Damian
“Yeah, they're not here yet,” I said.
I sat in the parking lot of the old, abandoned warehouse I was told to be at, talking to Donovan Mills, the MC's president, on the phone. I was waiting for Ray Mendoza and his crew to show up. Mendoza was the leader of the Fantasmas – another MC out of Bakersfield.
We didn't deal with them all that often, but every once in a while, interests aligned and we did a little business with them. We'd just run security on a big shipment of weed up to Eureka, and I was meeting with Mendoza to get our cut of the proceeds.
“Just make sure it's all there,” Mills said. “All twenty grand of it. I don't trust those spics to not short us.”
I cringed at his use of the slur. I was a lot of things, but a bigot wasn't one of them. I'd served with guys of every race and considered them all my brothers. To me, it was the content of a man's character, not the color of their skin or the God they prayed to. But to somebody like Mills, a guy who'd grown up in a backwoods town and had never served in a combat area, those racial lines never seemed to dull. He wasn't a hood wearing, white power kinda asshole. He just didn't like people of color.
It made serving as the MC's vice president tough, simply because I had to eat a lot of shit and not say anything about the garbage that came out of his mouth. Presenting a strong, unified front for the club was important – something my dad had taught me.
My dad had served a lot of years in the chair I now occupied. He'd had his shot to move up to the big chair, but he always declined. He'd always told me that he was able to bring about the most change and influence the direction of the club the greatest by sitting in that chair.
“The prez,” he said, “took the slings and arrows, while the VP got to move behind the scenes and chart the MC's course.”
I didn't yet see how that was possible. Granted, I'd only been in the chair for six months, but with somebody like Mills running the show, it was hard to get a word in edgewise – let alone an agenda. To be honest, in the brief time I'd been in the MC's leadership, I didn't like the direction I saw him taking us. He was getting us deeper into running drugs, and he'd talked about running some guns as well. The way I saw it, he was taking us down a path that was inevitably going to lead to violence and bloodshed.
Personally, I didn't like the fact that we taxed the local businesses. But we had to earn. And I convinced myself that we were doing a community service because we did, in fact, keep the streets of Fernwood safe – we'd run more than one dope pusher or gang banger out of town on a rail. Yeah, we ran drugs, but we never, ever, dealt in our town – and we kept any punk with designs on doing that out of our area.
But until I was in a position to do something about it, all I could do was bite my tongue and wait. Bide my time.
“Don't worry, Mills,” I said. “I got it handled.”
“Good man.”
I disconnected the call and dropped the phone in my pocket. I sat back on my bike and shook a cigarette out of the pack and popped it into my mouth. I lit it and took a deep drag, looking at the stars overhead. The sky was black, and the stars I could see were like bits of chipped ice. Though I could see more stars there than I would be able to see in a place like San Francisco – the nearest big city – it was a fraction of what I saw over in Afghanistan.
I remember sitting outside of our tent at the base and looking up at the sky on a lot of nights. I saw more stars than I'd ever seen before and I remember thinking that it was amazing. I hated the fact that it took me being in the middle of a goddamn war to get to see something so beautiful, but what could I do? It was what it was. At least I'd gotten to see it. That was something, I supposed.
The rumbling of motorcycle engines drew my attention. Coming down a service road that was overgrown with weeds, was Mendoza and a few of his guys. I wasn't too keen on meeting these guys out here all by myself – I didn't like being outnumbered – but Crank had been busy, and I hadn't had time to round anybody else up.
So, it was just me meeting up with Mendoza and three of his Fantasmas.
I didn't really expect trouble, but I unlatched the holster on the piece on my hip. My sidearm had gotten me through some serious shit back in Afghanistan, and I considered it my lucky nine millimeter.
Mendoza and his guys stopped a few feet from me and shut off their bikes. The three guys remained sitting astride their bikes and took off their helmets. As Mendoza climbed off his bike, he took off his helmet and hung it on the handlebar. He wasn't a big man – five foot nine or so – with dusty colored skin and eyes blacker than the sky above. He wasn't thin, but he wasn't fat, either. He was just sort of… average. The only real distinctive thing about him was his slicked back black hair that hung in a ponytail all the way down to the small of his back. Not that it was all that distinctive, really.
He stopped and stared at me. And I could tell by the way he was standing there that something was wrong. He looked pissed. It sent a spike of adrenaline through me, but I managed to stay cool. I took another drag on my smoke and acted like I hadn't noticed that he was pissed off.
“What's up, Ray?” I asked casually.
“Your boys fucked up,” he said.
“How do you figure?”
He shifted his feet and took his gloves off, stuffing them into the pocket of his kutte. I thought he pulled his kutte back intentionally, to give me a view of the 44 caliber Desert Eagle in his shoulder holster. Talk about overcompensation.
“Nice piece,” I commented to let him know I'd seen it.
“That shipment you were running security on got jacked, man,” he said.
The knot in my stomach constricted painfully. I hadn't heard that the shipment had been lost – I wasn't sure that Mills even knew yet. I flicked my cigarette to the asphalt beneath my boot and crushed it out as I sat up a little straighter. Maybe I'd been a little too optimistic about not expecting trouble.
“Jacked how?” I asked. “By who?”
Mendoza looked back at his guys for a moment before turning back to me. He lit a cigarette of his own and blew the thick cloud of smoke in my direction.
“I was hoping you could tell me that, carnal.”
“How the fuck should I know?” I asked. “This is the first time I've heard of this. Are my guys okay?”
“Not my problem,” he replied, taking another long drag off his smoke. “But what is my problem is that my truck got jacked and now I'm out over a million dollars – which makes it your problem too.”
A million bucks? The load we were running security for was for some weed. Granted, it was a pretty big chunk of weed, but there was no way in hell it would have totaled a million.
“A million? What in the hell was in the shipment, Mendoza? We agreed to protect your weed run. There is no way in hell you were running a million buck’s worth of bud.”
He shrugged. “Plans changed at the last minute, carnal,” he said. “My buyer needed a chunk of H to go along with the weed. And the customer's always right, holmes.”
“You didn't clear that with Mills,” I said. “And because you didn't, that's not our problem.”
Anger – dark and dangerous – flashed on his face. “You were running security for us, puto,” he snapped. “Doesn't matter what the fuck is in the truck. You were supposed to keep it safe.”
The situation was escalating, and the anticipation of violence hung thick and heavy in the air. I needed to defuse the situation and figure this out before somebody did something stupid. And if I had to bet, it would be one of Mendoza's three flunkies back there on their bikes – they all just looked anxious to shoot something.
“Okay hold up,” I said. “Where was the truck jacked?”
“Few miles south of the Oregon border.”
I looked at him with my mouth agape. “Dude, you contracted us to run an escort to Eureka,” I said. “Not all the way to Oregon.”
He shrugged. “Like I said, plans changed at the last minute.”
I shook my head. “This ain't our fault, man. We did what we said we'd do – escort your truck to Eureka. The fact that you were not only running H but took it all the way up to Oregon – and didn't clear it with Mills first – isn't our problem. That's on you.”
“Huh,” he said and dropped his smoke, crushing it beneath his boot. “On me, huh?”
“Yeah. On you. We held up our end of the bargain. We did what you hired us to do. Now pay us what you owe us, and we'll call it a night.”
“Yeah, sure,” he said. “I got your payment right here.”
I should have known. I should have been ready for it. But when he reached for his gun, I stood there like a fucking idiot. I never even got my piece out of the holster before he opened up. It sounded like a cannon shot, and when the first bullet hit me, it felt like I'd been hit by a truck. The force of the shot threw me off my bike and sent me sprawling backward.
I hit the pavement with a grunt and pain radiated through every nerve ending in my body. I checked myself before I screamed and started to sit up. I never even heard him fire again, but I felt his bullets punching into my body.
I lay back on the pavement and stared up at the stars. I felt blood, warm and sticky, running down my skin and pooling in my t-shirt. As I stared at the sky, darkness crept in at the edges of my vision, and I mused over the fact that I'd made it through hell in Afghanistan, only to die on the pavement of a shitty, run-down, abandoned warehouse.
With an arm that was quickly weakening, I took my cell phone out of my pocket and managed to hold it up to my face. I punched the button for Mills and heard it connect just as the darkness overwhelmed me and pulled me down into its depths.