“Anything out of place when you came in?” Big Papa pushed.
I shook my head.
“No,” I denied. “Everything was normal when I first came in. Nothing out of place. Lights all on, jukebox playing softly in the corner just like Pop liked it when he was by himself. I called out his name, and he didn’t answer, so I went through the back to see if I could find his car behind the building, and did. So I pulled my phone out to call, and his phone rang on top of the bar.”
Big Papa’s eyes looked haunted as he peered over the bar at where my grandfather’s dead body lay, curled up and broken.
“Chief.”
I turned to see Officer Stephanie come in, a worried look on her face.
“Yeah?” Big Papa grunted.
It was still weird to hear Big Papa called Chief, I thought numbly.
It’d been nearly a year since the old chief, and the president of The Dixie Wardens MC Alabama Chapter, Stone, was killed by a gang member.
To this day, I still found myself dialing his number only to hang up before it rang.
It was such a habit to call the man when I had problems that I didn’t even realize I was doing it until it was nearly too late.
Stone had been the one to take me under his wing when I’d come home broken. He’d been the one to bring me into his life, into his home with his wife and child, giving me the time I needed to heal from my wounds—both physical and emotional.
So to hear Big Papa, Stone’s VP, called ‘Chief’ was hard.
He still refused to go by ‘President’ of The Dixie Wardens. Though he technically was the president, we still called him the VP.
“Would you mind stepping outside for a moment?” Officer Stephanie asked.
I was surprised with the officer’s polite demeanor.
Normally she was a ball buster, but tonight I supposed she was being nice in deference to my grandfather’s murder.
She and I didn’t see eye-to-eye.
She was also an instructor at the police academy, and we taught differently.
Though, that was just because she was a woman and I was a man. We had different perspectives on certain things law enforcement wise, and that would never change.
“Okay,” Big Papa said. “I’ll be back. Aaron, finish up here, yeah?”
Aaron nodded and turned to stare at me.
“You’re going to be okay?”
I stared at the new guy, and nodded my head.
Aaron was a good man. He was the newest member of the club and was fast becoming one of my friends.
“I don’t think it’s sunk in yet,” I finally settled on. “I see him there, see his body…but I feel numb.”
A loud curse had me looking toward the door where Stephanie had pulled Big Papa to the side.
He was staring down at her with pure rage on his face.
She continued to talk, and I stopped listening to what Aaron was saying and started focusing in on what they were discussing.
“Shit,” Big Papa groaned. “Fuck.”
And that’s when I knew.
Stephanie had been the one to be assigned to go check on my grandmother.
And by the look on Stephanie’s face, my grandmother had likely received the same fate as my grandfather.
Having it confirmed moments later was pure torture.
And that’s when it finally sank in.
Chapter 7
In college, my favorite course was intercourse.
-Truth’s secret thoughts
Truth
The first time I saw the meme floating around the Internet, I had zero to nil patience left in me.
Everything that was left was rage.
Normally, I would’ve handled it better.
I would’ve told the person who shared it on Facebook that they needed to take that meme down before I beat their ass.
Instead, I went straight to beating their ass.
Well, not the person who shared it with me, but the person who made the meme.
‘Hey, isn’t this you, bro?’ I read again on my company’s page.
But it wasn’t just me who saw it.
So far, it’d been shared over a thousand times, and multiple people who I knew that were commenting or tagging me in it.
The picture wasn’t that bad.
Of me, anyway.
Well, not of Verity, either.
It was the words that had me pissed off.
The picture itself was of Verity and I riding on the back of my bike, my helmet seated firmly on her head, and her hands around my waist.
It was a profile shot, but it clearly showed part of Verity’s ass hanging off the back of the bike seat.
But that wasn’t because she was fat, it was because the seat on that bike was on the smaller side, and really only made for one person.
Yet, the person taking the photo had no problem putting ‘watch out—wide load’ across the bottom of the photo right under Verity’s ass.
Picking up the phone, calmly, I called in a favor from a friend of mine in Kilgore, Texas. A man whose wife was a computer savant that could find out anything I wanted to know with only a few minutes’ effort on her part.
“Hello?” Jack answered shortly.
I could hear kids screaming in the background, and I found my first smile in two days.
Jack was a good man. I’d met him while he was deployed at the same time that I was, though he was Army and I was Navy. Usually we would’ve never crossed paths, but a SEAL never knew where he’d end up or what mission he’d be needed on.
Ten years later, he was married with a shit ton of kids and living about four hours away from me in a biker club of his own.
“I need help tracking down the original poster of a picture on fuckbook,” I said without preamble.
I hated Facebook. It was a waste of precious time and brain cells, yet it was a necessary evil that I couldn’t stand.
“Shoot me the link,” Jack said.
He didn’t even need details. That was how much both of us trusted the other.
I did, and a few minutes later he whistled.
“Hot man. She yours?”
Heat pooled in my belly.
“Yeah,” I confirmed.
She was.
I just had to pull my shit together, first.
***
Two hours later, Jack shot me the original poster as well as the original poster’s address and photograph, and I found myself in front of a metal shop, idling on my bike, waiting for the motherfucker to come outside.
It didn’t take long.
It was near lunch time, and the entire lot was emptying faster than a disturbed wasp’s nest.
The man went to his own bike, straddled it, and I pounced.
One second I was on my bike, and the next I was eight spaces over, pulling the motherfucker off of his.
One well-placed fist to the man’s nose had the little shit doubling. The next fist hit one of the man’s kidneys.
“Pissing blood for a week,” I heard someone mutter.
I knew they were there.
I could see about ten of them, but not one of them tried to interfere.
Either that meant they didn’t like the guy I was about to teach a lesson, or they didn’t want to be on the receiving end of my fists…or possibly both.
“Should we call the cops?”
They could always try, but likely the one to come was going to be Aaron since I’d warned him it may happen twenty minutes before.