Death Lords Motorcycle Club: Chelsea and Wrecker (The Motorcycle Clubs Series) (18 page)

M
y old man
gave me my road name when I crashed my first two wheeler at age four. He’d given me a gas powered scooter and sent me off down the road where I promptly ran into two trashcans pressing the accelerator instead of the break. According to him, it was the first and only real argument that my mom and him had ever had. Since she died when I was a kid, I don’t remember.

She wanted him to ease up, maybe have me peddle around in a big wheel for a while but Dad was bullheaded and said I would never learn if I just didn’t climb back on.

“He’s a Death Lord. So he wrecked. Least he didn’t lay down his bike,” I remember him saying proudly. He ruffled my hair and set my bike upright. After a quick inspection to make sure that I hadn’t broken anything, I was placed back up on the bike. I raced it back to the house and crashed into the fender of his old Ford pickup.

My road name was cemented. Road names are an important part of our biker world. Like the cut and the patches, the road name identifies our brotherhood. Abel, the newest Death Lords MC patch, doesn’t have a road name yet. In my book, Abel suits him fine because he knows how to get shit done which is why I let him go five nights ago to take care of a Misery MC patch who decided club life wasn’t for him anymore.

I trust Abel to take care of business and to watch my back so when I emerge from the bedroom and see Abel leaning against the wall opposite of the door, I know immediately we need to talk.

“How about some breakfast?” I ask, shrugging on my cut.

“Sounds good. There’s a diner about four blocks away.”

“Chelsea wants to take a shower.”

“That’s fine.” He pushes away from the wall and starts down the stairs. “I’ll wait downstairs.”

Chelsea’s not part of the club but the vibes in the Misery MC’s clubhouse are off and I don’t want to leave her alone. I don’t think anyone of these fuckers would touch her. I pistol-whipped a guy for spouting off about her so the entire crew knows that she’s off limits. But you never know and I wouldn’t trust most of the guys in the Misery club to watch my second cousin’s cat let alone my most precious possession.

I stick my head back in the door. “Breakfast in about thirty?”

She wrinkles her nose but nods. “Yeah. I’ll have wet hair but it’s not like I want to be here alone.”

She dons one of my t-shirts and a pair of sweatpants and brushes by me on the way to the bathroom. There’s only two in this house. A small one downstairs that just has a sink and a toilet and a larger one with a tub and a shower up here. In the basement there’s a drain and a shower head used by Junior, the president of the Misery MC. Chelsea took one look at the dark, dank basement with its exposed brick walls and dirt floor and noped out of there faster than I could say her name.

It does look like a place where a serial killer dismembers his prey. Junior doesn’t have a killer vibe to him, not like Easy or Michigan, the Death Lords enforcers, but there is something off about him. It’s always the quiet ones who surprise you the most. They’re the ones in the aftermath of some bloody, inconceivable horror that neighbors refer to as nice and quiet and all of this is a complete shock.

I’m not turning my back on Junior any time soon.

Downstairs I find Abel flicking through messages on his phone while two hungover Misery guys are shoveling cereal into their mouths. Only Abel acknowledges me with a tip of his chin. The other two pretend I’m not there.

Junior ambles out of the kitchen, polishing an apple on his sleeve.

“Guess I don’t have to ask whether you had a good morning,” he jokes. One of the guys laughs but given that I’m the only one who’s been laid steadily since I arrived, I chalk it up to juvenile envy and ignore them.

“What’s the plan for the day?” I ask.

Junior bites off part of the apple and chews it before giving me an answer. He never responds right away and I haven’t figured out whether making me wait are power plays to try to display his dominance or whether he’s a thoughtful guy, picking and choosing his words carefully. Doesn’t really matter because not only am I patient—I learned in prison that the sun always rises after the long dark night—but also because the name on the back of my cut is Death Lords and the only club I’m accountable to is that one.

I take a seat next to Abel and wait. If Chelsea wasn’t upstairs getting ready, I might have tagged Abel and we would have taken off while Junior chokes on his fucking fruit.

“There’s a shipment of goods coming down 94 and working its way down to Chicago,” he says finally. “Another club asked if we’d handle the transport through the cities and down into Wisconsin. The SS out of Madison will pick it up around Eau Claire.”

The SS are a bunch of skinheads rumored to be loosely affiliated with the Eighty-Eight Henchmen, a West Coast supremacist club. I don’t know any of the SS personally but Judge, my dad and the president of the Death Lords MC, might. “What size is the transport?”

“Two moving trucks.”

“And how many bikers?”

“Six.”

Abel coughs next to me. I hear the word he’s not saying though. This sounds like a big clusterfuck.

“You’re taking two moving trucks escorted by a parade of bikers down Interstate 94? That’s not going to raise any red flags,” I say sarcastically.

The other guys at the table—Riot and Coffin—stop eating. No one argues with Junior, apparently. I can’t stop comparing Death Lords to this club. My dad’s secure enough as president that he doesn’t mind people arguing with him, particularly members of the club. Granted, he’d never come up with this shit kind of solution. If you are moving hot goods from one end of the country to the other using motorcycle clubs like a relay race, you are bound to raise the suspicions and hackles of police. It’s not like these fuckers don’t communicate with each other.

Junior stiffens. “Not my plan. I’m just along for the ride. Not all of us have custom chop shops we can rely on to pay our bills. Some of us got to take jobs where we can find them.”

He’s not wrong. Calling this place a dump is insulting dumps everywhere. There’s yellowing on the ceiling and walls were water damage has seeped through the drywall and curdled the paint. The floors are hardwood but so worn through that in many places the plywood floor base is showing through.

“How many of your members rely on club money?” It varies from club to club. Some of the established clubs whose sole purpose is running illegals from drugs to guns pay for every member in the club—their rides, their housing, extra spending cash. If you leave, everything is left with the club.

Most everyone who belongs to the Death Lords has an outside job. The Death Lords money is enough to provide for the basics—basic food, basic housing but most everyone has a regular job. Dad implemented that rule way back when saying that it helped make the club look less like a gang and more like a recreational, weekend hobby even if it wasn’t.

Men who went to bed with their bellies full and their bank accounts healthy were less likely to narc out the club for the less than above board activities.

And that meant less bloodshed overall.

Junior’s club—the one he inherited from his dad—is already a fraction of its previous size. The current membership is around eight.

“Right now? Several. Economy is in the shitter. Riot just lost his job at 3M and Coffin moves snow in the winter but we haven’t had much snow.”

“That sucks. You guys have families to support?”

“Just Moose.”

Abel and I exchange a look. Moose is the guy we caught meeting with Trainor, a local Fortune man whose wife was murdered. The Fortune police, led by Chief Schmidt, were trying to pin that murder on me.

“He got a wife?”

“Two sisters.” Junior’s mouth tightens. Again I can’t read his emotions. Something about those sisters bothers him.

“Who has sisters? I want to meet them.” Chelsea pipes up. She must have finished with her shower and came downstairs while Junior and I were talking. Her hair is up in a high ponytail and her skin glows like she’s a fucking angel. She’s the cleanest, prettiest, nicest thing in this entire house and everyone notices. Junior actually licks his fucking lips like he’s going to get of taste of her. Never. Not even over my dead body.

“Nothing, baby.” I rise and walk over to her. I grab that hank of hair in my hand and tilt her head back. Her cherry lips are glossy from some kind of product but I don’t give a damn. I plant a hard kiss on her lips, reminding everyone who she belongs to. Her nails dig into my biceps for a moment and then all too soon she pulls away.

Her thumb brushes across my lips to clean off the lipstick I just ate off.

“You need to get a coffee flavored lipstick.” I sneak a lick of her thumb and she shudders. Leaning over, I pull her down coat off the hook by the stairs and help her in it.

Abel is standing by the door, ready to go.

“What about the transport?” Junior calls out as we’re halfway through the doorway. “They’re going to want an answer.”

“Later Junior,” I say. “We’ll talk about it after breakfast.”

Chelsea raises her eyebrows but doesn’t say a word as we walk down the street. “Problems?”

I rub the back of my neck. “Don’t know.”

“That place doesn’t feel right,” she says. It’s not the first time she’s made a comment like that. When we first arrived, I figured it was because the place was falling down and there wasn’t a clean spot in the entire two story shambling building but I’m starting to think it might be something more.

“What don’t feel right?”

“It’s just…so filthy. I mean, even for a bunch of single guys. But Junior’s room? Impeccable? He’s a neat freak. Did you see he wiped his hands with a napkin after he was done eating the apple? A guy who lives in a house like that would wipe his hands on his shirt or jeans.”

“She’s right,” Abel says. “There’s something off about how the older members of the club are gone. Have you or Judge checked up on them?”

“No, I haven’t. Don’t know that Judge has. Are you saying that they might have been pushed out?” I let that thought roll around in my head. It seems like a big omission. We’d taken Junior at his word because he’s the son of one of Dad’s old friends.

He gives a small shrug, a tiny roll of his shoulders. “I’m thinking that Junior may have cleaned house.”

“You get that from Big?” When Abel went to take care of the Misery MC who crossed me, he went with a Misery biker named Big.

Abel gives me a half smile. “No. Big’s a good member. Close mouthed, efficient.”

“Where does he work?” I ask.

Abel nods. “A rubber and plastics refinery on the north side. They melt down and recycle old and used rubber that’s then extruded through big-ass machines to make other shit. They’ve got ovens there that can incinerate shit in about thirty seconds.”

“Useful guy,” I muse. That must be where the Misery MC gets rid of all its trash. Hard to come after a person for wrongdoing when all you can find is ash. “He must keep his nose pretty clean because I’d think he’d have to pass a background check.”

“He’s good at his job.” Abel replies. What he means is that Big doesn’t get caught.

At the cafe, we place our orders and find a booth in the back corner. We can’t talk club business here so I turn to the other important task of the moment—finding a place to live other than the Misery clubhouse.

“You find anything?” I ask Chelsea, who is in charge of that.

“I haven’t found a decent rental. Everything’s either too expensive or too small.”

“I can find a place of my own.” Abel shift in the seat across from us as if he’s some kind of fucking burden.

“Yeah, not happening man. We’re sticking together.”

“Just thought maybe you two would like a little privacy.”

Chelsea turns bright red. “Um, no, we like having you around.”

“Yeah. I’ll make Chelsea scream into the pillows next time.”

“I hate you,” she says and Abel laughs.

“Okay. Sound good.”

“What you need is to make your own noise,” I add.

Chelsea, desperate to change the subject, narrows in on Abel. “Why don’t you have a girlfriend? There’s always a half dozen girls at the Cut-n-Curl who talk about how hot you are but that you don’t give them the time of day. If I wasn’t completely gone over Grant, I’d be all over you. The club girls are always fighting over you but you don't take many of them up on their offers.”

It’s Abel’s turn to redden. “I’m not it really into relationships. It never really worked out for me. Screwing around here and there is fine, but long term? I don’t see it.”

Chelsea opens her mouth to further her interrogation when the food arrives. Abel thanks the waitress a little too enthusiastically and she lingers.

“Anything else you need?” her smile is overly friendly but either Abel doesn’t notice or he doesn’t care. He sticks a fork into his stack of pancakes and just shakes his head.

Chelsea gives the waitress a look of sympathy before saying, “We’re fine.”

The arrival of the food doesn’t stop Chelsea from pressing Abel. “Are you looking for something in particular? A girl who likes dogs or maybe one who plays video games.”

Abel swallows his pancakes and wipes his mouth—the sort of thing Junior does before answering me. Maybe Junior’s just worried about saying the wrong thing because I can see Abel trying to pick the right words to satisfy Chelsea. What he should know by now is that Chels will hammer this topic until she gets an answer that makes sense to her. Then the side of his mouth quirks up in defeat.

“I had a girlfriend in high school. We were going to get married. During my second deployment, I came home and found out that she’d got tired of waiting for me and decided my brother would be a better bet.”

“Holy shit!” Chelsea exclaims. “Did you walk in on them or something?”

“Not exactly. They didn’t say anything but I could tell by the way they acted around each other that they were fucking. He’d touch her waist or she’d put her hand on his knee when they thought I wasn’t looking.”

“Did you confront them?” I try to imagine what I’d do if I came home after my three years in prison and saw Chelsea with another Death Lord brother. It wouldn’t have been pretty.