Damaged & Dangerous

by A. J. Downey

  “Yeah, sure thing, Man. Good job out there.” He held out a hand and I grasped it and let him pull me in and slap me on the back. I returned the favor and snatched my helmet off the bar, hoisting my bags up. I made for the door.

  I was hooking the bags back up to my bike when the back door swung wide with a bang. I looked up, Rac had run full tilt into the crash bar and she looked down at me from the top step. She skipped lightly down the back stairs and strode across the lot towards me.

  “You dropped this.” She held out my face mask and I crooked a smile at her.

  “Thanks.” I took it from her. “Been meaning to ask you something.”

  “Oh?” Her tone was cool but her voice was thicker, like she had some kind of a cold or something coming on. I swept my gaze over her porcelain doll features.

  “How’d you end up here?” I asked softly.

  “Same way you did,” she said. I had to laugh.

  “I doubt that, Sweetheart,” I said dryly. She tilted her head to the side, considering, and started walking backwards towards the steps.

  “You’re a prospect, aren’t you?” she asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “So was Jared. That’s how I got here.”

  I frowned but she was up the stairs and back inside in a flash. I geared back up and drove home, which was an hour from here on a lake. A small fishing cabin my granddad had owned and no one else in my family had wanted. Didn’t have electricity, but it served its purpose when I needed a fucking break from these assholes. Despite the place being a summer cabin, the woodstove worked and there were enough permanent residences nearby that it got cell reception.

  As soon as I got a fire started and the shit sorted in my bags, I sat down, put my feet up, and pulled out the burner I talked to D on. He picked up on the fourth ring.

  “Was wondering when you was gonna check in. I was starting to get worried. How the hell are ya, Thirteen?”

  “I’m good, D. They had me go all the way out to fucking Colorado, but the amount of shit I brought back… that should fucking hold off any more runs for a while. You guys about ready to start playin’ ball?”

  “Girls are good in Florida. I forgot to tell you, there’s a bit of a change in plans concerning Rev. His woman is pregnant.”

  “Is that what that picture was?” I asked.

  “How the hell you get that?” he demanded.

  “Came through on my personal cell, someone mass-texted it. I have so many goddamned contacts, I didn’t realize I still had anybody from the club in it. No worries, my cover is secure. No one saw shit. I don’t leave things like that lyin’ around.”

  D grunted into the phone, “Cops‘re still sittin’ on us. They still watching you?” he asked.

  “If by ‘you,’ you mean The Suicide Kings, then yeah. Unmarked tan cargo van when we pulled in from the run. It’s a good thing Gordy’s a paranoid fucker and sweeps for listening devices on the regular. Pretty sure they only got visual. They’ll get tired soon enough and fuck off onto something bigger and better.”

  “Yeah. With our history, they ain’t investigatin’ or cryin’ too hard about our plight.” Dragon sounded both tired and downright pissed off at that. I didn’t blame him. Chandra deserved a lot better. Reave, too! Don’t get me wrong. But as a brother, you expect this shit to happen. No women and no children had been the SHMC motto from the beginning, even before our reformed ways. We did some gnarly and seriously rancid shit back in the day. Guns, drugs, gambling – you name it. But we always left the women and children out of it.

  No prostituting, no hitting. Rape was liable to get your dick chopped off – which is why, no matter how fucking hard, no matter how often the Suicide Kings tried to get me to join in on one of their trains, it was no fucking dice. Because very rarely, if ever, were the chicks they were fucking at all clear-headed or into it.

  It bothered me, a whole fuck of a lot, the way these animals treated their women and I found myself spilling it all. I told D everything I’d seen going on, everything I could garner about their operation, in effect, unburdening my soul from all the awful shit I’d been a party to in the name of the greater good. In the name of spying out our enemy. He was quiet for a long time on the other end and finally let out a sigh that made him sound like he felt every single year and every single mile. It’d been weeks since I last talked to him beyond a short text. The deeper I got in with these fuckers, the more I was around them, the less opportunity there was for full on communication.

  “Do you need out?” he asked.

  My thoughts drifted to Raccoon, to her sharp and calculating stare as she’d passed me my face mask.

  “No man, I’m good. My work ain’t over yet. Not by a long, flat, mile. It’ll be done when every one of these fuckers is in the ground and the Suicide Kings ain’t nothin’ but the dust of fuckin’ memory.”

  “Poetic,” he said, “What about our little rodent problem?”

  “Ain’t heard much, on account of bein’ out on the road. Just know it’s female, and from what I have heard, it ain’t pillow talk. They’re strong-arming her somehow. I just don’t have enough to say who, or how they’re doing it. Curse of being a prospect and it being straight-up Gordy and Pipes’ show. Those fuckers are paranoid as all get-out, and play things super close to the vest. I’ll let you know when I got something. What about on your end?”

  “Narrowing the field of suspects. Been a lot easier since the girls’ been stayin’ in Florida. If you’re sayin’ they’ve been in contact with the rat recent, then it eliminates all of our women in the club.” He gave a gusty sigh, “Not that I figured it was any of them in the first place.”

  “Dray’s heading down to the girls this weekend, he’s taking Open Road Garage’s books down with him for Shelly to go over. She’s already been over Open Road Ink’s and, as suspected, come up empty. ORG’s got employees who aren’t strictly club, but it’s a club business so we’re digging deeper. ‘Sides that, the fucker we caught during the raid had some interesting things to say about what our people were up to the day we got hit, and damn few people knew what was up with that. Just keep doing what you’re doing and give us a heads up when you can. Stay sharp and straight Brother, you need out we can go at this another way.”

  I sighed, “I’m oh-for-two and not about to give up yet.” I said dispassionately.

  “Hey! Grinder ain’t your fault, Boy. Neither is what happened to the club. It was just shitty luck they had you on that run when the club went down. No one knew a goddamned thing about Grinder until the deed was already done. Those fuckers were smart about it and kept their mouths shut until they was sure he was dead. You don’t get to take those on.”

  “Yeah, about that… Rush, Archer and Nox still in town?” I asked.

  “Patched over. They’re in it to win it until they got blood for blood on Grinder. They all came up in the system together, under the same roof. May not be blood but whatever they got is sure as fuck thicker.”

  “You tell ‘em it was a couple of twins that did it. Go by the name of Ace and Deuce. Fucking tweakers and I’m not sure how the fuck they pulled it off, keeping quiet about it for days. I know you guys buried Grinder in a cut, but his cut is hanging nailed to a wall in the Suicide King’s clubhouse like some kind of trophy.” I wouldn’t give those three any of this until D was ready to turn ‘em loose to go hunting. Knowing them, they’d go OFP – sorry, that’s Own Fucking Program – and settle that particular beef on their own. I’d worked with ‘em before. Still, it wasn’t my place to tell the Pres how to run his club.

  I tuned back in to what Dragon was saying, “…wheels are turning slower than I’d like but it’s a necessary evil. Too many of my guys have been netting themselves Ol’ Ladies. I want to see ‘em have a better go of it than me ‘n’ Tilly. Got some damned fine women attached to this club, and I wanna see them and my brothers thrive. Maybe I’m getting maudlin in my old age, who the fuck knows? I just know we were doin’ fine until these cock suckers sh
owed up, and I wanna get back to that as soon as possible. No more dying, no one going to prison, so we gotta do this careful. Not above seizing the moment, though, if you catch my drift.”

  “I get you.”

  We were finally getting to that stage. Cops stopped investigating; you behaved like pious little angels long enough. I was surprised they’d hung on this long. Six months was a long time to devote man power and resources when by all rights they should be pleased that the two MC’s were taking each other out. I was well aware of the rep my true MC had. It had been well-deserved back in the day.

  “Good,” Dragon grunted in my ear, pulling me from my walk down memory lane.

  “Thank you for doing this, Brother. You keep the dirty side down,” he finished.

  “You too.” It was an old saying among bikers, ‘keep the dirty side down’, and as I hung up I sighed. Unfortunately, I wasn’t doing what I was doing to keep the dirty side down. Nope. It was my job to pry up all sorts of rocks to find these fuckers crawling underneath. That way we could crush their sorry asses under our boot heels.

  We’d given them every opportunity to leave us be. It was too fucking late for them now. Let God have mercy on their souls, and here was to hoping that this little adventure didn’t tip my scales even further out of whack, but rather did something to right them.

  Chapter 2

  Dani…

  I didn’t know what to make of the prospect. There was something strange and different about him. I returned to the bar after giving him his facemask and finished restocking the booze.

  “Coon, go on and get the fuck out of here,” Pig ordered.

  “Do you want me to stick around the club, or should I go home?” I asked.

  “Ain’t you got shit to do at home?” he asked. I nodded rapidly and held my breath.

  “Well, shit, get you gone, Bitch! What’d I just fucking tell you!?” he yelled. I flinched, snatched my purse off the shelf under the bar, and skirted around its edge.

  “Fucking bitches, Man! You have to tell ‘em every fucking detail under the goddamned sun. Swear to fucking Christ they’re born with less than half a brain,” Pig griped at my back as I made for the back exit. I said nothing. I knew better. The only time I opened my mouth and put myself in the line of fire was for a new girl. But only until they learned. And only in hopes of them getting away from these animals before it was too late; like it was for me. I did it less and less as time went by, once I realized it was pretty much just wishful thinking on my part. The girls, they never left, and some weren’t as innocent as they looked or portrayed themselves to be.

  I went back out into the parking lot and coughed. I had this damned cold coming on and truthfully, I was pretty grateful I was headed home. I was starting to really feel like shit, and just wanted to be alone. To try and create something beautiful. It was both my blessing and my curse.

  I’d grown up with my grandfather. My grandmother had died before I was born. And my mom had ditched me with my dad, who couldn’t take care of me for anything. So, it was his dad who had taken me in, bless his heart. Philip Broussard was French, and a master jeweler. He had taught me everything he knew and had given me the best childhood a girl could ask for. When I was seventeen, he’d gotten too sick with the cancer to keep his custom jewelry store open. We lived in an apartment above it. The storefront sat vacant now, but his workshop space in our living room and in the shed outside… I’d hung on to those.

  My granddad had died when I was eighteen, just after I graduated high school. Jared, my high school sweetheart, had moved in with me and things were good. We lived off my inheritance from my granddad for a while. Then Jared fell in with this guy named Rabbit who introduced him to another guy he hung out with. The next thing I knew, I was seeing less and less of Jared. Then one night, he came home in a leather vest and told me he was a prospect in a motorcycle club. And I had to come with him to meet the guys.

  That had been a mistake, and it would be the last one he ever made. Pig-Pen declared that I was his, the moment he saw me. He said that prospects didn’t get to have girlfriends or Ol’ Ladies; that whatever a prospect had, belonged to the club. I didn’t understand anything that was going on.

  Jared had tried to argue, to fight for me. But Pig-Pen had ordered him beaten to death, and then forced himself on me, turning my life upside down and inside out. I didn’t dare run. I’d tried it once, and Pig had almost killed me. Then he saw my work bench, found out what I could do with a little bit of metal and a few stones, and suddenly I had value again.

  Instead of killing me, he let the whole MC pull a train on me as punishment. He said it was to remind me that if I didn’t want to belong to him, there were other arrangements that could be made. It wasn’t long after that before he started bringing me jewelry. Stolen jewelry.

  I’d done the only thing I could. With what I knew, and the skills I’d learned from my grandfather, I kept myself alive. I melted down and re-tooled the stolen shit into new, different, unidentifiable pieces that the Suicide Kings could easily pawn off without any blow-back for the club.

  It was my idea, but Pig-Pen had pulled it off so that Griz and Sparks thought he’d come up with the whole thing. It was one of the things that got Pig the VP seat after Sparks was murdered.

  I was Pig’s dirty little secret, his whore and golden meal ticket rolled into one, and he was mean enough and frightening enough that I stayed silent. Or else. I never tried to run again.

  I let myself into my apartment with a soft, tired sigh, closing the door behind me. I still lived in the sad, shabby, lonely little apartment above the shop. But the workbench - littered with tools, gems, and bits of settings and scrap metal - was a comfort to me. A piece of my grandfather and the person I used to be. All the melting and other heat work was done in a little stone shed out back where, if anything happened, there was no risk to the incredibly old building. Up here, in the apartment, I did all my finishing work and polishing.

  I took a shower, as I always did after coming back from the club. I hated smelling like weed, cigarettes, and – depending on the night – spilled booze, beer, or Pig. My clothes immediately went into the wash and I made some hot tea. I sat at my worktable and stared at an unfinished piece, hugging my knees.

  I never imagined that at age twenty-three, this is what I would be. Or that this is what I would be doing. I closed my eyes and tried not to let the hopelessness, the despair overwhelm me. I was well aware that I was riding that razor’s edge again. Like I’d been before Pig discovered what I could do, that I could be an asset to the club. He was doing more drugs than ever. Quicker to anger and even quicker to hit lately, I just tried like hell to stay out of his way, and out of the way of the other brothers with nasty temperaments.

  They weren’t all bad, at least not to me. Skid, an older man – and by older, I just mean older than me – saw me as the little sister he never had. He was in his late thirties, early forties, and had warm, kind, brown eyes. When things got real bad, he turned away and couldn’t watch. He kept his distance until I healed up again and didn’t make fun. He’d stepped in only once. But if ever there had been a time I’d needed someone to step in, then the time that Pig-Pen tried to brand me was surely it.

  Pig-Pen had whooped Skid’s ass that night. But I would never, and I mean never, forget what he tried to do to me. Thankfully, Skid’s interference kept me from getting branded with an iron that night, but then Pig dragged me to a tattoo parlor owned by a buddy of his. He’d held me down while the tattooist inked Pig’s name under my skin. The ugly mark was on my lower back in this big, nasty, spiky script. I suppose I should have been grateful for what Pig-Pen called his ‘tramp stamp of approval’. With it being where it was, I didn’t have to look at it every day. I could pretend it wasn’t there, and only rarely did I catch sight of it in the bathroom mirror.

  I scrubbed my face with my hands and sniffed. I hated it when I made a slide on the downward spiral of self-pity. But that was harder and harder not
to do, the more time dragged on. The more brothers that disappeared or got themselves killed, the harsher and angrier the guys that were left became. I think most of that was from fear. The Sacred Hearts didn’t play around. I saw that for myself when they’d come out of the woods at their Lake Run, Sparks’ bloody vest in the maniac’s hands.

  He’d looked like some crazed avenging angel, bloody to the elbow, his white shorts spattered and smeared with it. His cut hung loose over his bare chest. His eyes were hollow and empty; a barren, frozen wasteland, desolate, and devoid of anything human. I swallowed hard and banished the image for fear it would haunt my dreams. It had, on several other nights since then. That beautiful man with the empty eyes and savage look scared the ever-living shit out of me.

  No one knew what had happened, but the rumors and whispers started pretty quick. The one that had turned out to be true was that Sparks had taken one of their women by force, and not just any one of them, a club slut. No one’s Old Lady, just some random girl. I’d been floored. The concept that there were clubs out there that actually valued anything female simply blew my mind. I didn’t think such a thing could actually exist. Of course, it didn’t exist for me. It never would.

  I hung my head with a gusty sigh that ended in a fit of coughing, and picked up my latest project. A heavy gold ring shaped like a crown the whole way around. I was setting rubies into the gold at even intervals, alternating them with diamonds. The piece was to make Pig look good, something he could present to Griz. But Pig was a damned idiot. Griz didn’t go for a bunch of flashy bling. Still, Pig had told me to make something he could give Griz and I picked this as a lesser evil. It wasn’t super flashy. Gold? Yes. Real stones? Yes. But still, the ring was understated and tasteful, and fit within the club’s theme.

  I managed to carefully set a stone before the jeweler’s glasses began to give me a splitting headache, the pressure in my sinuses becoming too much to bear. I set the project aside and got up, going to my room. I plucked some nighttime cold medicine from my nightstand and took two big swallows of the foul green liquid. I recapped it and laid down in my full-sized bed, which was somewhat of a blessing. Pig-Pen hated to sleep over because the bed was too small, so he rarely ever did. I switched out the light, though it was still early. I didn’t care. I felt like hell.