Spike
“I’m going to kill every damn one of ’em!” Knuckles roars, charging into the clubhouse and kicking a table so hard that it collapses in on itself. He’s a tall, wide, fat man who makes the whole building tremble.
I follow behind the men silently. My anger is more of a seething, boiling anger, the kind of anger which takes a while to blow over the top. My anger is the sort of anger which causes men to turn up slit from ear to ear. I drop into a chair and wave at one on the pledges to bring me a whiskey. It’s evening, but it’s summer, and it’s Sunnyside, California, so an orange glow fills the room, bouncing off photographs of the MC, the old decommissioned WWII rifle above the bar, a pile of old motorbike tires in the corner which Red-Eyes says he’s going to fix one day. I sip my whiskey as my men gather around me.
Justin Herveux, my vice president, leans his elbows on his knees. He’s a good man, a couple of years younger than me, ginger, with freckles all around his nose. He’s the only one here who’s finished college. Business, I think. “I understand Dwayne’s anger,” he says. Justin is the only one who calls Knuckles ‘Dwayne.’ “But what are we supposed to do, boss? Can we afford to put security on our bars twenty-four hours a day?”
“So we’re gonna let ’em hit us twenty-four hours a day instead?” Alfred mutters, his voice wheezing. He must be ninety years old if he’s a day. He sits hunched over, clutching the table, eyes watery. But when he speaks, he looks like a young man again, if only for a moment. “The Scorpions need to be taken out. I’ve lived in Sunnyside since I was a lad. I helped make this club. And now you’re telling me these Scorpion fucks can just roll in and take over? I won’t have it.”
“The Dinosaur’s right,” Charley Red-Eyes says, his eyes bloodshot as usual. He’s short, stocky, with a flat face and a flat attitude toward violence. “They need to die.”
“I agree,” Danny Simmons squeaks up, nineteen years old, the youngest officer by far. He wipes down his blond hair and smiles nervously. “We can’t let them keep going in on us, can we, boss?”
They all turn to me, waiting. I’ll never get used to that moment. One day I’m sitting on their side of the room, looking to the President for advice, and the next I’m sitting here, dishing it out. Part of me misses just being able to sit there, waiting to be told what to do.
“Some of you might not know this,” I say. “But I had a girl I’ve been seeing on and off for a couple of months now. Her name was Christina. She was a cousin to one of the club girls. Anyway, she was at the bar tonight. One of the men—and I reckon it was that bastard Snake Lafayette, ’cause it’s always Snake Lafayette—left her bleeding out back. She’s dead.” I lean forward. The officers sit up, watching me intently. “So believe me when I say I want the Scorpions wiped out as much as you do. But here are the hard facts. They have just as many men as us, maybe some more. They are just as tough as us. They are just as brutal as us.”
Knuckles heaved up his huge body, smacking a meaty fist on the table. “Bullshit!”
“Do I look like I’m done talking?” I ask quietly.
Knuckles swallows, shakes his head, and hunches down.
“They are our equals,” I go on. “I know you don’t wanna hear that, but they are. So here’s what we need to do. We need to find a way to make things unequal.”
“Like in checkers when you get to the other side of the board and become a king?” Danny Simmons whispers, looking nervous when the men turn to him.
“Sure,” I say. “Like that.”
“But how?” Red-Eyes asks.
“Yeah.” Justin furrows his eyebrows. “Do you have a plan?”
“No. Not right now.” They all deflate. “For now, let’s all get some rest. Get some of the club girls in. Get some life into this place. It’s seven o’clock, goddammit; we’re not all dinosaurs here.” I wink at Alfred, who croaks out a savage insult.
Half an hour later, I’m in my office which adjoins the bar, listening to the sound of glasses clinking and women giggling in the next room. The only one who doesn’t get involved is Justin. He’s in an office next to mine. I can hear him in there, tapping on his keyboard. He’s working out the logistics for a gun shipment, I know. Leaning back on my chair’s hind legs, staring at the framed photograph of me and the previous president, Sonny, I think about Christina. Truth be told, I wasn’t in love with Christina; nothing as dramatic as that. She was just a woman who liked to fuck. But killing a man’s woman, even if it is just some casual thing, is crossing a damn line.
The whiskey bottle calls to me from the drawer of my desk. I’ll crawl into it soon, crawl deep, and forget about the trashed bar and the dead woman. I’ll try and forget about the other memory, too, the smoldering car and cooking flesh—I shake my head, forcing the memory deep down where it can’t bother me.
I need to ride, hit the road and be a man and his bike instead of the president and his officers. I need to pretend I’m just an enforcer again, working a job, trying to keep the Smoking Vipers afloat.
I feel oddly young when I climb out of the window into the parking lot. Not that I’m old at thirty-one, but I feel twelve or thirteen or something. This is the sort of thing Toby and I used to do, back in the day. The sun has almost set now, the silver handlebars on my bike catching an eerie purple color. I climb onto the bike, no jacket, no helmet, and ride away from the clubhouse. The music pumps behind me, becoming quieter as I get further away and release the engine to a full growl.
The wind feels good in my face, waking me up. I always think best when I’m on the road, metal roaring beneath me. I don’t know how a man can think in silence. There’s too much room for stray thoughts to get in the way. Sunnyside is a smallish town buried in the Californian south amidst trees and dust, San Diego a whisper to the west. As I ride, though, I don’t feel like I’m in California. I don’t feel like I’m in America. I feel like a pioneer, in the middle of nowhere, just me and the wide, unknown road. After about half an hour of aimless drifting, I ride toward the Scorpions’ clubhouse. I guess it can’t hurt to see what the enemy is up to.
During the two years I spent in the army, I learned to move quiet. So I park my bike on the far side of the road, hidden under the trees, and then creep across the road to the clubhouse. The building is squat and ugly, all jagged edges with a glaring neon light proclaiming Scorpion with a flashing scorpion figure next to it. Around thirty bikes stand in the parking lot. I approach from the dormitory side, skirting the lot, crouching low behind some bushes. I’ve got my pistol slung under my arm in its holster, just in case. But I’m confident I won’t get caught. A man can move like a shadow if he knows how.
I crouch here for an hour or more watching the dormitory windows. Most of the curtains are drawn, but I catch a glimpse of a couple of bikers. Mostly it’s just club women, the same kind we have, party girls who like to have fun, or cleaners and cooks doing their work. The moon is fading into the sky when I’m about to get up and leave. Coming here was a stupid idea anyway.
But then a light switches on, a yellow rectangle tempting me to stay. I crouch lower. The woman who walks into the room is like something out of a magazine. She must be around twenty, with a youthful, red-flushed face and big saucer-like blue eyes. Her blonde hair is tied up in a bun. She moves around the room with the grace of a dancer, her body short and curvy in all the right places. She’s the sort of woman who makes a man want to bury his face in her tits. I don’t know whether other men would feel guilty about eyeing up a piece like this after their girlfriend just died, but I don’t. A body and face like hers is too much to resist.
My smile drops when Snake Lafayette enters the room with the woman. I take out my pistol, wondering. But then I slide it back into the holster. I could shoot him at this distance without a problem. I’ve killed men from longer ranges with pistols. But guns are loud, way louder than in the movies. One shot would draw out the whole club and see me dead. The woman backs away from the man, shaking her head. I can’t hear what they’re saying, dammit. I don’t even know why I want to. Before I can question myself, I’m creeping to the window, making sure to stay in the shadows. I press flat against the wall, their voices dim but audible.
“Listen, I’m sure we can work something out.” Snake’s voice reminds me of the brown noses in the army, the ones who’ll do anything to please the officers, or like the brown nose pledges who never get patched. But Snake isn’t a brown nose. He’s just a snake. “I know you’re upset about your mother, but that’s no excuse for being unreasonable.”
“Unreasonable, Dad? Unreasonable?”
Dad . . . I creep away from the window, making my way back toward my bike. Snake Lafayette has a daughter. I had no clue about that. I have no clue how he could keep something like that a secret, either. But the facts are the facts. Snake Lafayette has a daughter, and we need leverage against the Scorpions. If the leader of the club I’m trying to take down has a daughter, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to work out what needs to be done. She could be useful. She could be the difference between the Smoking Vipers living another year or dying in the Scorpions’ pincers.
I ride back to the clubhouse, thinking of that bottle of whiskey. The plan is formulating in my mind, the logistics slotting together. This man killed my girlfriend. She wasn’t my fiancée, or even a woman I loved, but she was my girlfriend, and the principle of the thing can’t be ignored. Even without Christina’s death, though, I can’t let Snake roam around Sunnyside doing anything he likes to Viper territory. I can’t let Snake rob our stores and trash our bars. I can’t let Snake put my men at risk, men with wives and kids and bills and rent and responsibilities.
I sit on the edge of my bed, whiskey bottle in hand, taking slow, long sips. The whiskey is liquid fire down my throat, burning in my belly. I roll my head from side to side, clicking my neck. It’s time we did something. It’s time we stopped letting the Scorpions walk all over us.
I go into the bar, where the partying has reached the lazy stage, music playing low, the men dealing cards, the women sitting on their laps.
“Officers!” I shout across the room. “My office. We’ve got shit to discuss.”
Cards scatter. Women scatter. Whiskey glasses drain and slam into the table.
And then we’re in my office, talking about the sexiest woman I’ve ever laid eyes on.
“First thing’s first; one of you needs to get to the Scorpions’ clubhouse. I want that place under twenty-four-hour surveillance.”