Page 17 of Clean Hack
“Moon Hill,” she said in that strange distorted voice. I had come to hate it recently whereas I hadn’t really cared either way before.
I turned my truck around, I wasn’t all that far out from the small town. It’d been a good while since I’d seen them.
And because I was tired and hopping from job to job at the moment, I opened my mouth and suddenly didn’t care about whatever thing we had going on before. Whatever kind of unspoken rules that we followed. I wanted to talk and so I decided that I was going to try something new.
“How’s your night going?”
Wow, that was so smooth. I was going for friendly but I might not have pulled it off. I could tell that she was a bit skittish—okay, a lot skittish. Something in my tone almost seemed a bit too eager and I would have said a tad on the excited side. Or nervous, maybe that would have explained the sweaty palms a little more.
I waited and was met with dead air.
“Look,” I said with a calm, relaxed tone that was maybe even a little soft. “I have already had a long night and it looks like it’s going to be a little longer than I want, so maybe you could talk to me for a few. Help make this drive a little less dull.”
“I…,” the robotic voice said and I could tell she was maybe sort of trying.
“I think we’ve been working together, if you want to call it that, long enough now. Maybe you can tell me a little something about yourself. Or we could start with a name so I’m not calling you crazy, random things in my head.”
I just admitted that I thought about her.
Maybe she didn’t catch onto that.
“Uhhh…”
I could almost see her sitting there shaking, her finger ready to hit the end button. Not that I really knew anything about what she looked like. Strangely in my mind, she was kind of like a blobish entity. Light and without real form.
“Do you know my name?” I asked a hint of real curiosity in my tone. That was the thing, I knew nothing about her, but how much did she know about me? She shouldn’t have known anything, but I had a feeling that wasn’t the case.
And then the line went dead. I’d pushed too far.
With a heavy sigh, I tossed my phone onto the seat next to me.
The world was dark around me and my eyes were dry and tired. I’d keep going as long as the lines on the side of the road continued to look straight.
I was weirdly out of it when I pulled past of the gates to the Steel Paragons’ head chapter’s compound. Walking in, I was greeted by several of the members then shown to the basement.
This was Diesel’s work. I knew it immediately. Diesel was the Enforcer for this chapter. He’d had the title a few years now and I truly believed that it was a good thing for the guy.
I had a closer connection to Diesel than the others. After all, it was me that brought him to this club. It was me that helped him find his way after life pretty much emotionally kicked him in the balls and then cut his dick off. I didn’t think I’d ever forget the night I found him as long as I lived. It broke my heart all the while pissing me off at the same time. He was drunk, at the end of his rope and all but throwing himself at Death. I later learned—after I took him in, cleaned him up, and got him sober—that he’d lost his unborn child. That was bad enough by itself, but it seemed like the woman he loved and who was carrying his child was responsible for her own death, which resulted in the death of the baby. He blamed himself, I learned that pretty quickly. He hated himself that he hadn’t seen it coming. I’d never met a man so excited about the life he should have been bringing into the world. It tore him up and open. He was still clearly dealing with it. Though, now, he chose to stuff it all down and not really move on. Being the Enforcer gave him chances here and there to expel his anger. Or so I figured it.
I liked the guy. I, in some ways, felt responsible for him. I wanted him to find the happy in life again and that was part of the reason why I’d told him to take a ride with me one day. At the time, he didn’t know what my job was. And when I brought him here, he didn’t know that I’d come to get rid of a body for the club as well. Even when I left him after making introductions, he didn’t know that I was down in the basement, making parts of a man they had tied up down there. Diesel knew now though. All too well.
So, I’d learned over the years how his work turned out in the end. And I’d figured out by the finished result what level of closeness each job had. This guy was tied to a table, only after he’d been beaten to a bloody pulp. The skin on his back was bubbled up and oozing, clearly burnt off. I took a moment to get a closer look. There were colors around the charred skin. A tattoo, I guessed. Whatever it was, Diesel thought this guy didn’t deserve to die with it on him.
As I untied the guy and flopped him onto my tarp, I got the sense that the end of this job had been rushed. I didn’t wonder why because that wasn’t who I was. I didn’t need to know these things and it wasn’t a requirement to do my job.
Hours later, I was back at the clubhouse, body long gone and money in my pocket for a completed job.
I sat there at the bar because Cal, the President, had offered me a beer as he slid me an envelope full of money. He often ended it this way. I had nowhere else to be and I never wanted to seem rude or disrespectful, so I sat. And drank. Even if it was awkward because neither of us said anything.
The clubhouse was quiet. It was so late at night that it was almost early. If that made sense. The time of day that these guys called it a night. Which was late because they were party-all-night kind of guys. Cal left me half a beer in, clapping me on the back as a thanks and telling me to stay and finish. I did, because it didn’t feel awkward to sit there alone even if I didn’t wear the patch.
I was a little shocked when not much later, Diesel himself plopped his big, tattooed ass down next to me. We didn’t really acknowledge each other in a normal sort of way. But I studied him through the mirrored wall on the back of the bar. There were deeper lines etched on his face. Which told me that there was something more weighing on him than what I knew about.
I couldn’t help but to check on him in a subtle way.
That was when I noticed the new officer’s patch over his heart. Sergeant at Arms. It looked like he had moved up from Enforcer. I wanted to congratulate him, but I sensed a heaviness about it. Like maybe there was something behind that spot being open for him to take. I wondered why he was still doing the Enforcer’s job then. But it hit me, he did the job because he felt responsible for some reason. I opened my mouth to ask if he was hanging in there, but his body went stiff beside me.
Then I caught it. A tiny as fuck girl—no, woman—came running out, scurrying along the edge of the room heading away from where the men had rooms there. She wasn’t wearing much, and if I had to guess, she didn’t have anything under that huge men’s shirt she had on. There was an innocence about her. There was also no hiding the fact that she was pregnant. My gaze turned back to the mirror just in time to see something flash across Diesel’s face.
