Damien
I sit on my bike outside the Specters’ warehouse, wondering why they haven’t sent any of their boys out. It is spring, the sun setting, casting slanting yellow beams across Kansas City, which sits in the distance beyond the warehouse. The warehouse itself is situated just off a road which leads to the highway, a squat, unassuming building in almost the middle of nowhere, exactly the kind of place clubs love to buy. A place where folks don’t tend to bother you. Except here we are, and they are clearly here—their bikes are outside—and yet nobody’s coming out to meet us.
I chew on the toothpick, on the end of it. Chewing a toothpick is a good habit for the leader of a motorbike club. It keeps you focused, stops your mind straying. You start thinking about things you shouldn’t be thinking about, like what happened to you a long time ago, or anything that isn’t relevant to the job at hand, you just focus on the chewing instead. My men are all around me, sitting astride their bikes. Gunner, my VP, sits beside me. A short, red-haired broad-shouldered man with a face which is oddly elegant and womanly, with small blue eyes. The others sit all over the lot, all wearing the Death Heads leathers. Then there’s Ogre, dragging the guard across the concrete toward us. Ogre is as fierce and ugly as a man like Ogre must be to be called Ogre.
Gunner once told me that Ogre is like a Pitbull we’ve trained to attack our enemies, only one day the Pitbull will get tired of his leash and attack its owner. I don’t know about that. The man’s scary enough, big enough, looming enough, wild enough, but he’s been in the club a long while now and I haven’t had to tighten the leash once yet.
I start thinking about that man with the big worm-like fingers and the too-big smiling face and the way he seemed to smile as though I was his friend, just his friend and what he was doing was entirely acceptable, what he was doing was no big thing ’cause we were friends and friends could do anything to each other. My mind begins to stray, and so I focus on the chewing of the toothpick.
Ogre is tall, around six eight, and wide, a grotesque muscled-bound man with a shaved head and a squashed face, barely fitting into his leather. He pushes the guard into the concrete. The guard, a kid of about twenty, with a freckled face and a mop of sandy hair, lips quivering, looks up at me.
“Was this the only one?” I ask Ogre.
“Yeah.” Ogre’s eyes are set deep within his head, a brown so dark they’re almost blood-red. They never seem to move in concord with any part of him. When he smiles, his eyes just stare. When he frowns, his eyes just stare. I saw him shot once, a glancing shot across his middle, and even though he let out a yelp like any man would, his eyes just kept staring. “But I’m sure this little birdie can tweet somethin’ pretty for us, Boss. I like little birdies like this. They tweet so sweetly even when you’ve snapped their necks. Little birdies with snapped necks tweet the sweetest, I reckon.”
Some of the men glance at each other nervously. I just chew on my toothpick. I’m use to Ogre’s strangeness by now.
I kick the stand of my bike, set it to resting, and then walk across the concrete to where the guard kneels.
“Are you a Specter, boy?” I say. “Or are you just a hired contractor?”
“I’m a Specter,” he says proudly, or as proudly as a man kneeling on the ground can.
“Then let me ask you. Why the fuck are your people just sitting around inside the warehouse with us out here? Are they scared to face us or something? I don’t get it. I always knew the Specters were a bunch of weak bastards, but I never took ’em for a bunch of weak cowardly bastards.”
The kid just stares at me.
I almost sigh, before remembering I’m the President and the President doesn’t sigh in front of his men. I chew on the toothpick some, and then say: “Listen, I don’t have a fuckin’ problem if you all wanna sit around in a warehouse playing pin the tail on the fuckin’ donkey or whatever it is you’re doing in there. The thing is, your boss, Tinhorn, owes me a lot of money. And your boss, Tinhorn, has been dodging my calls. And now your boss, Tinhorn, has to face up to what he owes and be a man. Alright? So I’m going to go in there and get your boss to pay what he owes. Thing is, I don’t like going into situations where I don’t know the ins and outs. You get it? So I need to know from you what the hell is going on in there.”
The lad sniffs, shakes his head. “I don’t want to tell you that,” he says.
I nod at Ogre, who backhands the kid across the face and then hauls him back to a kneeling position.
“That’s not really your choice,” I say, and as I look at the kid I remember the kid I was, just as young and naïve and brave and foolish. I remember, and I think about what could’ve happened, wonder if I’m hurting this kid in anyway similar to the way I was hurt, or almost hurt. And then I chew on the toothpick and I push that shit down, where it belongs. A man doesn’t let stuff like that get in the way of his business. He just doesn’t. “It seems your friends don’t wanna come out here. So it seems we’ve got all the time in the world to get the truth out of you, kid. Now, me, I’m not really the fingernail-pullin’ type, but that big fuck there is called Ogre, and he most definitely is the fingernail-pullin’ type. Just take a look at him and tell me he don’t look the type, kid.”
He looks up into Ogre’s squashed face, at those emotionless eyes, and swallows. “I can see that he is, yes.”
“Yeah. So I’m going to ask you again, one last time. What’s going on in there, kid?”
“Would you tell, if you were kneeling where I was?” the kid asks, voice shaking. Ogre makes to hit him. I lift my hand. Ogre stops, but his muscles strain at the leather of his jacket. I can tell just by the way the man’s face becomes even more squashed that there’s a lot he’d like to do to this kid.
“No,” I say, though who the fuck knows. I hate hypotheticals like that. In this life, you deal in real things. Real bullets, real blood, real cigarettes. Real money. “But I’m not the one kneeling on the concrete. Tell me now, kid, or I’ll let the giant go to work on you.”
The kid licks his lips, and then nods. “There’s a woman in there,” he says, staring down at the ground, shameful. Shameful, but doing the smart thing. “I don’t know who she is. One of the new guys kidnapped her. I never met the man, no one has, except Boss, but he tells us that he’s a good man for getting hold of women. I don’t know. They’re going to sell her, I think, sell her to some Russian dealer. They got her in this special room, one of the walls a big window so they can record her. They’re hollering and drinking and getting wasted and getting geared up to have some fun with her. That’s why they’re not out here—”
“Do you see a man who is hasty in his words? There is more hope for a fool than for him.” Ogre speaks the words loudly, trampling on the kid’s words, with his arms at his sides, hands twitching. “The words of the wise heard in quiet are better than the shouting of a ruler among fools!”
He is quoting the bible again. Ogre often quotes the bible. A scare tactic, or maybe he really believes in it. Either way, now is hardly the goddamn time for it.
“Ogre, shut up,” I say.
Ogre nods, falls silent, but as soon as the kid starts talking, he starts spouting more quotes.
“I tell you, on the day of judgment people will give account for every careless word they speak! Be not rash with your mouth, nor let your heart be hasty to utter a word before God, for God is in heaven and you are on earth! There let your words be few!”
“Ogre,” I say, my voice with some edge in it now. “Shut the fuck up.”
“This man is a tongue-waggler and I cannot stand tongue-wagglers.”
Before anyone can do anything, Ogre takes his pistol from the waistband of his jeans and fires a shot into the back of the kid’s head.
The bullet explodes red mist and hair and brain and bone splattering the concrete and the kid falls on his front, dead and bloody. The men flinch, hands going instinctively for their own guns, but when they realize what’s happened, they just watch. Watch as I pace across to Ogre and grab the front of his leather, bringing my face to his. My toothpicks in my mouth so my words would be already slurred, but anger makes them into a ferocious growl.
“What the fuck is the matter with you?” I slap him across the face. He just takes it, head snapping, and then eyes returning to me. “You fuckin’ lump. The fuck are you doing? He was tellin’ us what we needed to fuckin’ know.”
“I do what is best for the club,” he says vaguely. “No more and no less.”
“What is best for the club—”
Suddenly, a few of the windows in the warehouse blow out, glass shattering onto the parking lot, flames licking from the shattered holes where the windows had been.
A fire, and a girl. A girl, and a fire.
I think of the girl in there, the girl they mean to sell, and I think of the worm-fingered man and what he’d intended to do with me.
And as I think, I sprint faster’n than the devil toward the burning building.