Had Preacher not been lying in a hospital bed, knocking on death’s door, Deuce might have taken a step back. Because this was the Preacher who’d turned The Judge’s motorcycle club into an empire that rivaled most mafias. This was the man who didn’t think twice about taking a life—even the life of a friend.
This was the man other men both feared and envied… and with due cause.
Part Three
“Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.”
- Haruki Murakami
“Pain is power. It’s what drives me.
Suffering is what happens to those that cause me pain.”
- Damon “Preacher” Fox
Chapter 26
Parked on a one-way street in East Village, New York City, seated in the driver’s seat of a dirt-brown Monaco sedan, Agent Donald Willis of the Federal Bureau of Investigation glanced over at his partner. Thirty years Willis’s junior, Agent James Parker was fidgeting in his seat, pulling irritably at the wool scarf wrapped around his neck.
“It’s fucking cold in here,” Parker complained. “My coffee’s gone cold.”
“Roll up the window,” Willis replied. “You’re cold because you’re sitting here with the goddamn window down, letting all the cold air in.”
“Wouldn’t be sitting here at all if the cops did their fucking jobs.”
Willis glanced across the street, eyeing their target—the Silver Demons’ clubhouse—and bobbed his head in agreement. It was no secret that the local police department tended to look the other way when it came to the Silver Demons. The Bureau had long suspected the Demons were paying off the police, but they hadn’t been able to prove it… yet.
There was nothing Willis hated more than a dirty cop. A former police officer, Willis had taken his oath seriously and expected the same from his fellow peacekeepers.
“I don’t blame them.” Parker rubbed his hands together before blowing on them. “Someone offered me the right amount, I’d be looking the other way, too.”
Willis glared at Parker and the younger man laughed. “Kidding. Take a fucking joke, will ya?” Rolling his eyes, Parker slouched down in his seat and resumed pulling on his scarf.
“Once we get these guys,” Willis muttered, “then it’ll be easy pickings. They’ll be clamoring to tell us which officers they’ve got in their pockets, and their house of cards will come tumbling down right on top of ‘em.”
Parker shot Willis a skeptical look, silently conveying what Willis was already thinking—that the Silver Demons were too damn good at what they did. There were no holes in their operation—if there had been, the Bureau would have found them by now.
The telltale rumbling of a motorcycle approaching drew their attention to the street. The heavily bearded rider slowed to a near stop as he passed and flashed a grin—and his middle finger—at the agents.
Wearing matching sour expressions, Willis and Parker watched as the rider turned down the alleyway beside the clubhouse and disappeared from sight.
Willis didn’t need to leaf through his stacks of files to identify the rider; he’d long ago memorized all their names and faces. This particular man was Robert M. Schneider, age 31, known to his family in Queens as ‘Bobby’ and to his brothers in the Silver Demons as ‘Hightower’.
A former private in the United States Army and a Purple Heart recipient, Hightower had once been considered an American hero. He’d dragged several unconscious soldiers to safety after an explosion had detonated near their camp, an explosion that had left him with a severely mangled left leg and a nasty limp. Willis had seen the pictures—it was a miracle he’d ever walked again.
“No respect,” Parker muttered, shaking his head.
“Of course they don’t have any respect for us. They don’t respect the law, they aren’t going to respect the people enforcing it.”
“I think he did it,” Parker said, frowning at the clubhouse. “I think that son of a bitch offed his own damn parents. These guys are sick.”
Parker was referring to was Damon Fox, better known as ‘Preacher’, the eldest of the three Fox brothers, and recently appointed president of the Silver Demons. Six months earlier both of Preacher’s parents and a fellow club member had been brutally slain at a state park in upstate New York. And the case had since gone cold. In fact, the case had started out frigid. Many people had been questioned, yet despite the sheer number of people in attendance, not one had come forward with any information. Without a murder weapon, without any witnesses, there’d been very little to go on.
Willis stared down the street, rubbing his chin, mulling over the facts. Did he think Preacher had killed his parents? Maybe. But he doubted it. A family of criminals was still a family. And Willis had observed the Fox family long enough to know that, despite the healthy amount of tension between Gerald Fox and his sons, not one of those boys would have ever harmed their mother.
“No,” Willis eventually replied. “I was at the funeral. I saw them—they were grieving. My best guess is they pissed someone off, someone high up. Maybe the Rossi family, maybe even higher. Maybe whoever is bringing in the drugs from overseas.”
Parker blew out a steamy breath full of frustration. “The Rossi family is who we should be going after, or the Columbos. Not these lowlifes.”
