Page 19 of Kick

“I know—”

“You take it to the Prez, or I will,” he says. “I covered for your arse before, but that was a different club and a different time. If this shit brings down the Saints, I’m gonna fuckin’ put a bullet in that girl of yours. We clear, brother?”

“Yeah, we’re fucking clear.”

Tank walks out into the alley, leaving me standing alone in the empty warehouse. I stare down the darkness and feel the hatred, hurt, and betrayal in the room around me, and I can’t help but think this is exactly where I belong. Here, in this dark room of horrors. This feeling, this warehouse, this is my heart’s home, because the atmosphere in here is every bit as fucked up as the emptiness inside of me.

Walking into church wasn’t my favourite experience. I’d asked Prez to call a meeting of the brothers and oddly he had, without even bothering to ask what the hell it was all about. Of course, it might have had something to do with the fact that when we arrived back at the clubhouse he was buried balls’ deep in Neisha, a hot little Asian bitch who could suck cock harder than a Hoover and have you decorating her pretty yellow skin with a pearl necklace in seconds.

I enter the room, glancing at my brothers seated around our table. Tank sits with arms folded across his chest. His eyes meet mine and he nods. Beside him, Crazy—named for the crazy motherfucking look in his eyes, 24/7—chews his fingernails down to the skin. In the short time I’ve been a member of the Saints, I’ve never known Crazy to be able to sit still for a whole meeting. He’s always running his hands through his jet-black hacked-off hair, chewing on some part of his anatomy, or twitching like he’s on meth and jonesing for his next fix. He isn’t, of course. He’s just that fucking manic inside his head that he can’t contain the excess energy, and so it spills out in church, and everything fuckin’ else he does. Across from him the blond-haired, green-eyed Killer gnaws his bottom lip.

Killer is the newest of the brothers to patch in—and by new, I mean all of a month ago. He’s probably the oddest member of all us criminals, a well-to-do rich kid from the North Shore. His trust fund is probably the equivalent of what the club makes in a year. We were all a little shocked when the dude showed up in some stiff fuckin’ designer threads and said he wanted to join. Prez outright laughed in his face. Then he told the spoiled little rich kid he’d seen one too many episodes ofSons of Anarchy,and that we weren’t into babysitting trust fund babies so they could walk on the wild side. Prez had also told him if he was serious about joining his club, or any club for that matter, he should get rid of that fucking show-pony sports bike and get himself something that at least fit the part. The next day, the cocky fucker was banging down the gates with a brand spanking new Fat Boy and packing two kg of fine-arse snow. Best fucking blow I’d ever done. Even Ivy knew the difference, and normally that girl cares for nothing but the high it gives her. Killer made it through the other hangers on, the hazing, prospecting, and then finally patched in last month.

Beside Killer sits Grim–named that because he looks like he went several rounds with the Grim Reaper and only just came out on top. The dude’s in his early thirties, with dishwater-blond long hair pulled back with an elastic. His face is all jacked-up due to a run in with a rival club member and a Zippo lighter. He keeps as clear as he possibly can from Crazy, who sparks a fucking Zippo every five seconds and goes around setting shit alight.

Raphe sits beside Grim. In fact, if Raphe didn’t have an old lady I would say there was someBrokeback Mountainshit going down between those two.

At the end of the table, One Eye leans his elbows firmly on the wood, his enormous belly protruding up and over the edge of the table. Dude might be fuckin’ ancient, and might only have half the vision of the rest of the brothers, but he’s still fuckin’ scary as shit. He’s a goddamned bear in a fight. He was built like Tank—if Tank had eaten an entire fuckin’ factory full of Krispy Kremes. Despite the patch we wear, there’s no love between One Eye and me. The Angels were a friend to no one, and yet One Eye knew my old prez well. Of course, no one here besides Tank knows of my affiliation to the Angels, but whether I’d seen him at a rally or he just had his suspicions about me, the fucker knew my face, and he knew my guilt, though he may not know exactly what part I played in bringing down my entire MC chapter.

Beside that cranky old fucker sits an even older one: Country. Country’s grey beard hits his too thin belly. It’s peppered with a tinge of ginger, proof that the ranga gene remains defiant and wilful right to the very end. Country has all but three teeth missing, forcing him to whistle when he laughs, and you never wanna stand in front of him while he’s talking, unless you’re into spittle in a big way. You can smell Country before you see him—he doesn’t go in much for that showering shit—and his tunnel vision reached a point earlier in the year where the RT-fuckin’-A took away his license. If you can’t ride, you hand in your patch; it’s the way it’s always been in every club since the beginning of MC history. Prez burned that rulebook and threw it out the fuckin’ window when he heard the news. He’s not crazy enough to let Country ride while wearing the patch, but he wouldn’t take an old man’s lifeline away from him either.

Prez might be a hard-arsed bastard at times, but he’s a man worth following. A man whose respect has to be earned, but once you have it, you strive to make sure you never lose it. At least that’s the way I guess most of the brothers see our prez. For me, I know I don’t deserve it. I know if he ever found out about the Angels he’d put me to ground faster than I could blink.

Our two prospects, Diesel and Squeals, stand at the back of the room, arms folded, faces stoic. They wear cuts with their name tags on them and rockers on the back that label them with a gigantic target for slinging shit toward. Prospecting is no fuckin’ picnic, and a lot of guys don’t make it through their hazing. Diesel may make it. He’s young, tougher than a pack of pit bulls, and has a good head on his shoulders, but I can’t see Squeals making it past the first six months. Some people are cut out for the life, and others die trying.

Prez clears his throat and says, “Well, are you gonna tell us why the hell you called us into church, Kick, or are we just supposed to play Guess fuckin’ Who while you stare like a fuckin’ retard at us?”

“Alright, Prez, keep your fuckin’ hair on,” I say and let out a deep breath, figuring the best way to say this shit is to just blurt it the fuck out.

“Tank and I tracked the Dentist to a warehouse yesterday. The plan was to capture the sick fuck and bring him in so Raphe could have a turn at him, but you guys know that didn’t happen. He was torturing a woman—” I shake my head, because I don’t know how old Indie is, but she couldn’t be more than twenty. “A girl. The sick fuck was ripping her teeth out, knocking her out with drugs and waking her up with pain. I lost it and shot him in the back of the head.”

I look at Raphe whose jaw is clenched tight. A muscle twitches in his face. I don’t know whether that anger is still directed at me, or if he’s imagining what could have happened to his old lady when she’d visited Dr Calder’s clinic. After all, if she’d never attended that appointment–and woken up from the gas while he was busy stuffing his fingers inside her fuckin’ pussy when he was supposed to be extracting a tooth–we’d never have found Indie.

“I know you know that she’s stowed away in my room, and Prez has given you all a direct order to shoot her on sight if she so much as tries to leave it. She’s messed up pretty bad: broken ribs, bruises, her face is banged up, so is her body, and she’s completely fuckin’ broken.”

“Wow, she sounds like a real catch there, Kick,” Crazy teases. “I bags the next go when you’re done with her.”

“Fuck you, man.”

“Jesus Christ. Will you two toddlers cut it out? I didn’t call you all here to bicker like children. I called because according to Kick’s cryptic shit, we have bigger fuckin’ problems than the bitch in his room.”

“The Dentist wasn’t the only one. There was a cop and a priest too. They videoed their sessions. There was a camera set up in the room. A camera that Tank and I forgot to get before we left.”

“Come a-fuckin’-gain, Kid?”

“We went back, just now, but the room has been gutted. Everything was stripped clean,” Tank says.

“You left fuckin evidence behind?” Prez shouts. “Are you crazy? Are you fuckin’ brain-dead, you little shit?”

“We were distracted with the body,” I say.

“And the bitch,” Tank supplies helpfully.

“So you’re telling me some bitch you don’t even know is the reason there’s a video tape out there with your faces on it, and it’s possibly in the hands of a fuckin’ crooked cop? I oughtta strip both your patches for this.”

“We need to find them both,” I say, thinking about the bruises marring Indie’s body. There’s so much I want to know. How many days did she stay in that room? What did they do to her? Are any of them the same breed of monster I am? Did they force her to cum while she begged them to stop? There’s so much left unanswered and the key to unravelling all of this is currently lying naked in my bed, covered only in a sheet and black bruises.

“I’ll fuckin say.” This is from Grim, who leans forward in his seat to stare me down across the table.

---