“Should we call you fucking Jesus now, seeing as you can rise from the dead?” He snarls at the man sitting across from him.
Jones stays silent however returns his glare two fold. Pipe doesn’t do us the same courtesy, not that I ever expected he would, the guy can talk under wet cement.
“Not gonna say it’s not good to see you in the flesh, because it is, but I’ve got a question too. Did you turn into a pussy while you were hiding out somewhere playing dead like a fucking cockroach?”
“What the fuck’s that supposed to mean,” Jones spits.
“Exactly what I fucking said. You must have, because don’t pussies have nine lives and all that shit?” Fucking smartass. I’m not sure whether this is going to be the most constructive way to have this conversation, but I don’t get involved. These guys have been friends for forty years, however they want to sort their shit out it’s not my place to get in between him and them.
Scowling at him Jones folds his arms across his chest reclining further into the couch. He doesn’t appear fazed by Pipe baiting him, I figure years later he’s got to be used to it.
“I suppose it would look like that to you wouldn’t it? After all, you’ve got no fucking idea what’s going on yet, so how about you shut your fucking mouth until I’ve had a chance to explain.”
Pipe releases a chuckle, easing further into his own seat, but Reaper who’s been sitting in a wing seat off to the side steeples his fingers under his chin saying,
“Yeah, you want to explain why it is that my best fucking friend for forty-five years up, and to my knowledge gets himself and his wife, who I’m assuming is alive and well,” Jones nods while Reaper is busy reigning in his inner beast. “They get fucking killed, only to pop up years later not so dead after all? Because if you can explain that shit to me in a way that erases the shit you put us through, go for it. If not get the fuck out. You can’t just walk your ass back in here after all this time, expect a pat on the back, and a beer you weak piece of shit.”
Standing Reaper storms out of the office, slamming the door after him. Pipe looks up chucking again. Fucking crazy bastard.
“He always has been a sensitive Sally.” His expression grows more serious as he adds, “You know you gutted him, yeah? You’re gonna need to give him a minute, he’s got a lot on his plate right now, and this might be the final straw, so you need to back off, let him come to you.”
He’s not wrong. It was as if Reaper lost a child when Jones died. They’d been closer than any of us, and finding out his life-long friend was never coming back did a number on him. He hasn’t been the same since, and if Jones hadn’t come back, if he was actually dead, I don’t think he ever would’ve been completely okay again.
Both of their mom’s had been old ladies of Devil’s Spawn brothers, got married around the same time, got pregnant, and had babies with only a few months separating them. Jones and Reaper were close from the time they could walk until the day Jones faked his own death. Going as far as to carry on the tradition; getting married, raising kids, and remaining in the MC together. I can see why Reaper would’ve taken this new the hardest, but that’s not to say Pipe or Priest remain unaffected.
Taking the lapse in conversation as a good time to start, Jones proceeds to explain where he was all this time. What led him to make the decision to leave? And finally why he felt he couldn’t come to them about it in the first place. I’d heard most of it, bar the details of the threats made against his, and the other families.
“I did what I thought was right. If you were in my position you would’ve done the same fucking thing, and you know it. We didn’t only take an oath to protect the citizens of our country, we took an oath to protect each other from any sort of danger when we took this operation on.”
“Yeah, and what about you? Who had your fucking back while you’ve been out there doing recon for the same goddamn organisation that threw you under the bus to begin with?” Priest enquires. There’s anger and disappointment in his tone, but no malice.
“It was better than the alternative, trust me. I wasn’t doing field work anyway. I had legs on the ground doing that shit for me. All I needed to do was analyse the Intel, crack through a few firewalls and security protocols to access the supporting information, then deliver it back to the bureau electronically. Nothing more to it than that, not hard work that would’ve put me in the line of fire.”
Jones is confident he wasn’t in any danger, but the other two don’t look convinced.
“That’s the part of this I don’t get,” Pipe mutters. “Killing you off, even if it was a bullshit cover, is fucking extreme. I can’t understand what could be severe enough to require inter-agency co-operation in order to make a ploy like that work. Those motherfuckers hate each other, to get them to co-operate would’ve taken an act of God. Or there’s something you’re not telling us.”
That’s another thing. According to Jones, it wasn’t only the FBI involved in the sting to bring Damon and his contacts down. It was the CIA and DEA as well. And Pipe is right again, the three, three letter acronym agencies despise each other. Effectively all three are attempting to do the same job, just coming at it from different angles.
On a whole you’d think that would mean three times the success, three times the productivity, but you’d be dead fucking wrong. More often than not we step on each other’s toes, not necessarily intentionally, but because there’s no inter-agency communication, or sharing of information we can’t possibly know what the other is up to. Needless to say, tempers run hot, insults fly, occasionally someone will do something to fuck with the other that can be as severe as sabotaging an operation, and thus the cycle of hatred continues. It’ll never change, so we learn to work with it the way it is. It took me a solid five years on the FBI’s pay role before I learnt to manoeuvre my way around the bureaucracy. Personally I think it wasn’t the Navy that taught me patience, it was working with those cocksuckers.
Jones looks pained, but he finally gives us the one detail that makes this entire situation make sense. It was the final piece of the puzzle, and now I wish he hadn’t said anything.
“You want to know what I’m holding back? You’ve got no fucking idea how hard it was to see the fucking pictures of our kids, photos the sick fuck took at close range. He mutilated those fucking photos, sent them one-by-one with letters that described exactly what he was going to do to them.” Priest and Pipe look murderous, and I can’t say that I’m not feeling the same. Jones isn’t done yet though. “I’ve got girls, two beautiful girls, Kane has one too, what he said he would do to my little girls was fucking sick, twisted beyond anything I’ve heard or seen before. And you know we’ve seen some shit. Well this was worse, far fucking worse. Some of us had wives at the time, do you think he spared them in his plan? Gang banging doesn’t come close to what he said he’d do to them. Sally isn’t like Brenna, Kane. She’s not strong enough to survive something like that. Even Brenna, Jesus, fuck Kane, they wouldn’t last an hour with that motherfucker, let alone longer. It was so bad, what they showed me, that if he followed through with what he said in those letters, I would’ve prayed they died quick, so they didn’t have to suffer what he had planned.” Sucking in a deep breath Jones finishes with, “So yeah, when the bureau told me the only weak link in the whole goddamned chain was me, that I was the only one he could successfully identify, and that he’d come for my family first, I abso-fucking-lutely said I’d do whatever it took to make sure that never happened. Pinning that shit on the president of Satan’s Sons brother at the time wasn’t my idea. I didn’t fucking agree that it wouldn’t come without blowback, and from what I hear you guys had your fair share of that. You can blame the F-B-fucking-I for that shit. In their eyes it was a happy coincidence that he was in the same place at the same time. You can all judge me however you want, I could give two shits, but what I did, I did for our families, so you could go home at night and they’d still be there.”
After that the tension in the r
oom both increased and ebbed at the same time. Awareness of why Jones chose to leave, the severity of what drove him away hit home hard. Thoughts of Priss, what she might have suffered at the hands of an animal bombard me from all angles. Flashes of her smile, her sweet laugh, all the ways she fills up my life, makes everything okay mixes with the gruesome images the cynical part of my mind’s concocted.
These thoughts send adrenaline racing through my veins, and me fighting the deep heart wrenching pain that comes from knowing how close she’d come, how close they’d all come to losing the people they love most. Even though the grave picture Jones painted us was just that; grave, it helps to know he didn’t leave on a weak excuse like we were all thinking he did. Threats are more often than not, only threats. Based on what Jones said this was one of the rare times a threat escalated into more, something tangible, something that shouldn’t be ignored.
The bureau assessed that only one percent of all catalogued reports involving harassment, stalking, and threats of violence surpass your genuine garden variety whack-job looking to fixate relatively innocently on the object of their desire. It’s the unpredictable nature of the class of person we deal with on a daily basis, coupled with the lack of information that makes it hard establish whether or not to categorise a report fit for shredding, or investigation. This was one of the harder parts of my job, being responsible for making these decisions. If I was wrong it could literally be a matter of life or death. But that’s no longer a concern of mine. And I honestly, it’s a monkey off my back I wasn’t even aware was having so much of an impact on me.
Less than a week post conversation with Jones major changes took effect. They effected all four of us with varying degrees intensity, me less than the others, but I still suffered some of the fall out. Jones’ return set a chain of events in motion that have been a long time coming.
Priest, Pipe, and Reaper sat their families down as agreed the day after Jones paid his first visit to Priss and I. At this point they weren’t aware he was in the picture yet, but their timing couldn’t have been more perfect. The three day deadline was a hard limit for me. I wasn’t going to budge, and Jones knew it. I hated I was put in the position to keep this from my brothers in the first place, there was no sense in drawing it out.
Each family took the news in a relatively similar way. First there was outrage, followed closely by the disappointment that their patriarchs spent years blatantly lying to them. But after all that there was acceptance, begrudging acceptance because they loved their men, but acceptance nonetheless. It wasn’t quite as straightforward as that, but in essence that’s what it amounted to in the end.
Months later, and Priest in particular is still working to rebuild his relationship with his family. His family took it the hardest by far, Brenna specifically. Kendall was disorientated by the news, but with Cage to support her through it, especially because he was struggling through the same thing, they took solace in each other making it out the other end relatively unscathed. Brenna was destroyed. She took it harder than anyone ever anticipated. She still is. Brenna isn’t the same woman she was before Priest came clean, I’d go as far as to say she’s been permanently altered by it. And not in a good way.
Having unconditional trust in her husband, Brenna created her world around him, so when that trust was broken and her world categorically fell apart it left her questioning everything she used to take for granted. Brenna moved out for a few weeks after letting the news sink in, she claimed she only needed the time alone to think, but as the days turned to weeks it was pretty evident that shit was festering, not going away. It took less than a month for Priest’s inner Neanderthal to raise its head and for him to bring her home practically kicking and screaming. I can’t say I blame him. If Priss tried to leave me, I say tried because I won’t let it get that far, I’d tie her to our bed not letting her free until she promised she was mine, and that she wasn’t going anywhere. It’s a moot point because she knows what she means to me, that she’s my saviour. At the end of the day she loves me too much to make me feel the pain a separation from her would cause. I can barely go an hour without her, a week might very well kill me.
Out of everyone Steel took the news surprisingly well. After an earful from Lou, that was a given, their family unit has stayed pretty much unaffected. It suffered a blow sure, but there isn’t any lasting damage.
The real shock was the easy way the brothers handled the news. If I was asked what the general reaction would be, I would’ve opted for not only having the shit kicked out of us, but possibly removal of our ink too. That would’ve been a bitter pill to swallow, being ex-communicated from the MC that brought me back to myself, but I would’ve understood if that ended up being their decision.
Sitting around the table during Church, Priest laid it all out, no detail spared. They deserved that, at least. The whole story, uncensored, even if it was well and truly past due. Priest opened the floor to questions when he finished, answering each one truthfully, with as much information as he was permitted to give. One of our redeeming points according to the brothers I talked to afterward, was that we’d already handed our resignations prior to calling the Church meeting. If we were still active FBI agents who knows which way they would’ve voted.
At Pipe’s suggestion, after four and a half hours of storytelling and question and answer time, Priest excused us allowing the brothers to vote on two issues. One was whether we would remain members of the MC, and the second was if we’d retain our current leadership positions. I won’t lie, I was on fucking edge the entire forty minutes they deliberated, and I wasn’t the only one.
All-in-all nineteen fully patched Devil’s Spawn MC members voted that day, and it was a unanimous yes on both counts. We would stay, and the hierarchy would remain unchanged.
As for Priss and I, she moved in within a month of the news going viral around Blackwater, and after a few occasions that had me seeing red, seeking out motherfuckers that were causing her trouble. It was over me no less, so there was nothing for it than for me to put a stop to it. And I did, in a very permanent way.
News hit town the way it I expected it would. There were reactions ranging all the way from excitement there were real live “spies”, their word not mine, through to disgust they socialised openly with “narks”, again their word not mine. Priss bore the brunt of that shit, and to say I was fucking furious would’ve been an understatement. She’d had her car keyed, windows smashed, the siding on her house spray painted with the word “whore”. But the last straw for me was when she was grabbed by some asshole at Rough Shod one night as she was making her way through the crowd of people to me.
The asshole has already made himself known to the MC for assaulting a woman outside the bar a few years back. Luckily the woman was left relatively unharmed, but that wasn’t his original intention. It was just sheer dumb luck he was stopped before he could take it too far. She only had a couple of scrapes and bruises for her troubles, she was terrified and saw a counsellor a few times, but otherwise she was okay. None of that mattered to us, Devil’s Spawn doesn’t tolerate violence towards women in any form.
Ricky Pointis was lucky he walked away alive after the beating I put on him. After thinking it was okay to put his filthy hands on my woman, I wasn’t so sure he’d be walking away this time. Thankfully, for me, Reaper was there that night talking me off the ledge before I found myself on the opposite side of the bars for a change. Priss wouldn’t have been happy if after all this time we finally get it together, and she has to spend the next twenty-five to life visiting me in prison.
Reaper ended up taking care of it not trusting me in my current state of rage to keep myself under control so as not to kill him. Seeing the bruise forming on Priss’ delicate skin in the shape of a handprint, I’m not surprised but I am grateful, that the next time I saw Ricky out-and-about he was sporting matching casts on both arms. Obviously Reaper feels the same way about women being manhandled as I do.
We later found out R
icky was the one behind all damage done to Priss’ property and possessions. He’s not a fan of law enforcement, apparently being arrested and then incarcerated twice, both for eighteen months will do that to a man. The arrests were just, and both for domestic violence involving his now ex-wife. In hindsight, we did Blackwater a favour, but personally I see it as a public service that we took out the trash, teaching him a lesson he wouldn’t soon forget. Meeting the ends of Reaper’s fist has hopefully curbed his need to take his anger out on defenceless women in the future. I honestly don’t believe he’ll survive another go around with the pissed off biker tattooist if he pulls that shit again.
Priss moving in with me might’ve been a fucking good day, but the day she told me she was carrying my baby trumped any I’ve had to date. She was a week late, so she took a test while I’d gone to check up on the guys I supervise at Chasers. The two assholes that own the place with me refuse to teach the newbies fuck all, so I end up with the unenviable task. They’d get there’s because I was intending on hiring a new body work specialist in the next few months. My area of expertise is mechanical, anything that has moving parts, so those to asshats were going to have to work together to train the new guy. I’d been spending as much time as possible with Priss since getting together slacking on my duties, which Cage reminded me of by calling every ten minutes for three hours solid.
Saviour: A Devil's Spawn MC Novel (Savior Book 3) Page 24