I used the barrel to open the door and pushed it open so I could enter inside. I hadn’t even made two steps in before a sinister voice stopped me in my tracks.
“I was wondering when your lazy ass would show up,” a strange voice said from the shadows of my hotel room.
I gripped the trigger of my pistol, ready to shoot if I needed to. I learned never to leave home without it; otherwise, someone else would take advantage of your weakness and shoot you in the back.
“Don’t worry, I’m here as a friend,” the voice told me. I could briefly make out his shadow sitting in the corner chair. I tried to flip on the light, but it wasn’t working. This is what I get for buying a cheap hotel room to hideout in.
“Who are you?”
“The better question is, who are you?”
“I asked you first,” I growled, gripping my gun even tighter.
The street lights outside lit the doorway a few feet in and the man stood up and walked toward me, standing just at the edge of the light so I could see his face. It took me a few seconds to realize it was Cipher, the guy who just got patched into the club. I saw him talking to Scythe, Switchblade, and Faith before I slipped out the back exit.
“I knew telling you she was in trouble would draw you back home.” His disheveled brown hair fell over his eyes, hiding the penetrating brown eyes that seemed to be analyzing me. He was young, maybe mid-twenties, but he tried to look older by hiding his youth behind a badass beard, a nose ring, and a sleeve of tattoos.
“Wait . . . are you the mysterious emailer? How is that possible? I don’t even fucking know you.”
Cipher grinned, extending his hand, “I’m Cipher, newest member of the Devil’s Armada. Nice to officially meet you.”
“I don’t think you have the right person. I’m a nobody.”
Cipher walked back over to the chair he was sitting in, grabbed something off of it, before turning to pull the chain on the cheap lamp near the bed. The crappy light bulb barely illuminated the bed; it glowed a soft orangish-yellow light and blinked and made that electric buzzing noise like it was about to fizzle out. He threw a folder onto the bed and I gulped when I realized it had my name on it—my real name.
“I know exactly who you are. You’re license says your name is Holden Gregory Hall, but before you started using that name, people knew you as Midas, Tail Gunner for the Devil’s Armada. Before that, you were born James Dylan Sheridan, people called you JD for short. You spent a handful of days in Juvie when you were sixteen for assault after your father pressed charges against you for fighting back, and then you spent a couple weeks there after you were caught shoplifting some CDs from Best Buy a few months later and violated your probation. You left home and were marked a runaway only to be picked up by the Devil’s Armada and recruited by their president, Dutch, when you were seventeen. You served them faithfully for ten years only to be murdered by a rival MC seven years ago. Your death was the catalyst that turned the club upside down. It turned them into outlaws and eventually led them to a life of crime. Everyone thinks you’re dead, but somehow you survived being murdered. I could tell you more, everything is in this folder.”
“How in the fuck do you know all this?” There was no way this guy could know so much about me. I chose Holden for my alias because I named myself after Holden Caulfield in the Catcher in the Rye, my favorite book as a teen. Either this guy was insanely good at stalking or he was a fucking Fed.
“I’m really, really good at my job. Finding people is my specialty. You’re a hard person to find, Holden.”
“Then how did you find me?”
“Six months ago, your mother had a mysterious phone call from an unknown number located in Texas. The phone call didn’t last long, but the man stated he was friends with JD and wanted to check up on her. Your mother found it odd that out of the blue seven years after her son’s death that someone would call, she reported it to a police officer. Due to your case being cold, they did nothing, but the report popped up in the system. I’m trained to find abnormalities like that, it’s like a gift or something. Part of my job is running names of former club members periodically, just to make sure they aren’t doing something fucked up. I saw that shit and it got me wondering. Could the mysterious Midas still be alive? I started digging and then I researched the phone number; it wasn’t long before I found you. A few facial recognitions later and voilà, JD Sheridan is alive and well in Texas.”
I was dumbfounded. Who the fuck was this guy?
“Are you a fed or something? Why would you be interested if I was alive? We don’t even know one another.”
He didn’t move. He didn’t even flinch. If he was a cop or a fed, he had a damn good poker face.
“A mutual friend had a suspicion that you were still alive and wanted me to keep an eye out. And surprise, surprise, you were fucking alive just like they thought.”
“Who?”
“Who is not important, but the what is very important, and what you need to do is save this club and Faith before it’s too late.”
I plop down on the bed and start flipping through the pictures Cipher had in his folder. One of them is from when I took Faith to her senior prom. Man, I was grotesquely fat back then. My body mass took up almost the whole photo and I looked like I weighed eight-hundred pounds standing next to Faith’s petite body. I don’t know why she ever liked me, but she stood there holding my arm with the biggest smile on her face—like I was her everything. Her other hand was folded over mine protectively, holding me back from tearing apart the two guys from her school that were making fun of me on the other side of the photographer. My scowl and size ruined this photo.
Faith could’ve picked anyone to take her to her prom, but she chose me. I still don’t know why she asked me. I was nineteen and had to get special permission to escort her to her prom. Most people avoided me like the plague, but Faith, she only showed me kindness from the moment we met. Our sparks were like shooting stars, taking off fast and floating through the sky in a streak of perfect light. That momentum is what led me to take her virginity that night. I’m not sure how I pulled that off, but I remember that night very vividly, how her face looked as she stared up at me with nothing but love in her eyes, fighting through the pain as I claimed her virginity as mine. She wasn’t the first woman I had ever slept with, but she would be my last—that’s one thing I knew for sure. I just didn’t know how she would react when she finally found out that I left her alone and never said goodbye. Man, the engagement ring I had for her has never felt as heavy in my pocket as it does right now.
“What do you want from me?” I asked, barely moving my eyes from the picture.
Cipher walked back to the chair in the corner of the room and sat down. “Simple. I want you to fix what you broke and save your girl before she ends up dead.”
“Dead?”
Cipher leaned forward and took me in carefully, “Faith has been fucking with the enemy . . . literally. Word is, she’s soon to be Diego’s Old Lady. She’s been going behind enemy lines and playing badass bitch for the last five years in the Diablo Saints, all behind Scythe and Dutch’s back.”
I could feel the blood drain out of my body. Diego. Of all the people Faith could get tangled up with, it had to be mother fucking Diego. The most ruthless and blood-hungry MC leader in town.