Page 10 of Ghoul

11

Ghoul

A few months later

“Holy fucking shit,” Tin Man said, cocking his head to the side and dramatically blinking his eyelids as Spider gave us our new person of interest. The entire dynamics of the club had changed in the course of a month. As far as the rest of the brothers were aware, everything was business as usual, but it was anything except that.

“Isn’t that the pig that busted you with an eighth when we were probating?” Tin Man slapped the photograph down onto the table in front of him and shook his head.

“Knew something was off with that fucker.” I said in a severely irritated voice. I wanted to get all of this handled and go on with my life. I was fucked up before all of this, but at least I was comfortable with it. All of the shit that swam around in my head was mostly things I had put there on my own. I had no difficulty believing the reason I took Stunner’s life was because he crossed the club, but his involvement in fucking trafficking kids didn’t make any sense at all. It wasn’t that I thought so highly of the man. What made me doubt he was a chester was his kid was the eyewitness that put me in jail. She didn’t behave at all as if she had been abused or touched inappropriately. She was just a little girl missing her daddy. The one I killed, and she saw part of it happen until Spider found her.

In my opinion, Stunner was always a shady fuck when he was hanging around our clubhouse. In fact, I told Spider that a couple of weeks before we began suspecting a rat in the house. It was rather convenient the law didn’t find our chapter of the Royal Bastards interesting enough to tail and hadn’t raided our clubhouse until his ugly mug started showing up every weekend. Shortly after, we were getting busted for petty shit, like the eight-ball of cocaine I caught a charge for. We bought the judge, and it was thrown out, but it was the principle of the matter. The majority of our brothers were getting charged with shit left and right, and it stopped after I offed Stunner.

“Fuckin’ cops,” I muttered. “He was an undercover cop turning us in for shit that didn’t matter while he was doing who the fuck knows what to kids. This shit is the reason the law can’t be trusted.” I slammed my fists down onto the table and lit a smoke. Even when I was young, I didn’t trust police officers. They were supposed to protect my mom and me, but when I snuck out and called them because dad had beat the shit out of her, they always listened to dad and not me. He was on the force, too. I was his disappointment for wanting to be nothing like him; she was his because who the fuck could guess. It changed daily. Eventually, she wised up and left his ass, found another man who treated her right and had a little girl, my half-sister. Now, she had a son of own who was around ten or eleven.

Spider raked his hands over his thinning hair and down his braided ponytail. “I never wanted to involve my brothers in this shit. The deal was I handled the shit, and our club was in the clear.” He grimaced and ran his hands over his knees. “Fuck, I’m getting old.”

“It is what it is, Boss.” I shrugged, we were about ten feet deep in the shit, and there was no turning back now. “And getting old?” I coughed, taking a drag from my cigarette and swallowed the smoke by accident. “You were an old bastard when I joined. Ain’t that right, Tin Man?”

“Damn skippy. We’re gonna have to put all the money from our dues to get you a trike, Spider.” He laughed in his deep voice, and the rest of us joined in.

“Keep that shit up, and I’ll find a new vice president,” Spider retorted, shaking his head, but we all knew it wasn’t long before Spider being on a trike or not riding at all was a very real thing. His body was eaten up with arthritis, and he popped pills like candy. We all had our own addictions, but the pills he took weren’t to get high. They were so he could walk.

“What do you say we get this shitshow on the road?” Wily asked, adjusting his leather cut as he stood from the table we normally had church around. The meetings between the four of us were basically an impromptu form of it, but I missed the fuck out of the old days. The days when the topic we were discussing was about shit happening in our town. Shit that didn’t involve kids.

“Ready as we’ll ever be,” I said, butting my cigarette out in the ashtray.

---