Page 1 of Crow
Chapter One
Crow
Just sitting inside the strip club made me feel fucking disgusting. I didn’t want to touch anything in case I got stuck to the spilled remains of overly sweet drinks. At least I hoped it was spilled drinks that were making every surface sticky. The image of sweat and semen and fuck knew whatever else coating everything I touched made me shudder and want to take about a thousand showers. Not to mention, the fog machine blowing through the club made me cough more than cigarettes ever had, and the neon lights pulsing in time to the crappy music gave me a headache. Why the fuck did I agree to come here again?
“Crow!” I felt a hand clasp my shoulder as Archer put a shot of Jack Daniels in front of me. “Come on, buddy, liven the fuck up. It’s my bachelor party!”
Oh, right. That. I remembered now. Archer was insisting on a public spectacle to prove what we already knew: that Rose, his old lady, had him wrapped tightly around her little finger.
I glared at him, and from the corner of my eye, I saw Ripper grabbing the shot glass and replacing it with an unopened beer bottle. I nodded at him as I twisted the lid off and took a long drink. If I had to be here, I fucking well wasn’t going to do it sober.
“Attaboy,” Archer said, not seeming to notice the switched drinks as he took a seat at the table with the rest of the guys. “I think I even see a smile.”
I narrowed my eyes at him, glaring harder. He laughed and let me be, going to talk to one of the others.
We had pushed four tables together to accommodate the whole club. It was odd seeing us all together but not in leather. Not wanting to bring attention to ourselves, we decided to wear regular clothes, parking our bikes a few blocks away from the strip joint and walking the rest of the way. All the younger guys were dressed in suits or ironed shirts. They reminded me of the drones that buzzed around the business district, which only added to my discomfort. I turned to Ripper, silently judging the big brute of a man wearing a white pinstripe button up, surprised he could find one large enough to cover his torso.
He was practically drooling as he drank in the view of a tanned stripper removing her hot pink bikini top while Vegas and Maverick hooted and tossed dollar bills onto the stage. One of the women walked up to Tank, who was sitting with his back to the stage, and asked if she could fetch him anyone who was more his type. Tank, as devoted to Evelyn as he was, told her to fuck off and continued nursing his beer. Like him, I chose to not get dressed up for the event, wearing jeans and a battered brown coat over an old rock band T-shirt I had owned for about a decade.
To my side, I heard Ripper mutter, “My god, I’d marry that woman if I could…”
“She’s a hooker,” I scoffed.
“Stripper,” he corrected.
“Whatever.” I drained the last of my beer with a snort. “Whichever she is, you don’t fucking marry it.”
“Why the fuck not?” Ripper asked. “I’d get a pole installed in my house just for her. It’d be great.”
“You’d be better off buying a blow-up doll,” I said, bringing a fresh bottle of beer to my mouth. “At least one of them won’t drain your bank account.”
Apparently, even Tank had had enough of my complaining at this point, and he looked up from his drink to scowl at me. “Lay off, Crow. It’s a bachelor party, let them enjoy themselves. How often do we get to have a night out like this, especially recently?”
Wrench sat down at the table next to Archer. “Yeah, Crow. Relax a little, we fucking deserve it.”
“I don’t get how you can all be having fun when the Freeway Fucks are out there somewhere plotting a war,” I said in a sour tone. “Or did you all forget that it’s only been two weeks since they killed Snake.”
That shut everyone up. They all looked down, raising their drinks in silent tribute to Snake.
Snake had been our secretary, a member who’d been with the club since the beginning. He was a couple years older than me, with a grim face lined with a nasty scar down his cheek that on anyone else would have been intimidating, but he’d had such a way with people. Everyone loved him. At the beginning of December, he had been talking about retiring from the club to live a relaxing life, work on renovating his small house. He’d been seeing a woman for several years, a tough old biddy who didn’t put up with any of his shit. Said he was thinking of proposing on New Year’s Eve.
He never got the chance. The Freeways got him on Boxing Day in a drive-by. I’d never forget the look of his old lady, sobbing over his casket as he was lowered six feet into the ground. It was a harrowing image that had been keeping me up at night. That poor woman.
“Snake would be wanting us to have fun,” Archer said finally. “We all know how much he loved this place, got him in trouble with his old lady more than a couple times.”
“He’s right, Crow,” Tank said, but his tone was gentler now. “We’ve got all the time in the world to worry about the Freeways. Tonight, let’s just have fun. Relax. Fuck, Archer’s gettin’ hitched, who woulda thought this day would ever come?”
“Not me, that’s for fucking sure.” Archer laughed, and the others joined in.
“Hm.” I grunted, looking away from Archer as I said, “That Rose is a fucking lunatic if you ask me, tying herself to you forever.”
“Hey. If she wasn’t a lunatic, she wouldn’t get along with you, would she?” Archer asked, smirking with one eyebrow raised. I shrugged one shoulder, taking another long drink from my beer as Archer snorted. It was true, I liked Rose. She cracked me up.
I looked over our group, and realized that of the five I was closest to, only me and Ripper were single. And Ripper was drooling and proposing marriage to the tanned woman who was now fully nude apart from some pink heels that looked like they could kill a man and hanging upside down from the pole. I couldn’t understand why they were all so eager to run headfirst into something that I knew would only bring pain and anger and betrayal in the long run.
I drained the last of my beer.
Fuck love. Never again.
