“You figure out your own fucking way home. Come back here again, and it’ll be your skull that’s being taken apart instead of your bike.”
“Fuck…”
He didn’t get a second word out. It probably saved his life. I lifted him up and tossed him on the street just as I saw Spawn pulling up, a bemused look on his face. I gave a look to Spawn that suggested the work was done and stepped back inside.
“You showed some mercy, Pops.”
I grimaced. I didn’t like being called Pops for the same reason I didn’t think of Sonny as my son at the club. We were all Devil’s Patriots here, not Briggs. He only was saying that because no one else was around.
“I’d sooner fall in love again than join another club.”
My son bit his lip at that. I didn’t, but only because I knew I was going to say that. We both knew.
We both missed her. My wife. His mother.
But she wasn’t coming back.
She’d been dead for a good twelve years now.
* * *
Hailey Cook
Three Months Later
In a bland, dry break room, the kind far too prevalent across all workspaces in America—the kind meant to give employees a chance to unwind from work, but really just reminded them that they were sacrificing their time to someone else’s bottom line—I sat with my legs propped up on the table, contemplating some new pitches that I had ideas for. Keeping my legs up was my small act of rebellion, my way of saying that I might have accepted a job that required me to live in the slums and give up on the idea of retirement, but I wasn’t giving up on the idea of individuality.
There was the possibility of the new family-owned BBQ joint just down the road. They’d come from South Carolina, moving to Albuquerque before moving to Phoenix after all of the violence from the past year or so.
I could always pitch a piece about the local animal shelters. That kind of thing was the easiest way to get views. Or maybe I could talk about rumored corruption in the mayor’s office as it related to school vouchers.
But none just resonated with me. They were all so…drab, trite, too familiar. I didn’t just want to avoid cliche—I wanted wholly original, daring, dangerous even. Or, at least, the appearance of danger.
Call it the curse of idealism, but when I studied at Arizona State, I always envisioned being the reporter that broke the “big story.” The one that went viral. The one that got shared on social media even by people outside of Arizona.
And…
I guess entry-level jobs were just one’s reminder that ninety-nine percent of life was monotonous dread, meant to contain nothing more than the same cookie-cutter events with the same cookie-cutter people, just in slightly different but still mostly the same cookie-cutter times. And I was getting damn tired of it all.
“Miss Cook, I know we’ve talked about your feet on the table.”
I scrambled as my boss, an older gentleman who preferred to be called Mr. Roberts, entered the break room, holding a coffee cup that probably didn’t yet have any coffee in it.
“It’s the position most conducive to brainstorming,” I said, which was somewhat true.
“If you say so,” he said, “but I actually came to find you. I have a job that not many other reporters are willing to take on.”
“Oh?” I said, mildly curious.
This either meant something incredibly risky or incredibly boring, like the renaming of a street.
“Violence is erupting in the Southwest over biker wars,” he said, “and we’ve got one of the most notorious ones right here in Phoenix. We want you to get some blurbs from the Devil’s Patriots.”
It was quite possibly the one “non-cookie-cutter” idea that I loathed.
My sister, Hannah, had moved back to Texas to be with my parents not because of financial reasons, but because she’d made the mistake of dating one of the guys.
Or, perhaps better said, she’d made the mistake of breaking up with one of the guys, who had harassed and stalked her to the point that living in Phoenix, let alone dating normal men in Phoenix, just wasn’t an option. She hadn’t said anything since she’d moved back home, but the scars of that club still remained in my family.
