The man tossed him the keys on his belt.
Derrick tossed them to Hank, who moved as fast as he could to the back where the weekly drop safe was supposed to be. Finding the safe, he lucked out on finding the right key. He opened it up and found — less than five grand. Probably closer to four grand.
Motherfucker!
But now wasn’t the time to hash it out with Derrick. Now was the time to get this crazy fucking idiot out of the store and back to the club house, where he would give him all of this money, and then beat the crap out of him.
“We’re out! No more shooting!” he said as he passed Derrick.
Apparently Derrick didn’t hear him, because he emptied the rest of his clip into the bottle display around the man, pouring broken glass and liquor over him.
Then he stopped, opened the register, and pulled out the few twenties that were there, while also setting off the alarm.
The alarm was local and loud. Hank was on his bike and had it started. Derrick finally came out of the fucking store, laughing and dancing.
“Fucking get on your bike or I’m leaving you!” Hank said it, and he meant every word of it.
Derrick seemed to get it too, because he quit dancing, got to his bike, and got it started. In the process, he dropped his gun. Hank saw him drop it — Hank didn’t miss details — but he revved the thumper and took off down the getaway route they had planned. Derrick could follow or get his fucking gun.
Derrick chose to follow, Hank saw in his rear-view mirror. “I’m so going to kick his fucking ass when we get back. What an amateur, childish display of bullshit!” he said to himself.
Derrick really had come close to shooting that man! And for what? Nothing! If they were caught then, that was an automatic ten years tacked onto the sentence.
Making it to the first dirt trail, which was more like a dirt access road, Hank was making the turn with a skid and a slide when there she was, a sheriff’s deputy. What he could not have known was that she was in fact off duty and using her patrol car to go home since her car was in the shop with a blown head gasket. She lived in a small house just off this dirt access road. She was the single mother of two children, a boy and a girl, neither older than six.
Witnessing the two dirt bike riders speeding and driving recklessly up what amounted to her driveway, she hit the lights and hit the gas, aiming to run them down.
She only heard the call out for the liquor store robbery when she was about fifteen yards behind the last one.
Derrick reached for his gun to shoot that fucking sheriff’s deputy, but then remembered he dropped it, and it was empty anyway. Whoever she was, she was good on this road, because she was running them down and gaining speed.
Then the unthinkable happened. Derrick’s engine seized. With several jarring, deep, knocking explosions inside the engine case, the bike lost power so fast, the deputy’s car almost ran him over without stopping. It was a testament to her skill that she didn’t wind up thrashing both him and his bike under her bumper. She did hit him, which sent him sprawling, but she managed to stop the cruiser before crushing him.
Liquor store robbery in mind, she came out of the car with her shotgun, jacking a shell in the chamber and bringing it to bear on Derrick, who was pinned under his bike. His bike was pinned under the front fender of the car.
“Move and I blow a large hole in you. Questions?”
“Fuck you!” Derrick shouted at her. “Shoot her! Fucking shoot her!” he screamed, looking up the road. “She can’t cover me and you! Fucking shoot this bitch!”
She spotted the other rider at the top of the rise, about twenty yards away, through the clearing clouds of dust and dirt. She saw he had a gun in his hand, but his was arm hanging down his side. Through the sun-shaded dirt-bike helmet, he was studying her and the situation. He checked the skies, but she knew that she hadn’t called in her merry chase yet. No chopper would be coming, no backup coming fast up the hill. And this asshole under her shotgun was right. She couldn’t cover him and this guy on the hill at the same time. Besides, he was just at the edge of where she believed a shotgun would be effective, anyway. He could take his time, take careful aim, and this would be her last act on earth.
“What the fuck are you waiting for?! Shoot this cunt!” the blond man screamed.
God, she wanted to pull the trigger, and she decided that if that gunman lifted his arm, she was going to. She wasn’t going out like this! Not with two kids just over that rise and down the drive. No! Not a fucking chance. But tears were watering her eyes as she decided on this last act of defiance.
Then the man’s gun arm moved, very slowly, as if he wanted her to see what he was doing, and he put the gun inside his jacket. He watched her for a moment longer, and then gave her a nod. In that nod, she saw, “Good game, you win. Well done.”
It was all rogue-class bullshit, of course, she decided, but her heart swelled with a bit of pride anyway.
Then with startling speed, he was gone, past the rise, and all she had of him was the sound of his engine going down the trail.
She looked down at the blond man, the man who called for her murder, with murder in her eyes. He must have seen it, because he shut up.
With her hand radio, she called for backup and said she had a possible suspect for the liquor store robbery. She gave the general direction of where number two had gone, but if he knew those trials and knew where he was going, they weren’t going to catch him. He was gone, and privately in her heart of hearts, she hoped he would make it.
***
Hank took the stairs up to the office of the president two at a time. Gripped in his hand was his leather patch vest. He had defeat in his shoulders but no shame in his eyes.
After knocking on the door and hearing the summons, he went inside the office, which always struck him as being too large for the space, and closed the door behind him.
Knight, the president of the Steel Riders, and Ben Tailor, the VP, were there. Knight was washing a broad leaf of one of his plants on the cabinet behind his desk.
Hank felt that it was best just to get this over with. He walked forward, and with only a slight tremble in his hand, put his patch vest on Knight’s desk. He was about to turn to leave without a word.
“Wait,” Knight’s voice said. It didn’t sound like a command, but it was one.
Hank turned and looked back, not sure he was going to get through this without a tear if his elder kept him too long. Ten years he had ridden with this man, and the men downstairs, and the nearly two hundred others.
“Tell me,” Knight said.
Hank started with the oil leak, and then it just poured out of him. Every detail, every turn of events, all the way to him sitting on the hill with his gun in his hand, looking down on the deputy. It was a clear shot. He could take it in his sleep. There was no cover for her, and she couldn’t get him with the scatter gun. That was a bad choice on her part. She should have stuck with her revolver.
“Derrick called out for me to take her,” Hank told Knight and Ben, “but I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t. It wasn’t self-defense, and it certainly wasn’t war.” He took a long breath. “So I left him. I left my brother.” He looked to Knight. “Can I go now?”
“No,” Knight told him. “No, you can’t. And you can’t give me your patch, either. Now, if you would have come in here and told me the story with murder on the end of it, then you could have given me your patch. Because that’s what it would have been. Not a killing, not self-defense as you already suggested, but a simple murder. And for what?
“No,” Knight continued, and as he sat down he picked up his phone. “I got this. I’ll call Larry, Larry will do his Larry thing, and we’ll have Derrick back with us in no time at all. All Derrick has to do is sit tight for a couple of hours and keep his mouth shut. No worries.”
Hank’s hand was shaking when he picked back up his vest. “Thanks. Let me know what to do to cover Larry’s cost. Any job the club needs, consider it done.”<
br />
“Coming from you, that’s quite an offer, but one I accept. There is something, as a matter of fact. Sit down, let me call Larry and get Derrick taken care of, and then we’ll talk about it. Ben and I were just discussing who might take care of this problem for us.”
But Derrick didn’t sit tight, and he didn’t keep his mouth shut, and he did two years in Chino for robbery.
***
Knight was expanding the Rider’s distribution and connections network, and he used Hank as his rider. Hank rode to Texas, to Florida, down into Mexico, up to Seattle, and into Canada. He rode all across the Midwest. For the next three years, Hank rode with, met, drank with, and occasionally fought with bikers all over three different countries. With the Internet, he kept in touch with many of those he befriended along the way.
At the end of it, Knight had a resource network far greater than a club their size would be expected to have. He could move dope and stolen goods with effortless speed. Several times, through this network, he invested club funds into drug deals other clubs were investing in, allowing greater buy-ins with much greater profits.
Then Knight came to Hank with a real job, a job that would take all his skill, all of his observation talents, and some fucking amazing luck to accomplish without dying.
Hank accepted the job with a nod, took off his vest, and rode away for eight months.
CHAPTER TWO
Current Day
Cynthia "Cyn" Palmer pulled her red Lowrider up to the club and scanned the bikes outside, recognizing several. She spotted Larry’s blue and white Heritage and slid in beside him. She liked Larry. For a lawyer, he was alright. Sure, he was old enough to almost be her father, but he was easy to talk to, funny, intelligent, and had great blue eyes that sparkled like sapphires. To top it off, even with his age he had a nice ass in his blue jeans.
So, yeah, a few too many drinks and Larry saying the right words, it could happen. Thinking about it, she wouldn’t mind it at all, and could easily play the scene all the way through. In the morning, they would likely be slightly embarrassed about the whole thing. For the next few chance meetings, they would give each other smiles and waves and keep on going. After a couple of weeks, though, they would settle back down into the comfortable friendship that they enjoyed together right now — and hell, then it could happen again.
She brought her Lowrider down on its stand, pulled off her helmet, and shook out her thick red hair, running her fingers through the mane to fluff it out a little. Then she got off and headed for the club door.
So far, Larry was the only one she thought it could happen with. There were plenty of good men in the Steel Riders MC, having over two hundred members in the San Diego area. She had met Ben the VP, James, of course, and Halo, and even Rick — and all of their beautiful wives and girlfriends.
Randy, a prospect, was more than a little cute, but he was a prospect still, and she got bad vibes from the way he looked at Daphne, her best friend. Daphne was with Derrick, and Derrick sponsored Randy in, so it seemed to Cyn that Daphne would be way off-limits for Randy — if he had any respect in him, but Cyn wasn’t sure he did.
That aside, it was honestly difficult to think of Derrick with respect. She just didn’t believe that Derrick would have her back when the chips went down. He talked a lot, too.
Most of what came out of Derrick’s mouth was mean, and normally about someone in the club. He just said shit, and it was constant. She had only been coming around here for two months and she had witnessed Derrick get the crap beat out of him three times for saying the wrong shit about the wrong person.
Derrick wasn’t that big of a guy. About six feet tall, yes, but he didn’t have a great build. His shoulders were alright; his body was more or less in shape. The muscles of his arms were defined by hard labor, not gym groomed. His shock of blond hair and those blue eyes of his were his best features, but they didn’t help much in a fight.
On top of that, the man couldn’t fight. She would have done better against the men who called him out. A lot better. Derrick took a beating each time. A hard beating.
It never stopped his mouth, though.
Cyn loved Daphne, however. She was a gorgeous blond, with laughing green eyes and a body she loved to show off. When Cyn first moved into Lakeside, she had no friends and knew of nowhere to go in the area. She and Daphne became friends, and Daphne was the one who brought her here to the club.
Cyn had tried the local tavern a few times, but there was just nothing to get into with the regulars there.
El Cajon was close, but it was filled with biker bars of the monstrous testosterone variety that she found more disturbing than alluring. And sure, she understood her place in the grand scheme of things, as a woman hanging around the men she chose to, and she felt good about it too. However, there was a line between her place and being a second-class citizen — a line that she wasn’t comfortable crossing, and certainly wasn’t going to cross by force or fright. A guy could lose his nuts trying to force her across that line. She didn’t carry the blade on her left hip for show. She’d use it if backed to a wall. Her father had taught her how to use that blade against stronger, taller, and more powerful adversaries. She was a quick study, too.
So, yes, she tried a few of the clubs in El Cajon, but she knew they weren’t going to work out, and a man who would get her fires burning wouldn’t spend much time in them either.
She had met Daphne in the laundry mat on a Sunday morning, and they had hit it off instantly. Daphne was fun and into the life. She had said her ol’man was a patch holder for the Steel Riders and that Cyn should ride back a patch into the rural background to look for a place called Knight’s. She wouldn’t miss it. It was two stories tall and long like a ranch house, painted white with blue trim, and there was a large sign out by the road. Daphne told her there were always bikes outside as well. On Fridays and Saturdays the bikes were parked three or four deep, making it hell to leave early.
“It is a nice country-style bar, but really it’s the club house. They’ve got over two hundred active members right now, with probably another hundred in various inactive states,” Daphne explained.
“Like moved out of the area, getting on in the age area —”
“Being down in the prison area,” Daphne cut in with a singsong tune in her voice, giving Cyn a light smile.
“So, are they all outlaws then?” Cyn asked.
“Not all. No, but none of them are angels or white on the inside. Even Larry has been known to dabble in drug trading and fencing, and he’s a lawyer.”
“What does Derrick, your ol’man, do?”
“Mostly a mechanic, and he’s a good one. He’s been wrenching for more than twenty years, to hear him say it, though he’s only thirty-two. His dad owned a shop near downtown, and Derrick started there. Not sure he started when he was twelve, but Derrick’s certain of it. He makes good money wrenching, but he’s always scheming and plotting something.”
“Sounds like a busy man,” Cyn offered.
“He’d be so busy I wouldn’t get the chance to suck him off between coming in and going out, if he did one-tenth of the heist jobs he came up with. So far, since he got out of Chino, he’s done nothing but wrench and talk. Which I don’t mind so much. I really didn’t enjoy him being down in the pen for two years.”
“Yeah, that doesn’t sound all that fun to me,” Cyn said.
“It’s not. The guys were good to me, though. Two or three would come by to visit sometimes. The girls would call and keep me up on things. Occasionally, one of the guys would take me on a club run, which was always fun. Knight, the president — and yeah, that’s really his name — he always asked how I was doing financially, and if I had the basics covered, which I did, after he let me waitress at the club during the weekends.”
So, Cyn agreed to meet up with Derrick and Daphne on a Wednesday evening, go to Knight’s tavern and grill, have dinner, and be introduced to Knight and probably Larry, Ben, and James as well. She liked wha
t she saw and how she felt instantly.
Knight Walker, the president, was brown-eyed and gray-maned. His hair was full and wire thick. He looked like old Spaniard rancher mixed with Irish bootlegger. His smile didn’t always reach his eyes, but when it did, it made him a very attractive rogue. He talked with her for more than an hour about all kinds of things. She kept up for the most part, able to share knowledge if not experience.
Ben Tailor was a tall but stocky man with a brutish look and sharp hazel eyes Cyn didn’t believe missed much. He might have been forty, but she guess him to be closer to thirty-five — the brutishness gave him an older appearance. He didn’t talk much and didn’t smile often. He liked her tits and her long legs, even spent some time with her ass when she wasn’t using it to sit on the bar stool, but she didn’t get the feeling he liked her. Most likely it was her vocabulary, she decided. She possessed a large vocabulary, and she used it with thoughtless ease in conversation. Just to test this theory, she told the gathered group a seriously raunchy joke, using words like cunt and twat with the same ease she used more descriptive words, and Ben lightened up several notches.
Outlaw's Wrath - An MC Brotherhood Romance Boxed Set Page 25