Adam “Gunner” Davis had heard those steel doors clanging in front of and behind him too damned many times in his life. They always sounded better on the way out, and today he was thankful that this time he’d only been there for a six-hour stay in the drunk tank. His head still throbbed at the obnoxious sound, though. It had been one hell of a night.

“Where’s my bike?” he asked the property officer as he signed for his keys, sunglasses, wallet, and leather kutte. If he wasn’t mistaken, this was the same officer that had been there the last two times he’d taken advantage of the shitty accommodations at the county jail.

The bored-looking officer shrugged. “Were you driving it when you got arrested?”

“No, I don’t think so. No, I wouldn’t be checking out with a citation this morning if I was. There was a fight in the bar…”

The cop looked at the blood and bits of dried vomit splashed across the front of Gunner’s t-shirt and raised an eyebrow. “You don’t say?”

Gunner grinned. “You should see the other guys.”

“I’m sure I will as soon as they toss them out of here too. Now, no offense, but you smell like shit, Davis. Get the hell out of here.”

Gunner grinned at him again and shoved his wallet in his pocket as he went out the back door of the station. The bored property officer was right,— he did stink. It would probably be impossible to pinpoint if it was sweat, old sex, liquor, smoke, or vomit, or maybe a combination of it all, but he was turning his own stomach. All night long he’d thought the smell was coming from the other SOB in the tank. As he stepped through the last door into the back parking lot, the bright Texas sun burned into his eyes. He had no idea what time it was, but it had to be damned early for the sun to be that bright. He could swear he felt his corneas sizzling.

“Jesus, you stink. You’re not getting in my fucking car.”

Gunner fished the sunglasses the property officer had just given him out of the pocket of his vest and slipped them on. He looked over where the voice had come from. It was his friend Billy Strickland. He and Billy had been friends since they were in grade school. Billy was pretty much his only real friend. Gunner flipped him off and said, “Fuck you, chickenshit. Where’s my bike?”

“It’s at home and who are you calling a chickenshit?”

“You would have been locked up in there with me if you didn’t act like a pussy and stay behind the bar when things really got rough.”

Billy laughed. “You really were fucked up, weren’t you? I don’t know what you snorted, but I was fighting right alongside you. The only reason you ended up sleeping in Bexar County’s finest last night was because, when the cops showed up, you wanted to keep fighting.”

“Shit.” He hadn’t even looked at his citation. If he hit a cop, that meant he had a summons to appear, and assault on a police officer charges. He didn’t need this shit.

“Toss that nasty shirt in the dumpster and I’ll give you a ride home.”

Gunner pulled off the vest and handed it to Billy as they walked toward his old ’66 Mustang. He pulled the t-shirt off and something hard, crusty, and not attractive fell out of his hair onto his chest. He picked it off and tossed it on the ground. He tossed the shirt in the dumpster, and when he reached for his vest Billy was making a face. “What now?”

“I think it’s your hair. When’s the last time you washed it?”

“You don’t just ‘wash’ dreadlocks.”

“Maybe it’s time to cut them off then.”

Gunner put his vest on and reached for the passenger door of the Mustang. “No fucking way. I’ve been working on them for five years. When the fuck did you become a fashion consultant anyways?”

Billy shrugged. “You seem to need one lately.”

“Not what that chick that was bent over the sink in the bathroom said last night.”

Billy slid into the car as Gunner did and he laughed. “I hope that was some damned fine pussy, man. You know that’s what started all the shit? You remember that much, right? Patty’s pissed.”

Gunner leaned back into the recently restored leather seat and closed his eyes. He grinned then said, “Did you see her ass? Her pussy was even finer. Patty will get over it.” Patty had been pissed at him at least once a day for nine years, and for lots worse things than a bar fight. Gunner heard and felt the V8 rev a few times as Billy maneuvered the Mustang out of the crowded lot. When he didn’t say anything, Gunner opened his eyes and looked at him. Billy was staring at the road, but the look on his face was too serious. “She’s really pissed? I’ll help clean up the mess.”

“Those bikers tore the shit out of her place, man. They busted a ton of expensive bottles of alcohol and probably ran off customers who won’t come back now. She was just starting to recover financially from that fire last year, so yeah, she’s really pissed.”

“Shit. You think she’s going to throw me out?”

Billy sighed. “It’s always about you, Gunner. Maybe you should worry about what Patty’s gonna do without that bar. How the fuck she’ll support herself. Or maybe you could worry about my job or Lucy’s or…”

Gunner put his hands on his head. It felt like it might explode. “Okay, I get it. I’m a selfish asshole.”

“Newsflash, everyone already knows that.”

“What the fuck is your problem today? I didn’t even throw the first punch.”

“Nope, but you didn’t think twice about taking that big-ass biker’s woman into the bathroom and fucking her either. He was already talking shit about you wearing that patch. You should have just laid low until they were gone, but no, you fuck his old lady instead. What the fuck did you think was going to happen?”

Billy was the more responsible of the two, but it wasn’t like him to lecture his friend like this. Gunner tried humor again: “I wasn’t thinking clearly. My balls were too full.”

Billy tried not to smile, but he lost the battle and even laughed. “You stupid fucker. You better duck when you get out of the car, because Patty had the shotgun out when I left.”

They both started laughing and Gunner said, “Patty would never shoot me. If she was gonna do it, she would have done it nine years ago before I grew on her.” Patty owned the bar where they worked and the house where they lived, but she was much more than the two young men’s boss and landlord. The two boys met on the streets when they were twelve years old, both products of illicit drugs, sex, and shitty parents. They met Patty when they were thirteen and decided to break into her bar and steal a few bottles to sell on the streets. They might have missed her all together if Gunner hadn’t decided to make himself a hamburger since they were there anyway. Patty crept in the back door with a shotgun and it was the closest either boy had come to pissing his pants since they were toddlers. Instead of shooting, she’d finished fixing them something to eat, and sat them down to answer her questions. She wasn’t soft or motherly in the least, and she kept the gun on them to keep them from running off. But after getting their bellies full and spending the night in a real bed with a real pillow and blankets, neither wanted to leave. Patty pretended not to give a shit either way. She told them if they wanted to stay, they’d have to earn their keep. For the past nine years, they’d worked in one capacity or another around the bar. Patty never offered much in the way of shows of affection or discipline, but they were always warm and fed and in their own twisted way, they became a family. Any of the three would kill or die for the other two.

Gunner talked big, but as soon as they pulled up in front of the bar his stomach began to roll again. He told himself it was the alcohol on top of the two lines of blow he’d done with the biker chick, and then they’d smoked something that he’d bought from their friendly neighborhood dealer Wheezer that was stronger than usual. That’s all it was. He wasn’t afraid of Patty. She’d never shoot him.

He held onto that thought right up to the point when he pushed open the doors to the bar and felt the barrel of her shotgun press into his ribs. Gunner stood six-foot-four and Patty was five-foot-two in her boots, so the ribs were the right height, otherwise he was sure she’d have it aimed at his heart.

“Hi, Patty.”

“Don’t you hi, Patty me, you little, long-haired, wannabe-biker son of a bitch!”

“Whoa, harsh.” Gunner drove a Harley that he’d bought secondhand and put every penny of money he made into, and he wore a leather kutte that he believed to be his father’s. He’d found his mother holding onto it the morning she died in her own vomit. She’d left him a note before she killed herself…that was nice of her, and more communicative than she had been the first ten years of his life. It said, “This guy was like a legend or something. He owes you. Sell this. The money will keep you going for a month or two.” Touching, maternal words they were, Gunner thought. He didn’t sell it, though. He kept it, fighting for it on the streets more than once, even drawing blood a few times. When he got big enough to wear it, he wore it every day. It was stupid, but it made him feel like he belonged to something other than the gutters of San Antonio for once in his life.

“Oh, you think that’s harsh, do you?” Patty said. “Look at my bar, asshole! All of this because you think you’re so pretty you got a right to dip that little dick.”

Gunner put his palms up and said, “Whoa now, Patty, the wannabe biker thing was harsh, but if you’re gonna bring my dick into it, I’ll have to tell you that words like ‘little’ aren’t going to keep this very civil.” Suddenly the double-barreled shotgun was no longer pointed at his ribs. It was now pressed into his crotch, and Gunner was afraid to speak for fear that he’d sound like a ten-year-old girl.

“As I was saying, you think being pretty gets you special privileges around here, but it don’t. If you don’t know that by now, then you’re either stupid, or you’ve fried what brains you did have smoking that shit Wheezer comes around here selling.”

Carefully, and happy that he only sounded slightly out of breath, Gunner said, “I’m sorry, Patty. I don’t think I have special privileges. I got too wasted. I’m sorry. I’ll start working right now and have this place fixed up for you in a hot minute.”

Patty squinted one green eye, which Gunner knew meant that she was at least considering it. “You know what you need to work on, Gunner?” Before he could even speculate she said, “Your mouth. That mouth has got you into more trouble since you were a kid than anything I’ve ever seen. It’s a wonder someone hasn’t killed you already.” She wrinkled her nose and said, “Jesus, you smell like something died up in that hair, though.”

Gunner breathed a sigh of relief as she seemed to switch her focus and pull the shotgun away from his crotch. “Why’s everybody picking on my hair all of a sudden?”

“It stinks. Go on in the kitchen and get a bottle of apple cider vinegar outta the cabinet and dilute it half and half with water. Take a damned shower and use that vinegar to rinse your hair.

“Vinegar? That won’t make it fall out, will it?”

She rolled her eyes. “No faster than scalp rot will.”

“Alright. Are we good?”

“Good as we ever are,” she said. Gunner didn’t smile until his back was to her. He knew she wouldn’t shoot him…probably. He went into the kitchen and searched the cabinets until he finally came to one with an unopened bottle of apple cider vinegar. He found a Kool-Aid pitcher and started back out into the bar. His and Billy’s house was out back. He had almost stepped through the door when he heard Patty say:

“I don’t know anybody who fits that description. Now if you boys don’t mind, you can see we got a lot to do before we open tonight.”

“Look at the picture.”

Gunner peeked out around the corner. There were two bikers standing near the front door. Patty and Billy were facing them. The bikers were both tall. One of them was lean like an athlete, but especially a runner or basketball player, and he had long, straight black hair. The other one was built like a linebacker and every exposed part of his body was tattooed except his face and his mostly bald head. The thinner one was holding an iPhone out in front of Patty and Billy. Gunner could see it was a photo from where he stood, but he couldn’t make out the picture.

“Ooh, he’s a pretty one,” Patty said. Gunner stepped back against the wall and smiled. Patty was going to think of something sarcastic to say with her last breath.

“You’re telling me you don’t know who this guy is? It’s obvious that this picture was taken in this bar, and the guy that took it sent it to my boss at nine o’clock last night.”

Damn, Gunner thought, wasted at nine o’clock? Maybe Patty’s right about that weed. He would have sworn it was closer to midnight when things went bad.

Billy said, “As you can tell, there was a lot going on here last night. There were a lot of bikers in here and he may or may not have been one of them. Why is it you’re looking for him?”

The men exchanged a glance and the bald one said, “Curiosity, mostly.”

“Curiosity?” Patty asked.

“Yeah. Curious why some punk in Texas, that none of us have ever heard of, is wearing a kutte that is identical to the one that’s been hanging on our clubhouse wall ever since the man it belonged to died.”

Gunner didn’t hear much of what they said after that, thanks to the sound of his own breathing and heartbeat. He chanced another glance around the corner, though, just as they were leaving. The back of their leather vests both had the same patch sewn on that he had on his. It was a big white circle with a black skull in the center. Across the bottom of the circle it said “Southside Skulls” and across the top, one said “Sergeant at Arms” and the other, “Road Captain.” Gunner stepped back into the kitchen and slipped his off and looked at the back of it, just like he had done a thousand times before. It was the same as theirs, only his said “President,” and on the front, it said “Doc.”