Survivor: Steel Jockeys MC (2 page)

“
Ever
again. Got it?”

He nodded and gulped. When Ruby had her mind made up, she was a swirling tornado in miniature, sweeping everyone in her path off their feet. And from that point on, other than Kyle, nobody in a Jockeys cut had darkened the doorway of Ruby’s house. Of course, she knew that hadn’t stopped her brother from riding with them every chance he got. But she’d done enough to give herself peace of mind. Even if it was ultimately only an illusion, it was one she needed to be able to carry on.

Their mother had died a year after the store fire, of sudden heart failure; though she was only thirty-six. Her best friend Ghislaine, who fancied herself a Regency romance novelist, always said it was a broken heart, but Ruby didn’t buy into that sentimental nonsense. It was nothing but a genetic defect, one her mother’s doctors hadn’t discovered until it was too late. And all Ruby could do was make sure it didn’t happen to her. It wasn’t as if avoiding fried chicken and french fries in the mall food court would bring her mother back, but at least it gave her an illusion of control, one of the few she had.

She glanced up at the moon. She knew she should be in bed; she was working an early shift tomorrow at the candle store in the mall where she’d worked since she’d graduated from high school. But at the same time, she knew that even if it meant caking on a layer of makeup to hide the bluish bags under her eyes, she couldn’t even shut her eyes until she heard the sound of Kyle’s pipes pulling in to the driveway. Then she could sleep. Then everything would be all right, for another night at least. Tomorrow, who knew? But she wouldn’t think about tomorrow. She’d trained herself not to.

Once he’d actually idly tried to set her up with one of his boys. “He’s really your type,” he said. “I think you’ll like him.”

“Are you crazy? On what planet is one of your meatheads ‘my type’? You don’t know anything about my type if you think I would even be seen in the hemisphere with one of them, if I had the choice.”

He laughed. “Relax, Ru,” he said. “Nobody’s forcing you. It was just a suggestion. Most girls I know would go for one of my boys in an instant after that Gordon Gekko slickster you were dating. I swear, he must have gone through about a can of hair gel a day. What was his name again? Barley?”

She hesitated. “Farley. Farley Main.” She crossed her arms.

“Oh,” he chuckled. “Right. My mistake.”

“It’s a family name. He comes from a very old, very respectable family. What kind of family does...?”

“Joseph Ryan,” her brother filled in the name.

“Young master Joseph come from?”

“To be honest, I’m not sure.” She frowned. “But he’s one of our family now, and that’s all that matters. But if you’re happier with Michael Milken...”

“Don’t bother,” she said with a groan. She might as well come clean now. “That’s over.” She’d met Farley when he’d come into the candle store, looking for a birthday gift for his mother. She should have been suspicious that someone who came from a family as wealthy as Farley’s supposedly was couldn’t afford more than a set of loganberry-scented votives. In fact, they’d made some unwise investments during the nineties dot-com boom. Farley may have been willing to wine and dine Ruby on his AmEx card for a month or two, but he needed someone who could bring assets to the table. And though Ruby knew he’d appreciated her large, firm breasts, and olive-toned curves, they weren’t exactly something that would send his portfolio soaring. Ruby had only learned it was over when Ghislaine had spotted a photo of him on one of her favorite local gossip blogs, coming out of the San Francisco Opera gala with the blonde daughter of the chairman of the board on his arm. “These guys,” he said. “You’ve got them all wrong. It’s not just a club, Ruby. It’s a family. My family.”

“You don’t need them,” she’d insisted fiercely. “You’ve got me. We’ve got each other. That’s all we need, Kyle. That’s all we’ve ever needed.”

He stuck his hands in his pockets of his heavy jeans, his broad back leaning against the kitchen counter. “I know, Ru. You’re right.”

“I’m always right,” she teased. But her teasing sounded a lot like sorrow, because he wouldn’t give up the M.C. He was in too deep, and they both knew it. All Ruby could do was make herself stiff and unfeeling, like a seawall to break the waves as they crashed against him.

Suddenly, she heard a sound humming up the street, though it wasn’t a bike. Ruby rose from her chair, heart knocking against her rib cage. A car. A nice car. It pulled into their driveway and a man got out. He was tall and ripped like a professional soccer player, his blond hair gelled into a perfect fauxhawk, the tail of his expensive wool peacoat flapping. His eyes were blue and full of pain. She’d only met him once before, but now, almost robotically, she tumbled off the porch and into the arms of Fox Keene, who quickly settled her in the passenger seat of his BMW and slammed on the gas onto Highway 99, heading northwest toward the outskirts of Oakland.
She gripped the sides of the heated seats as he guided the car further into the city, into neighborhoods she avoided as a rule; neighborhoods
everybody
avoided, populated by boarded up warehouses, dilapidated bodegas, and liquor stores guarded by sheets of bulletproof glass.

“The Jockeys. Drug deal gone bad,” the husky-voiced female cop said when they arrived, unrolling plastic police tape, her cap pulled down low over her eyes. The sirens were still coming, and they seemed drown out all logic.

“When has a drug deal ever gone
good?”
demanded Fox, his arm still drawn around Ruby, who was searching the scene wildly for any sign of her brother.

“Kyle?” she shrieked, tearing herself away from Fox, at the sign of a dark shape on the sidewalk, somewhere past the cop.

“Ma’am, I’m going to have to ask you to step away from the crime scene.” She wrapped one end of the tape around the naked trunk of an oak, her face silhouetted by the orange flashing lights of ambulances and police cruisers.

“Crime scene?” Ruby bent down to the body on the sidewalk, but it was too late. All she could make out was his curly chestnut hair plastered against his bloody face. She didn’t even get a chance to see his eyes as the police threw a tarp over all that remained of Ruby’s family.

“She’s his sister, for God’s sake,” said Fox, behind her. “Have some compassion. Ruby,” he called. “Come on now. There’s nothing you can do for him now. It’s better if you come with me. I’ll get you someplace safe.”

But Ruby just stood staring down at the cold, hard sidewalk. Fox wasn’t talking to her anymore. He was talking to a shell, a hunk of blood and bone who had once been Ruby Clarke. Someone who had once had a family and who thought she was entitled to love, to happiness, as much as any other person. Someone who now knew that was a lie. It always had been.

“Wait,” she screamed. “The necklace! Where is it?” She raced to the back of the ambulance. She frantically scanned the ground, the bushes, the streak of blood and bone fragments that remained, like a sparrow taken from above by a hawk. “My necklace, Fox! My heart! I gave it to him, just for tonight, I--”

“Shh,” Fox said. “You’ll get it back.”

“No, it’s gone,” she sobbed. “I know it. My heart is gone.”

She turned and saw a tall, broad-shouldered and long-legged figure down the street, dressed all in black, featureless, leaning on a hulk of a bike under a swaying fir tree. A helmet was grasped in his hand.

“You!” she screamed. “Where are you going? You stole it! You vulture! You murderer! Don’t just walk away from me!” she screamed into the void. “
You
did this!
You!”
  Actually, she wasn’t sure she screamed anything. She wasn’t sure she had the energy, or the voice. She just felt so
tired.
Defeated.

But by then, even the pipes had been washed away into the wind, leaving only the choke of exhaust in her lungs.

She sank to her knees, watching them loading the gurney into the back of the ambulance. Fox bent down with a blanket that one of the EMTs had handed her, but Ruby shoved it away.
Everyone she loved has been stolen from her. No matter how hard she fought, no matter how firm she stood, she lost them.

At last, she collapsed into Fox’s arms, burying her head in his chest as if he’d been a tree trunk, just something solid to lean on. It didn’t matter. She could hear them still, like the roar of a jet engine as it was taking off. But it wasn’t a jet; she wasn’t anywhere near the airport. She wished she were; she wished she were on a plane, getting smaller and smaller in the sky, until she was only a pinprick. Because that would mean she was free. Free from the Steel Jockeys, the gang of soulless, violent, trigger-happy thugs that had killed  her brother. But she was afraid she would never be able to run far enough.

"Let’s see what’s left in here," joked Rita Chambers, the officer at the front desk, opening the plastic storage container labeled Joseph Rhys Ryan. The number on the container matched the one on the wristband he was still wearing from his three day's stay in the Contra Costa County lockup.

She beckoned for his hand and cut it gently off, holding his ivory fingers briefly in her warm, cocoa-colored one, as fleshy as a padded sofa. She handed him the container’s meager contents--a pair of black leather motorcycle gloves, a helmet, and keys, and he grabbed the helmet, hoping to hold the shield down before Rita could get a glimpse of the ugly purplish puncture wound marring the side of his face. It was a souvenir from a bearded, scraggly wannabe Reaper who had gotten bored gambling his commissary money away to the resident card sharks and decided it would be a great way to make a name for himself in the jail's dayroom by taking a spork to Joseph Ryan’s eye. Joe, agile and more practiced, had easily dropped the guy before the guard intervened, but by then was enough to get both of them locked in solitary for the next day and half--and an ugly souvenir that he was hoping his shaggy wheat-colored hair would hide well enough.

Rita eyed his silver money clip, looking down at Abraham Lincoln's visage. "You keep your big bills on the outside?"

“'Very funny, Rita."  He shoved it in the back pocket of the dark True Religion jeans he'd changed into, along with his gray v-neck t-shirt, hoodie and black leather Steel Jockeys cut-off jacket. Those jeans been a birthday gift from Colt, the nicest article of clothing he owned, and he was ridiculously grateful to get them back. Typical of someone with friends who inevitably skirted the edges of the law, he had heard stories of Gucci wallets and Armani suits mysteriously disappearing while their owners were temporarily detained, then someone spotting it on the jail accountant at a downtown Happy Hour.

"Believe it or not, I really was just trying to help a friend," said Rita, narrowed her eyes.

"First time you ever heard that, right?" he joked.

"Son, those kind of friends don't need no help," she said. "It's one thing to help someone up a mountain, but when they’re gonna pull you over the cliff, you let go of the rope."

Joey sighed, looking down at his hands.

"I know you've got a good heart, Joey, and a good head. But you need to learn how to use both at the same time."

"Listen, Rita," he said, flexing his fingers inside his gloves, "I need you to do me a favor," he said with a mischievous little grin. Rita frowned.

Joseph lowered his broad shoulders and rested his elbows on the desk, stretching his long, strong legs behind him in their motorcycle boots. He watched as the rather large woman fluttered her eyelashes as she glanced down at the Steel Jockeys tattoo covering the milky, smooth skin on his slim but wiry inner arm, its tendons flexing with his fingers. 

Rita's deep, dark eyes looked a bit glazed as she met his warm amber-gold ones, dotted with flecks of green, the kind of eyes more than one transfixed woman had told him she'd never seen on anyone else. Ironically, he'd hated for so long the kind of effect his looks had on people. Of course, there
were
fringe benefits--he was a guy, after all. By and large though, it tended to be more trouble than it was worth for someone like Joe, who, from a very early age, had showed an innate talent for finding trouble anyway.

But sometimes, he had to admit, it worked as a useful way to sweeten a deal when a woman was involved, particularly for someone like him who was chronically short on cash.  "Can you do that for me?"

"Yes, but only because I don't consider you a con. You're more like a son to me. Or a nephew. Let's keep it at nephew. Once removed."

Joe laughed, turned his hand over, and ran it through his thick, longish hair, the color of a ripe wheat field.

He pointed to the cut under his eye that was disfiguring the snowy smoothness of his face. Rita drew in a sharp, hissing breath at the sight of the nasty cut. "Lord, child. I'm sorry. Is it bad?" Rita looked like she was about to cry, and Joe backtracked quickly to calm her down.

"It's nothing. If it had been bad, I wouldn’t be walking out of here under my own power, that’s for sure. Anyway, that little pissant Chad Carter will be in here until he works out his probation rap, but when and if he does leave...pay attention, okay? Chat him up. Ask where he’s going. Who he’s meeting. What he has planned.” He saw Rita purse her lips, looking skeptical. “He’ll tell you,” he reassured her hastily. “He’s not too bright, I promise.”

He thought about Kyle, who had only been trying to do the right thing for the club; right for his family. But he’d been in too deep with someone he shouldn’t have trusted. If only Joe had caught on sooner, had done something differently...He gritted his teeth, trying to shove those thoughts down in the back of his head where they couldn't cripple him; couldn't bare their teeth like wolves, threatening to take him down. It was the only way he'd been able to move forward from that wretched night one year ago.

"You got a cell phone?" Rita paused for a second, then slid a pen and yellow legal pad across the counter, quickly re-crossing her arms in front of her massive bosom.

"Here." He quickly wrote down the phone number for the Thunderbird bar in Madelia. "The owner there is a friend of ours. He'll know how to get in touch with me. Okay?"

Rita clucked her tongue and shook her head. "And here you go again, racing off on to save the world. Mmm-hmm. Some people never learn."

He grinned sheepishly. “That was my problem in school, too. Why listen to a teacher when you know everything already?”

And if Tony Weston hadn't been an idiot and ran off to Oakland to meet one of their suppliers by himself, Joe wouldn't have spent the last three days locked in a cell before the cops decided to drop the charges against him--and Weston wouldn't be in traction at the hospital, handcuffed to a bed. And if Joe himself hadn't even been a bigger idiot, with no regard for his own welfare, he wouldn't have raced after Tony, trying to warn him not to do it.

"You be careful, Joey, you hear me?" Everybody said be careful; parents said it to their children; friends to other friends. But Joe knew that when people said it to him, it was more than just kind words. Joe found danger. He tried to be careful. He just wasn't very good at it--not when the welfare of someone he cared about was at stake. This was because for most of his life there had been too few people falling into that category. He knew the value of them, the worth of each. He never took it for granted. Rita handed him a slip of paper. "Oh, and your bike's in the impound lot. Here's your ticket to get it out."

Joe grimaced. "How much?"

"One seventy-five. Have a good one.” She signaled to the guard to open the door of the sally port. He stuck his hands in his pockets; it was a brilliant, cloudless fall day, crisp and a bit cool, and the sun on his face again after three days under harsh fluorescent lights made him squint. He raised his hand to shield his eyes at the glint from the chrome finish of the bike of Bruce "Colt" Curtis, his friend and sergeant-at-arms of the Steel Jockeys Madelia Charter. Colt, true to his name, was the kind of man you'd see if you looked up "biker" in the dictionary--almost seven feet tall, with a frizzy reddish-gray beard he knotted together messily almost down to the center of his weathered black cut. Scars and tattoos covered his arms, neck, and every inch of his visible body, fitting together like a puzzle so that it was sometimes hard to differentiate which was which. Out of context, he was truly terrifying, leaning on his Dyna Glide that was polished like a diamond and was as massive as he was. His arms were crossed impassively in front of his chest, barely nodding at Joe as he emerged. Loyal to the club to a fault, Colt was the kind of man you wanted on your side in a fight--and his size had nothing to do with it.

"Sun hurts your eyes, doesn’t it?" asked Colt, clapping the younger man on the back and pulling him close in a hug that was genuine and not a bit gruff. If Kyle had been like Joe's brother, Colt was the closest thing he'd ever had to a father. "You should know, Colt. They told me you met two of your ex-wives while you were in here."

Colt tipped his head back and guffawed. "I can't help it that the second they saw me, they forgot all about whatever clown they came to see."

Joe put a hand over his mouth, trying to hide a yawn, and Colt took a step back and looked at the young man critically. Joe shrunk back, knowing Colt was looking at the stab wound on his temple, not to mention the dark circles under his eyes. Needless to say, he hadn't gotten much sleep in there.

"You look like hell, kid."

"Thanks, I hadn’t noticed. Have you seen Tony?"

"Nah. Tried to go to the hospital, but they wouldn't let me in to see him. I guess they thought I looked like a disreputable character."

Now it was Joe's turn to laugh. "Do you think they'd let me?" Colt eyed him thoughtfully. "I've been told I can pass for only semi-disreputable." He looked down sheepishly, then put on one of his angelic smiles, the same one he'd used on Rita.

"You're also an accomplice," said Colt. "Of sorts."

"I've got to see him, Colt. It's my fault he's in there."

"The hell it is. You were trying to help him. That greedy little bastard knew full well he shouldn't have done that deal alone. Without a gun, no less. What was he thinking?"

"He thought it would be a walk in the park. Aaron Beeson was one of our closest suppliers. I mean, he knew Kyle back in the day. They used to shoot pool together.”

“This wouldn’t have anything to do with that cousin of his, would it?”

Lydia. Joe’s stomach twisted at the mere thought of that name, and not in the good way it had when they’d first gotten to know each other. No, it hadn’t been about her, but it certainly complicated things--as women always did. He tried to steer the conversation elsewhere.

“I just had bad feeling about it, so I followed him. And then when we got there, it wasn't Beeson."

"I don't care if he was going to meet his grandma. You don’t play fast and loose with your life or the club's money. He's lucky he didn't come home in a body bag." This was another reason people trembled when they met Colt--his absolutely unrelenting scorn for anyone who went against the M.C. Joe pitied Tony--even if he made it out unscathed and with no charges, he'd still have Colt to deal with. "Who was the guy, anyway?"

"No clue. He just ran at me as he was on his way out after stabbing Tony. Got the stuff, the money. Everything."

"How much?"

"Tony said it at was at least fifteen grand."

Colt's eyes grew hard. Joe didn't blame him.

"Did you get a good luck at the guy?"

Joe looked down at the asphalt, trying to picture the guy’s face. "Tall, dark-haired. A lot of acne scars. Nobody I knew." Joe tried to change the subject; he'd get enough of the third degree when he got back to the bar. He set one of his boots on the pedal, prepared to hop on the wide leather seat, inhaling the smell of leather and vinyl and gas, folding into it. Then he remembered it wasn’t his bike. "Mind if I drive?" His lip turned up daringly. "I know, I know. One scratch and I'm going to be the one in a body bag."

"No. One scratch and I'll make sure there won't be enough left of you to bother with one."

Joe grinned and slid forward, flexing his gloved fingers on the chrome handlebars, warmed by the sun. He kicked the engine into gear. 

But wait. He froze. There was something he had forgotten to check, and it was the one thing he owned that was irreplaceable; the one thing, along with the photo of his sister, that Kyle had entrusted to his best friend in the moments before the life drained away from him, as softly as drawing a curtain closed. Was it still there? Had it fallen out? Had one of the jail guards pawned it downtown? Heart now racing, he shoved his hands into the tight pocket of his jeans, and exhaled audibly as his fingers closed around the gold chain, then sliding down to the heart-shaped ruby to which it was attached.