“What are you going to do?” I ask fearfully.
“I’m going to hand it over,” Big George replies. “It’s the only thing I can do. Whatever happens after that is Dick’s problem,” he says, but he knows as well as I do that the Angels don’t discriminate when it comes to payback.
As if thinking about them has made them appear, the bell on the diner door rings and two bikers walk in, their heavy boots slapping on the floor. Big George and I look at each other for a beat and then he walks out to the front of house and I follow close behind him. I vaguely recognize the men, but I couldn’t put a name to their faces—partly because they’re both tattooed up to the hilt and one has a huge ring coming out of his lip that morphs his mouth into a perpetual sneer.
“Well aren’t you a pretty little thing,” the blonde biker says, and I wonder if the Angels teach that sense of entitlement or if it just comes with the territory.
“What can I get you?” I ask, nonplussed, forcing myself to remain civil. There is no point in getting them fired up when they are about to find out they aren’t going to get what they had come here for.
“Two whiskeys, straight up,” the guy with the shaved head and the hoop in his lip replies without breaking his stare from me, and I try not to shift uncomfortably.
“We don’t serve alcohol here. It’s a diner, not a bar,” I tell them, busying myself with filling some sugar bowls so I don’t have to look at them or the wolfish way they’re staring at me.
“Well I suggest you find some, sugar lips, before we get so thirsty and we do something stupid,” Blondie says, his voice full of menace. I have to bite my tongue to prevent saying anything about nothing being stupider than whatever his friend has done to his face.
“In the back, Aimee, there’s a bottle in the back,” Big George says, looking at me and nodding towards the kitchen. I know he’s just trying to avoid any trouble.
He’s doing the sensible, mature thing, but it riles me beyond my limit that they think they can just turn up and everyone should bow down to them, as if the angel on a crucifix tattoo they all have makes them special or important. It just makes them part of the problem, the problem that is strangling this town.
Without saying anything I turn on my heel and stomp into the kitchen. I know exactly where Big George keeps his secret stash; he’s not a big drinker, but everyone in this town needs a little swig sooner or later to calm their nerves. It’s just the way of things. As I walk back to the front of the diner with the whisky bottle in hand I can already overhear that the Angels aren’t happy with whatever Big George is telling them.
“What do you mean this is it? Where’s the rest?” Baldy asks, leaning threateningly over the counter with the half-empty envelope in his hands.
“There is no rest,” Big George says slowly and calmly, and I’m impressed by him yet again—he’s one of the few men that can stand up to the Angels without flinching, and that is saying a lot. “Dick dropped the cash off earlier, and that’s all there is,” he repeats, nodding towards the envelope that Blondie has now snatched out of his friend’s hand.
Blondie starts leafing through the cash, counting as he goes. “It’s not even half! What the fuck are we supposed to do with this?” What the fuck are we supposed to tell the Chief?” he asks explosively, looking at Big George like his eyes are about to pop out of his head.
“Drinks are up,” I say loudly, nudging the glasses that I’ve just filled almost to the brim with whisky in their general direction, trying to break the tension that’s crackling in the air.
My eyes flick over to the table at the back where two cops are sipping on their coffees as if this drama isn’t playing out in front of them. It’s not surprising; there’s no way the cops are going to get involved in a dispute over money between us and the Angels. It’s much easier for them just to pretend they’re completely unaware of what’s going on.
I want to scream at them, to ask them why they even bothered to become police officers in the first place, to remind them that they’re supposed to serve and protect and that they haven’t been protecting this town for a good long while. But I don’t do any of those things; I know there’s no point. Instead I concentrate my attention on the Angels in front of me that look like they’re hanging by a very thin thread.
The two bikers barely spare me a sidelong glance as they continue to stare at Big George. As if staring will suddenly magic the money that they’re missing out of thin air. “Well if good ol’ Dick can’t be fucked to cough up the cash, then maybe we need to send him a message,” the bald biker says quietly, the ring in his lip making his grim grin even more unpleasant.
“This doesn’t have anything to do with George. Why don’t you just crawl back under the rock that you came from?” I shout at them, unable to contain my anger and frustration any more.
What happens next all plays out so quickly that I don’t even realize what’s happened until it’s too late. The bald guy pulls a knife out of his pocket, and at the same time Blondie pushes me so I slam into the cupboards behind me.
There’s a grunt from Big George that sounds like an animal in pain and I can feel my eyes widen as I look from his face down to his left hand that is resting on the counter. But it’s not resting there anymore—it’s been pinned. The knife that Baldy had pulled out of his belt has been shoved through the palm of George’s hand and a puddle of blood is starting to pool around it.
“What the hell is the matter with you?” I explode without thinking. “You think stabbing George is going to get you your money? If you do then you’re even more stupid than you look,” I shout as I rush over to George, pulling the knife out of his hand. The wound isn’t big, but it’s deep. The knife has gone all the way through and, although I’m no doctor, it’s clear he’s going to need stitches.
“You better watch that smart mouth of yours, beautiful, unless you want to give us a reason to cut you too,” Blondie tells me menacingly before his friend picks up the bloody knife, slowly and deliberately, and then licks the tip, tasting George’s blood before he secrets it away to wherever it had come from in the first place.
“Threatening a girl. That’s impressive,” I say, my voice shaking from anger more than fear. “You’re sick, the lot of you. Just take your money and get the fuck out,” I tell them, not even looking in their direction as I wrap a clean dishtowel around George’s injured hand.
“Don’t push us, Aimee,” Baldy says as the other biker collects up the envelope and shoves it into a pocket in his leather jacket. “The Chief is going to hear about this, and you don’t want to make things any worse for yourself than you already have, sweet pea. Now tell Dick that we expect the rest of the money, with interest, at the end of next month or he’ll find himself even shorter than he already is,” the bald guy hisses, laughing at his own joke.
“How is he supposed to do that?” I ask, unable to keep my mouth shut. It was something I’d never been very good at—my dad used to say that I was born without a “brain to mouth” filter; anything that I think just tends to come spilling out before I can stop it. “You Angels have been sucking this town dry for years, so there is no more money!” I shriek at them.
“It’s protection money, sweetheart. That’s what you pay us for, for your own protection,” Blondie explains, speaking slowly as if he thinks I’m completely crazy, which I suppose I might seem to be to them.
“Protection from whom?” I ask, pulling myself up to my full height, ignoring Big George tugging on my uniform with his good hand, trying to get me to shut up.
“From us, hot lips, protection from us,” Blondie says menacingly as he and Baldy turn and walk out of the diner.
Without even giving them a second thought, I reach for my cell and dial 911. “Ambulance please,” I say, and stop when I see George shaking his head again and again. “You need an ambulance big guy. That hand is going to need stitches,” I point out.
“Hang up the phone, Aimee,” George says between gritted teeth as he looks down
at the towel covering his injured hand. “No ambulance, no hospitals,” he tells me and the look in his eyes tells me that there isn’t going to be any persuading him.
“You’re as stubborn as a mule, G,” I tell him. “You head into the kitchen, I’ll grab the first aid kit,” I instruct, pushing him in the direction of the back room.
As I rifle around in the cubby-holes underneath the counter, my eyes travel to the table that the cops are sat at, still doing great impressions of ostriches, sticking their heads in the dirt and ignoring everything around them. “You should be ashamed to wear that uniform.” I veritably spit the words out at them and they have the decency at least to look embarrassed before I sweep out into the kitchen cursing.
I do my best to patch George’s hand up, and once the bleeding has stopped it’s easier to see that the cut isn’t all that bad. It’s going to be painful for a few days, but it didn’t look like the knife had done any permanent damage. He can still move all of his fingers and that’s about as far as my medical expertise goes.
“When are you going to learn to keep your mouth shut, Aimee?” Big George asks, shaking his head in mock despair at me.
“When someone else starts speaking up,” I tell him without missing a beat as I wrap the gauze around his hand. It’s not neat, but it’ll do. “What happens now?” I ask, not really wanting to hear the answer.
“Well, I show Dick the message that they wanted to send,” George sighs, waving his bandaged hand at me, “And then he either comes up with the cash or I reckon the Angels will burn this place to the ground.” He says it as nonchalantly as if he were talking about the weather.
“And does he have the money?” I ask, wondering at how the man is always so unbelievably calm. Whatever it is that he puts in his coffee, I decide that I might need some.
“You see how many customers come in, the prices we charge and the percentage that the Angels take,” George reasons, tilting his head at me. “What do you think?”
“I think there’s no way he can come up with the kind of cash they want,” I reply, the enormity of what I’m saying dawning on me. If there’s no diner, there’s no job—not for me, not for Suzie, and not for George, and it’s not like Painted Rock is overflowing with employment opportunities. If the Angels are going to torch Sunny Side Up, then I need to be out of this town before that happens.
“Bingo,” George says. “Now why don’t you grab that bottle of whiskey and bring it back here and pour us a couple of glasses. I think we could both do with a drink,” he suggests.
I don’t bother to tell him that I don’t touch the hard stuff—it’s something he already knows. But I figure he’s right. If there was ever a time to become a serious drinker, now would be it. As I head out to the front of the diner, I watch as the cops leave their cash on the table and I can see they’ve left a bigger tip than necessary. As if that’s going to make all the difference.
Most of the cops in this town are dirty, getting pay-offs from the Angels left, right, and center to keep them sweet and in line. I want to shout after them that it’s because of people like them that this town is in the state that it’s in. But it wouldn’t make any difference—it’s not like I’d be telling them something they didn’t already know anyway. They walk out, studiously avoiding eye contact, leaving the diner empty except for an older guy who is nursing a coffee like he’s afraid of what’s going to happen when he finishes it.
George and I hang out in the kitchen, him virtually downing the whisky shots I’m pouring while I take small sips, wondering why people decide to drink this stuff when it tastes like liquid fire running down your throat. I don’t ask why George refused to go to the hospital to fix his hand—I already know.
One night when I’d asked him why he doesn’t date, he’d confided to me that he had been married once. He didn’t go into a whole heap of detail, but he told me that she’d been in accident, he’d taken her to hospital, and she’d died there. Since then, he doesn’t go to the doctor and he avoids hospitals like the plague.
He figures the doctors just pretend to know what the hell they’re talking about, when really they have no idea and they’re just trying to play God. I’d tried to reason with him, asking whether or not, if he had a car accident, he would want to go to the hospital. George had replied without even having to think about it. He had said that he would rather die on the street than in a white building with people poking and prodding at him like an experiment.
“How long?” George asks eventually and I know exactly what he’s talking about.
“Fifteen days and counting,” I tell him sadly. Every few hours brings Jake’s birthday closer.
“You got enough saved to get out before then?” he asks innocently, and I do a double-take, wondering if I’ve heard him correctly.
“How do you know about that?” I ask, trying to keep the surprise out of my voice.
“I’m big, not stupid, guapa.” George lets out a low rumble of a laugh. But his eyes are kind as he says, “You and that boy of yours should get as far away from here as you can as soon as possible.”
“He’s not my boy,” I tell him, and try to pretend that it doesn’t hurt me to say. “Besides, he has other plans,” I add, staring down into the amber-colored liquid in the glass.
“Plans change, Aimee, especially when feelings get in the way,” the big man says wisely, and I wonder, not for the first time, what his life was like in Mexico before he came here. Something tells me that he wasn’t a fry cook.
“What feelings?” I ask him as I take a long swig from my glass and try not to cough it all up as it burns the back of my throat. “We’re just friends,” I assure him.
“Mhm,” George replies noncommittally, giving me the one-eyebrow-raised look that’s the visual equivalent of saying “whatever you say.” The bell on the diner door dings and that’s my cue to get back to work. “Saved by the bell,” he says enigmatically, clearly enjoying teasing me.
“Right, well I better go get those nice men some menus,” I say with a pasted on shit-eating grin and false cheer that makes George splutter out the whisky he had just sipped, which in turn makes me burst out laughing.
After the dramatic events of the night it feels good to laugh, especially when I can’t help but feel like there’s not going to be much to laugh about for long.
CHAPTER NINE
As always, I arrive at The Hideaway before Jake does. Even though neither of us were twenty-one, Painted Rock bars never checked ID's. Not since the Bleeding Angels came. I always joked that he would be late to his own funeral. I even keep reminding myself that I should really start turning up an hour after we’ve agreed to meet, and maybe then we’d actually arrive at the same time. But lateness isn’t in my nature. Besides, the bar isn’t a bad place to kill time; especially with how limited the options are in Painted Rock.
The Hideaway is one of only two bars in town, the other being the biker bar, Wheels, where no one in their right mind would go unless they were either the girlfriend of one of the bikers or were looking for a fight. I’d never been to Wheels and I had no intention of changing that anytime soon. I wonder if that’s where Suzie is right now.
It was one of the strange features that had become so normal in this town: you might find a group of bikers at The Hideaway, but you never found non-bikers at ‘Wheels’. The Bleeding Angels could go where they want, when they want, take what they want, do what they want. There was no one to challenge them. Not anymore.
I cast a look around the place as I walk in and head straight for the bar. It’s kind of a dive, but it has a certain charm about it despite the sticky floors. “Hey Noah,” I say as I hop up onto one of the stools and greet the owner.
“How’s it going, Aimee?” he asks back.
Noah was born and bred in Painted Rock, so he knows everyone and everything that goes on in this town. Although he’s no fan of the Bleeding Angels, he knows that it wouldn’t be anywhere near worth his while to do anything about them, just like ever
yone else.
If you wanted to know anything about Painted Rock, anything that’s going on that may not necessarily be public, Noah was your man. He could find out whatever it is that you want to know—for a fee, of course. Just like everything else in this town, information can be bought. I wonder how responsible Noah feels for some of the beatings—or, I should say, examples—that have occurred in Painted Rock over the years.
Sometimes someone lets slip how much they hate the Bleeding Angels when they’ve had a few drinks, or maybe confides to their drinking buddy that they haven’t handed over all the cash for their “protection” that month—that they’d kept some back. A few days later, that someone disappears only to be found barely alive by the roadside with drag-marks up and down their bodies.
That was one of the Bleeding Angels’ favorite ways to send out a message to the people of Painted Rock. Nothing quite says “don’t fuck with us” like being dragged behind a motorbike along desert roads.
Seasons of Change (Bleeding Angels MC Book 1) Page 5