Riding Dirty (5 page)

Did he trust her? She was naive and inexperienced and scared. Bronson had spent most of his life on the streets and usually had a quick, penetrating insight about people, but all he could really say so far was that there was something different about Rowan, something he couldn’t place. Sure, he could say she had the face of an angel and the experience of a baby, coupled with the motivation of a junkie. He also felt instinctively that she was honest, loyal, and serious enough about her sister to do what needed to be done even if there were a few hiccups along the way. Why he felt so compelled to help her, he couldn’t yet begin to articulate. Was it stirrings of his long dormant conscience, an appeal to compassion?

Ridiculous. Just now, with the eyes of the MC on him, Bronson was trying to convince himself that it was more about helping the club, helping himself; finding a loophole in the Auditore problem, gaining his freedom again with the Ruiners, and pinching pennies for his secret Mexican piggie bank. If helping Rowan could accomplish that and maybe give him an opportunity to settle his curiosity about her, he wouldn’t mind one bit. It wasn’t really like he was sticking his neck out, if he looked at it like that.

True enough. Bronson sighed. Every lie he had ever told had been true enough.

“Yeah,” he said. “I trust her.”

Why not? What did he have to lose, anyway?

After a contemplative moment, President Axle cleared his throat. “Alright, vote-time. All those in favor of Ramsey’s temporary business model?” Around the table, hands slowly rose. “Opposed?”

Only Rex and Dolce lifted their hands to vote against.

“It’s settled.” Axle relaxed in his chair. “Ramsey, you’ll be leading the operation. Act as pimp, solicit customers, and handle the up-front payments from the johns. Dolce, Smiley, and Luther, you’re the beta team, the muscle. Always pack your heat and make sure you’re never more than a minute away.” His gavel crashed down, ending the session. “Meeting adjourned.”

As the men filed out of their meeting, Bronson felt Axle’s arm holding him back. With pained eyes he watched the door close behind Dolce. Bronson didn’t feel good leaving Rowan alone out there with the guys awake and lucid. But more than that, he didn’t like being on the rocks with the club. This whole Italian job had him in knots.

“I know your patience must be wearing thin,” began Axle.

Bronson grunted. “That’s putting it mildly.” All the drama of the previous months hadn’t been his fault, but since he was Sergeant of Arms and the busted deal involved the guns, he had taken most of the fall for the club. Paying penance was not congenial to his nature.

“You know there will be a built-in life span to this little idea of yours,” said Rex. “Once the Auditores find out we’re operating on the strip during the truce, it’s over.”

“There was never a truce,” spat Bronson. “You know that. It’s more like a prisoner exchange, except we’re on the short end. Besides, they won’t find out.”

“They will, eventually,” said Axle. “Rex is right. You’ve just got to delay it as long as you can. Be extra careful Ramsey. We support you, we support this idea of yours, but the club’s vulnerable here, make no mistake.”

Rex looked at him, eyes full of meaning. “We can’t afford another Delilah.”

Bronson stared back at the Vice President, his eyes stony and cruel as he dared him to say more. Choosing not to credit the young man with a retort, Bronson addressed Axle. “Lecture over?” Receiving Axle’s nod, Bronson slammed the conference room door open and stomped off down the hall.

Finally alone with his son, Axle placed a reassuring hand on his shoulder. “Hey,” he rumbled. “Ramsey’s loyalty is not in question.”

“No, just his judgment.”

Axle pointed to a framed picture hanging on the wall, showing a long line of polished Harleys and their dusty riders posed in front of the clubhouse. “See that? Scrawny kid at the end? That’s you, fifteen, polishing the sleds. See Ramsey? He’s already got his wings, same age as you. Use your damn head.”

More people in the bar were groaning awake now. The big front window blinds were cracked open and dusty white sunlight streamed through the stuffy atmosphere. The Prospect had been busy. A higher percentage of furniture was standing up the way it was intended, and he’d mopped all down the hallway and into the mess behind the bar. All the same the smell in the bar area hadn’t much improved, nor had Bronson’s mood.

Yes, he was grateful the club was behind his idea. They could get started with a new enterprise and bring all his personal and group goals one step closer to fruition. He tried to focus on the positive and silence all the misgivings he felt in the pit of his stomach when he noticed a few of the hang-around women talking to Rowan across the room, playing with her hair and laughing. It looked like a scene in a porno; the girl next door had tried selling Girl Scout cookies in the wrong neighborhood. God, she stuck out like a sore thumb.

That’s why this will work
, Bronson reminded himself.

You can’t fake innocence.

Before he could join Rowan, he felt an arm reach up his calf and stroke his thigh. He looked down and smiled lazily. “Hello Lola.”

“Hey stranger. Where were you last night? We missed you.” She groggily rubbed her eyes and reached both hands leisurely up toward Bronson. She was tangled with another Latina woman on the floor. “Help me up.”

Bronson pulled her to her feet and felt his body respond when he noticed that she was only wearing a black thong, dark leather boots and nothing else. “You’re looking good sweetheart, as always.”

“Thanks boo,” she murmured, resting her head on his chest in an intimate hug. She shifted slightly, letting her breasts sway against Bronson’s firm muscles. “You know you always look so sexy. I was hoping I could give you your congratulations present last night but you never showed up.”

“You didn’t have to get me a present.”

“I didn’t get you a present…I’m giving you one. I’ll give it to you right here and now if you’re ready.” Her hand slid down to his fly, but before he knew what he was doing his fingers closed around hers and whisked them away.

“Not today,” he said brusquely. “I’m busy.”

She stomped her foot and groaned. “You’re always busy lately. You can’t just keep me on the shelf like fucking aspirin.”

He shook his head, disentangling himself from her arms and at the same time offering a consoling pat on her bum. “Lola, I told you, you and me…we tried that. It didn’t work very well. Remember? No more.” He kissed her lightly on the lips, a goodbye. He felt the back of his neck prickle and turned to find himself the subject of an interested third party. Dolce offered him a cold grin and raised an eyebrow, the message clear. The last thing Bronson needed was more trouble brewing, so he cleared his throat and stepped away from the dame. “Besides, maybe I should remind both of us that you’re with Dolce now anyway.”

It was a thin excuse. He’d hooked up with Lola since their breakup and since Dolce. Not that he’d felt great about it. Still, he couldn’t quite admit why he wasn’t in the mood today.

Lola rolled her eyes. “Dolce’s not you, baby.”

Bronson met Lola’s eyes and saw the flicker of pain and disappointment. There he went, hurting her more. Evidently the band-aid he’d tried to slap over their history wasn’t fixing a thing. His soul was bound up in this club in more ways than one and he was starting to think he’d never finish paying his dues.

Automatically, he felt himself glance over to where Rowan stood. “Actually,” he found himself saying, “I could use your help with something. See the blonde? She’s a new friend of the club, a business partner. We’re starting a project tonight and we’ve got to give her a little makeover, some nice dresses, you know, get her looking expensive. Dolce will tell you what you need to know. Think you and some of the girls could take her downtown this afternoon, keep an eye on her, pick out some things?”

Lola nodded, pouting.

“A’ight, see you then. I gotta go.”

Many curious biker eyes were on the blonde as they watched their Sergeant at Arms introduce her to Dolce, Smiley and Luther before he protectively hustled her out of the clubhouse. No one stared more openly than Lola. Her burning gaze almost bored a hole through the door long after they left. Her fixation was not lost on Dolce.

“Business partner,” she muttered to herself. “Give me a break.”

Her dark thoughts were on Bronson and the new girl long after they disappeared down the road on his Harley in a roar of sun, smoke and steel.

Outside, the cheery June sun seemed to make the air above Lockala Pines Motor Home Park shimmer and ripple with tangible heat. With her nose pressed against the grimy, dusty window in the living room side of her parent’s trailer, Lacy Thomas was daydreaming. She could almost picture the tiny green fairies she liked to imagine zipping around on warm spring days in Lockhart, stirring up the atmosphere before causing the crescendo of a late afternoon thunderstorm. Maybe there would be rain later today. It would match her energy a lot better than the spring sunshine.

Even though those silly fairies were pretend and she was probably way too old now to think about them now, they were her best and only friends. Lacy wasn’t quite a normal fourteen year old. She’d grown up in isolation and illness, and spent most of her time in her own company. Whenever she found herself feeling lonesome, Lacy couldn’t help but indulge in her flights of fancy.

Imagination had always been her secret weapon, a skill her big sister had taught her to use to enrich their drab reality. Right now, despite the crackling energy and silence of the afternoon, she could close her eyes and populate her world with her favorite fantasy creatures somersaulting through the low-slung tree branches over her mobile home, waving their magic wands and giggling together. She had named them and created elaborate stories about them when she was younger—the Lost Fairy Kingdom Chronicles of Lockhart, she had called it.

In her stories, the graceful Fairy Queen Arrowlace had fought against the evil human lumber company that was destroying Lockhart’s beautiful longleaf pine, hickory and oak trees, foiling their schemes through clever trickery and help of her handsome fairy Prince Ponce, the valiant wild animals, and two golden-haired human sisters who could understand the fairy language.

Not the most original title or plotline, Lacy thought ruefully, but it had helped her pass the hours when she was too tired and swollen to play outside—and that was most of the time. She used to write all her made-up adventures in notebooks, decorating her colored pencil drawings with stickers that her big sister would bring her from the general store. Rowan used to read the stories with her when she finished her homework, and once in a while if Lacy was feeling better she would take her for walks to show her old tribal mounds in the Indian grass prairies. They’d pick wild orchids and look for arrowheads, sometimes staying out past sunset to see the lightning bugs. Those were the happiest days.

Now Lacy wished she could fly away into those pleasant memories instead of sitting alone in her trailer, waiting for an alarm to go off to remind her to take her oral diuretics and vitamins. There was no sound in the trailer park right now, not even an air conditioner or truck engine. In a way, Lacy was thankful for the quiet. It was so exhausting when her mother or, God forbid, her father was home. Then she’d have to focus through the haze in her brain to try to answer confusing, meaningless questions with a “yes, sir,” or “no, sir,” or else risk a painful slap across the face with a hand or belt.

Luckily, it had been about three days since her father, George Thomas, had shown up for dinner. He was probably down at the beach in Florida or camping in Conecuh National Forest with a case of liquor and his pal Jimmy Dixon again, pissing in pitcher plants and shooting skeet. He’d do that for days, leaving Lacy and her mom Barbara to awkwardly silent, stressed meals, both on edge to hear his heavy boots on their makeshift pressure-board deck. If he didn’t come home, Barbara would rant about the tiny size of the welfare checks and complain that he would certainly get himself fired this time, and then what would they do?

Lacy didn’t really care anymore what happened to them. It used to scare her when she was little to hear her mom talk like that. Lacy used to be scared of just about everything. Rowan was the only brave one. Whereas Lacy would retreat, Rowan would fight. Before she left home, Rowan used to tell their mom to do something about it if she was so worried. “Go to Andalusia, get your own job. Grow up!” That always shut Barbara up.

Their father was another story, though. Rowan had stopped calling him sir a long, long time ago, and as a teen had developed an unhealthy habit of always telling him what she really thought even when he hit her. Lacy asked her to stop once. “Just say what he wants you to say, Roro,” she had begged, full of dread. “Then he won’t get so mad.” She was scared he’d kill Rowan one day, but Rowan didn’t stop.

One night at dinner she had talked back to their father again. Lacy couldn’t remember what Rowan said to make him angry, but she did remember him hitting Rowan with a beer bottle. It cut her pretty deep and left an ugly cut that sealed into a tiny scar on her left cheek.

That was the night Rowan had left home, leaving Lacy alone with her parents and the gnawing silence and aching in her belly. “You can’t let him bully you, Lacy,” was what her big sister had said that night when she packed her bag and hitched a ride with a friend to Montgomery. “It doesn’t matter that he’s your daddy; he doesn’t deserve to be. He doesn’t own what you think. You keep your mind free of him and don’t you ever let him make you feel small. Someday, you’ll leave and come with me. Just hang on sweet pea.”

Nothing else really changed about the family: it just got a little quieter when Rowan left home. George didn’t have anyone to fight with anymore, especially as Lacy got sicker. He seemed to have enough sense to know he couldn’t smack her around when she was so weak, and so he hardly bothered with her. Barbara mostly avoided saying anything that would upset him, which severely limited the available topics of conversation. And so the three of them had come to a sort of unspoken understanding that allowed them to lead non-intersecting lives in their tiny trailer. Now that they knew what was wrong with her health and they were on the transplant wait-list, there was nothing to talk about again.

It was just as well, because Lacy was finding it really hard to focus on conversation or books lately anyway. Dr. Hall said it was because of her ascites getting worse, that her whole body was going to be getting more tired as her liver hardened into one big scar. It would make her brain slower, her skin yellower, her breath shallower. Toxins like copper would build up in her body and make the whites of her eyes change color. She felt full all the time, even when she didn’t eat. In fact, she barely ate anymore. It was too much work.

The alarm clock went off, and Lacy pulled herself away from the window and slowly stood from her perch on the couch, stumbling over to the kitchen. She rifled through the cupboard, found her pills, and swallowed them. Then she trudged back to the couch and flopped down, catching her breath before picking up the envelope that was lying next to her lap. She had been waiting to open it, savoring the treat.

She slowly and carefully tore along the top border of the envelope, so as not to rip through the address label in her sister’s sloppy handwriting. Las Vegas! It sounded so glamorous. Lacy gently slid out the contents of the envelope. There was a postcard with a photo of the Strip at night, the buildings so colorful and bright that Lacy could hardly believe they were real. On the back, Rowan had written, “It’s enough to make the fireflies jealous.”

Lacy smiled, tracing her fingers over the Luxor pyramid and wondering what it felt like to walk down the street in front of it. Rowan had included a necklace, a small arrowhead shape fashioned out of rhinestones. Best of all, there was a letter.

“Sweet pea,

I wish you could know how much I miss you and love you. You’d like Las Vegas, I think. There’s a circus, a show with tigers, and so many interesting people that you’d never run out of story ideas. Someday maybe I’ll bring you here so you can eat at one of the casino buffets. They had an ice cream sculpture shaped like the Eiffel Tower last night. I can’t wait to show you the world outside Covington County. There’s so much waiting for you. We just have to get you healthy first!

I’m sending you a good luck charm to wear every day, especially when you have to drive with mama to the city for the hospital. Fit for an Indian Fairy Queen…

Don’t give up! I know it’s hard for you to write, so I am going to look for a tape recorder you can talk into. I want to hear the first chapter of your first full-length novel next time I visit home. I’ll hope to find one and some blank cassettes and send it in my next package.

Stay strong, sweet pea. I may not be able to visit for a while. I’m sorry. It’s nothing to do with you, not even with or mama or George. I’m working really hard to try and get you the best doctor and the best surgery. Nothing but the best for my sister! I’ll come as quickly as I can. Don’t give up.

Love,

Roro”

Lacy fastened her new necklace proudly around her thin neck and lost a few moments enraptured in the twinkle of the rhinestones. She didn’t really mind that Rowan still talked to her like a child. Mostly it made her feel loved, if a bit babied.

Gathering herself, Lacy struggled up to her feet again, clutching the letter and postcard to her chest as she shuffled back to her bedroom. Even though she was alone in the silent house she deliberately closed her door behind her for privacy. She went to her mirror and drank in her reflection, happy to see that even though she was too skinny and too pale, she still looked a lot like her big sister. Rowan was so pretty. If Lacy got better, she might be beautiful like her someday. Her new necklace was a start, and it brought a smile to her face.

Turning, she surveyed her little retreat. Here, she had some control over her life. Some space. There was the Alabama State University poster that Rowan had given her to keep her motivated, the world map from her kindergarten teacher for inspiration, the Indian dream catcher she bought herself at the State Park for hopes. There was a Justin Bieber poster too, for no good reason. Moving slowly, Lacy knelt on her bed and held up her new treasures, moving Rowan’s letter and postcard around the wall until she picked the perfect place for them. Satisfied, she reached to her nightstand for tape and fixed them up on the wall over the head of her bed. That way, she could read them as she was falling asleep.

Sleep. That sounded wonderful. Curling up, Lacy rubbed her fingers over her new necklace and let her eyelids flutter shut. As consciousness faded, she could almost hear Rowan and her laughing together, running down a sun mottled path in the prairie grass, the remembered sound mingling with birdsong and wind in the pines and the faint beating of tiny wings.