Page 2 of Givin' Me Fitz!
The previous night, there’d been an issue at one of our Cowpokes brothels in Pahrump. An out-of-towner had gotten carried away and roughed up one of our girls… badly.
Derson Lynn—my road captain in the Pahrump Steel Cowboys Motorcycle Club—and I had been called over to the house on East Adkisson by the house mother. Miriam Rey, the club member who was guarding the house during business hours to ensure everyone played nicely, had left early because she wasn’t feeling well.
Miri hadn’t called to let us know so we could send someone else because the house was closing at midnight and she thought everybody would be fine. Clearly, that wasn’t the case.
The son of a bitch who’d harmed Emily was gone by the time we got there. The doctor we had on retainer, Dr. Emmett Rains, was already there and looking Emily over when we arrived.
Dr. Rains was a decent guy. He did our Sunday health checks to ensure our guys and girls were safe for work, as required by Nevada state law. Doc told us Emily had a broken nose, bruised or fractured ribs—he couldn’t be sure without X-rays, which Emily had refused to go get—and a torn anus.
I wanted to hunt the fucking abuser down and do the same to him, and after I was through with him, the guy would never raise a hand to anyone again. Emily said it wasn’t worth worrying about because the man was gone, and he wouldn’t come back.
“I didn’t know him at all,” she’d said, but she wouldn’t meet my gaze, so I had a hard time believing her. She began to cry when I tried to press her for anything the guy said, so I backed off.
I couldn’t stop fixating on whether the man who assaulted her was someone she’d entertained at Cowpokes who’d promised her the high life or was he someone she’d entertained somewhere other than our house, which was completely against the rules.
Repeat customers would come and go, sometimes promising things they’d never deliver to our employees. I hated it when the lie was exposed and the john never returned. The workers were devastated, and we were left picking up the pieces.
The guy had presented an ID to Bess Carroll so he could get into the house, but Bess thought it looked weird, and with Miri gone, she had nobody to verify something was off. At Emily’s urging, Bess let him in anyway.
When Bess had booked the reservation earlier in the evening, she’d checked with Emily, who agreed to take the late-night appointment and seemed excited about it. “I told him the appointment would only be for thirty minutes since he couldn’t get here before eleven thirty, and he said it was fine. I figured he probably had a hair trigger and they’d spend the other twenty-eight minutes talking,” Bess, who was the epitome of a strict mother figure, had told me. Under any other circumstances, I’d have laughed my ass off at her assessment.
We had cameras every-fucking-where, and we had a computer guy who had access to facial recognition software—though probably not legally. We’d find the motherfucker, and he’d pay for his treatment of Emily.
“I talked to Mouse. He says the bastard’s ID was fake, like Bess thought, but he was able to find the guy. He’s stayin’ at the Skylark Lodge and Truck Stop on 160 not far from the house. He found the guy walking back from East Adkisson and traced the license plate number of the red Peterbilt he climbed into. If he owns the truck, he lives in Barstow. Over the road driver. Hobie and Spider are chompin’ the bit to go pick him up.”
Hobie Richards did double duty at the club: treasurer and enforcer. Spider Remmick had been moved up to be my vice president about a year ago. He’d been the sergeant at arms when I returned to the club from the Army. Spider had been patched into the club under my father’s presidency, and I trusted him because he was loyal.
We had two spots on the executive board that were currently empty, and there was a lot of pressure to fill those spots with one of the old-timers who’d already served as an officer of the club. I was still thinking about it. The four of them weren’t all bad.
All my club brothers and sisters were family, and we had each other’s backs regardless of the circumstance. We also took care of our employees. If one of them had been harmed, we took it very seriously.
“Who’s the john?” I stood from the couch, giving up on a nap.
There was business to handle, and the guy would be lucky if he survived the beating my guys planned to give him. He touched one of our people, and he would be a lesson to the world not to lay a finger on those who were friends and family of the Steel Cowboys.
“If the guy owns the truck, his name’s Charles Smith. According to Mouse, he’s scheduled to pick up a load going to New Orleans this afternoon for Sans Truck Lines. How you wanna handle it?” Ders sounded eager, which didn’t surprise me at all.
I checked the clock to see it was just about lunchtime. “Meet me at The Roundup. I’m hungry. You got the address for the terminal where he’s picking up? There are about ten of them out there, and I don’t wanna go to the wrong warehouse and miss him.”
“Sure. You wanna pick him up at the Skylark instead?”
“Let’s get him at the terminal. Those folks at the Skylark don’t deserve to have to clean up the mess I’m planning to make. I’ll see you in thirty.”
We ended the call, and I went to the bathroom to turn on the shower. I set it for cold and walked over to the mirror to check the bags under my eyes. Thirty-five was killing me.
Once I was dressed, I went to my truck and drove along the gravel road to the clubhouse up the hill, with The Roundup just outside our security fence near the road. A few of my brothers were there, along with some of the older members who had nothing else to do. I pulled in front of the clubhouse to grab Hobie, who lived upstairs since his last old lady kicked him out.
Dean “Tiny” Granger, one of our prospects, came over to the truck, so I rolled down the window. “Prez. What can I do for you?”
“Hey, Tiny. Will you tell Hobie we’ve got someplace to be and to hurry the hell up.” He nodded before he rushed inside the clubhouse.
Tiny was a beast of a kid with a huge heart who I’d met when he applied for a job at The Roundup. He was a hard worker, and the kid could lift a damn refrigerator, so I offered him a job at the restaurant as a busboy and dishwasher to help Arlo, our chaplain and cook, and Gilly, the server who worked there.
When Tiny told me he didn’t have an address for the application because his folks had kicked him out of their house when he brought home a boyfriend to meet them, he didn’t hang his head when he said it. I was damn proud of the kid for living his truth, so I didn’t hesitate to invite him to prospect with the Cowboys and offered him one of the empty bedrooms we had on the second floor of the clubhouse or at The Roundup so he had a place to live instead of couch surfing with friends.
That was a year ago. The boyfriend broke up with him because he didn’t agree with Tiny being involved with a motorcycle club. It was probably for the best. Unbeknownst to Tiny, we were going to patch him into the club this October. He had a new family now. The ex-boyfriend could go fuck himself.
A couple of minutes later, Hobie came outside with a brown bag and a paper cup with a lid. “Bones, here’s some coffee. I got Arlo to make you a biscuit sandwich since Gilly’s handling the lunch shift at the restaurant. You get any sleep?”
