No Angel (26 page)

I started to cry.

Damn that Pops.

God bless him, too.

WE CONVOYED TO
New Mexico. The Dobynses in one car, the Slatallas in another. It was an eight-hour slog, but with all the driving I’d been doing, it felt like nothing.

Jack sang “Jingle bells, Batman smells, Robin laid an egg,” and the rest of it over and over. We sang along with him initially, but after ten repetitions it was just Jack. I told him to zip it, which he did.

We pulled into a truck stop for lunch. Slats’s kids jumped out of their car and Dale ran to join them. Jack took his time, walking with the adults. I looked at him. He was uncharacteristically quiet.

Gwen asked him if he was OK. He smiled and said, “Yep.”

Not fifteen minutes later Jack walked up to Gwen and tapped her knee. He was as green as seaweed. I stifled a chuckle, Slats grabbed my wrist.

Jack moaned, “Mom, I don’t feel so good,” grabbed her purse, pulled it open, and barfed directly into it.

I hoped it wasn’t an omen for our trip.

We cleaned him up and hit the road again. After puking, Jack managed a PB&J and felt much better. He started singing again. The little guy couldn’t wait for Christmas. Dale kept pestering Gwen for details of that year’s presents. Gwen said, “I’m not going to tell you, Shoey. And besides, you know Christmas is about more than presents. The presents just remind us that we’re luckier than others.” Dale whined that she knew all that, Gwen told her to sound more appreciative, and Dale wisely chose to drop it.

I didn’t engage in these discussions too much. I checked my phone constantly. I’d missed calls from Smitty and Bad Bob. The missed calls made me anxious. I felt I needed to be with them, massaging their egos and ingratiating myself. I decided to turn off my phone.

Sitting in the car alone with my family for eight hours for the first time in months—maybe even a year—it dawned on me that I’d put myself at complete odds with … myself. The part of me known as Jay Dobyns felt guilty, while the part known as Bird was angry at Jay for feeling guilty.

The Slatallas had rented a condo at Angel Fire: four bedrooms, three baths, a nice, small outdoor hot tub. We settled in. Slats and I got lift tickets while the girls and the kids went grocery shopping. On our way to the ticket offices, Slats and I agreed to keep case talk to a minimum. We both knew that we needed to chill, and that we each needed some exposure to our old, more regular lives. Slats said, “Nighttime only, after everyone’s down.”

I agreed, “Nighttime only.” And added, “At the bar.”

“Most definitely at the bar.”

Slats made a big breakfast every morning we were there. The first day it was cheese and scallion eggs, toast, bacon, OJ. The next was pancakes. The day after that was French toast; after that poached eggs with homemade hot sauce. He was a regular short-order superstar. I joked that if this federal agent thing didn’t work out, he had a future at the Waffle House. He said, “Naw, I’m too good for the House.”

We stayed for six nights and seven days. The kids got along great. Dale was the same age as Slats’s older son, and Jack was the same as his younger. We’d spend three or four hours a day on the slopes, trying to stay together. I’d constantly challenge Slats to races to the bottom, and he’d constantly refuse them. It didn’t matter. I went down hellbent on shorty skis with no poles. I liked them because I could do anything on them. Their only drawback was that I looked more like a monkey on sticks than like Bode Miller. Each run, I’d be the first to the bottom, where I’d wait impatiently for everyone else. Slats would be last, carving graceful arcs through the powder on parabolic 210s, making sure everyone was down in one piece and not horsing around when they shouldn’t be. Then we’d pile onto the lifts and do it all over again.

On Christmas Eve, after the kids went to bed, I snuck out to the back porch and called Smitty’s house. I lit a cigarette while the line rang. Lydia answered. She wanted to know what I was up to. I told her Big Lou had sent me on a collection around Santa Fe. She asked what kind of Scrooge works on Christmas Eve? I told her if Big Lou said the word, I’d shoot Santa in the knee and take all the world’s playtime swag off the back of his sleigh while he rolled around in the snow. Lydia just said jeez, and told Smitty that Bird was on the phone. We spoke for a few minutes. He said everything was fine, good holiday, I said mine was as good as could be expected. Gwen came outside as we talked. She looked at me, then at the cigarette in my hand, then back at me. I gave her a wild-eyed look. She shook her head and went back inside.

If I’d had a shred of decency I’d have felt ashamed. Instead, I was relieved she was gone.

I hung up, smoked another cigarette, and went back inside, where a game of Scrabble was starting up. With Slats playing, I knew I had no shot at winning. I played anyway.

On Christmas Day the kids were up at the crack of dawn and the coffee was brewing. The sound of three boys tearing into wrapping paper, and one girl carefully pulling apart folds, filled the living room. Their energy was infectious. I started wadding up the wrapping scraps and throwing head shots at the kids, and before I knew it we were in a full-tilt Christmas Day wrapping-paper fight. That wound down and I played hide-and-seek with the younger guys. I was the seeker. Slats made breakfast again and we ate and then we hit the slopes.

That night, after lights-out, Slats and I went to the bar. Since it was Christmas night, there wasn’t too much going on—mostly lone-wolf locals and resort workers boozing after another day.

We talked about the case’s next step. We agreed that whatever it was, it had to be something that would really knock the Angels’ socks off. I suggested we bring them a show of force. We decided to orchestrate a Solo Angeles Nomads run in Arizona, where every Solo who showed was an ATF special agent. We decided to roll hard and deep and show the Angels what we were all about.

This worked into Slats’s operational direction of maintaining the Solos, and without conceding anything, I knew it worked to my advantage too. If the Solos came in and proved we were a solid club, then Bird would gain that much more credibility, and I’d become an even more desirable Angels recruit. As far as Slats and I were concerned, this idea was win-win.

We put the case aside for a while and talked about the week. I thanked him for making it happen, saying that if he hadn’t, the Dobyns clan would be sitting around our living room staring at the walls. He shrugged, as if to disagree, and changed the subject.

He said, “Earlier today I was thinking about how we ski.”

As usual, I’d spent the day racing to the bottom, while he enjoyed the sound of the breeze in his ears and the snow-covered pine trees lining the slopes. Or whatever it was he did. “What about it?”

“Well, you know how you race down and fall and get up and race forward and tumble some more and get up and race forward again?”

“Yeah. If you’re not falling you’re not skiing hard enough.”

“Yeah, well, you know how I cut from side to side and glide and check everything out and make sure everyone gets to the bottom in one piece?”

“Sure. You’re slow. I get it.”

He let it pass. “I was just thinking we have opposite styles, but in the end we both get to the bottom of the run at about the same time and then we both ride the lift up together. One’s really not any better than the other, that’s all I’m saying. It’s just how we are.”

“Yeah, I guess you’re right.”

We clinked glasses and ordered another round.

JANUARY 2003

BEFORE CHRISTMAS
I worked fifty to seventy hours a week. After, I knew I’d be facing eighty to a hundred. I threw the switch undaunted—in fact, I was exhilarated.

We busied ourselves setting the thing up in the first half of the month. We called a bunch of ATF agents and ended up securing three for duty: Steve “Gundo” Gunderson, Alan “Footy” Futvoye, and a hotshot from San Diego, Jesse Summers. Each brought something to the table. Jesse was young and hard—appearing more Latino gangbanger than anything else. Footy was enormous—six-four, 285 pounds—and had an easygoing personality that both frightened and attracted people. Gundo, an academy mate of mine who was ten years older than I, was a crafty old-school UC, a classic, straight-up operator who everyone—good and bad—couldn’t help but like.

While Slats, Timmy, and I briefed our peers, JJ and Pops were busy with the minutiae of hosting and outfitting three “new” Solos. They lined up rental bikes, a couple of motel rooms, and, most important, created the cuts and made them look authentic. Our aim was to have the guys up to speed as soon as they hit Arizona, which would be on January 28.

I also equipped the Phoenix undercover house on Romley Road with some new props. My three-foot-long iguana, Spike, hadn’t been getting the love he needed from the Dobyns clan, so I’d brought him up from Tucson. Once Spike got to the house, I realized that he should have a friend. For some reason one of the task force agents was selling a nameless eight-foot boa constrictor. I bought him—and his huge glass tank—for a hundred bucks.

We ramped up our contacts after mid-January. Timmy and Pops went out with Bad Bob and the Mesa boys one night. Bob announced there’d be no more drugs in the clubhouse—no selling, no buying, no using. The guys said fine. Bob said there’d been too much of that lately. Then Bob took Timmy and Pops aside and asked, “By the way, you guys got any party favors?” Apparently the rule didn’t apply to him. Timmy later told me he had to stifle a chuckle by coughing into his hand, and Pops said he couldn’t even believe it.

Not much else happened until the show came to town on the twenty-eighth.

Slats rolled out the equivalent of an undercover red carpet for the temporary Solos: grilled New York strips, ice-cold Cokes, and a makeshift casino in the Patch—craps and blackjack tables and a roulette wheel. I tried to get JJ to dress up like a showgirl, but she told me to fuck off.

We gambled quarters and laughed and ate. Around ten I suggested we go for a ride. Everyone was game.

As we saddled up Slats yelled, “Take it easy tonight. We got a big week.”

I said, “Got it.”

“No clubhouses. Only soft spots.”

“Got it.”

“You got no cover.”

“Got it.”

We left.

I knew these guys were up for anything, so I immediately violated Slats’s orders. We headed to the Desert Flame, a strip club owned by a new Mesa prospect named Big Time Mike.

We rolled in seven deep, counting JJ.

Big Time Mike asked, “What’s up?”

“Big Time! These are my Solo brothers—Jesse, Footy, and Gundo.” Big Time asked us what we’d have, and we told him.

After serving us he said, “You guys should go over to Mesa. Some guys are there, they’d love to see you.” Before I could say anything, he called, spoke to them, and hung up. “It’s all set. They’re expecting you.”

“Cool, dude.”

I pulled Gundo and Footy aside and asked, “Whaddaya think? We won’t go over there if you’re not comfortable yet. You heard Slats—he doesn’t want us doing anything like this.”

Both said, without hesitating, “Hell with that, let’s go!”

I asked Jesse and JJ the same, and they were game too. Timmy and Pops were always up to see the boys. I told everyone we wouldn’t stay longer than an hour or two. In and out, meet and greet, get the lay of the land, that kind of thing. As we assed-up I looked at my guys. I thought, We don’t need a damn cover team. We
are
the cover team. There was no way a roomful of Angels was going to outdo the seven of us. My confidence soared.

Mesa Angel Alex Davies met us at the gate and showed us inside. It was a small group. Nick Nuzzo, Mark Krupa, Casino Cal, Paul Eischeid, and some prospect I’d never seen. Nick stepped behind the bar, poured us all drinks, and toasted the Solo Angeles.

Then he said, “Let’s go next door.” He meant the members-only section of the house.

For the first time, we went next door. The decor was more of the same, except there was a greater concentration of lounging furniture: a couple of couches, four overstuffed chairs, a low coffee table with nonsense scratched all over it—affa, i (heart) the hells angels; mesa rocks; and
JAIL
,
DEATH
,
AND PUSSY
.

Everyone mingled. The new Solos hit the ground running and took over: no fear, no hesitancy. They’d been on the case for twelve hours and they were already performing like A-list actors. For the first time in months I was able to sit back and enjoy myself as my partners worked the room. Nick and Cal started to do bumps of crank off the tip of a Buck knife, openly violating Bob’s no-drug rule. Nick must have seen me looking at him, because he sheathed his knife and came over.

He blurted out, “Fuck Bob.”

It was the meth talking. I didn’t say anything.

He repeated, “Fuck that guy.” Cal came over and sat down. Nick sat down. He bounced one of his legs and spoke fast. “Shit ain’t right around here, Bird, I’ll tell you. Guys are splitting. The guys in this room, we wanna be outlaw. Bob and Whale and Crow, those old fucks, they want us to take it easy.” He spit on the floor. “We want to be outlaw—like you guys, you know?” That took me aback. The Mesa Hells Angels wanted to be like us? Like Solos?