“About time you fucking got here” Wyatt said as he wiped his oil covered hands on and old rag.

Wyatt ran a bike and body shop, in our earlier days we used to jack cars and sell them for parts by using his garage to disassemble them. From the looks of it he was doing that right now. He had two guys with him practically tearing apart an expensive looking car, we always had a rule back when we were younger and that was never go after the expensive shit. What do you think a cop cares more about finding? A Mercedes built in the past few years or a 2001 Toyota? Exactly.

“Is that a Mercedes? You jacked a Mercedes? I only just got out of jail and you’re trying to bring attention to us already?”

“Relax princess we didn’t jack it. You’re not gonna believe this but we found this baby empty on the side of the road. Best part is we ran the plates and they’re for a Honda, ain’t nobody looking for this car.”

One of Wyatt’s workers started laughing “hey Wyatt should we show Axel what we found near the car on the side of the road?”

“Yeah yeah go ahead.”

The worker walked behind the car and came back out with something in his hands, tossing it over to me.

I reached out and caught it, it was a purple high heel, dirty from the desert with the sole partially melted from the hot asphalt. Wait a minute, that girl was barefoot wasn’t she? Was this her shoe? And if that was the case was this her car?

“Did you find any body along with it?” I asked. “A guy dead in the driver’s seat? Any sign at all who might have owned the car?”

“All I know is there were some light brown hairs on the headrest of the driver’s seat, the car also smelled a little bit like perfume. Sounds like some girl got a little tipsy and took daddy’s car out for a joyride and then bailed.”

“Where did you find the car anyway?”

“About two miles away from the Double H, why what do you care?”

“I was just wondering” I said as I inspected the high heel. It did look like it was about her size, and the hair color matched. It had to be hers, why would she be driving a Benz though?

All I could think of was that the girl was lying about not being involved with another gang. Why else would she have a car like this, a car without its registered plates, if she wasn’t working with someone? Why else would she be so willing to just bail on a car that was worth at least 35 grand? She would have had to have gone into this whole situation with the knowledge that she might not walk out alive.

Who sent her after me? Who was keeping track of when I got out of jail?

“Is this really what we’ve come to Wyatt? Getting excited over making a few grand for the club? We used to have big dreams for the Desert Vultures and now we’re right back to stripping cars for part money?”

Wyatt sighed as he tossed aside the oil covered rag he used to wipe his hands.

“Things have been different since you got pinched, having to bury Zeke took a lot of the fire out of us. Not to mention the cops have been up our ass absolutely everywhere, we barely even hold the town now. We have no money coming in and to be completely honest we’ve lost some damn good people to desertion in the past couple of months, can’t say I blame ‘em.”

He looked back at the men as they stripped one of the doors off, scratching his arm before looking back at me.

“We also got the Scorched Satans muscling their way into our territory. It’s been pretty recent but the cops are just letting it happen, they only intervene when we retaliate... I wanted to tell you all of this last night but I didn’t want to ruin your homecoming.”

“Alright well who’s their leader? Maybe if I get a one on one with this guy I can find out what the hell they want and we can work on a compromise.”

“That’s the thing” Wyatt replied. “We don’t know who their leaders are, we’ve tried to get some info on them but we don’t know who their president is, their vice president is, hell we barely even have any member names. They’re keeping their shit locked tight, personally I’d say put them all in the ground and sort out their names for when we order their tombstones. They’re hitting us hard and we can’t retaliate without the cops on us, we gotta figure something out.”

I sighed and ran my fingers through my hair, looks like I had a lot more work to do than I thought to get this club back on track. I’d like to think that most men in my position would just bail, but I wasn’t like most men.

If what he said about the Scorched Satans was right then the situation with this girl might be far more important than I thought. We have nothing on them but who knows how much they know about us. If they sent her to come after me then maybe we had other girls in the club who were working with them, feeding info back to them so they knew when to hit us hard. One thing I’ve learned from being in this club is that a man’s lips are loose after he’s had himself a nice go around with a sexy girl he’s had his eyes on for a while. We had to start looking at the girls the club passed around and make sure none of them had ties to another gang.

Guess the best thing to do would be to start with the one I had in my very own bed.

“Listen I got something I got to take care of, I’ll try and figure out how to take care of all of this. Somehow. Just keep your head down and get this car stripped and taken care of fast before we get anyone snooping around here.”

Wyatt nodded his head and reached into his pocket before pulling out a crumpled up piece of paper.

“Here, I wrote it down for you, it’s the number to my burner phone. We need to get you a phone so I don’t have to wait for you to get home just to contact you.”

“Appreciate it Wyatt” I said as I took the paper and put it in my pocket,

I turned to get out of there, that girl had a lot of explaining to do.