At the opposite side of the property from the clubhouse, the first, vivid impression of Dartmoor, was Green Hills Nursery. Every one of the separate businesses bore its own name, all of them somehow related to the rolling moors of England after which the property, and their club, had been named. Green Hills had almost a thousand square feet of indoor/outdoor aisles of plants on raised tables, sorted according to sun and shade, perennial and annual, interspersed with fountains, birdfeeders, and garden art. A rectangular space had been cordoned off with low counters that served as an office and a place for customers to checkout with their purchases. In back, parked semi trailers held pine straw, bags of sand, cattle manure, fertilizer, potting soil and mulch. There was a gravel pit. In front, two original preserved oaks shaded the hardscape and stone samples, the concrete statues, the wheelbarrows and miscellaneous garden gear for sale. It was in the process of closing up for the afternoon, the last customers pulling away and the staff chaining the wheelbarrows together so they didn’t walk off in the night.
Ava had worked here in high school. Mercy smiled to himself, as he remembered her green polo shirt and khaki shorts, the smudge of dirt on her forehead as she stole a moment in the shade with him, her kiss tasting like Coke and cherry Chapstick.
The reverie was broken by the sound of approaching bikes. Mercy glanced toward the road and saw three turning in at the Green Hills gate. Most of the crew used the clubhouse gate – there was a gate at each business front – but on occasion, the guys would use a different one, as a way of keeping an eye on things.
He recognized them before they pulled up alongside him and killed their engines. His mood soured, but he kept his face from showing that.
He tossed a smile toward Collier, James’s sergeant at arms. Mid-forties and just beginning to gray at the temples, Collier was the epitome of his officer’s rank: composed, controlled, precise in all things. He took his job seriously, serving as bodyguard for his prez and VP, keeping the order within the club.
Riding alongside him was Andre, a perpetual fuckup of a kid with a coke habit he couldn’t kick and two baby-mamas whose child support he usually flaked on paying. He was harmless, and up for anything most of the time – so long as that “anything” wasn’t important. He was the last man Mercy would ever want covering his flanks in a fire fight.
And then there was Michael.
Mercy’s replacement.
On the first group run where NOLA and Knoxville convened after Mercy’s departure from Tennessee – five years ago when he’d abandoned the city he loved for the sake of the girl he’d ruined – he’d met Ghost’s new go-to guy. Odds were, Michael was his birth name, but there was a certain air of the Biblical about him, the archangel of unswerving devotion and brutality. Mercy had never seen him smile, heard him laugh, detected a hint of humor in anything he’d ever said. Walsh detested him. Mercy tended to agree, but when it came to efficiency, there was no better Angel of Death in the MC. If someone needed to go tits-up, Michael was the man to get it done; most of the time, he could make it look like an accident. He was damn good at a sending a loud and clear message, too, if that was what the occasion called for.
His face, beneath his helmet and behind his riding glasses, was a nondescript mask of exact planes and angles. His eyes were dark and flat behind the clear lenses of the glasses. His straight nose, his unforgiving mouth, unremarkable clean-shaven chin – all were plain, all enabled him to melt seamlessly into crowds. Not an extractor, like Mercy, but a true soldier.
“Hey, Merc.” Collier pulled off a glove and offered Mercy a handshake that was readily accepted. “How you been, man? You just got back from London, right?” He pulled a face. “Shit. How was that?”
“Ah, you know me.” Mercy grinned. “Always up for a field trip.”
“I can’t believe you guys didn’t kill that English prick,” Andre said, and spat on the pavement to display his opinion of that.
Collier turned to him with a tired sigh. “It’s not just about killing, Andre. It’s about doing what helps the club the most.” He glanced back at Mercy, shaking his head. “What the hell’s wrong with this generation?”
“Participation trophies,” Mercy said. “And Adderall.”
Collier nodded in agreement.
Mercy glanced at Michael. Gave him a little up-nod. “Hey. How’s the murder business?” He said it jokingly, though why he bothered, he didn’t know.
Michael gave him a flat look. “Fine.”
Collier lifted his brows in silent apology for his comrade. “So, you patching Tennessee again?”
“Looking that way.” Mercy shrugged. “We’ll see how things go at church.”
Michael’s face gave one small twitch of reaction.
Collier said, “We’ll be glad to have you back. With things shakin’ up, we made need you around here.”
“That’s what Ghost tells me.”
Andre, oblivious, said, “Wait, though, isn’t Ghost’s daughter back in town?”
Collier thumped him hard on the arm.
“Wouldn’t know.” Mercy affected a pleasant non-smile. “Don’t much care. I’m just glad to get out of the swamp again.”
Collier nodded, like he approved of that answer. “Like I said: we’re glad you’re here.” He cranked his bike again and it snarled to life. “See you tonight?”
“Yup.”
The three rode off down the lot and Mercy watched them go, hands in his pockets. Wondering just how many people would give him that questioning look, or even dare to mention Ava out loud. They might have been glad to have him back, but there was a warning there: Don’t push Ghost again.
Right: no fresh starts.
Four
Fourteen years ago
Ava was eight. She wasn’t supposed to be in the chapel. It was forbidden, actually. No women, no children. Certainly no children who would grow up to become women. But the room held an intolerable fascination for her, always had. Its cinderblock walls were cluttered with Lean Dogs flags, pennants, a tattered Old Glory, the Stars and Bars, countless photographs. A local artist had fashioned the club dog from welded steel scraps, and it ran behind the chair at the head of the table.
The table: it had been a dining room table once, a heavy relic of some pre-Civil War mansion with sturdy legs carved with intricate vines and bundles of grapes so round and shiny they looked edible. Ava thought she may have tried that once, when she was even smaller, during one of her other unforgiveable ventures into the chapel. Talk about forbidden fruit.
The table stretched from one end of the rectangular room to the other, a hulking mass of cherry that was kept oiled and buffed at all times. Beneath the stale clouds of lingering cigarette smoke, she could smell the furniture polish that the prospects worked into the wood with small slow circles of soft rags. Twenty chairs ringed it, each a solid, weighty work of art with engraved vines and knobby clawed arms and threadbare red velvet seats that had nearly been chafed away by the years and years of denim-covered asses.
There was a matching piece that went with the table, taken from that same antebellum mansion that had yielded up the table: a buffet cabinet, with green marble top, thick veins of white and black streaking through the stone. Instead of the grapes or the vines, its double doors were carved with an entire vineyard, an Italian hillside with its rolling dales of grape vines growing on their frames, a great house with three chimneys rising behind. It had always enthralled her, the way each tiny detail, each window, each grape leaf, was captured with stunning accuracy and realism. When she stared at it, it transformed from its true cherry tones: she saw the blue of the sky, the emerald of the vines, the rich brown of the earth, dusty between the rows, where the workers had trod. She was in a bad habit of sitting in front of the buffet and simply staring, letting her daydreams catch hold of her and pull her up from the chapel, spiral her through the ceiling, above the clubhouse, until she floated somewhere nameless and boundaryless, where her mind was all that limited her adventures.
/> She…
Someone was coming. Several someones, judging by the low thud of boots. She heard the male voice – “in here” – and her ears perked at the sound of her father’s familiar tenor. James was with him, she heard. And there was a third…that one she didn’t recognize. He had a deep voice, and a funny accent she’d never heard before.
Too late to escape, she realized they were coming into the chapel. She’d never been caught during one of her private sojourns into this special and forbidden place, but she wasn’t eager to find out what would happen if she was. In a series of practiced motions, she swung open the doors of the buffet, whisked herself inside, and pulled them shut again. She could sit sideways, with her legs drawn up, and a single thread of light seeped through the two doors, striking her across her thighs, giving her just enough of a glow to see the dim shapes of her small hands. She breathed slowly, shallowly, and went perfectly still, listening, as her father, James, and the stranger entered the chapel, closed the door behind them, and took seats at the table.
The thick clawed feet of the chairs scraped at the hardwood floor as they drew back and were scooted forward again. Someone coughed; James, she thought.
Then Ghost said, “Mercy, Justin filled you in on our situation?”
In a deep voice that cupped each word in soft hands, smoked and easy, the stranger, Mercy, said, “Yes, sir. It’s the Carpathians giving you trouble, right?”
That was a word she wasn’t supposed to know, the Carpathians. She didn’t know much, if she admitted it – no one told her things. But she was small and church-mouse-silent most of the time; she heard snatches of conversation. She knew the Carpathians were another club, and that they were no friends of Daddy’s.
“Yeah,” Ghost said. “It started out with them wanting a pissing contest. Let ‘em piss, I thought. But then there was that business with Laverne.”
Ava went cold inside at the mention of Laverne, her stomach knotting painfully like when she gorged herself on Tootsie Rolls each Halloween. Laverne was Pat’s old lady; she was thirty-two, dark-haired, and left bright red lipstick prints behind on Ava’s cheeks when she kissed her and fussed over what a “doll” she was. She smelled like thick smoky perfume and her high heels made click-click sounds when she walked through the clubhouse, or Maggie’s kitchen.
Two weeks ago, Pat had called the house and asked if Laverne had been by. Ava remembered the moment: Maggie toweling her damp hands on the tail of her shirt as she cradled the phone between her ear and shoulder and frowned at the wet stack of clean plates she’d left on the counter. “No, I haven’t seen her today. Have you tried the salon?” But Laverne hadn’t been at the salon; she hadn’t been anywhere that any of them could find. Three days later, Ava learned through an eavesdropping session as her mother talked on the phone to Nell, the police found Laverne’s body in the backseat of a Cadillac parked under the bridge. She was dead, badly beaten, and had been raped – a word Ava wouldn’t understand for a few more years.
Since the incident, after the black-curtained funeral, a pall had settled over the club. The Carpathians were on the tips of everyone’s tongues. Ava felt the churning in the atmosphere, the restless need for male action.
James said, “We heard what you’ve been doing in New Orleans,” in his crusty smoker’s voice. “Bob says you do good work.”
“Well…” the stranger said. “That’s nice o’ him.” His voice – there was such depth to it, layers of richness she’d never heard in Tennessee. It wasn’t merely Southern; it belonged to a special place, one that was a world unto itself.
“We’d like you to stay up here with us for a few weeks,” James said. “See if you can–”
“Hold up a sec,” Ghost said. His chair creaked as he rose from it; his boots thumped across the floor.
Ava gasped as she heard his hand on the cabinet door, but she had nowhere to go. She’d been caught. Her heart stuttered in her chest. All she could do now was pray the punishment wasn’t too severe.
The doors pulled wide, and there was her father, crouched down in front of her, his wallet chain dangling off one hip and coiling on the floor like a bright silver snake. His face, suntanned and lined around the eyes, was set off by his bright dancing eyes, the white glimmer of teeth as he flashed her a grin that told her she was in so much trouble, but she was his little girl, and he wouldn’t resort to blatant scolding.
She breathed the tiniest sigh of relief.
“What?” James asked, and coughed.
“We have a highly trained, black ops spy in the room, boys.” Ghost reached into the cabinet, palm held up for her to take, and Ava slid her little fingers against his and let him tow her out into the room, standing up with her head angled down toward the ground, long tangled hair falling across her face on either side, hiding her blush. Ghost set his hand on the top of her head as he straightened beside her.
“You want to tell us what you were doing in here?” he asked in that scary-calm voice of his. Mom was all about yelling and fit-pitching. Her disciplinary style was loud. But Daddy…Daddy just got quiet. One glance was usually enough to send grown men running. Ava had never tested him beyond “the look.” Not before, anyway; she was afraid she just had.
“I’m sorry,” she said to the toes of her sneakers. “I just…”
“Just what?” Ghost’s fingers tickled at her scalp.
Her fascination with the delicate carvings of the table and buffet seemed foolish now, considering she knew she should never have been in here in the first place. Besides, while the furniture was glorious, and the focal point of her staring, it wasn’t her main attraction to the room.
“I just like being in here,” she said in a miserable voice. “I’m sorry. I won’t come in again.”
“Hey, sweetheart,” James said, and she lifted her head. “You understand why you can’t be in here, right?”
She nodded, only dimly aware of what he was saying. Her gaze had been drawn away from his friendly, craggy face to the next chair over, to the stranger whose voice so captivated her ears.
He was tall; so much of him sprouted up above the glossy tabletop, his reflection in it seeming to lengthen him further. His arms were long, quite long, and rounded at the tops with muscle, bared by his sleeveless shirt, browned from the sun and dusted with coarse dark hair below the elbows. His hands seemed too large for comprehension, too large for his body, even, like he still needed to grow into them. And grow into them he would, most likely, because he was young, she noted, as her eyes traveled up his tan throat to his face. Older than Aidan, but younger than her father and James. He was old enough to wear the club colors. And his face…she was enchanted.
His nose was a little too large and sharp, his jaw narrow, his lips thin. His eyes were dark and deep-set, staring at her with rapt attention from beneath straight, black brows. His hair was black and fell in silky, straight hanks across his ears and forehead. His eyelashes, she noted when he blinked, were long and black and curled.
He was beautiful, in the way that a Doberman was beautiful: better looked at through a fence.
“Because we talk about club business in here,” James was telling her, “and we don’t want you to know any of that, because we want to keep you safe, right?”
Ava forced her eyes to the MC president, and nodded. “Yes, sir.” Though she didn’t understand, and never had. It was all so vague, this idea of club business and keeping safe.
And then, because she couldn’t seem to help herself, her eyes returned to the stranger.
One corner of his mouth lifted in a small smile. His eyes, black in this dim interior light, sparkled.
Her chest tightened and she didn’t understand why.
“Ava,” Ghost said. “This is Mercy. He’s gonna be hanging around for a few weeks.”
Mercy.
“Hi, Ava,” he said, giving her a little two-fingered wave across the table.
“Hi,” she said, and felt her cheeks grow hot.
That was the m
oment, she would later reflect, when she first became achingly aware of her gender.
**
Present Day
“Is it always like this?” Ronnie asked. He had to lean in close, until their shoulders bumped into one another, to be heard above the roar of the music.
Ava sipped her red Solo cup of Budweiser and scanned the clubhouse parking lot set before them like a carnival. Makeshift steel tent poles mounted in buckets of Quikrete supported the dozens of interlacing strands of colored Christmas lights that draped the parking lot in brilliant, festive hues. White lights had been used beneath the porch canopy and around the potted evergreens. The effect was dazzling: brilliant pinpricks of red, blue, green, yellow, and white catching on jewelry, on amber beer bottles, on glittering motorcycles, in the slick convex curves of eyes. The air seemed filled with fireflies.
Outside, a portable stereo system blasted Jackyl. Beer-stocked galvanized tubs of ice were stationed at convenient intervals, chips and salsa and other munchies set out on gingham-draped outdoor dining tables. Dogs talked, laughed, and milled about, drinking and admiring one another’s bikes. Rottie was working the keg, filling cups; he’d winked at Ava when he’d handed her hers, a fast, questioning glance sent Ronnie’s way. Can your college boy handle this? his eyes had asked.
I hope, she’d said with an eyebrow shrug.
“Only for big blowout parties like this one,” she answered. “It’s usually more low key than this.”
“You should have seen the ones they had when we were in high school,” Leah said. “Now those were crazy.” She twirled the beer around in her Solo cup. “My parents forbid me to come to another one, actually.” She shrugged. “Oops.”
Ronnie shook his head, sipped his beer, and watched Collier and RJ fawn over a New Orleans member’s brand new Fat Boy.
Ava didn’t tell him that if he thought this was crazy, he should see the inside of the clubhouse. Ava knew the dancing girls would be doing their thing. Groupie girls would be doing their thing. There would be clouds of pot smoke. Someone would have busted out a little recreational coke, despite Ghost’s strict no-narcotics policy within the club.
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