Page 2 of Stone

“We came here out of courtesy to you, Jimmy. Because the last thing we want is ill feeling between our family and yours,” Smoke replies calmly.

“Ya’ crack me up. Fecking motorcycle clubs.” Jimmy's laugh is a little manic. “Ya’ might call each other brothers, but that’s shite. Yous ain’t family. Yous are just a bunch of selfless US military rejects, too fecking lazy to hold down a job, so you stick on a badge and call yourself outlaws. Now us Dunne’s, we are family.”

My phone vibrates in my jeans pocket, letting me know Hurricane, Crave and Rex are poised to make their move. I quickly glance over at Edge. He sniffles and swipes the back of his hand under his nose, the sign that Mayhem and Blackjack have eyes on the target. I cough.

Smoke drops his head, shaking it from side to side, giving Jimmy the impression he’s cool and unaffected by his slagging off of the YOMC.

I know better.

The double tap of his beat-up boot on the rotten wood is what I’ve been waiting for.

Shit is about to go down.

“You know, Jimmy?” Smoke lifts his head back up to look at him. “You obviously have the wrong impression of us. You see, we do like to give people the benefit of the doubt, but how does the saying go?” Smoke mimics Jimmy’s stance, bringing his arms behind his back, inches from his weapon. “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” Smoke's shoulder doesn’t move, giving nothing away. But as I’m standing at an angle at his side, I see what his hand does. “But I ain’t no fool.”

Smoke is fast, his gun is in his hand, and fires off the first shot. Jimmy is quick too. He fires a shot at Smoke, but it’s wide, skimming his temple. There’s blood, but you can tell that it’s superficial. Jimmy jumps back into the house, kicking the door shut, but not before he takes a bullet to the shoulder.

The sound of splintering wood from the back of the house can be heard, followed by shouting, shots and general havoc.

I run up the steps and kick down the door. I hold back so I can take in the chaos. When I see my brothers clearly have control, I step further into the house.

There’s no hallway to his property. From the front door, you step right into the main living area. It’s dark, with very little light other than what is filtering from the gaping doorway. What windows there are, are covered with tatty drapes which have seen better days. The bulk of the space is taken up with an old couch and a couple of armchairs. A coffee table littered with half-empty bottles, and overflowing ashtrays, stands in the middle. Over towards the kitchen area is a dining table. Sat in one of the chairs is a lifeless body slumped across the surface, with outstretched hands grasping for the packets of white powder piled high in the middle of it.

Two guys are on their knees, hands zip-tied, with a gun to their heads. Crave is intermittently booting them in the side or stomping on their ankles. By the expression on his face, and his sneering laugh, he’s enjoying every minute of it.

Smoke hangs back in the doorway, checking out the carnage while holding Edge’s bandana to his grazed temple.

Hurricane is dragging another bloodied body over to the three already laying at Rex’s feet.

“Who do we have here?” I ask, rolling over one of the bodies with a push of my boot.

“Fuck knows who this is,” Hurricane huffs. “Took one right to the face. You know how Ghost likes to get up close and personal when he takes someone out. I’ve checked, but he doesn’t seem to have a wallet or ID on him.”

Hurricane’s not wrong. Any facial recognition is gone. Only bloody flesh is visible except for one of his eyes. The other is gone, possibly rolling around here somewhere on the dirty floor, but as all these fuckers seem to have green eyes, it’s not going to help with identification. Only way we could do that is to take his head and see if we can get a dental match. Not worth the cash we’d have to lay out to get it done.

“Any sign of Jimmy?” I enquire. The bloody corpse is far too short to be him.

“Not as yet,” Rex joins the conversation. “But Ghost shot out the back after he found a trapdoor in the kitchen that drops down into the crawl space under the house.”

“How the hell did we miss him?” I grit out.

“Fuck knows, but it was like Vietnam in here, bullets flying.” Hurricane explains while kneeling down to one of the bodies to wipe the blood off his hands and onto the shirt of the dead. “We’re lucky that none of us took a hit.”

I glance down to where Hurricane is crouched. “Danny?” I ask, recognizing the green checked shirt he’d been wearing, now splattered with claret.

“Yeah, Jimmy’s younger brother.”

“Shiiit!” I groan, rubbing the back of my neck. “We better hope Ghost catches up with the motherfucker then, because if not, the Irish are going to be more of a problem than a few thousand dollars’ loss in drug money.”

ChapterOne

Six months later

Stone

“Do you want another beer, honey?” Ginger, one of the club ladies, asks me as I lounge on the beaten-up leather couch that sits in front of the wall-hung 60-inch TV. Most of the furniture in the communal clubhouse area has seen better days, but the TV, that’s state-of-the-art. Although the only things we tend to watch on the huge thing is porn, war movies or documentaries, it comes in high on the list of most precious possessions after our rides and MC family.

“Sure, babes, but if you stand in front of the screen again, I’m going to smack your ass until it’s purple,” I growl back at her, leaning forward and pushing her out of the way with my inked-up hand.

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