by Zoey Parker
I couldn’t stop looking for answers, though. Even when it looked more likely every day that Sabrina was dead, I had to know why and how. I would stop at nothing to bring her home, in whatever condition she was by the time I found her. I didn’t care. I had to know for sure where and how she was. I prayed she was alive…but like the sheriff had informed me, I needed to get myself used to the idea that she was gone.
So many of my memories were tied up in my sister. Watching her grow up. Spending endless hours reading the same boring storybooks to her until she was old enough to read them to me. I’d taught her to tie her shoes and write her name. It had been a lot of responsibility for a girl in her early teens, but it hadn’t felt like a chore. I loved her so much, from the minute she was born.
Mom relied on me a little too much, but life as a single mother meant she had to be away from the house while she worked, picking up whatever shifts she could. So did her constant search for a man. My stomach turned at the memory of some of the winners she brought around. Men she’d met on her bar crawls. Looking back as an adult, I knew she was lonely. Dad had abandoned us when Sabrina was only three, and that was just the official abandonment. He’d been practically a ghost for years, only coming around when there was nothing better going on.
So Mom had gone out to find somebody to replace him. Maybe she was looking for a dad for us, knowing how we needed a father figure. Or she could have been looking for somebody to help support us, since it couldn’t have been easy to manage on her own. There was no way of knowing for sure, seeing as how she’d been dead for five years. I couldn’t ask her, or tell her that I now understood why she’d lived her life the way she had. She was only making the best decisions she could at the moment, with the information she had at the time. Mom wasn’t book smart, had barely finished high school. She was a limited woman living a limited life.
I was determined to give Sabrina more than that. As soon as I was old enough to get a job, and Sabrina was old enough to leave home alone, I made it a point to show her the world with the little money I was making. I took her to museums in the city, out to dinner, shopping. We’d plan all sorts of trips we were going to take someday, and learn about the countries we intended to visit. China. France. India. We would go to the library and take out books on those places, pouring over pictures together. I wanted her to have everything Mom couldn’t give us.
Look where it got me, I thought. Look where it got her. Hooked up with a motorcycle club and missing for weeks. She’s only eighteen. She hasn’t started living yet.
My friends had all thought I was crazy, taking so much of the responsibility of raising Sabrina on my shoulders. While they were out partying and getting laid, I’d been at home with my sister. Watching movies, playing board games. Practicing piano and violin—the only thing I really allowed myself, the practice of my music. Sabrina would sit and watch for hours on end while I practiced, or else sit with a coloring book or her dolls. She never showed interest in learning how to play, though God knew I tried to get her into it. I’d hoped musical ability would get her further ahead in life.
She was my biggest fan, coming to the gigs I managed to book in local coffee shops and bars. Even though she wasn’t old enough to drink, I would sneak her in with me, and she would cheer her head off after every song. She became my mascot, almost. People expected to see the pretty little blonde girl with the big blue eyes and a huge smile when they came to see me play. I was never the best, but she always cheered as though I was.
How could I not love her? How could I not want to bring her home safe?
What could have happened to her? Had she seen something she wasn’t supposed to see? Maybe the club was mixed up in something dangerous, something nobody could know about. In my mind, I saw a backroom meeting—maybe in the very room Gabriel had dragged me into. The door was open a crack. Sabrina had innocently walked up to the door, overhearing what was happening inside. She had gasped, or made some other noise, cluing the guys in on her presence. They’d needed to get rid of her before she told anybody what she’d heard. I closed my eyes, whimpering.
I couldn’t keep torturing myself like this. These scenarios were only breaking my heart. I’d been having them more and more often lately. Now that I’d gotten a first-hand look at the inside of that awful bar, the visions would be even more realistic. Now, when I lay awake at night imagining what had happened to Sabrina, I’d be able to smell the smoke and the spilled liquor. I would see the tables and chairs, the photos on the walls of different motorcycles. My torture would be that much more vivid.
I had to put a stop to this, either by finding Sabrina soon or by finding out exactly what had led to her disappearance. Then, if I found that she was dead, I could, at least, know what I was in for as I searched for her body.
I stared at the front door to the bar. The music and rowdiness hadn’t died down a bit in the time since I’d left—if anything, it was louder. What the hell did they have to be so happy about? If I was a criminal, possibly a murderer, would I be living it up in some seedy roadhouse? It was like they didn’t have consciences.
I sat back, my eyes on the door. Waiting for Gabriel to show his face again. Planning my next steps. I had to find some way to get through to him, to show him how important it was to me that I find my sister. If he had a shred of humanity left in him, he’d have no choice but to open up and at least give me some measure of peace.
This was what I told myself. I needed something to believe in.
He had struck me as hard, callous. Maybe that was the front he put up in front of the club members. Maybe he was a nice person in private.
I needed to believe that, too.
Chapter 4
Gabriel
She would be back. There was no way she could react the way she had and not come back. If not for more of me, then for more information. As sexy as she was, I hoped I never saw her again. It could only mean trouble.
The club had a way of dealing with trouble. Even though I didn’t know this girl I didn’t want it to come to that. I thought back and could remember the people we’d punished or otherwise silenced over the years. There had been a lot of them. Too many to count. I’d been there for some of them. It wasn’t pretty. I didn’t want her to go through the same thing.
I couldn’t remember her sister very well, but I hoped somebody hadn’t decided she was trouble. It would be a shame for such a pretty girl to go out like that.
I got myself together in the back room before going back out to the bar. As soon as they saw me in the doorway, my guys cheered and stomped. I held up my hands, pretending to feel modest, making them cheer louder. I wasn’t sure what they thought we’d done, but they probably thought I fucked her, or at least made her suck me off. I figured I’d let them think what they wanted. It only added to my legend.
Most of what people said about me was true. My favorite hobby was sex, end of story. When I saw a woman I wanted, I took her. I’d fucked every woman in the bar that night at one time or another, sometimes two at the same time. I rode my bike hard and my women harder, and just about as often. It was who I was, and I liked myself the way I was. The club was the perfect place for me to be myself. These guys thought it was something to be proud of.
Rusty was already pouring a round of drinks by the time I walked up to the bar. I took a glass, raising it to the rest of the guys. They all came to get one of their own—there were a dozen guys there, patches and prospects. I looked out over them. They were my guys. I was their leader. It was a good feeling a moments like this.
“To the meanest son of a bitch in town, and the Crooked Souls!” The guys cheered Rusty’s toast before tossing back their liquor. A few of them patted me on the back. We laughed over how I’d shut the little bitch down. I stayed quiet when they asked me what I did to her. They had imaginations. And my image wouldn’t be helped if I admitted I hadn’t done anything worse than kissing her and grabbing her ass. They might have thought I was losing my touch.
Even w
hen we were all laughing, I couldn’t stop thinking about the missing girl. Sabrina, her name was. I remembered her better than I’d let on. She looked just like the girl who came in looking for her, except younger. She was dating Thorn…at least, she was when I last saw her.
Thorn was my best friend. We met on the first day of grade school. Both of us were from shitty homes, with parents who didn’t care about us. We were each other’s family. I would ride into hell for him, and I knew he would for me.
We were like brothers, and we had shared everything over the years. Now he was my vice president and second-in-command. Our bond was tighter than anything else in my life. There was no way I would betray him, even when I knew he was wrong. Most of the time I could convince him to change his mind before he got into serious trouble, and he did the same thing for me when I lost my temper.
Now I heard that Sabrina had vanished. I’d noticed she wasn’t showing her face around here, but I thought she and Thorn had broken up. She wasn’t a part of the club. She just hung out here because she was dating Thorn. Some of the girls, like most of the ones there that night, were permanent fixtures at the bar and the clubhouse. They served us, serviced us. Anything to be part of the action. It was sad when you took a minute to think about it.
Ever since that last day I saw Sabrina, when I rode over to Thorn’s and saw her leaving, I knew there was a problem. She had looked like she’d been crying, which I hated to see a woman do. At first, I had wanted to ignore her—it was none of my business if the two of them were having trouble. Personal shit was personal, even though Thorn was my closest friend. But she had seen me and walked over to the bike. She was a sweet girl. I remembered how she’d tried to smile even though she’d looked like shit. They had been fighting. It was obvious. But she had tried as hard as she could to pretend everything was okay. We’d stood in front of the house talking for a few minutes. I guessed that was where these so-called witnesses were getting their stories. They needed to mind their own business.
Sabrina wasn’t the first girl who had trouble with Thorn over the years. I remembered not being surprised at the time that she’d looked so upset. Just another one of his fuck-ups, I had thought. Thorn never had a lot of luck with women. When we were kids, like in high school, he used to go through girlfriends almost as fast as I did. Only I didn’t bother calling them my girlfriends. I’d fuck ’em and chuck ’em. Thorn actually tried to date women, for real. But it never went well.
He would blame the girl every time it went south. She was crazy. She wanted too much from him. She was jealous or controlling. She was a prude.
But after a little while, it hit me: it couldn’t always be the other person’s fault. By the time we were seventeen and he’d gone through something like three dozen girlfriends, I figured the problem was with him. He was the only constant in all of these relationships where things had gone to hell for one reason or another. I couldn’t tell him how I felt about it, though. Guys didn’t talk about things like that, especially not guys like us. It would be weird. Besides, he wouldn’t have listened to me.
So it didn’t surprise me when I saw how hurt Sabrina looked. Not physically hurt—I wouldn’t let Thorn get away with that, friend or no friend. I had no time for guys who hit women. It wasn’t fair to them when they couldn’t defend themselves. Sabrina was just as tiny as her sister, maybe smaller. Five feet three, at the most. I’d have kicked the shit out of Thorn if it looked like he was beating her.
When she stopped coming around, I told myself it was for the best—for her, anyway. Thorn wasn’t the kind of guy who should be permanently fixed up with a woman. I’d never understood why he kept trying to go for a relationship. Me, I just wanted a good time. It would have been smart if he would come around and start thinking the way I did.
I thought Sabrina had left him, and I’d pushed her out of my head. She was hardly there, anyway. It wasn’t hard. But then Thorn started falling apart. He was still falling apart now.
I had to wonder, sitting at the bar with the guys, if he hadn’t done something to her. Maybe he got mad and lost his mind for a minute. It happened all the time. Crimes of passion or whatever they were called. But at the end of the day, it wasn’t my problem. I couldn’t get involved. If he did hurt her or even kill her, it wouldn’t look good to the cops if I was involved somehow. And if Thorn did kill her, and if he admitted it to me, I’d be pulled in somehow.
Just then, Thorn walked in. He’d been MIA lately, showing up now and then. And when he did, he looked like shit. Just like he did right now. He was a mess. Unshaven, dark circles under his eyes. His clothes looked like he’d been wearing them for days. It didn’t take a genius to see something was wrong. But even though he’d been getting worse and worse since Sabrina left, he wouldn’t admit what was happening. At first, I had assumed he was upset over their breakup and taking it a little harder than he usually did. Now that the sister had come in looking for her, I was having second thoughts.
“Hey, man,” he grumbled, sliding onto a stool next to me. Rusty poured him a drink. I watched as he threw it back. He signaled for more.
“Hey, yourself. Where you been? Could have used you earlier today. A bunch of the guys went on a run, almost fucked it up.”
“How?”
“They almost got the order wrong. You’re always the one who keeps an eye out for shit like that. What happened?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“You should have been here to make sure it didn’t. That could have cost us a lot.” I was trying to get through to him, even to get a reaction other than indifference. It was like talking to a wall.
“I’m sorry, okay? I’ve had a lot of shit going on.” He stayed quiet and stared into his glass.
“Why don’t you try telling me about your shit? Maybe I can help.”
“You can’t help me,” he mumbled so quietly I almost didn’t hear him over the music and laughter around us.
“Since when? Listen to me,” I looked around to make sure nobody was listening, “I need you right now. We’re a team. If you fuck up, it looks bad for both of us.”
“I won’t do it again. Okay?” He looked at me, and I could have sworn I was looking at a stranger. There was no friendship. He looked hard and cold. For a minute, I almost wondered if he was working with another club against me. No, that was impossible. I’d known him my whole life.
He got up to sit near the stage, where two of our girls were dancing. I watched him. What was happening to us? The last thing I needed was to look weak in front of these guys. I made it a point to smile like everything was okay. There were eyes watching me closely, everywhere. I hated to have a paranoid thought like that, but it was true. I couldn’t get away from the feeling that I was being watched all the time for the first sign of weakness so somebody else could jump into my seat.
Thorn and I had been part of the club for most of our lives. Neither of us had family ties, and we needed to feel like we belonged somewhere. And the club just seemed so cool. It still did. I still loved it. It was the only place I’d ever felt like I fit in. I didn’t fit in at school. My teachers hated me, the kids called me white trash. Thorn was the only person I had in those days. Then we found the club. We found a family.
Only now that I was at the head, life was a lot more complicated. Why did I ever want to be in control? The idea of being president of the club was exciting on the outside. Being in power, keeping us strong, leading us to the future. If I knew then what I knew now…I shook my head at myself, laughing. In those days, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. When Spike made it known to the rest of the club that he wanted me to take his place, I was on top of the world. What a stupid, naïve kid I was back then.
These were my friends all around me. I sat down at one of the tables, and right away the girl who had been on my lap when that little blonde first came in sat back down. She was giggling, rubbing herself on me. I could have this every night of my life, and it was a great feeling. Only I wondered
if it was real. Back before I was president, I didn’t have to ask myself if the girl actually wanted to be with me because she wanted to or because she wanted to be with the head of the club. I didn’t ask myself if the guys around me were laughing at my joke because they thought it was funny or because they thought they had to. And I never had to worry about who was trying to get me out of power.
That was the worst, and it was why I couldn’t let Thorn be the weak link. I knew there had to be at least one or two members who wanted to see me get knocked down so they could take my place. I had to show them I was strong, that the club was strong. Screw-ups like this morning couldn’t happen again.
That was why I couldn’t have anything to do with Sabrina’s disappearance. That was all we would need, to have the cops look at us more closely. We had a sort of unspoken agreement with the police in this town. As long as we weren’t burning shit down or causing too much trouble for the people who lived there, we were left mostly on our own.