Chapter 3
Dancer
I watch as Bull rides away with Carrie, it leaves me feeling unsettled. I don’t know why. It shouldn’t bother me to see Carrie on the back of Bull’s bike. After the shit she pulled two years ago… Fuck, I know that’s not fair, it wasn’t her fault. It was me. I made the decision to gut the motherfucker who tried to rape her. I did that and I shouldn’t hold her responsible. Hell, given the choice, I’d do it again. How screwed up is that?
She shouldn’t have been at the bar. She was under-age; she had no business being there that night. I knew she was chasing me around like a little lost puppy and while it was cute, I made it clear that nothing would ever happen between us. She was—hell she still is—just too damn young. Instead of taking my rejection like the adult she claimed to be, she went outside with that slimy motherfucker and ruined all our lives.
My head is a dull roar even after the shower. I slip my shades on and get on my girl, without looking at Crush. I rub my hand over my stubby hair that’s growing out.
My girl is a sleek black, Fatboy, Soft tail. She’s smooth and shines like wet pussy and rides low with twin pipes. She holds me close, her fat wheels grip the road better than any bike I’ve ever had. She’s weighted perfect, just a slight movement by me and she knows where to go. She purrs when we ride and growls when I’m stuck in traffic or a light.
She’s the only woman I need for sure and a fuck of a lot less headache than any bitch I’ve been mixed up with. Definitely less aggravation than that damn red-head who just ran off with Bull.
“I still don’t know why the fuck I have to go to the club. I told you pricks that I’m not doing this shit anymore.”
“Dragon wants you at the club and if I have to drag your fucking ass there, I’ll do it.”
“Like you could.”
“Don’t fuckin’ try me, Dance,” Crusher responds.
I ignore him and start my girl. I’ll answer Drag’s summons and that’s it. I’m tired and I’m not getting into this shit anymore. The club was a life I had. A life from when I was a different person. I am not that person anymore. I never will be again.
We pull into the club about twenty minutes later. I look around the parking area, but I don’t see Bull’s piece of shit Triumph anywhere. I write off the disappointment of him and Carrie not being here as stupidity—caused by my hangover. I follow Crusher inside, refusing to ask where Bull is. It’s not my business, but how fucked up is it that my club has brought in the woman who has caused me so much misery? She’s nothing to them.
“Hey, Dance! Good to see you man!” Frog calls out as I walk through the door. He’s talking to one of the newer members.
What was it Drag had said his name was? Fuck, not like I care anyway.
I nod my head in response and let my eyes adjust to the dim light of the room.
Dragon is in the back at his usual table. He has Nicole in his lap and he’s biting on her neck, whispering in her ear and he’s smiling. It’s weird to see my brother smiling. I’ve known Dragon a long ass time and up until this woman came into his life, I’m not sure I had ever seen him smile. I sure as fuck hadn’t heard him laughing before, like he is right now.
I’ve met Nicole a few times, she came with Dragon the day I got released and they took me out of hell (that’s the best way to describe prison. It is hell). She was okay I guess. I never really bothered to find out. Still, seeing my brother like this, I’d have to say she must have a gold snatch. That’s the only reason I can come up with as to why he would keep a ho’ around permanently.
“Yo,” I growl, letting Dragon know by the tone of my voice that I’m not happy with my summons.
Dragon looks up at me. His hand freezes on Nicole’s breast and even I will admit the large globe would make a man beg for more. It fills my brother’s hand and then some and the large nipple is dark through her white shirt. Oddly, I think of how Carrie’s are much smaller, but they’d be perfect in my hand…I feel my dick jerk in reaction.
“Dance, you look at my woman’s tit another minute and you and me got problems.”
“You’re the one playing with it for the world to enjoy,” I respond.
Shit if he doesn’t want other men to notice he needs to lock it up in his room, pious bastard.
“Mama, can you…”
“I’m gone, sweetheart. Six and Crush are taking me, Dani, and Lips to visit Carrie anyway,” she says. Her voice is soft and loving and it amazes me that someone like that could be so wrapped up in my hard ass brother.
She gets up to leave and Dragon stops her.
“Be safe, Mama. Make sure you do what Crush and Six tells you,” he orders, pulling her back to him. “Mine.”
When the kiss is finished I hear her whisper, “Forever.”
She turns and walks by me, giving me a slight nod. It is my brother though that draws my attention. He has the biggest fucking smile on his face I think I have ever seen.
He waits until Nicole gets to the bar and then calls out, “Hey, Mama?”
“Yeah, sweetheart?”
“Going to spank that ass later, don’t think I didn’t notice you’re wearing those damned boots.”
“I was counting on it, Dragon,” she laughs.
Crusher follows her out of the room, yelling back out over his shoulder, “Lucky Bastard.”
Dragon’s eyes follow his woman until she leaves the room and then the easy going look on his face disappears. He kicks the seat out at the table across from him.
“Sit.”
I rub my hand over my face. Fuck, this might be worse than I imagined. I take a seat though. There aren’t many men I’d follow orders from. Dragon is one, and probably the only one.
“Drag,” I say. My tone says I don’t give a damn, and part of me doesn’t. Still, Drag is a man I respect, a brother I love.
“You want to tell me why I haven’t seen your fucking face around here, Dance. I got to tell you, I’m not happy.”
“Drag, told you when you dropped me off, I’m done.”
“You still got our brand on your sorry ass?”
My hand automatically rubs the back of my shoulder, where the Savage MC tattoo is. It was forged through me, not by the ink, but by the blood and tears my brothers and I shared.
“That’s right, motherfucker. You’re part of us, so you want to tell me why you’re locking us out now, when we need each other?”
Fuck, he’s going where I’m not ready to go. So I throw up some other shit that’s bugging the hell out of me.
“What the fuck do you have Bull and Crush dragging that bitch around for?”
Dragon looks blank for a minute and then his face turns to stone. I’ve seen that look before and usually the person getting it, is about to die. I figure I’m at least safe from that, maybe.
“Watch your mouth. Red is family.”
“You can see how having my brothers claim the bitch that got me in this mess as family might piss me the fuck off, right?”
“Red didn’t do shit motherfucker. You got messy. You want to handle an asshole? You don’t go off, in a town we don’t own, with witnesses around. Dance, you’ve been around, you know how this shit works. You screwed the pooch here. That’s on you. I couldn’t get you out sooner and that shit? That’s on me. Way I see it, Red is the only one here free and clear.
Fuck. He’s right.
He’s not saying anything I don’t already know. It’s not something I want to acknowledge.
“She shouldn’t have…”
“Red was in love with you. For some fucking reason Nicole tells me the woman still is. I don’t get women and this crap, but I do fucking know it makes women do shit they shouldn’t,” Dragon growls, looking away from me to stare out the window. “Nearly got my woman dead. You get lucky enough to get that from a good woman you don’t mock that shit, Dance. You embrace it.”
“I think claiming a woman has made you soft,” I state the truth, ignoring the weird feeling his words send through me.
Love? Me? Fuck a duck.
“Fuck you,” Dragon barks back at me, but at least his face is friendlier.
“Carr…Princess is too young to know what love is, fuck I’m thirty-five and I don’t know what that shit is.”
“Way I figure, women have a better handle on this crap. Red’s just a few years younger than Nicole and I don’t doubt my woman one fucking bit. Now if we’re done with our Dr. Phil moment, we got shit to discuss, first being Red.”
I sit watching him. I’ve got nothing to say to that. I shouldn’t want to know. Anything and everything to do with this club and especially Carrie, has nothing to do with me. It doesn’t bother or affect me in the least. At least that’s what I tell myself. Still, here I am waiting for what he has to tell me.
Shit.
“Your mom asked us to pick up Carrie.”
“No fucking way.”
“Shut up and listen,” Dragon returns. I bite my tongue to keep my retort from coming through. I don’t know if I could take Dragon, we’re pretty evenly matched. I do know he’s my brother; I owe him everything. So, I shut the fuck up…for now.
“When you first…” Dragon pauses and I know he blames himself for everything. It’s not his fault, but there is fuck-all I can say that he’d listen to and I don’t really want to talk about that shit anyway. “When you first got put in the can,” he continues, “Carrie came to see you. Do you remember?”
Fuck yeah, I did. I was pissed at the world, at her for causing this mess, at me for making the mistake, at the way I wanted to hold her and kill her at the same time…at everything. My head stays a fucked up mess. It’s much worse around Carrie. I am NOT telling Dragon that, so I nod my agreement.
“You sent her away, but after that I guess, things started happening.”
“Things?”
“Started small from what I understand. She’d get notes taunting her with things no one should know. There were a couple of break-ins. Her shit was tossed, notes left on her car, different kinds of shit.”
My jaw tightens and that uneasy feeling in my gut gets worse.
“And,” I prompt because I know there is more.
“There were accidents. At first it wasn’t recognized. Don’t know why, you would think even being fucking idiots, given the history of the case, that the cops would piece together what was going on. Some sick fuck definitely has it in for the girl.”
“What accidents?” I ask, feeling even more on edge.
“A bus she was riding had a blowout, food poisoning, equipment short circuited at the library where she worked. She was nearly electrocuted. Each time something bigger, something more obvious would happen, until the night of the wreck.”
“Wreck?”
“Yeah, some motherfucker ran her and her parents off the road. The car went off a mountain and down a cliff. Red was thrown out, escaped with a broken arm and a concussion. Her parents were trapped in the car. It caught on fire, she lost them both.”
“Fuck,” I said before I could stop it. Carrie came from money, and she never should have been friends with me or my little sister. Still, her parents were descent people. Hell, I don’t know if I’m a good judge, but they had been kind and they loved Carrie.
“Dance, Red’s been through the ringer. The last fucking thing she needs is your smart ass.”
“Why did you and the club get involved?”
Dragon puts his hand over a plain manila folder and pushes it towards me. I look down at it, shore up my courage and open it. Instinctively, I know I will not like what I find.
I sift through it, pictures of Carrie’s room with her clothes scattered everywhere and her underwear laid neatly on the bed cut in pieces, pictures of notes threatening to rape her and kill her afterwards. Each picture is worse, each note more damning. Then there are pictures of the accident. Only these aren’t police photos, these are pictures the sick pervert must have taken while Carrie lay unconscious. They are pictures of her parents burning alive.
I do my best to keep my hands from shaking, even with my anger and confusion I know that Carrie…is special to me. She always will be. The fact that she almost died while I was rotting away.
Christ.
“Your mom called when Carrie was released from the hospital and I put her under club protection,” Dragon said.
Mary isn’t my mom, not really. I grew up on the streets with Dragon. My life was shit, until I was placed in the care of Mary and her husband Walter. They were a nice, older couple who had always wanted a kid. For some reason, instead of adopting a baby or a young child, they took a chance on a wilder than hell teenage boy, who was mad at the world. I had been in their home for a year when Mary got pregnant with Jazz. Walter passed away shortly after Jazz’s birth with a heart attack and I stayed around and helped out any way I could. When I went into the service, I sent money and always came home on leave to visit with them. Jazz was special. She was all sunshine and completely untainted by the world. I cherished my time with her. Had I known she would die so young, I would have cherished it more. Carrie was my last connection with Jazz, something pure and innocent in my world. I tried to take care of it and protect it too, just like I did with Jazz. Apparently, failure was all I managed with both.
I shake my head, trying to ignore the emptiness of not having Jazz and the memory of her death. I have enough on my plate, no sense in bringing even more ghosts to life. I take a deep breath and look at Dragon.
“I still don’t understand why the club got involved.”
“Dance, they’re your family, whether you acknowledge it or not. That was why. Still, you haven’t finished looking at the last picture.”
I look back through the folder to find the photo in question. My body breaks out into a cold sweat and my breath stalls.
Fuck me. Why? What would be the point?
I pull it from the rest and look. It is a picture of me covered in the blood of the man I had killed. Carrie is crying and reaching for me as the police pull me away. I remember that night easily. It is engrained in my brain and frozen there in stark clarity.
I remember the feel of the knife in my hand, the breeze in the air, the stink of the dark alley, the way the moon shone down on Carrie’s auburn curls, the lust in the fucker’s eyes as he ripped the shirt off her shoulders and put his fat, dirty hands on her small, pale breasts. I remember everything. Every. Last. Thing.
Yet, there is one thing I had somehow forgotten. Maybe semi-forgotten, but just the same I didn’t remember it as strongly—until right now. The dim memory of how it felt to have Carrie in my arms when I promised I would protect her. For a moment everything in my life had been…right. It hadn’t lasted long, because minutes later men were tearing me away. I could do nothing but listen to her cry out my name.
I turn the picture over, read the writing on the back and my blood runs cold. My heart freezes.
Vengeance shall be mine. Phoenix.
“Who the fuck is Phoenix?”
“If you had been around here sooner, that would be one of the answers you would know. Dance, I told you the club needs you. We’ve got crap to take care of since the mess with the traitors.”
Dragon never used Irish’s name. He hadn’t since the day it happened. When he came to the prison to tell me about it, he used the man’s name once and after that it was never used again. I understood it, hell I felt the same. It was bitter shit to know that a brother we trusted as one of our own would do that shit. Twist wasn’t that hard. Neither Dragon nor I had emotions tied up in the man. Irish had been a brother. If I had room for more nightmares, Irish might have been in them.
“I’m here now. Tell me who the fuck it is that’s been coming after Carrie.”
“I’d watch my tone, Dance.”
“Bullshit, if some fucker was coming after your woman you’d be worse. Now tell me who the fuck I’m dealing with.”
“Well don’t that beat all,” Dragon says and leans back in his chair, his eyes raking over me and instantly making me uncomfortable. Dragon sees more than the normal man, it is one of the things that makes him such a good leader.
“Drag…”
He holds up his hand to stop me from going on and then pulls himself close into the table.
“After the shit with Nic and her girl I went after Skull and his men full force. All roads led to them and I was ready for heads to roll. Only, it seems Tiny had just signed on with Skull’s crew a month out. He came recommended by their parent charter.”
I nod because while I figure this shit has nothing to do with me, it will eventually lead me to what I need to know.
“Skull swears he didn’t know about Tiny and what the fucker did.”
“You believe him?”
Dragon shrugs, but eases back in his chair.
“Skull’s a smarmy son of a bitch, but he has a code and top of that code is no hurting women or children.
“So who is this fucker?”
“Some ass wipe having a ball toying with me and mine,” Dragon growls.
“So you’re saying we have no idea who this asshole is?”
“I didn’t say that. Got to wonder though, if you’re so done with the club and you hate Red so much, why you care?”
“Drag, psycho-analyze some other motherfucker, I’m not playing.”
Dragon gives a half laugh, looks me over once more and rubs his chin and the side of his face, as if he’s deciding something.
“The cop you gutted, turns out his dad has some pretty powerful connections.”
“What’s that mean?”
“This motherfucker is the father of the man you killed.”
“If that’s true, I could see him coming after me, after Carrie even, but why the club?”
“Because you are the club and it’s not a secret I pulled in every marker I had to try and get your ass out of trouble.”
“So why can’t we just find this guy and put a bullet in him?”
“Damn, why the fuck didn’t I think of that?” Dragon asks sarcastically and then flips me off. “Because, the man is like a fucking ghost. I can’t find him. His bank accounts, his house, hell any of his assets haven’t been touched since the shit with Twist and company. We’ve got surveillance in place; we’ve added someone in the bank to watch over things. Fuck, I’ve even had Freak mess around and freeze his account with a fake levy. We’re coming up with nothing.”
“All this over a sniveling piece of shit that didn’t deserve to take his next breath of air.”
“No, motherfucker. All this and more is because you went off half-cocked. Dance, I got your back man, but you have to be smart this time. This man wants you dead. Fuck, he wants all of us dead. We have to work to make sure at the end we’re standing over the son of a bitch and spitting on his grave. You feel me?”
“So where’s Carrie at now?” I ask before I can stop myself. It’s fucked up, I admit it. I’m mad at her, I blame her…well mostly, but I’m not exactly crazy happy she’s off somewhere with Bull either.
“Bull took her out to the safe house in Manchester.”
“Is that necessary?”
“She has been staying at the club, but the girl is pretty innocent and I have the Atlanta Charter coming in tomorrow for a few days…a big party.”
I don’t know what to say to that. Several things run through my head, but none of them I want to voice so, I let it go.
“This fucker got a real name?”
“Francis Owsley.”
“Francis? Jesus, no wonder the fucker is ripping off names from Greek mythology.”
Dragon laughs and I almost do too, except all this talk of Carrie has me feeling like I’m crawling out of my skin.
“He hasn’t made any moves since the day your woman was hurt?” It was tricky wording that question since bringing up Irish was bad, and saying Nicole and shot in the same sentence seemed to set Dragon off even more.
“Not a damn thing. He went underground as soon as we got his name. Something will give soon. I can feel it.”
I don’t roll my eyes, that shit would get me shot, plus I know from years of being in the service with Dragon that he has a pretty good sense for when things were about to get all fucked up. That means his surety that things are about to go to hell is bad, fucking bad.
“Well I better get back to the hotel,” I say getting up to leave.
“I expect your ass here tomorrow night,” Dragon orders and there’s no doubt that it is an order.
I grunt and walk out without giving him a solid answer.