Page 10 of Dizzy

Grinder grins. “It was the damnedest thing.”

Oh, shit. What if he knows my ghost girl? My stomach sours. He’s too old for a girl like her. Hasn’t stopped him the past. And my girl seemed desperate.

“You ever seen a girl around here, twenty or so, long black hair. Smile tilts funny?”

Grinder gives me the side-eye. It ain’t like me to inquire after a woman. Engine parts and vehicles, yes. Females, no. I’m a mechanic. What can I say? A man don’t ever get over his first love. God don’t make nothin’ as perfect as a shovelhead.

“Can’t say that I have. She do you right?”

I shrug as we file into the boardroom. The table’s only half full, not surprising considering the day and time.

Boots and Eighty are down at the old-timer’s end of the table. Boots has nodded off in his wheelchair. Par for the course. Most of the time, he only bothers to wake up when Grinder needs him to pass a vote.

The club’s in a weird place right now. We voted in Heavy as president when his old man passed, right after I got out of the service. Heavy’s a few years younger than me, and he’s got his crew: Charge, Scrap, Forty, Nickel.

Nickel’s the only one present, pacing by the window. Charge is probably on a job site. Scrap’s upstate, has been for the past six years. He’s doing a dime bid for manslaughter. Forty’s on deployment.

So, Heavy’s the man, but he don’t always have the numbers. He’s gotten us out of running cigarettes and doing bitch work for the Renelli organization up in Pyle. Now we’re in construction and vehicle mods. That’s how I spend most of my time, rigging out cars and bikes like Q from James Bond.

See, our clientele is interested in a little something extra. And one hundred percent discretion. Rooms that don’t show up on blueprints filed with the county. Compartments and defensive equipment that isn’t apparent to the casual observer.

We do your basic construction projects, too, and that’s bringing in more and more cash, but at the beginning, it was the vehicles we modified for the Renellis and shadowy dudes from overseas that paid the bills.

The old-timers are pissy about the change. Eighty don’t want to wear any kind of helmet, hard hat included. They don’t trust anything new. Heavy’s crew backs him unconditionally.

That leaves us guys in the middle—me, Jed, Wall, Pig Iron—to break the ties. Thankless fuckin’ position.

I take a chair, and Heavy ducks through the door. He’s got his laptop. I still can’t get over the fact he went to college. I wonder how many times he got security called on him. Once, at night, he was in the yard, and I mistook him for a bear.

Heavy lowers himself and turns the laptop to face us. There’s a screensaver of a cherry-red Road King. Sweet.

Grinder takes the seat to Heavy’s right, and Gus shuffles in, beer in hand.

“All right, brothers,” Heavy begins.

“We don’t have a quorum,” Eighty pipes up from the foot of the table. Three years ago, dude didn’t know a quorum from his asshole, but Heavy’s big on proper procedure, and so Eighty picked it up right quick so he can be a dick about it.

“Don’t need a quorum,” Heavy says. “We ain’t voting on a motion. We got a problem.”

Shit. I was hoping to get home, get some work done on the sportster. Big George has us working out of our home garages while he renovates the Autowerks, another part of Heavy’s master plan. We’re getting a new hangar out back to do custom jobs. It’s gonna be epic.

“What problem?” Grinder folds his hairy arms. Grinder’s the kind of guy that if he don’t know about it, it can’t be a thing.

“We got an uninvited house guest.” Heavy clicks the mouse pad, and there in grainy black-and-white is my ghost girl, sitting on a parking stop out in front of the clubhouse.

She looks even younger than she did this morning. Her hair’s in pigtails, and her knees are tucked to her chin. Her face is tight. Worried.

My heart rate kicks up.

“Since when we sticklers about random pussy hangin’ out?” Eighty snorts.

“Since she rode in on the back of Chaos’ bike,” Jed answers.

Oh, fuck.

The mood gets stone cold sober in an instant. Chaos is—was—a hang around. A dude we rode with for years. About a week ago, the night of the rager, Pig Iron busted him in Heavy’s office in the dark, hunched over the blueprints for the facility we’re building for the Wade Group up by Pyle, phone out, taking pictures.

Of course, those were the papers filed with the county. The real schematics, the one with the subterranean storage rooms, those are in the vault. Still, if he knew enough to look at blueprints, he knew something.

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