Tank

We got to the motel the Spawns’ VP was staying at too late. Our informant told us he was supposed to be spending the night at a local MCs bunkhouse, but we didn't find out that was false info until almost dawn and then we still had to torture it out of them to find out where they did go. I left the torture part to Scar and it didn’t take long.

The VP was already packing up the car to leave when we arrived, and a whole crew of construction workers was having their breakfast thirty feet away. Much too public for a hit. Even Ice agreed, though I could feel him bristling with the need to slit the man's throat as soon as he saw him. He didn't stop bristling even while the guy buckled his small child into the car seat. Even as him and his ol' lady bickered about something, but ended it with a hug and a kiss.

I didn't need quite so stark a reminder that I no longer know why the fuck we're doing what we're doing to the Spawns. Or the reminder of the way me and Kim said goodbye yesterday morning. But I think Ice remembers for all of us, and I doubt the man understands love anymore. Not that I care. At least one of us is still on point with this job.

"We follow at a distance," I tell Ice and the five men with us. "Let's not spook them. As soon as they hit some backwaters stretch of road we'll make them stop and get this done."

We came here in two cars. There are few things as enjoyable as running down your rival on the back of a motorcycle, but these fuckers know we're coming, and they know they're running for their lives. The element of surprise is gone and they don't have a lot of fight left in them. It's mostly just flight now. A cornered animal is always the most dangerous one, and a cornered man is worse.

I tell them how I want us to handle this, sending two guys ahead to overtake them, while me, Ice and Scar will be taking up the rear, following the car as close as I dare. We're in grey station wagons for this job, which are stolen. We also stole the license plates from some other random cars. My plan is to make this one look like a case of road rage gone wrong and nothing more. This is too close to home and too public to mess up.

"The woman and child live," I add although I'm pretty sure that needs no saying. But it's never good to be too sure of anything in this life.

"What if she talks?" Level asks. He might be a new addition to the MC, but he's as bloodthirsty as they come. I'm guessing he was born that way.

"We'll make sure she understands it's in her and her child's best interest not to," Scar explains harshly, saving me the trouble.

The doomed little family is done packing and drive off, and Level and the guy I sent with him take off right after them. A part of me would prefer to be sending Ice in that car, but I like to keep him close where I can keep a good eye on him at all times.

Luckily, the Spawns' VP drives straight out of town and doesn't get on the highway. It's morning rush hour time, and he's clearly determined to cover as much distance as he can as quickly as possible. He's speeding too, and before long we're driving down a stretch of country road that leads off into the mountains. Level overtakes him. Houses are few and far between, standing far away from the road, the sides of which are overgrown with lush green bushes you'd practically need a machete to get through. This is as good a place as any for the hit, and better than most. And I'm thinking the VP might be angling to get on the highway soon, now that he's out of the city.

I call the car in front and tell them to fake an accident and block the road. There has been virtually no traffic coming from the opposite direction for awhile, nor is there anyone behind me, or in front, except for our quarry.

"We'll have a very short window to do this, Ice," I say to him, as I pull my bandana up over my face. Scar does the same, but Ice doesn't. He never hides his face for job. I suppose he wants his enemies to see him coming. And he’s also been, for all intents and purposes, a dead man for the past seven years. There's no coming after a dead man. "Let's make it a quick one."

He shrugs. "Fine." But he doesn't put the huge double-edged hunting knife he's holding away.

The car in front is breaking hard, and I can already see our station wagon blocking both lanes in the distance. There's no more time for talking. This is on.

I don't slow down the way the VP is doing, but instead come at his stopped car at speed, veering onto the shoulder in preparation for our quick getaway.

"What's happening?" the woman shouts. I can hear her loud and clear through the tightly closed windows. I can hear the fear in her voice too. The VP is frozen at the wheel, staring dead ahead, his eyes glassy. He knows what's up even before he sees me, Scar and Ice approaching the car.

I'm going towards the driver's side, Scar by my side. The guys from the other car are coming out too, bandanas covering their faces. The VP is staring at Ice, his woman at me.

She snaps out of the terror freezing them both first, and starts shrieking his name, shaking him to do something. But it's too late. Much too late.

I yank open the driver side door. "Come on, Seven, you don't want your kid to see this."

The kid is about three years old. I'm thinking he's too young to remember any of this, but memory can be a tricky fucking thing. I can remember things from before I started actually remembering. Just flashes and still images, but they happened.

I have no idea how Seven came by his name, and I like to know things like that, but I suppose that after today it won't matter. The woman is begging him not to go, clutching his arm, but the frozen fear in his eyes is all hard determination as he glances at the kid in the back seat, who's bawling at the top of his lungs.

This is taking too long. It's just a matter of time before someone does pass down this road, or hears the kid screaming and comes to investigate. The woman's screams might already be getting heard by someone in the area too.

Ice opens her door and puts a gun to her head. "Shut the fuck up, bitch. And you, Seven, get out of this car now. Do something good for once in your life."

Seven gives him a look of pure loathing, but the woman is silent now, so there's that. And clearly Ice has decided to let me lead on this one, which is a bonus. Seven gets out of the car slowly, his hands up by his head.

"Make her get out too," I tell Ice. "We need to have a word."

Ice tells her to do it, and with shaking hands she unbuckles her seatbelt.

"Over behind the bushes," I say and grab Seven by the arm to drag him there.

"You don't have to do this," he tells me, once Ice and the woman are already behind the bushes. "I'm leaving the country, and no one will ever see me again."

"Yeah, well, the coroner will see you," Scar says. "Keep walking."

The woman is shaking when we reach them, her teeth chattering.

"Say your goodbyes. Quickly," I instruct, loosening my grip on Seven's arm.

Which was a mistake, because he breaks free and grabs her, hides behind her as best he can, seeing as she's a tiny thing, and he's taller than me.

"You won't shoot a woman, will you, Tank? That's not how Cross does things, is it?"

"They won't," Ice says venomously, as he aims his gun at her chest. But luckily he doesn't pull the trigger like I was sure he might as soon as his words faded.

She's as pale as new snow. It was a mistake bringing her back here. I realize that in the same moment it all goes to fucking hell so fast, none of it registers until it's over.

Scar is sneaking up behind Seven, to get him from the back, but Seven sees him and turns, pushes the woman straight into the path of the bullet Scar had aimed at his side. Too late to stop it. It gets her straight in the chest, straight in the heart it seems, because she goes down without a sound. It misses Seven completely, and he starts running, but doesn't get far. Ice catches him, tackles him to the ground, opens his throat with the knife he somehow exchanged for the gun in his right hand in the split second it took for all that to go down.

I can hear the child wailing in the distance. Seven is gurgling blood, his eyes full of poison, full of an intense hatred such as shouldn't be the last thing on the mind of anyone right before they die.

"Let's get the fuck outta here!" I yell and run for the car.

Level and the other guy from the first car are already in the back seat, as per the original plan, which pretty much went to hell when Seven tried to run by sacrificing his woman. It's a tight fit when Scar joins them, but we're ditching this car in the next parking lot we find.

"What about the child?" Ice asks. His voice is as cold as ever, but I don't think he's actually suggesting we kill the child too.

"Someone will find him soon enough," I say and get behind the wheel. Ice gets in the passenger seat.

No way this will be viewed as a case of road rage now. We needed the woman to tell that story to the cops. But at least the child didn't see any of it. Although he looks big enough to climb out of the car on his own and go look for his mother and father. I hope someone finds him before he thinks of that.

* * *

"It's done," I announce to the execs already gathered in the meeting room as I enter, then pause while I take my seat to Cross' right.

"The VP was the last of the top level Spawns," I continue. "Only the stragglers are left now. But it was messy. We killed his woman too, but the child was alive when we left. He probably still is, unless no one found him, or he wandered out of the car and someone ran him over."

For some reason I'm not very clear on, I spent the entire ride back home worrying that's what happened. Usually I can disconnect from a killing right after it's over, since I barely have a conscience anymore. But this child…I don't want his death on it.

"The child survived," Rook says and tosses the newspaper he was holding onto the table in front of me. "But it was clearly very messy."

I pull the newspaper closer and glance at the front page. There's a picture of the scene we left behind on that backcountry road in Washington yesterday morning, only there are a couple Sheriff's cars parked next to Seven's vehicle and the station wagon we left behind. There are no pictures of the dead bodies, or the kid.

"This is a California paper," Rook adds. "Meaning the thing went national overnight. What the fuck happened?"

He's not the one I need to answer to, and he damn well knows it. If he didn't, then my murderous look just told him. But Cross' gaze is just as murderous as I lock eyes with him.

"The Sheriffs of a bunch of counties all pledged to investigate this until they find who did it," Cross says in that cold, menacing way he gets when things don't go the way he wanted them to go. "What went wrong?"

He's not saying it directly, but it's there, plain as day, in his voice. He thinks I fucked up and he doesn't like it.

I shrug and push the paper away from me. "What does it matter? Seven is dead, the only witness to the killing is dead, and we were miles away by the time anyone found out what happened. This won't come back to haunt us. Especially since we've already done the lion's share of the work and can lay low for awhile now."

Cross shakes his head. "You're wrong, Tank. The biggest job is coming up. We have to dispose of the guy running for Sheriff."

The rest of the execs recognize that tone in his voice too. They know I'm being scolded, and I was never good at taking a scolding.

"You're worried about nothing, Cross," I say, turning in my chair to face him. "This thing that happened in Washington, won't come bite us in the ass here in California any time soon. We were careful like we always are. Killing that woman was just a hiccup, but one that disrupts nothing."

Cross is still staring at me in that piercing, cold way of his. "You take too many risks, Tank. You always do."

"And I always walk away safe and sound," I tell him. "Don't forget that either."

After that we just stare at each other, and to be completely honest, I don't know why he's making such a big deal out of this. We've left behind messy crime scenes before. Many times before. On jobs he was heading.

"The journalists have figured out that someone has been killing members of Hell's Spawns MC for the past six months or so," Rook says in that perfectly calm way of speaking that he has. If I hadn't seen him fly into a rage on those five or six occasions when it happened, I'd say he was incapable of it. He's almost as lethal as Cross and me. But also a lot more remorseful. "Or maybe it was the cops that figured it out. But that's what most of that article is about. And the feds are looking into it. They will be working closely with local law enforcement from here to Illinois and back to figure it out."

"It says they found that child clutching his dead, bleeding mother," Scar says, setting down the paper he picked up to read. With that huge scar covering half his face, the man looks like something out of anyone's worst nightmare, but he's got a very soft spot for the poor unfortunates of this world. What he read about the kid's fate is worse than wandering into the path of a semi truck. I know it's worse. And it's something he'll remember whether he's three or eight or eighty. It will haunt him forever.

"We've had the feds breathing down our necks before," I say, ignoring Scar and his useless information, and going back to the thing we can do something about.

"Push up the Sheriff from whatever else is on your to-do list," Cross says. "I want it done as soon as possible, so we can have a Sheriff that's on our side once this shit starts hitting the fan."

"Alright, Prez, I'm on it," I say, since he's right. But I so wanted to just go over to Kim's tonight and let her help me forget all about yesterday morning. Now I'll be lucky, if I don't dream that kid hugging his dead mother tonight. Or dream something worse. Something closer to home. "I'll personally inspect where we are with the planning and make a decision as to the best way to get it done quickly."

Cross nods, and I think he's satisfied for now. But with Cross, you can never be too sure that you know what he's thinking. Many have paid for that mistake with their lives. And I’m still not sure if our life-long friendship will protect me from every mistake I make.