The line goes dead.
I can’t wait for him to find out what this is, though. I move slowly, dread sinking deep into my bones. It’s not a body, thank fuck. Carefully using the toe of my sneaker to disturb the pile of material on the ground, panic shoots through me like a series of lightning bolts.
It’s her dress.
It’s her purse.
And worse…
It’s her bra.
It’s her panties.
And every single item of clothing looks as though it’s been cut with a knife.
CHAPTER ONE
NOW
A JOURNEY
Dirt. Dirt everywhere. Dirt for days and motherfucking days, working its way into my helmet, getting in my eyes, into my ears, making my nostrils burn. Seriously. So much fucking dirt. The sound of my brand new Yamaha scrambler snarling as the tires eat up the road beneath me. The universal smell of Subway foot-longs, gas station toilets, and leaking oil filters as I pass through small town after small town, trying not to notice the gaunt, starved-looking locals and countless shot-up signs, riddled with bullet holes. The language starts in English, quickly turning to Spanish when I cross the border. The gun holes get bigger.
Three Rivers welcomes you!
You are now leaving Boles Acres.
Richardsville! Home of the King’s Cubs football team.
Truth or Consequences, population 6246.
Bienvenido a Atascaderos
La ciudad jardín de Santa María de los pobres!
I don’t even stop in these ghost towns to sleep. At night, I pull off the side of the road and disappear into the desert, until the only visible lights I can see are from the stars overhead. My tent is enough. I carry everything I need on my back. Occasionally, I’ll stop and grab a six-pack from a liquor store before I head out into the back of the beyond for the night. I sip each bottle slowly, thinking over everything that’s happened in the last seven years.
Life got real fucking weird, real fucking fast. It hits me sometimes, how strange things are now. I don’t even recognize myself anymore. I was meant to become a lawyer. Instead, I’ve gone from being a respected twenty-six-year-old war veteran with a bachelor’s degree to the vice president of a motorcycle club. It’s even weirder still that my best friend, Jamie, or Rebel, as he’s now called, is the president of the same club. Then again, maybe it’s actually not that strange. Our fates have been joined for so long now, that I never even questioned if he would disappear down this rabbit hole with me, on my search for my missing sister.
Name a law, and we’ve broken it.
Name a moral line, and we’ve crossed it.
Name a country, and we’ve been there.
We never meant to start the club. The Widow Makers MC was an accident, a by-product of our search for Laura. We needed a hacker, so we found Danny. We needed someone who was good with ordnance and heavy machinery, so we found Keeler. We needed someone who could fly a plane, so we scraped Carnie out of the dirt and took him home with us. Twenty-three people, both men and women, joined us over time, and none of them ever left again. Motorcycles were quick and efficient for getting in and out of sticky situations, and the cops were suspicious of so many social outcasts and ex-cons with criminal records living in the middle of nowhere out in the desert of New Mexico, so we formed the club as a front. And then we actually became one. Our genesis story is a bizarre one, and we keep it to ourselves. It’s better for us if the other clubs, cartel leaders and mafia bosses we run with think we’re simply out to make money and hoard power as they are. But in truth, we’re still looking for my sister. We haven’t given up.
Every night, I stare at a photo on the screen of my cell phone until my eyes feel like they’ve been scrubbed with sandpaper.
Laura.