Alice
The rest of my night passes in a wave of grief and pain. I get home, take a couple sleeping pills from my mom’s medicine cabinet, and down them and wait for sleep to take me.
I don’t want to think about tonight. Not now, not later, not ever.
I wake up, groggy with the medicinal hangover and force myself through the morning routine — getting my mother ready for the day, making sure everything’s set for Eleanor’s arrival, all the stuff I need to do to tread water for one more day — and head into work.
There’s a sense of finality to today. I go through the motions as the hours roll by, keeping myself moving with the knowledge that everything I’m risking is for the two-fold benefit of my own and my mother’s financial future. And for freeing myself from Thrash. Whatever lengths he might’ve gone to in order to get me out of jail, and whatever his friends might say in his defense, I can’t deal with the feeling that, on some level, he sees me as just a means to an end.
I’m just a tool to him, something to use and discard. I have no value beyond the dollars and cents calculus that I contribute to his enterprise.
“Ms. Alice, are those kegs hooked up? Are the lines clean?” Hammer bellows at me from across the bar. “And the whiskey, are we stocked?”
“For the thirtieth time, they’re ready.”
We have two fresh kegs hooked up, and the extras that were delivered yesterday — two kegs of the most popular beer we serve, a local microbrew called ‘Crescent Falls Lumberyard Lager’ — which are both marked with a small, almost undetectable ‘x’ on the side of the keg. Thrash explained that these two kegs are to be hooked up last, once the band and the party is in full swing.
“When the fuck is your friend supposed to get here to help serve drinks? There’s less than an hour to go.”
“She’ll be here. Chill the fuck out, Hammer. Lexie knows this is important.”
I suffer through another near hour of Hammer acting incredibly un-Hammer-like, in the sense that he actually gives a damn about managing and making sure the bar is clean and practically presentable. However, he’s still very Hammer-like in the sense that he’s a raging, terrifying asshole who always seems on the border of a killing spree.
Lexie shows up at the last minute, just before the mayor is about to arrive. She’s dressed in a low-cut white blouse that’s exposing enough cleavage that she’ll have every man in the bar panting after her curves.
She’ll make great tips tonight.
“Way to nearly be late,” I say.
“Nearly late, but not late,” she says, correcting me.
“You didn’t have to deal with Hammer this whole time. I think he’s just one outburst away from having an aneurysm.”
“That’d save us a lot of trouble, wouldn’t it? Want me to drop some glasses or something?”
“No. Please, don’t. Either he’ll die from an aneurysm, or his anger will open up some kind of black hole and kill us all.”
“You’re joking.”
“I heard this rumor from some of the bikers that, when he was younger, Hammer tried to enlist in the Marines. They kicked him out of boot camp for shouting down his drill sergeant. To this day, he’s not allowed within five hundred yards of a Marine Corps base.”
“Fine, fine, I’ll try not to fuck up tonight.”
“Did Thrash tell you everything you need to do?”
“No. Riot told me the other night.”
I ignore the implication and keep focused on my work. Lexie and I become whirling dervishes of activity in the last burst of getting the bar ready. No matter how much work we get done, it seems like there’s always something else to do. It’s endless.
While we work our asses off, Lucky and a few of the other guys from the Reaper’s Sons set up the stage for the band. There’s a banner against the wall announcing ‘The Steel Hearts’. It’ll be another hour or two before the band is here, but everyone’s determined to have everything ready. Plus, I’m pretty sure the guys are doing it just to have the option to play with some of the sound equipment that Hammer brought in especially for this occasion.
But Lexie and I hardly have time to think about anything other than work. Pretty soon, we’re swept up in the maelstrom of the party — ferrying drinks around and trying to keep track of orders while dodging some of the more handsy customers. Even though Hammer’s made it clear to the club that I’m off limits, some of the guys become a little forgetful after their sixth beer.
So much for being untouchable.
The more the party gets going, the more nervous I become. I’m surrounded by violent men, the bar is packed to the rafters with bikers and I know every single one of them is armed in one way or another. This whole place is just waiting to explode.
All it would take is a word from Hammer or anyone else in the club’s leadership, and every single one of these men would come for me.
One wrong step and I’m dead.
And yet, here I am, working against them, helping to rip them off.
“Keep it together, Al,” Lexie hisses to me beneath the rumble of the crowd. “You are slipping. Don’t.”
I’m at the bar, my hands shaking as I fill an order of six beers.
I start to answer that I’m doing fine when Hammer’s voice rises in a shout above the crowd. I nearly drop the glass I’m holding just hearing his voice.
“It’s the man of the fucking hour. On your feet, everyone.”
Every man stands and I take a full breath trying to calm myself down.
The front door to the bar opens and Mayor Tom Gardner enters. He’s dressed casually in a white button-up shirt and jeans, with his thinning hair brushed back. There’s a grin and a flush on his face that hints he’s already several drinks in. He’s the walking, talking definition of the word ‘rotund’ and he has a mustache that would make a walrus jealous.
The mayor has his arm thrown around the shoulders of the club president, Rex ‘Mortar’ Simmons. The rumor is the two of them go back ages as friends, though that’s something both of them will deny until they’re blue in the face.
The club president, ‘Mortar’, is every bit his namesake. He’s a barrel-chested man, with impressively thick, long, very dark brown hair, swept back and loose, and a beard that’s so dark it’s almost black, speckled with grey. He has the temperament of a loose cannon and the consequences of his anger are just as deadly.
Seeing ‘Mortar’ now is as intimidating as the first time I saw him. There’s something feral and vicious that lurks behind his eyes even when he’s laughing, like he’s just waiting for a reason to hurt someone.
“Here, take these,” I say. “We have to keep the drinks flowing.”
I hand over the tray of full glasses to Lexie and start filling another set. I have to be on my game, and, considering I’ve got maybe a week of actual bartending experience, that means I have to focus extra hard.
“You got this,” Lexie says when she comes back for another tray of drinks. “Besides, everyone’s starting to get drunk enough they’ll be fine as long as you keep the beer in their glasses.”
“Thanks,” I say. It feels good to hear something positive right now and it does a lot to calm my nerves.
“The band should be here soon, by the way. Once they get here, things will be even easier. Everyone’s going to be focusing on Scott Davis and The Steel Hearts,” Lexie says. “I wonder how the hell the Reaper’s Sons managed to book those guys? They’re way too famous to play a joint like this.”
“Thrash is distantly related to Scott, their lead singer. They’re cousins, and they used to jam together in some old punk band they were in.”
Lexie gasps. “You mean the Skullfuckers? Holy shit, I saw them live once, way back when, and they were amazing.”
I blink in befuddlement. “You actually knew Thrash’s old band? He was their drummer. But only for a really short while.”
“I mean, yes, kind of. Except for Scott, no one in that band knew a damn thing about making music. But they were a great show and I don’t think I’ve ever moshed harder in my life; I broke my arm and knocked some guy’s teeth out, I was so into it. It was great.”
As if on cue, the front door to the Smiling Skull opens and guys who absolutely look like a hard rock band step inside, carrying their own instruments. I spot their lead singer in a second — he’s got the confidence necessary to rock a stage, he’s got a leather jacket on, no shirt underneath, and his abs are entwined with tattoos. Both of his ears are pierced, and his hair is styled like he just got out of some kind of alt-rock J-Crew photo shoot — wild, almost unkempt, but still stylish. Their guitarist looks like a young Slash from Guns N’ Roses, right down to the long hair and outrageous tophat. Their bass guitarist is a heavier guy, big, thick, and with a beard and a shaved head. I hear him laugh through the noise of the crowd and even his laugh is like an octave lower than anyone else’s.
But what catches my eye — and what no one else seems to notice — is the drummer. Or drummers, to be precise. There’s two of them. And one of them — though he’s dressed in a leather vest and is shirtless underneath, and wearing tight jeans, with a cap pulled down low over his painted face — is instantly recognizable.
Thrash.
He’s got to be insane coming here. He’s stepping fearlessly into the lion’s den.
Everyone in the bar is on their way to getting drunk, they’re so preoccupied with having a good time that no one is even paying attention and none of them would ever expect a Rebel Rider to show his face here tonight.
But one wrong step, or one word to the wrong person, and Thrash is as good as dead.
He doesn’t seem to give a damn, though.
He makes a beeline for me through the crowd.
“What the fuck are you doing here?” I hiss at him before I catch myself and realize it’d be way less suspicious for me to actually talk to him like a regular customer.
“I’m ordering a beer, what does it look like?”
I get him a beer, half dumbfounded, half angry at him showing up.
“You’re not going up on stage, are you?”
“Fucking right I am. I wouldn’t miss this for the world — Scott wants to open with a couple ‘Skullfuckers’ songs, and for that, you need the original ‘Skullfuckers’ drummer. Me.”
“You’re legitimately insane.”
He laughs and flashes me a cocky grin.
“There’s no way I was going to let you do this alone. Even if I never see you again after tonight, I’ve got to be here and make sure you’re safe,” he says.
That moment catches me off guard, and I can’t tell if he means it or not. Am I just a tool to him? A means to an end? Is he saying all this because he cares, or because he thinks it’s what I want to hear?
I don’t know what to say to him. So I settle for “Thank you.”
Then I remind myself that I can’t for his manipulations again. I have to keep this to just business, otherwise, I’ll just be opening myself up to more hurt and more lies. Everything else from him is suspect.
He nods, then looks over to the extra kegs the bar took delivery of earlier. “By the way, you’ll want to tap those special kegs any minute now. Scott’s going to raise a toast to the mayor and to the Reaper’s Sons. There isn’t a man here who won’t drain their beer for that.”
“What’s in the kegs, by the way?”
He grins.
“I finally found a use for all that Molly you sold me.”