Ruined (The MC Motorcycle Club Romance Series - Book #1) (7 page)

“Did you have much trouble with the gangs in there?”
he asked next. He was the first one of them to ask me anything about my time
inside.

“Not really,” I told him honestly. “They kept us
pretty segregated.”

“In gen pop?” he asked, referring to general
population where everyone was supposed to get along with everyone. I got the
feeling he was fishing now.

“No, I spent a lot of my time in the SHU.”

Blake laughed and said, “You don’t say? Why is
that?”

“Because I didn’t play nice in gen pop,” I told him.

He laughed again and my dad who was taking a shot
again smiled. Go figure, it was the only thing I had said in four days that had
made him proud. The truth was, I had just refused to segregate with the Aryans,
but that didn’t make the blacks and Mexicans like me any better so when they
wanted to fight with me, I had no backup and I had to learn to fight as dirty
as the rest of them to get along. I
got caught
with a
shank in my cell. They sent me to Administrative Segregation, which I hated.
There were no windows and no cellmates to talk to and no television. I was
going to lose my mind there, so I attacked a CO. I didn’t hurt him, just pissed
him off. That
was what got
me into the SHU and that was
where I spent the duration of my sentence.

While we played, the other club members started
showing up and a few of the nomads I had known years back. I figured whatever
my mom was cooking up was for me and as much as I hated being the center of
attention, I resolved to play nice and let everything run smoothly for her
sake.

After we had been shooting pool for about an hour,
my mom stuck her head out and said, “Joe, can I see you for a minute?”

Joe was my dad’s given name and my mother was the
only one in the world who wouldn’t get a bullet in her brain for using it. He
was okay with Bull, which was what everyone called him, but Joe was a no
no
. Sometimes I
thought
maybe that was why my mother used it, just to prove she could
.

“Yeah, sure.”
He sat his pool stick down and went inside. After a few minutes he came back
out and told the other guys, “Hey, can I see you guys in here for a sec?
Dax
you go on and take your turn, we’ll be right back.”

I didn’t know how my father got away with the things
he did, he was a terrible actor. I guessed it was a good thing he was smart. It
was funny the things my mother could still make him do though.

Not long after that, they finally called me in and
everyone yelled, “Surprise!” For my mother’s benefit, I acted
like
I was. It was a welcome home party in my honor.

My mom and Cookie had outdone themselves on the
food. There was fried chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy, corn on the cob, ribs
seeped in barbecue sauce and beans. I was in Heaven. The food sucked in prison
and there was never enough of it.

My mom also made a big ass cake that said, “Welcome
home,
Dax
.” It was
like
I had
been away to war or something. In some small way, I guess that I had. There
were close to a hundred people there and everyone seemed to be in a good mood
and getting along. Since my mother was there, all of the guys had toned down on
the making out with biker babes and were just talking, laughing, dancing,
drinking and having an all-around good time.

Terrance and Olivia were there too, but I did my
best to act
like
I didn’t notice. I had actually
enjoyed talking to her the other day, but it was hard to look at her lips and
not want to kiss them. It was hard to think about Terrance kissing them and not
punch him in the mouth.

“Hey, boy,
wanna
throw a
dart or two?” It was Buster Balls. I looked at his swollen knuckles curled
around a dart and I wondered if we should clear the place out first. He could have
likely taken out someone’s eye.

“Sure, Buster.
Don’t hustle me though.”

The old man cackled. Sometimes I wondered how old he
really was. He told me sixty-nine when I asked, but he had been saying that
since I was fourteen at least. He hadn’t been able to hold on to the handlebars
and operate the hand brakes and clutch on his bike for years because of his
arthritis. I was surprised to see that with the darts, his aim really wasn’t
half bad.

We took a break for another beer and I opened his
and handed it to him.

He thanked me and said, “You know, I did some time I
didn’t have coming once…a long time ago.”

That simple statement was huge to me. It was the
first acknowledgment from anyone besides me that I was serving someone else’s
time.

I threw my dart. I looked at him and said, “What did
you do time for, Buster?”

“Same thing you did,” he said, tossing his dart. It
barely stuck to the outside circle of the target.
“Drug
trafficking and possession with intent.
I did five years, but that was
almost twenty years ago and they were tougher on drug crimes back then.”

Interested, I asked him, “So when you say you did
someone else’s time you mean you weren’t guilty of the crime you got charged
with?”

“Yep, that’s exactly it. I was set up, like you.”

“Who set you up?” I asked him.

“The old club president, the one
before your daddy.
His name was Raymond Winkle. He was a
tough old bastard.”

“Why would your own club set you up?”

“You’ve heard how the inner city gangs use kids to
do their killings and their drug running, right? Well, I wasn’t a kid. I was
twenty-one at the time, but I was squeaky clean. I didn’t have a record and I
was the only one of them who didn’t. I thought we were
goin
’
for a ride. But I found out when the State police stopped us that we were
moving a few kilos of coke and we were
movin
’ ’
em
in my saddle bags. I had no idea them drugs was there,
but since I refused to roll on anyone else, I took the fall.”

It sounded eerily like my situation. I had spent two
years thinking that maybe the shit
was put
in my bags
at the bar we had stopped at in Barstow. I always knew I was set up, obviously,
but I thought or at least I hoped that it was by a rival club; one that had a
grudge against my dad for whatever reason. Buster had me thinking differently.
What if my own father had set me up? That would just clinch him for father of
the year, that’s for sure.
 

I had been in college at the time. My dad and the
other guys in the club used to bug me all the time about taking over the bar.
Bartending at The Smoke Joint wasn’t a big deal. It wasn’t
like
anyone popped in and ordered a Sex on the Beach. It was straight up beer, vodka
or whisky. They thought I could do that until I finished school and then when I
had a business degree I could take it over, make improvements. I told them all,
more than once, that once I finished school I was getting as far away from the club
as I could. The only thing that would bring me back would be my mom, but she had
been the first one to understand me leaving and she encouraged me my whole life
to do so.

Would my father go to such an extreme to keep me in
the club? With two felonies on my record no one was going to hire me. But that
was ridiculous; my father couldn’t have controlled the cops pulling us over and
searching the bikes. Could he?

That didn’t mean that he didn’t set me up though.
Maybe I was like what Buster
said,
the guy who was
carrying just in case they got stopped. I looked at Buster and saw what the
rest of my life was going to be like. I suddenly saw red.

I looked across the room at my dad. He was talking
to Bo and his old lady. Bo had a kid named Mickey who was about twelve. He hung
around the club a lot and Bo’s old lady didn’t quite seem smart enough to
protect her son from this life. She seemed happy as could be to be standing
with her old man. In twenty years that would be Mickey and his boy would be
playing in the back.
It was a vicious cycle, one that I had
tried to break.

Did my dad use this set up to drag me in against my
will? I needed to find out. Whoever did it was going to get the payback they
deserved.

“Hey, Buster, who do you think set me up?”

Buster glanced across the room at my dad and said,
“I didn’t live to be this old by answering questions like that, kid, sorry.” I
knew better than to push it. That was all he was going to say.

I finished my game with Buster and mingled a bit. It
was actually kind of nice to see people I hadn’t seen in a long time. None of
them were exactly upstanding citizens, but they weren’t all bad either. Some of
them worked hard and played hard and some of them found themselves victims of
circumstances they couldn’t break free
from
. I wasn’t
normally one to judge, unless of course you set your own son up to take your
fall.

I hung around until I saw my
dad,
Blake and Bo go out to where the pool tables were. There was always someone
hanging around the clubhouse, day and night. This might be my one and only
chance, so I took it. There were two ways into the clubhouse. I never asked
outright, but I’m sure they planned it that way in the event of a raid. There
was a door in the kitchen that connected to the hallway where my father and his
friends proudly displayed the patches they had taken from other members over
the years.

I let myself in through that door and stood quietly
for a second listening to make sure no one was back there. I didn’t hear
anything so I moved down past the meeting
room which was a
small room with a big table
where their decisions were voted on and club
members were made or broken.

I stopped at the next small room.
My
dad’s private office.
He never locked it; none of his guys would dare
cross him. I honestly had no idea what he was capable of if he was crossed, but
the fear of God in the eyes of his crew when he was pissed was enough to tell
me that they did fear him.

I trudged in and moved over to the desk and slid
open one of the file drawers. They were all neat and labeled, part of my
father’s control freak personality. They were all labeled legitimate business
things like invoices, receipts and tax documents. You would think I was in the back
room of a legal establishment.

I opened a few other things and didn’t find
anything, but I did notice that he
was still logged on
to his computer. I went back over to the door and looked down the hall to make
sure I was still alone. I was shaking a little bit, again wondering what he might
do if he caught me in there. There was no one out there.
So
far, so good.
Sitting down in his chair I pulled up his email. I
scrolled through a few of the newer ones and realized that unless it was from a
legitimate business contact, they
were written
short
and curt.

Things like, “We’re on for Friday,” or “Things at
the warehouse are set.” It wouldn’t be enough to charge him with anything, let
alone convict him if the authorities ever seized his computer. Once again, good
thing he was smart. Some crooks think you can just delete emails that may get
you into trouble later on. They aren’t smart enough to realize that if you don’t
scrub the hard drive and email server, they are never
really
gone
.

I typed in 2011 and hit search mail and it pulled up
the emails from that year. As I scrolled through I realized there were a lot of
back and forth e-mails between him and Terrance. That was odd. Terrance was my
age, which meant he would have been just over eighteen at the time. What did my
dad and he have to talk about so often? The emails didn’t make sense to me.
They knew what they were talking about I guessed, so some of them were only one
or two words. I did find one from Terrance to my dad that interested me. The
date was September 6, 2011. It was the day before I
was
busted
on the side of the road with a lot of heroin that wasn’t mine.

I opened that one up and read, “Everything is set up
and ready to go.”

What the hell did that mean? Was Terrance part of
setting me up too? Shit! I heard a floorboard squeak. I hit the “x” in the
corner. I prayed that when my dad logged back on it would bring up his current
e-mail and not the ones I’d just been looking at. I leaned back in the big
leather chair just as my dad stuck his head in the door.

“There you are. What are you doing?”

“I just needed a minute to myself. Sorry, I hope you
don’t mind that I was hiding out in here.”

He shrugged and said, “I guess you kind of get used
to the solitude in the joint, huh? All this is a little overwhelming when you
first come out.”

“Yeah, a lot, actually,” I told him. “Did you ever
do time? I mean, I know you did a few stints in county when I was a kid, but
have you ever been in prison?”

He dropped down into the chair on the other side of
the desk and after he lit his cigarette he said, “Yeah, once. I was
twenty-four. I spent six years in Folsom. When I came out your mama and I got
married and a year later, you came along.”