“That girl in there…” King asked, tossing me a package of black tattoo gloves and rounding the truck to the passenger side. We’ve always had a ‘your ride, you drive’ rule which apparently applied to the bread truck rental. “…She tell you why there are two bodies rotting in the sun right now?”
I shook my head. “No, she won’t say much. She mutters a lot. Rocks back and forth. Lucky we got her address out of her. Seriously, you shouldn’t even be coming with me. This entire thing could be a setup. Something happens to you or you go back upstate, Ray would kill me with her bare hands.” King had done time for letting his mom, who was an evil cunt druggie bitch, die in a fire that he didn’t start. Can you believe that shit? He doesn’t do time for killing her. He serves time for not saving the dumb cunt who neglected his baby girl.
It was bullshit to me four years ago and it was still bullshit to me sitting there in that bread truck.
“When I came to you at the MC. After all the shit that went down with Eli and asked you to soldier for me to get my girl back, did you hesitate? Fuck no you didn’t. You went there GUNS-A-BLAZING like a badass MOFO!”
“Yeah, because it was Ray, but this isn’t my girl. This is just a girl. A wacky, parent-killing bitch who may or may not be sucking my old man’s cock. This isn’t a life-or-death guns-a-blazing situation,” I said, repeating the same words my old friend had just used. “This is just a problem that needs fixing.”
King laughed. “You’ve seen thousands of Beach Bastard Bitches come and go at the club.” He jerked his chin toward the room where I’d locked Thia inside. “Answer me honestly, she look like any BBB you’ve ever seen?”
“No, but that could all be part of it.” Chop couldn’t exactly send someone who had ‘cum dumpster’ written all over her so he sends an innocent looking girl with a fat lip…and even fatter tits.
Down boy.
“Do you even hear yourself right now? You got history with this girl, right? Enough to know her name?” King asked.
“Yeah, but…” I started to argue.
“But nothing. Skid’s been in the ground for years. What are the chances he told your old man that story before the cartel took him down, AND that your old man remembered it years later, and then decided he needed to go seek out that same girl, turn her into a club whore, AND then send her back to you to carry out his revenge against you for leaving the MC he practically pushed you out of?” King asked, pointing out the huge and obvious holes in my entire Thia conspiracy that up until a few seconds earlier had seemed like the most plausible explanation for Thia suddenly popping up in my life.
“Well, when you put it that way,” I said, realizing how farfetched the idea seemed now that King had said it out loud, but that didn’t change the fact that something about the girl didn’t sit right with me, although I couldn’t for the life of me figure it out. Which was fine with me, I wasn’t going to stick around long enough to figure it out either.
“What you been getting into on the road?” King asked, and again my old friend surprised me with the concern in his voice.
“Nothing good.” I answered honestly, but it’s better than being here. “Looking forward to getting back to it right after I see what this crazy bitch did to her family.”
“Did she say the second body was a family member?” King asked.
“Nope, just a feeling,” I admitted. “She killed her mom, and if she really is an innocent then it only makes sense that the other body isn’t some random, so I figured it’s probably another member of her family.”
“Don’t take this the wrong way, but why do you care? You said yourself that you don’t even know the girl and that the ring and promise thing was a fucking joke. Why do any of this?”
“I don’t care. Not about the girl. It’s not about her.” I hopped up into the truck and slammed the door. “But I told you already. The sooner I fix this, the sooner I can send her on her way and go back out on the road until I can figure out my next move. If I don’t do this she might cause problems, get loud, hang around longer than she’s welcome, which was already about the time I had to come riding back into town to see what the fuss was all about,” I said, not willing to admit that a little bit of my motivation was the evil five letter word that’s been haunting me for the past year.
GUILT.
“That makes a fuck of a lot of no sense,” King said, lighting a joint and passing it to me, I took a hit and passed it back.
“Didn’t think it did, man,” I said, starting up the truck and easing it out of the garage. I turned us around once we were clear of the overhang and started down the narrow driveway.
I pulled out onto the main road and waited for the radar detector to chirp, and even though King said he was tight with the local cops I was still relieved when it remained silent.
“You know what?” King asked, picking a stray bit of weed off the tip of his tongue before taking another deep drag from the joint.
“Huh,” I said. He passed it back to me.