Spike
As the men deal with Yazmin, I turn on my computer and navigate to the basement cameras. I tell myself this is to make sure that Yazmin doesn’t get free somehow, but I know the real reason. I don’t want Danny or Justin touching her, even brushing against her hand. I don’t want them saying anything suggestive, either. I feel a possessiveness over her I can’t understand. I feel more possessive over her than I ever did over Christina, poor woman. She never had a chance with me. She couldn’t break through all the shit that goes whirring around my head. But somehow Yazmin has done in hours what Christina couldn’t do in weeks.
The basement room is like a miniature apartment with a bolted lock on the outside of the door. Inside, there’s a bed and a sink and a microwave, a fridge and a freezer, all the shit a person needs except for a window and a chance to escape. There’s even an en-suite bathroom. Justin and Danny untie her and step back warily, as though expecting her to start fighting. But she just backs away to the bed. Then Justin stands guard as Danny brings down bottled water and some food for the fridge.
When that’s done, they leave, locking the door behind them. I watch as Yazmin struts around the room before walking right up to the camera. Her lips are moving, but the audio is switched off. I switch it on.
“. . . Do you like watching me, Mr. Viper? Does it excite you?”
I switch off the camera. I’m too aware that this girl could be a plant. What she told me about her old man and her mom could be a lie to get me to trust her. I guess I’ll know more after this raid. I could be walking my guys into a trap.
A few minutes later, the officers are sitting around my desk. Red-Eyes is drunk but sobering up now that he knows we’re working tonight. Knuckles looks ready for a fight after learning about our dead brothers. Justin and Danny look ready for business. Alfred looks like he’d go out there himself if he wasn’t too old, his eyes full of death.
“I think I have some information about a Scorpion drugs shipment.”
The men lean in, listening.
We move quickly after that, getting ready, tooling up. I always feel oddly comfortable when I’m tooling up. I know it would make other men uncomfortable to have guns pressing against their ribcages and their calf muscles, but for me it’s the norm, something I know how to do. I may be lost when it comes to knowing whether or not Yazmin is playing me, but here, riding with my men toward the city, I know exactly what to do. Watch, wait, kill, steal or burn.
Around eleven p.m., we ride out toward the docks, thirty of us in a line of bikes, growling through the summer’s night, cutting a wide line around Sunnyside proper and the Scorpions’ clubhouse. We can’t let them know we’re coming. They have no reason to suspect we’re going into San Diego to mess with them, anyway, unless Yazmin really is a plant . . . The idea bothers me more than it should. She’s my prisoner. That’s all. Sure, she’s got some nice tits and some nice legs and an ass that needs to be spanked, but that doesn’t mean I’m about to lose my head over her. I’m not a love-at-first-sight kind of guy.
But as we near the city, the lights rising out of the darkness like never-ending fireworks, I know I’m bullshitting myself. There’s something about Yazmin. I get a feeling of dread in my belly when I consider that she may be lying. If she’s lying, I’ll have to kill her. I won’t have a choice. If she’s managed to work her way into the Vipers and lead us into a trap, she has to die. I swallow, nervous like I haven’t been since I was a kid. I don’t want to hurt her, I realize, not like that.
We stop a good half mile from the port, everybody climbing from their bikes and checking their weapons. For a few moments, the night is filled with the click-click-click of guns being checked and loaded. Then we’re walking through the city in packs toward the docks, five to a team, using different streets so we don’t draw attention to ourselves.
“I’m going to kill these bastards,” Knuckles says, gripping the spiked knuckle dusters that give him his name. “I’m going to kill every goddamn one of them.”
“Not if I get there first,” I mutter, my rage growing larger by the second. I think of the scorpion in the jar, the dead men the Scorpions have left in their wake, the pain in the ass they’ve been over the past few months.
When we get to the port, standing in crowds along the perimeter, I nod to one of my men and he goes forward with the bolt cutters, clipping the gate, making a hole big enough for all of us to crawl through. All along the perimeter, men are doing the same. Even if the guards happen to pick one or even two or three groups up, there’s more of us. That’s the benefit of having so much manpower to hand. It gives you power.
I take out my pistol and jog across the parking lot toward warehouse fifteen, its number visible in the streetlamps which light up the lot, a low-lit blue sign. As we get closer, more men join us, more and more until there are thirty men with their backs to the warehouse, waiting for my command. We’re all completely silent, listening to the night. The docks are deserted except for the sound of the waves and then, rising slowly and becoming louder, the sounds of Scorpions unloading the shipment.
“Good stuff, this,” one man says.
“It better be,” another man replies. “Standing out here in the middle of the goddamn night.”
“Don’t let Boss here you talkin’ like that.”
“Do I look like a fucking idiot to you?”
“You hear about the boss’s daughter?”
“Yeah, I heard. Ran away, I reckon. What else?”
“That’s a damn shame. One more week of sitting around on her ass and I swear, man, I swear boss was gonna let us take turns on the slut.”
Hearing this shouldn’t make me angrier than anything else, but it does. I imagine five Scorpions standing around Yazmin, all taking their turns to steal pleasure from her. Closing my hand around my pistol so hard it hurts my palm, I send word down the line. It’s time to hit these bastards.
I stalk to the edge of the warehouse, peeking around. From my hiding place I can see five men standing at the edge of the water, smoking cigarettes, and watching as other men unload the shipment. I don’t know how many men are unloading; I can’t see, so I have to assume there’s at least a few more.
“Okay, send word. We’re firing.”
Twenty-nine men whisper, “Boss.”
I aim my pistol at a big fat man with a goatee and a shaved head, a tattoo between his eyes which might be a dagger, but in the darkness could be anything. Maybe even a target.
I remember the first time I saw what a bullet could do to a man’s head. I was using a twelve-gauge shotgun. It was like seeing a watermelon dropped from twenty stories, the sinews and bone and skin and flesh and cartilage which hold a man’s head together coming apart as though in slow motion. I remember feeling sick, disgusted. It wasn’t that I was emotionally moved—the man deserved to die, there was no question about that—but there so was much blood, so many fleshy chunks.
Pistols are cleaner.
The man makes a stifled coughing sound and then falls backward into the water. At the same time, his friends are riddled with dozens of bullets, all falling back as well. I sprint down the warehouse toward the corner so I can see the unloaders. It turns out there are just two teenagers there, spotty-faced, not wearing the Scorpions jacket. Pledges.
“Wait,” I call down the line. Thirty Vipers emerging from the darkness would be enough to make anyone piss his pants, I reckon. So I don’t blame the rake-thin teen with the jet-black emo cut. I lean over them, keeping my gun trained on their heads. “Tell Snake Spike says hello.” I smile savagely. “Tell Snake his days of fuckin’ us over without retribution are done. Run along.”
The pledges sprint away, panting girlishly.
“Knuckles, Danny, Justin, Red-Eyes. Do the honors.”
Four flip lighters hiss yellow in the darkness. Four flip lighters spin over and over into the boat. Four flip lighters start four raging fires.
By the time we’re jogging away from the port back to our bikes, the fire is kissing the sky, turning it orange and red. I try and imagine Snake, the weasel-looking bastard, when he finds out about this. But thinking of Snake brings something home. Snake is exactly the sort of man who would let us burn a shipment if it meant getting a mole into our organization. Snake is exactly the sort of prick who’d let us kill dozens of his men if it meant he could trick us into believing his daughter has switched sides.
Back at the clubhouse, the men drinking like men do after bloodshed, I go through Yazmin’s bag in my office, spilling the contents out on my desk. There’s nothing incriminating, just makeup and clothes, nothing to indicate she was doing anything other than running away.
I join the men for a while, grinning when they grin at me, taking a few drinks and smoking a cigar, but I can’t stop thinking about Yazmin. Maybe it says a lot about me that I killed a man tonight but the only thing I can think about is a woman I barely know, but there it is. After an hour of going over and over this, I reckon there’s only one thing to do.
I have to talk with her. Before I go down, I disable the cameras. I don’t want anybody watching us.