The Dust and the Roar Page 11

  After rehearsal, I’d pick her up on my bike and bring her home. She’d be so high on the ride back to Meager. Her arms waving up in the air, I’d weave on the road on purpose to make her laugh and whoop “Wooooo! Do it again!” as she’d squeeze me even tighter.

  She told me all about the band—Len, the guitarist, Teddy, the bassist, Stewart, the drummer, and Rick, the keyboardist. I met them all the first night. Their eyes had gone to my club colors, and they’d shared a stiff look before each one shook my hand.

  This would be the first time Isi had sung more than one or two songs on the fly at a party. She wasn’t the traveling troubadour any more. She fit in with a band, had a place, had a part to play in a full show. The mic was hers to use, to hang onto, she didn’t have to hand it over after her song was done. She didn’t have to get off the stage.

  The band set up, geared up, and finally played. My woman belted out Patti Smith’s “Because the Night,” our favorite. Her voice carried the blunt strength and emotion of the song, and it made you sit up and take notice. She was relaxed up there under the lights with the band and easily forged a connection with the audience.

  She took the lead on a handful of songs, like “Jesse” which she turned into something dirtier and ballsier than Carly Simon had ever offered. For the rest of the band’s songs, she hung back between Len and Teddy and sang backup for them. She wasn’t a diva or a stage hog. She engaged the guys in her energy. I could tell the guys dug her sound and how it meshed with theirs. Pride swelled in my chest that I’d help make this happen for her. She’d taken the opportunity and blasted it to high heaven.

  “Hey, you! You fucking my sister?”

  I turned toward that sharp voice. Leo, the skanky looking local drug dealer, stood in front of me, feet planted firmly in the ground. Stringy brown hair brushed his shoulders, eyes pinned as fuck. Hard as nails and pinned on me.

  “You talking to me?” I said over the blaring music, slanting my head.

  “Yeah, I’m talking to you.”

  “You’re Isi’s brother?”

  “That’s right.”

  She’d never mentioned another brother, only the dead marine. “Hold up. You’re Isadora Dillon’s brother?”

  “I’m the other brother. Less confused now?”

  The town candyman was a Dillon? Jesus. Retail was certainly the family business.

  “Are there any more of you I should know about?” I asked.

  “Our cousin Ryan, he’s a cop in Meager. His sister, Georgia works at Drake’s Cafe and the store.”

  “Yeah, I know Georgia, thanks for the info. Look, Leo, I dig your sister something fierce. We’re good, she and I are real good, man. We’re together.”

  He pulled in closer to me. “Keep it good, or I’ll be coming for you.” His voice was stern, he barely blinked. I believed him. And if he did come for me, I was sure his tactics would be unusual and out of left field.

  “Great to meet you, too.”

  “Hey, Wreck!” Mick’s face was pulled into grim lines. “It’s Cheezer, he’s blowing steam, mouthing off at a Demon Seed. We need to nip this off sooner rather than later.”

  I shot Leo a look. “What did you sell him tonight?”

  A cold smile seeped over Leo’s thin face. Oil on water. “He likes my weed laced with my special Angel Dust. He’s my best customer.” He let out a thin laugh and slithered back into the wave of people dancing and singing along with the band.

  “Where is he?” I asked Mick.

  Everyone at the party was glued to the band onstage, to my Isi. Mick and I hustled through the crowd, and with each push and shove my pulse thudded in my neck. I was going to bust Cheezer right in the jaw for this after I saved his ass.

  We finally found him up in the face of a young Demon Seed who was flanked by two other brothers on each side and more behind him. Not good, especially as the young one was laughing, egging him on, and from the twist of Cheezer’s mouth, the rigid line of his neck craning up toward the taller guy, I knew he was in this to beat that kid down a peg. The kid pushed him, and Cheezer flipped, yelling even louder. Willy held fast alongside Cheezer.

  “You touching me? Huh? Who are you to touch me, you piece of shit?” Cheezer muttered, stumbling.

  More laughter, more shouts. The crowd thickened. Threats hurtled through the air like automatic weapon fire. Letting junk talk blow up into a full-fledged confrontation at a civilian party was plain old stupid. We had to defuse this shitbomb now.

  “Hey, hey, hey, come on!” Kip slapped a hand on Cheezer’s shoulder. “We’re here to celebrate my birthday. Y’all are here to party, have a good time. Come on, man—” Kip struggled to stay upright and grabbed onto Cheezer’s shirt. He was pretty damn drunk. He stumbled, got shoved, shoved back.

  “Get out of the way!” some Seed yelled.

  Kip teetered to the right, and Terry and a Seed each grabbed onto an arm of his pulling him back, out of the way. Cheezer sprang forward, his hunting knife in his grip. A snap of fast movement. Everything morphed into a blur.

  “Noooo!”

  Kip’s body seized, his eyes bulging. He staggered and slumped in the men’s hold.

  “Kip! Kip!” Terry’s voice yelled out.

  The Demon Seeds scrambled, taking off like cockroaches in the light. The crowd moved in a churning wave of panic, and Cheezer vanished within its wild current.

  “Cheezer!” Willy shouted. “Cheezer!”

  “We got to find him!” said Mick, and he and Willy ran after him.

  Yells, angry shouts filled my ears along with the blare of bikes and car engines grinding. The acrid burn of rubber and exhaust, the flash of headlights. Yells and wails. I felt for a pulse on Kip’s throat, but there was nothing. No sign of life. Nothing.

  Only blood. So much blood. I could feel it pumping out of me, I could. My breathing got louder, and a clammy chill crawled over my skin as a phantom hand gripped me at the throat.

  “Terry, man, we got to go,” I managed. “They can’t find you holding him. You—”

  Terry clung onto a lifeless Kip. Bleeding, bleeding. “Kip…”

  “Terry, come on—” I grabbed him by the shoulders, pulling him off of Kip, dragging him with me, away from the corpse of our friend. “We’ve got to go!”

  But I had to find Isi first.

  “Wreck! Wreck!” She flew toward me out of breath.

  Thank fuck.

  “Isi, start my bike. I got to get Terry in Murphy’s truck.”

  She grabbed the keys from my jacket pocket. “What’s going on? What happened? I heard screaming, everyone’s running to get out—”

  “I’ll tell you when we get home.”

  “Tell me now!”

  “Kip’s dead.”

  “What? How?”

  “Isi, get to my bike!”

  Her eyes flared, her face tightened. She ran.

  My gaze shot back—I couldn’t help it. People hovered over Kip’s lifeless body. How did this fucking happen in the split of an instant? Wailing, and shouts grew louder.

  How did it all go wrong? Kip, the host of his own birthday party, the guy who’d done good things around town, never bothered anybody, lay crumpled in the dirt, the earth and wild grasses soaking up his blood.

  I brought Isi to her house and headed back to the farmhouse. “Fuck,” muttered Murphy from a dark corner of the sofa in our clubhouse. “He thought he was stopping a stupid fight, and instead…”

  The sirens had long stopped. They’d probably brought Kip to Rapid, to the morgue. Now they were hunting for Cheezer.

  We all wanted Cheezer.

  Flashing red and blue lights surrounded the road leading to our barn. “Ah, shit,” said Terry, scrubbing a hand across his mouth.

  “Be cool, Terry. For shit’s sake, get yourself together, man.” Terry buried his head in his hands, rocking back and forth.

  Willy opened the old wood slat door we’d reinforced with metal strips, and Officer Ryan and Officer Ned of the Meager
PD entered the barn. “You want to tell us what happened out there tonight?” asked Officer Ryan.

  “We were at the party. We knew Kip, he’d invited us. There was a fight, and Kip tried to break it up,” I said.

  “It was real crowded,” said Willy, the fatigue dragging through his voice.

  “Kip got in the middle of ‘em,” Mick said.

  “Jesus, you never get in between dogs fighting,” muttered Willy.

  “Where’s Doug Robbins? His nickname is Cheezer?” Officer Ned asked, looking up to his notepad. “Witnesses say he had a knife. That he was the one fighting with a group called the Demon Seeds at the time.”

  “Don’t know where Cheezer is,” I said. “Haven’t seen him since. He took off.”

  “I know how this works,” Officer Ryan said. “Don’t think I don’t know. You all aren’t going to tell us shit about your buddy. Would go against your gang code.”

  “Gang code?” said Mick. “You’d know about that, wouldn’t you? The local Elks gang, the Mooses gang, the cops gang and whatever the fuck gang?”

  “Mick—” I cut him off.

  “Those gangs run this town, and they run Rapid,” Mick’s eyes were on fire. “And you all are their little foot soldiers. The only difference is they’re all dressed up in nice suits and white shirts.”

  Officer Dan crossed his arms. “We’ll be questioning each of you separately. Kip Ogden was well-liked by everyone. He goes to break up a fight and gets slaughtered like an animal for no good reason. This here, tonight, is one stupid goddamn tragedy.”

  I held his hard gaze. He was right, but I wasn’t about to verbalize my agreement with his assessment of the situation. He gave each of us a bitter glare.

  Silence fell over us. A seething kind of quiet. In that silence were bundled the words no one wanted to say or hear, all of them roped and tied with shame and loss and regret. But they were true. We could no longer be the local free-wheeling, high-chasing, bike riding fraternity.

  Things had changed.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  The next day we got formally questioned by the Meager PD. Not only were they unhappy about a killing in their town, but this killing earned us all the attention of the Feds.

  “See that suited up gentleman over there?” said Officer Ryan to me as he brought me into a room. I glanced down the hall at a tall, thin guy in a dark suit and a thick tie, who was scanning the Most Wanted notices in the hallway of the police department. “That’s a Fed come here to see what we’re all up to and take a hard look at our local outlaw activity. They like keeping track of your shit. Put that under your helmet, why don’t you?”

  “Great,” I muttered.

  Back at the barn, Terry poured himself a whiskey. Glass after glass. “How’s it going, Terry?” I said as I threw myself next to him on the old couch.

  “Just dandy.” He swallowed hard. “Tried to grab some grub at Marla’s, and they wouldn’t serve me. You believe that shit?” He gulped down the liquor.

  “Yeah, I do,” I replied.

  “We got a problem,” announced Willy, stepping inside. Jim came in after him. Jim was the owner of the farm where we hung out.

  “Hey, Jim,” I said.

  Jim let out a breath. “Y’all got to go.”

  “What are you talking about? We’re all paid up with the rent,” Mick said. “Been doing that repair work for you on the roof, free of charge.”

  “You got til the end of the week to get out,” said Jim. “End of the week.”

  “Hey, come on! You’ve never had a problem with us!” said Terry.

  “Now, I do.” Jim shot Terry a final glare and stalked back outside.

  “Oh man…” muttered Terry.

  Willy charged inside. “I got news. I heard from one of the girls I know who’d come down to the party from North Dakota,” said Willy. “She said she saw the Demon Seeds stop for gas in her town. They were loud, couldn’t not notice.”

  “And?” I said.

  “Cheezer was with them.”

  “Then they’d head west across state lines to Montana. That fuck!” Mick said.

  “How in the hell did he take off with them? Jesus, he was arguing with one of them to begin with!” said Terry. “All this shit was for nothing?”

  Killing an innocent was never for something, was it?

  “If he went with them, that means they offered to hide him until shit blew over,” said Mick. “Soon enough, he’ll contact us.”

  “Or they will,” I said, “with some sort of deal.”

  “What are we supposed to do now?” said Terry. “Go up there and get him?”

  “Get him?” Willy snarled. “No, you idiot, we’re supposed to become Demon Seeds. You can bet he gave them some kind of assurances that we’re going to do it.”

  “I’m sure some kind of deal was already on the table before the party happened,” said Mick. “Kip’s death may have been an accident, but it played perfectly into their hands, and so did that fucker. Now it’s a done deal.”

  “Not for me it isn’t,” I said. “I’m not going to let that fuck make a decision like that for us. No fucking way.”

  “Yeah, but—” Terry let out a groan.

  “No.” Willy’s jaw tightened. “Wreck’s right. No fucking way.”

  “He’s our brother, man,” said Terry.

  “Was he thinking about our brotherhood when he took out that knife? When he ran off with another club?” I said. “Think about it, Terry. If Kip hadn’t gotten in the way, Cheezer was going to slash at that Seed. And then where would we be? They’d come after us one by one and slice us up, I guarantee it. He keeps jumping on another seesaw and then another, and always will.”

  “Jesus,” muttered Terry.

  “I am not going to let these assholes force me into some corner that they chose,” I said, “and there’s no way I’m going to be Cheezer’s victim. Kip paid that price for fucking nothing. He intervened out of goodness and a good time. Man, even when Cheezer does the worst possible shit, he still ends up turning the situation into what he wants. He and the Demon Seeds can go fuck themselves.”

  “That’s right! I don’t want anything connecting him to us. And I sure as hell don’t want the Seeds to think that they got some kind of claim because of that dirtbag,” said Willy.

  The sharp ring of the old telephone sliced through the air. I answered. “Yeah?”

  “I want to talk to Wreck,” growled a familiar voice. Scout.

  “Scout? This is Wreck.”

  Terry let out a groan. Mick rubbed a hand down his face.

  “What the fuck is going on up there?” Scout asked. “We had a discussion. An agreement. You shit all over that?”

  He’d heard, and he’d heard a different version.

  “No, man. Cheezer ran off with the Demon Seeds, and got himself across state lines.”

  “A nomad brother of mine was up at a big bar in Montana. He spotted the Demon Seeds, said a guy was with them with your Bleeding Eagles patch on, drunk and attracting attention and not the good kind. He was boasting about a kill he’d made in South Dakota, showing off his knife. Ended up getting beaten to a pulp for cheating at a game of pool.”

  Ah fuck. “Yeah, sounds like Cheezer.” My gaze shot to Willy and Mick, and I shook my head.

  “Can’t imagine the Seeds are going to put up with that shit much longer. They must be holding out for you, that how it’s gonna go?” Scout’s voice spat out.

  “They’re not going to get what they want,” I replied, lifting my chin. Willy nodded at me, then Mick, Bobby. Jump’s mouth hung open. Terry’s head was in his hands. “We want to meet.”

  “You sure about that?”

  “Real sure.”

  “Get down here, we’ll be waiting.”

  “We’ll be there.” I put the phone back on the receiver. It was done. We were joining the formidable One-Eyed Jacks.

  Terry broke the silence first. “I can’t do this.”

  What? What are
you talking about?” Willy said.

  “I had a hand in Kip’s death. I was the one who pulled him away, I held him up and—”

  “You didn’t do it on purpose, man. You pulled him away to keep him clear, and Cheezer took his opportunity,” I said.

  “That don’t matter, ‘cause Kip’s still dead,” muttered Terry. “Joining the One-Eyed Jacks is the solution? That’s what’s going down now?”

  “We want to be a real club with a respected name and history behind us,” said Willy.

  “After that, it’s up to us to make our own history right here in the Dakotas, and we will,” I said.

  “Shit’s changed, Terry,” said Mick. “They’re going to come gunning for us, and I ain’t going to sit here and let it happen. I’m no one’s chump. Are you?”

  “It’s time, Terry,” I said. “I sure as hell don’t want my chosen way of life threatened by those who think they’re better than me and can just come along and interfere whenever the fuck they feel like it. I know that this is the life I want, and joining the Jacks makes sense to me. I want what we got here to continue, but if we’re going to survive, it has to continue in a new way.”

  “That’s right,” said Willy.

  “Yeah, agree,” said Mick.

  “Damn straight,” said Bobby.

  “Yeah, me too,” said Jump trying to squash his grin and keep it serious.

  “I love you guys, you know I do,” said Terry. “But I can’t do this, man. I’m sorry. I can’t. I got kids, an old lady. I take care of my ma. I got to think of them. This is all kinds of complicated now. What we had was good fun, us riding, partying, hanging. It’s one thing to get in a scuffle, have a bust-up, but this? This ain’t for me, I’m sorry.”

  “That’s all right, Terry. Better you tell us now.”

  “What we got here, together meant a lot to me,” Terry continued. “You know that, right?” Willy and Terry hugged.

  “Can we keep Farrah, man?” Bobby asked thumping Terry on the back, and we all laughed.

  “Yeah, you keep her for me,” he replied, wiping at his eyes. Terry took off his jacket and laid it on the table, a hand smoothing down over his Bleeding Eagles patch. He stuffed his shit in a duffel bag and took off, the screen door squeaking and scraping in his wake.