s family had camped in it three times that he could remember, and not at all since he was about seven. Apparently, when their dad had been around, they went camping a couple of times a year, but Sherlock hadn’t even been three when the he’d run off. He had no memory of a life with a father. According to Thomas, their old man had been a drunk who liked to pound on their mom, so no loss there.
Since he was seven, with the exception of the occasional friend or neighbor borrowing it, the only use the camper had ever gotten was when their mom would let them open it up, and he and Thomas would ‘camp’ in it on the driveway. Since they were home alone so often anyway, he had no clue why sleeping on the driveway had been so cool to them, but it had. Thomas would tell ghost stories, holding a flashlight to his chin, and they’d eat sandwiches and drink soda from a cooler, and they’d get to actually believing they were out in the woods.
Sherlock was eleven the first time he knew his brother was high. By the time he was fourteen, he was usually the one making dinner and taking care of things around the house.
He looked out the window now. Thomas was still digging. Sherlock turned back to his mother and sat down on the sofa.
“You good, Moms? I’m going to trim the hedges while I’m here. Anything else you need me to do?”
~oOo~
“Nolan! Good to see you, brother!”
Nolan grinned. “Hey, Sherlock.” He’d been pinballing around the Hall, getting bear hugs from all the SoCal brothers.
Not to be outdone, Sherlock grabbed the kid by his kutte and pulled him into a hug of his own. Not a kid anymore—he was the Missouri SAA now.
And Nolan was about Sadie’s age, so he should probably stop thinking of him as a kid. That seemed like an incredibly awesome idea.
Sherlock let him go and punched him in the chest, over his SAA patch. “What the fuck is that?”
Nolan shrugged. “My turn up front, I guess.”
“You guys are still riding clean, though, yeah?”
“Yeah. Signal Bend is quiet. We’re building it up. Things are good.” As of a month or so ago, right after Isaac Lunden and Len Wahlberg were released from prison, the mother charter leadership had gotten stunningly young. Sherlock was older than every one of their officers. Badger, their President, and Dom, still their IO, were both only in their early thirties. Double A was VP, Nolan was SAA, and some baby Sherlock had never met, or at least didn’t remember, Kellen, was their Secretary—they were all still in their twenties, he thought.
It was a damn good thing Missouri had hung up its outlaw spurs, because all the experience had moved to the other side of the table. Showdown, Isaac, Len: none of them was an officer anymore, even though they were all free now. They were members, and he supposed they would advise, but they weren’t calling the shots, making the plans. Sherlock didn’t get it. You kept experience at the head. It only made sense.
Not his call, though. And Missouri was definitely a different club now, mother charter or not. They ran their town, but they didn’t play even in the grey anymore.
Isaac and Len had even stayed home from this run, obeying the terms of their parole.
As Nolan caught sight of Fargo and Keanu and headed in their direction, Sherlock scanned the Hall. They were packed with alli
ed and friendly clubs—the showroom, the Hall, the parking lots, everywhere. Horde, Brazen Bulls, Marauders, Vikings, Priests, Freaks, several other clubs, patches and old ladies, all mingling together. Partying as hard as they possibly could. The Red Rebels out of Markham, another SoCal club, was hosting, too, or this clubhouse would be splitting at the seams.
Connor’s old lady, a firefighter, had pitched a fit when Con and Hoosier had sat down with the county fire marshal and worked an ‘arrangement’ making the legal occupancy limit considerably more flexible this weekend than usual.
Luckily, Cordero’s bitch fit was nobody’s problem but Connor’s.
Hoosier, Bart, Show, and Badger had taken up residence on leather chairs in the far corner and looked for all the world like they were trying to have a fucking conversation in the middle of the blaring music and high-spirited chaos. He wondered briefly if he should pull on Dom’s kutte and head over there. The Missouri tech officer was sitting at the bar. But frankly, Sherlock felt too good, and buzzed, to care much. If it was important, he’d hear about it. Besides, that was hardly an officers’ meeting. Just dudes shooting the shit, most likely.
Sherlock went to the bar. He’d been sticking to beer, but there was no reason not to get completely shitfaced tonight. That was the fucking point, after all. There was no work to be done while riders came in in waves, and nothing else drawing him away from the party.
He’d texted Sadie to say that he’d be out of pocket except in an emergency, and then he’d shoved his phone away, knowing she wouldn’t respond. She’d been all spikes all week; she was not happy about his plans with the club. He got the feeling she’d have been happier if he’d told her he was going off to do violence. He could soften her up like always, but turning her frown upside down had started to lose its allure. When he got back from Sturgis, though, they’d get things square again.
In the meantime: to the bar. No reason not to drink until he dropped.
Dom had Tina on his lap, drinking shots from between her prodigious tits. All the girls had dressed for tonight like it was the biker version of the Oscars. He’d never seen so much tiny, spangly Spandex outside a Vegas titty show. Bibi had had the club girls recruiting aggressively to bring fresh meat in for the huge influx of bikers; they’d had an open door the past few parties, essentially auditioning girls for this one.
Sherlock had been around long enough to know that a lot of the girls who thought now, while the sun was still hanging onto the horizon, that they were in for the time of their lives, were going to be stunned speechless when they discovered how very right—and very wrong—they were. Just sitting here at the bar, looking around, he could pick out those who were in deeper than they could swim. He could hear it, too. They giggled. Real club girls hardly ever giggled. Real club girls called themselves bitches and meant it.
“Get y’another, Sherlock?”
He turned and saw Shaylee behind the bar, nodding at his hand, where there was an empty shot glass. He didn’t even remember having had the whiskey in it. Maybe he was drunker than he’d thought already. Being with Sadie was turning him into a lightweight, then. “Yeah, sweetheart. Just leave the bottle.”
Shaylee smiled. She’d spangled herself up good. Even her skin and lips glittered. Her eyelashes, too. “You bet. Need anything else?” She leaned over the bar. Sherlock could see the dark borders of her nipples, just at the edge of her glittery blue top.
He grinned at her. “Nah, Shay. I’m good. Just the bottle.”
“Okay, then,” she purred and sauntered off to the other end of the bar. She had a great ass. He didn’t think she’d be making drinks for long tonight. Somebody’d snatch her up. And Shaylee was a real club bitch.
CHAPTER TWELVE
You know what was a really stupid thing to do? Researching motorcycle clubs while dating a biker. When that biker was your first boyfriend ever. When he had just gone off for weeks of ‘rallies’ and ‘runs’ and left you behind. That was the worst possible time to start looking into what he meant when he talked about ‘the club.’
It wasn’t like Sadie hadn’t heard of the Night Horde before she’d met Sherlock, or had somehow managed to avoid all the popular fascination about bikers in general and their outlaw mystique, but sitting at her desk on Friday, digging around online between help desk calls, she had gotten a lot more information than she really wanted.
The stuff about criminal activity didn’t bother her that much. There wasn’t much about the Horde that was specific, but there were lots of news stories and commentary articles about other clubs or about the ‘culture of violence’ or misogyny or countless other critiques, and none of it was news to her. She hadn’t been living under a rock. As someone who’d spent years as a consumer of illegal, or at least illegally procured and used, drugs, she had some insight into the people doing that business. Her personal position was that drugs shouldn’t be illegal at all, and more and more people were agreeing with her.
She didn’t blame growers, traffickers, dealers, or anybody in the drug business for her problems. She blamed herself, and she blamed Darcy and Brandon.
As for the ‘culture of violence,’ well, she’d been shot by a cop for no reason, so whatever. People were violent assholes. As a rule.
Besides, for every story about violent, criminal activity associated with bikers, there was another story about them protecting abused or bullied kids, or raising money to support somebody in dire straits, that kind of thing. They were people. Good and bad. So whatever. Didn’t bother her.
What had her full, unhappy attention were all the images, page after page of image hits, of naked or nearly-naked women. At rallies, at parties, on bikes, on bikers—it seemed like every woman who came near a biker had her clothes shrink or just fall right off. And they all had huge tits and perfect asses.
That wasn’t true. There were lots of normal people, too, but her eyes stopped seeing the photos of normal people with flaws, and collected the memory of all the nubile nakedness and stored it in her mental cache.
And Sadie discovered that she was a jealous woman. Really fucking jealous. Sitting at her desk, twiddling her thumbs while she emptied the trash folder of some moron who had never, ever emptied that folder before and had more than two million files to delete, Sadie sat and went through a slideshow of images from the last Miles of Smiles run, five years before.
The rally in L.A. seemed also like a carnival, with rides for kids and things like that. Lots of daytime photos of people smiling, holding kids, eating carnival food. Normal.
And then the sun went down. All of the raunchy pictures were taken at night.
Sherlock was in one of those photos. Just in the background; without a flash, he would’ve been indistinguishable. His hair was different, but his beard was the same. There he was, grinning a bigger grin than she’d ever seen on his face, and he had his hands full of some tart’s hydraulic boobs.
She stared at that photo for a very long time.
She bookmarked the image and went searching for more. She searched for information about this ‘Sturgis’ thing he kept talking about.
Sturgis was worse. Sturgis was Woodstock on wheels, for a whole week. Women apparently strutted around this tiny South Dakota town in nothing but body paint. In broad daylight.
What. The. Actual. Fuck.
After her shift was over and she’d logged off, she sat at her desk and flipped through images she’d bookmarked. And then she just stared at Sherlock and his hands full of massively fake boobs.
She trusted him, right? Yes. She trusted him.
But he was drinking and getting stoned. She didn’t know drunk, stoned Sherlock. She’d never met him. She did, however, know what it was like to be fucked up. She knew it very well. She had kept her shit together, but that didn’t mean she hadn’t routinely made terrible life choices while wrecked. She’d had chlamydia twice because of terrible life choices made while wrecked. She’d found herself in some bizarre, dangerous situations because of terrible life ch
oices made while wrecked.
Sherlock hadn’t made her any promises. He’d said he’d definitely be getting wrecked, and he’d said to trust him. He’d said what they had was special. But he hadn’t promised her anything, and she hadn’t asked him to.
Why hadn’t she asked him to promise? He’d put it all on her, told her to trust him. He hadn’t said that she could trust him, that her trust was well placed. He’d only told her to do it. ‘It is what it is,’ he’d said. What the fuck did that mean? People said that all the time. A meaningless tautology. Total bullshit.
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