Page 2 of Eternally Ginger

1

Ghoul

Cleveland, Ohio

Circa 2002

Hawk and I slid the gloves over our hands. “How long has he been in there?” he asked, arching a brow and blowing a few strands of dark hair out of his eyesight. He’d made killer time by not often stopping while traveling from his clubhouse to ours. He lifted the man’s flaccid body by the feet while my hands white-knuckled around the ice-cold shoulders.

“No clue.” I shrugged. “This was Tin Man’s doing.”

“Why the hell did he shove the guy into the freezer?”

“He was rushed; something about the man’s wife coming home.” We tossed the frozen body onto the blue tarp after a couple of swings to aim it. “I didn’t stick around for the details. Didn’t want to have to deal with this guy thawing. Figured we needed to get rid of as many bodies as we could since we had the extra help.” I nodded in appreciation to him.

Each time we neared the end of the hit list, another name would trickle down the chain of command to us. Occasionally, the person of interest was closer to one of our other chapters, so we asked for a favor from a few of our out-of-state brothers. Bulldog, our national President up in Washington state, really did a number on one of the sick SOBs. He didn’t let them off the hook with a quick death, either. The guys suffered just as they should. Other times, a brother stopped over in Cleveland and helped us tie up loose ends like Papa from our Tonopah chapter had. Technically, this meant our Non-disclosure agreement or NDA was null, but what the Feds didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them.

“Good point,” he huffed, bending over and breathing in deeply, his hands pressing against his knees as he caught his breath. “How much do you think a frozen body weighs?”

“Same as a regular dead one.” My shoulders rose and fell. “It’s the water that makes it feel heavier.”

“Why do you know that, Ghoul?”

“Truthfully? I really don’t know.” I laughed, forcefully shoving the man’s head further onto the tarp with the edge of my boot. “I guess you pick up all kinds of useless information in prison.”

“Seems that way,” Hawk calmly said, undoing the end of twine off the spool and setting it to the side until we were ready for it.

“Want to know something else that’s pretty wicked about dead bodies?”

“Sure,” he smirked and shook his head as we both rolled the dead body in the tarp one time to wrap it in the plastic material.

“After they’ve been dead so long, the blood pools into the lowest part of the body. Like this guy, Tin Man had him stuffed into a freezer, so that’s why his feet are this reddish-purple color.” We rolled the body over again and kept doing so until all the tarp surrounded it.

“How many people have you killed, Ghoul?” He wrapped twine around the foot portion of the tarp and tied a knot once the circle was completed. From there, we took turns feeding the spool around the body while the other person held the body up from the ground.

“Truthfully, brother?” I pulled a joint out of my pocket and coughed through my dry throat as I inhaled to light it.

He nodded, pinching the end between his thumb and pointer finger, puffing twice before passing it back to me.

“I’ve lost count.” A cloud of smoke floated out with my words.

“Damn.”

We had specific members who did exactly this for the RBMC—made people disappear. On a general note, it wasn’t the president; at least that was true in our chapter. Yet, with the child-trafficking ring being much larger than the Federal Bureau of Investigations told us about, we enlisted help from every patched member, and a small number of the prospects got their hands dirty, too. This particular time, Sledgehammer and Sleeper were the lucky prospects to tag along with Hawk and me. If everyone was guilty, we were less likely to find a rat in the clubhouse, again. A narc was what got us in this mess with the FEDs in the first place. The initial person I murdered off the list was suspected to be our clubhouse rat. At the time of his death, I didn’t know we were doing the government’s bidding. I simply killed him for crossing my club and drawing more unwanted attention to my brothers and me from the law.

“What’s the plan now?” He grabbed the joint and tapped the ashes off with his thumb before taking another hit.

“Figured we’d drop him into the Cuyahoga River or thaw him out, cut him up, and let the prospects feed him to Spider’s hogs.”

“For real? Hogs?”

“Yeah, if they’re hungry enough, they’ll eat a person.” I sucked on the tip of the paper and breathed the last of the weed into my body, flipping it onto the ground and stomping on it with the tread of my boot.

He nodded again. “One of my uncles has a hog farm back in Ankeny. I meant, Spider has hogs? That doesn’t seem like the pet he would have.”

“What kind of animal did you expect?”

“I don’t know. A spider?”

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