Grease lifted a fist at the front of our convoy and peeled off exit 78 to wait behind sparse shrubbery for The Fallen to ride by. It was a good place to ambush them, our bikes concealed, this stretch of highway 99 filled with steeply curving lines that meant the rival gang wouldn’t have time to react and pull away when we descended upon them.
Still, my cop’s intuition was scratching at the back of my neck, insistent and annoying. I scanned our surroundings as I swung off my bike and quietly pulled it into the vegetation off the side of the road with the others. It was a partly cloudy night, the light grainy and dark grey over the sheer cliffs at our back and the expanse of dully shining metallic ocean on the other side of the pavement. Perfect light to hide dark and dangerous things.
“Gonna fuckin’ stick those mother fuckers,” Mutt said to my left, his leg bouncing with restless energy, his eyes slick like an oil spill in the moonlight, filled with insanity. “Gonna taste their blood.”
I had enough on Mutt to incarcerate him for life already. He was a sick fuck without much care for subtlety and I’d watched him beat a man to death in the back of a bar one-night last fall. No one in the club reported the incident or narked on the biker when the police finally showed up. Berserkers were a well-known Vancouver menace, no one spoke out against them unless they wanted to die.
Of course, I’d witnessed the beating, how Mutt lost his shit at a man because he accidently bumped into him and spilled some of his beer, how Mutt then used the heavy stein to beat the man over the head until he dropped to the floor and then proceeded to kick him until his spleen ruptured and he died of internal bleeding. I told my senior officer in the joint task force even though I had also been wearing a recording device at my crotch and he told his superior in the RCMP.
We did nothing.
It was the hardest part of policing, the idea that one part was not a worthy substitute for the whole. If we started picking off individual bikers for their transgressions, it would tip off the MC to a greater police presence in their lives, and make it nearly impossible to get close enough to take out the entire club. The goal was the entire beast, not just cutting off one of its many heads.
So, we waited.
I was the first officer in British Columbian history to become a fully patched member of an outlaw MC despite multiple efforts throughout the years and the RCMP was not going to waste that opportunity.
Three years, dozens of transgressions on my soul for the sake of the greatergood, and countless lonely nights, going home to a house that held my dog and nothing else. It was a life without real friends, with only occasional, risky nights spent in a hotel with Diana, and telephone conversations with a father I hated and a mother who was growing more and more absent because of her dementia.
All for the greater good.
It was a phrase I repeated to myself every day, sometimes multiple times a day.
I was doing the right thing.
But I was tired to my fucking soul and having Harleigh Rose suddenly in my life blazing like a comet across my dark universe, the creeping doubt that I wasn’t living the life I wanted to live came rushing back.
I wanted to be free.
The thunderous roll of motorcycles rolled over the warm night air.
“Secure the cargo,” Grease reminded us. “Mutt, Roper, you take it back down the mountain, me and Hendrix will follow. Wrath and Lion will clean up the mess an’ make sure as fuck they don’t follow.”
Meaning, Wrath and I should kill The Fallen brothers and dispose of their bodies.
This was the first time the Sergeant at Arms had seen fit to put me on clean up duty. Believe it or not, it was a promotion. It said he trusted me enough to do the dirty, do it well, and do it quiet.
I’d do it, hate it, and report it back to my handler.
It still wouldn’t be enough to take them down. For that, we needed something bigger, accounts or cooked books, or, ideally, seizing a cargo of guns.
The bikes moved closer. I could taste the adrenaline leaking out of the men’s bodies into the air and my heart pumped harder.
“With me,” Wrath murmured out of the corner of his mouth from my right and then the bikes were rounding the corner and Grease called, “Go.”
We went.
I was an auditory man, music a language I understood better than spoken words, so the fight happened for me with a series of cacophonic events.
The Fallen laid down their motorcycles, a euphemistic biker expression that meant the skid to a painful stop flattened to the asphalt. There was the sparking hiss of metal on concrete, the rough cry of men as their exposed skin grated like cheese against the asphalt and then shouts of warning as they realized we were on them.
Wrath and I approached the man farthest away from us, sneaking up on him from either side so that when he sprung free of his bike, we were already on him.
It was King.
We stared at each other for a long second that seemed to stretch an eternity.
He’d grown in the three and a half years I’d been away from Entrance, filled out his tall frame so that it was thick but lean with power under his cut. My eyes caught on the patch over his left chest, “Prospect.”
I wanted to close my eyes and observe a moment of silence for the good, smart kid I’d known and helped raise. King wasn’t supposed to join the club, he was supposed to join Doctors Without Borders, head a coalition at the United Nations or start a billion-dollar hedge fund company. More than Harleigh Rose, I’d played a role in influencing King as a kid, cultivating the goodness, the morality in him until he was more white knight than black marauder, more me than Zeus.
That was obviously no longer true.
It was Wrath that broke the stalemate with a meaty fist connecting to King’s jaw. The kid went reeling backwards, caught himself on his back foot and remembered he was in an ambush. He launched himself at Wrath.
I needed to join the fray, to wear the blood of The Fallen on my knuckles so that Grease and Reaper would see it later, how it anointed me irrevocably as one of them.
But fuck me, this was King.
He was the kid I’d fed Cinnamon Toast Crunch to nearly every morning for almost a year, who’d helped me turn my Mustang Fastback into a gleaming beauty I was proud to ride, who’d sat with me at the table in my mother’s kitchen doing homework for hours on weeknights even after he’d moved back in with Zeus.
This was, in so many ways but blood, my brother.
I looked around for someone else to latch onto when I saw a flash of pale hair catch in the moonlight briefly peeking through the clouds.
A slight, black-clad body was moving through the calamity to the last biker laying half in the vegetation at the side of the highway, crouching beside it and fiddling through the saddlebags filled with prime grade weed.
Harleigh fucking Rose.
“Fuck me,” I cursed as I went ducking and weaving through the fistfights going on. The Berserkers were playing with the four Fallen bikers, if they were seriously in danger of losing the upper hand, I knew the knives and guns would come out.
I skidded to my knees beside her and hissed, “Get the fuck out of here right the fuck now.”
She bared her teeth at me, deftly unbuckling the bags and tucking one then the other under her arms. “There are three bikes loaded with stuff. They probably didn’t even see this one. They’ll think they got the goods, but I’m saving my club thousands of fucking dollars by doin’ this.”