by George Rowe
For me, the homestretch would prove the hardest. Now that I knew the end date, I just wanted the damn thing over with. I’d been effectively off the grid for a month now, walking the high wire without a net. There were no cover teams, no backup at all. Kevin Duffy, my old friend from the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department, had asked for increased patrols around Shooter’s place and the house on Espirit Circle. John Carr was calling every day to make sure I was still alive.
I felt like a soldier on short-time, nervous about getting picked off in the waning days before leaving the war zone. Whenever friends asked me to join them for a night on the town I’d decline, worried about getting ambushed. I was getting a stiff neck from looking over my shoulder.
By Wednesday, one day before the takedown, everything was set. I would be waiting at the house Thursday morning at 6:00 a.m., when lawmen from the ATF and the Riverside Sheriff’s Department would arrive to escort me, Jenna and Sierra to a safe place—provided, of course, Jenna wanted to go. That was still a big question mark, given the bomb I was about to drop on her.
If all went according to plan, we’d head across town to Shooter’s place and pick up Old Joe, whose marching orders were to pack a bag, stay sober and meet us outside the trailer between six and six thirty. John Carr had cleared my friend to stay with us until the U.S. Marshals could make a decision on whether to take us into the WITSEC program.
And then I phoned Jenna.
“I’m coming home tonight.”
“Fuck you. The locks have all been changed and your garage door opener doesn’t work.”
“I’m coming home, Jenna.”
“You’re not welcome here,” she said, and hung up on me.
If something was going to happen, I wanted to go down protecting my home and family—such as it was. Melodramatic, maybe. But that’s how I was feeling on the eve of the takedown.
On Wednesday night—as over seven hundred lawmen from across the country were converging on Southern California—I went to my last Vagos church in JB’s garage. I was nervous as hell as I sat in that meeting, and I wasn’t even wearing a wire. I was so close to getting off that wild fuckin’ ride, and yet coincidence had put me in a room with every member of the Hemet chapter just hours before the shit hit the fan. Most of these boys would be staring through bars come this time tomorrow.
I looked around at the faces in that garage—faces of men who had called me brother for the past three years. Some of these boys were friends, decent people who’d made the mistake of throwing in with bullies and assholes. I wasn’t out to hurt all of them, and I’d asked John to spare a handful of those Vagos come judgment day. But my handler had made no promises. If free passes were to be handed out, Special Agent Carr wasn’t saying.
So there I sat in JB’s garage stressed out of my mind. It was an eternal hour and a half of paranoid thoughts and jangled nerves. Someone knows. Big Roy is looking at me funny. I’m too quiet. I’m fidgeting. My armpits are drenched. They’re gonna fuckin’ kill me, I just know it.
The rational part of me laid this off to an overactive imagination, but, man, the damn thing was galloping wild. And it didn’t help that it was the weirdest friggin’ church I’d ever attended. I mean, nothing got done. It was just one big party in the garage that night. Everyone was in a great mood.
I asked Big Roy if I should read the minutes.
Don’t bother.
Should I collect the dues?
Naw, we’ll do it next week.
Motherfucker, there is no next week.
After church adjourned, the whole chapter wanted to keep the party going and raise some hell around town. Come on, George, ride with us, pleaded the boys. I told them thanks, but I had things to do. Truth was, I was worried I’d end up taking a sand nap.
I motored over to Shooter’s place and left the Heritage in his garage. The ATF would collect that bike later. Then I gathered the leaf bags stuffed with belongings I’d been collecting over the past month and tossed them into the truck bed.
When everything was ready, I called Jenna again.
“I’ll be home in a few minutes,” I told her.
“I’m shutting the lights off and going to bed,” she snapped, then hung up.
As promised, the house was dark when I pulled into the driveway.
It was late. Close to midnight now.
I snuck in through the garage and entered the kitchen, pulled off my boots and headed into the hallway. I passed Old Joe’s bedroom and noticed Jenna had turned it into a nursery. There was a crib and a changing table in there now. I moved quietly past Sierra’s room and entered the master bedroom.
After stripping off my clothes, I slipped beneath the covers next to Jenna, mentally wrung out yet too wired to sleep. If my fiancée knew I was there—and I suspect she did—she wasn’t letting on. Waves of emotion washed over me, from relief to hope to anxiety to happiness to sickening, sweat-popping fear. Sometime after 5:00 a.m. I got tired of staring at the nightstand clock, climbed from bed, threw my clothes back on and headed into the kitchen to brew coffee and smoke a cigarette.
John Carr’s orders were to stay put and wait for a police escort out of Hemet, but I was never good at following orders. I was dying to know what was happening out there, and Jack Fite’s place was less than a mile away. Jack was on the ATF’s target list, specifically his little meth stash out near the backyard shed. Curiosity had me by the shorthairs, so about twenty minutes before takedown, I finished the coffee, lit my third cigarette and slipped from the house.
As I drove through the dim streets of Valle Vista, headed toward Highway 74, I realized disobeying orders had been a mistake. Two Riverside County cruisers sped past, flying in the direction I’d just come. I arrived at Jack Fite’s house a few minutes later. The ATF had hit him early. There was an armored truck parked at the curb and federal agents swarming the property carrying automatic weapons and wearing bulletproof vests.
Those SRT boys weren’t playing around.
At that moment my Nextel rang. It was Special Agent Jeff Ryan on the line—apparently released from shooting-range duty—calling to say he was on his way. Shit. No time for sightseeing, I had to get back to the house fast.
In just the few minutes I’d been gone, four deputy sheriffs’ cruisers had arrived on Espirit Circle. The street was sealed now. With that much protection I felt like the president of the United States.
As I jumped from the pickup and made a beeline for the house, Special Agent Ryan emerged from his unmarked SUV to intercept me. Behind him strode a stocky Mexican deputy and a ponytailed female officer, both wearing the pressed tan and drab green uniform of the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department.
“Everything okay, George?” asked Jeff as we walked toward the front door.
“I’ll let you know after I wake Jenna,” I told him.
“Better hurry. There’s not much time.”
I flipped on the living room lights and left Jeff and the two deputies while I headed down the hall to wake Jenna. I didn’t know what to expect. I mean, on the best of mornings, waking that woman was like waking Satan himself. And this was nowhere near the best of mornings. My fiancée was about to get the mother of all wake-up calls.
I clicked on a lamp and sat on the edge of the bed.
Man, I felt like I was lowering my ass on a lit keg of dynamite.
“Jenna,” I whispered, giving her shoulder a gentle shake. “Hey, Jenna. You’ve got to get up.”
She rolled over and blinked sleepily at me.
“Baby, you’ve got to get up,” I said softly. “The cops are here.”
She pushed herself up on her elbows, instantly awake.
“Where’s the warrant?”
That girl had sold and used just about every drug imaginable, and she must’ve figured the law had finally caught up with her.
“They can’t come in here without a warrant,” she insisted.
“It ain’t like that,” I said.
“What do you
mean it ain’t like that? Tell them they need a warrant or get the fuck out.”
Jenna was building up a head of steam now. She threw off the covers and lurched from bed, revealing her black Vagos Old Lady pajamas. Later she would claim she sniffed something different in the house that morning. Not the usual scent of coffee and cigarettes. This was something different. A sterile, antiseptic smell was how she described it. The smell of cops.
She charged from the bedroom, blowing past the female deputy in the hallway with a “What the fuck?” then storming into the living room, where the Mexican deputy and Special Agent Ryan were waiting. The law was ill prepared for the coming of Satan’s child.
“What the fuck?!” Jenna raged at the two strangers. “Where’s the warrant?!”
Jeff gestured toward the couch. “Have a seat, Jenna, and I’ll explain—”
“I don’t fucking know you,” she flashed, cutting him off. “Get the fuck out of my house!”
Then she turned to me. “What’s going on, George?”
“Just listen to the man, baby,” I said.
“Listen to what? Somebody better tell me what the fuck is going on.”
Agent Ryan took his cue, addressing Jenna as if he’d been practicing in front of a mirror.
“For the last three years George has been working undercover in conjunction with the ATF and local law enforcement to bring down the Vagos motorcycle gang.”
My fiancée stood there blinking at the man, looking as if she’d been sledgehammered. She was trying to process what she’d just heard. Only she couldn’t. It was too much.
Ryan kept flogging the dead horse. “Right now there are seventy-two raids taking place throughout this city, Riverside County, Orange County and San Bernardino County,” he informed her.
Jenna turned to me with a look of stunned disbelief.
“Is this true, George?”
“It’s true,” I said.
It took a few more seconds to wrap her mind around it, but once reality clicked in, I thought the girl’s head might explode.
“You’re a motherfucking snitch?!”
I honestly hadn’t known what would come from Jenna’s mouth when she learned the truth. Maybe I’d been naive, but for some reason I’d never expected “motherfucking snitch.” When we’d first met, she’d had a needle hanging from her arm, bruises all over her emaciated body and no shoes. I was paying for a $300,000 roof over her head and had given her a safe place to stay. I’d cared for her little girl, cleaned the shit from her sheets and taken cold showers with that woman to keep her alive.
And now I was a snitch.
Check that. I was a “motherfucking snitch.”
I hung my head. I was at a complete loss for words, so Special Agent Ryan spoke for me.
“First of all, it’s not like that . . .,” he began.
“Not like what?!” Jenna exploded on him. “You tell me this. That he’s a snitch? It is like that! I want all of you out of my house right now! Get the fuck out of my house!”
“I’m sorry, but we can’t do that,” said Jeff. “It’s not safe for you here anymore. You’ll have to come with us.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You have fifteen minutes to gather your things, and then we’re going to escort you, George and your little girl to a safe place.”
“When am I coming back?”
Jeff fidgeted, then said, “You’re not.”
As reality crashed down on her like an avalanche, Jenna freaked.
“Oh, my God! Oh, my God!”
I tried to hold her, but she pushed me away.
“Oh, my God!” she shouted again before bolting out the front door in her pajamas screaming, “They’re going to kill us! We’re all going to die!”
Right about then John Carr called me on the Nextel. He wanted to know if I’d broken the news to Jenna yet.
“Yeah, we told her.”
“How’s she taking it?”
“Not well.”
“Let me talk to her.”
“You can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because right now she’s running down the street screaming, ‘We’re going to die.’ ”
I hung up with John and put in a call to Jenna’s dad. Nobody was better at getting that girl under control than Bill. I woke him from a sound sleep.
“I know it’s early, Pops, but I have to tell you something. Something important.”
“Yeah, okay. I’m listening.”
“I’ve been working undercover with the federal government to take down the Vagos. That’s why when you were asking me what was going on I couldn’t tell you.”
Silence followed, but I could hear Bill scrambling out of bed.
“You still there, Pops?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I’m here,” said Bill, trying to shake the cobwebs. “What are you telling me?”
“I’m gonna put you on the phone with a federal agent,” I told him. “He’ll explain everything. And I need you to talk to your daughter. She’s freaking out.”
“Let me call you right back.”
I handed Jeff the cell phone and went outside to locate Jenna.
There was a glow in the eastern sky behind the San Jacinto Mountains. A new day was coming, and many of the neighbors were in their yards wearing robes and pajamas, wondering why their street was suddenly infested with law enforcement. Jenna’s ranting had flushed them from their homes like a stick poked in an ant hole.
I spotted my crazed fiancée at her neighbor’s place, bawling on the shoulder of a woman she’d known since she was in high school.
“Jenna, your dad’s on the phone,” I called from a safe distance.
“Get away from me,” she spat, pointing a warning finger at me.
“I’m not going near you, okay? But he wants to talk to you. Phone’s in the house.”
She rushed past me and back through the front door. I followed her inside, but she was already gone when I entered the living room.
“She went that way,” said Jeff, pointing down the hall.
Jenna was in the master bedroom’s walk-in closet behind a closed door. I could hear snippets of conversation as she cried to her father.
“Fucking cops . . . turning over the house . . . George is a rat . . . want to take us away . . .”
Whatever Bill said to his daughter worked, because when Jenna emerged from the closet, all the anger had drained right out of her. Now she just looked completely spent. When she spotted me in the bedroom she paused to study me like I was some curious abstract painting. There was no recognition behind those eyes. It was as if my fiancée was gazing at a complete stranger. And I suppose that wasn’t far from the truth.
And now she had fifteen minutes. Fifteen short minutes to leave her life behind and start over with a man she no longer knew.
This imposter.
This motherfucking snitch.
Without a word Jenna drifted like a zombie without direction into the hallway. The female deputy corralled her and led her toward the nursery.
“Do you have kids?” I heard Jenna say. Her voice cracking. Sad and lost. “I don’t know what to take. What would you take?”
“Anything you’ll need for the baby,” replied the deputy. “Take enough clothes for a week. Anything else we’ll get to you later.”
“We have a dog,” said Jenna wearily. “We have birds and a rabbit. I think we have a cat. I just want to lie down. I want to lie down and sleep.”
Together they packed the portable crib, a changing table, the stroller and the car seat, along with all the baby clothes from the shower the week before. Then they hauled it out to the minivan and loaded it inside. Last to go was little Sierra, wrapped in a blanket and half asleep. Still wearing her VOL pajamas and a pair of flip-flops, Jenna carried her daughter to the van and strapped her into the car seat.
“I haven’t brushed my teeth,” was the last thing Jenna said to the deputy.
“No time,” came the reply.
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Jenna tucked her pregnant belly behind the wheel of the Caravan while I climbed into my truck just ahead of her. We had two black and whites and two undercover escorts as the parade began to roll, headed across town to round up Old Joe.
When the escort arrived at Shooter’s place, my buddy was waiting outside the trailer with his bag packed and ready. He walked to my truck, slung the bag into the cab and climbed in after it.
“Think I was going to leave you behind?” I grinned at him.
“Well, the thought did cross my mind,” said Joe. “But I’m sure glad to see you.”
With Joe now aboard, the procession began rolling again. But doing an about-face in the cul-de-sac at the end of Shooter’s street created a clusterfuck. The cops didn’t know which way to turn. Eventually they got it straightened out, though, and the circus rolled out of town at last.
We headed north on Highway 79 toward the range of hills known as Lambs Canyon. The undercover cars soon dropped off, and three more county cruisers joined the parade through Beaumont, the town where John and I had met for all those Friday meetings at the Little Luau Hawaiian BBQ.
Guess no more chicken katsu.
It was about 7:00 a.m. and the sun was rising over the mountains when our five-car escort fell away and a California Highway Patrol cruiser led us onto the interstate. At that hour the I-10 heading west toward Los Angeles should have been bumper to bumper with morning commuters. But every lane was empty. There wasn’t a vehicle in sight. Just my truck, Jenna’s minivan and the Highway Patrol.
It was fuckin’ weird, man.
The trooper stayed in front of us for a mile, then turned off as a second CHP cruiser picked us up. Like clockwork, the same thing happened a mile later. This relay continued all the way down the I-10, the Highway Patrol passing us off like a baton from trooper to trooper.
As I’m driving along the interstate my cell phone is blowing up with voice mails and text messages from the Hemet Vagos. At first the messages voiced concern; “Are you alright, George? Did they get you too?” But at some point the Vagos had figured things out and the messages turned nasty. Now it was “Where the fuck are you, George?” and “We know you did this, you motherfucking rat.” I even got a voice mail from my ex-girlfriend Christie, who warned, “They’ll get you for this, George. You’re gonna die.”