Chrome & Leather - The Novel (Adriana Ness ♯1) (Motorcycle Club Romance) (2 page)

In his warm embrace I said, “I couldn't stop him, he killed the man right in front of me. I didn't have a chance to stop him”.

Stensel pulled away from me and locked eyes with me, he was like the father I never had. “You did good, you took another scumbag off the street, this fuckers timecard was punched the first time he started his sick little game. Im glad it was you that took him down and Im sorry you couldn't save that homeless man. It is what it is and you stopped him. Thats a win in my books”.
 

At other times Stensels hard but stern words had comforted me, this time I made all the motions that they had worked, but deep down inside felt nothing but pain and despair for the man I didn't save.

Our moment was cut short by the loud booming voice of the captain “Get in my office now Ness and the rest of you reprobates quit you’re hollering”. I went to his office and shut the door behind me.
 

Stacks of files where piled high on his desk and the air was heavy with the smell of coffee and sour sweat. I always imagined that Captain Travers had seen one too many eighties cop movies as he sometimes fitted into the cliche of the loud black captain who was always shouting and cursing at his officers. I knew that was mostly an act as he was more like an overprotective shepard. I had watched him pull twenty-four shifts when some of his flock was undercover. He would constantly pace back and forth across the office with an ever present cup of coffee clenched in his fist. He would constantly move and reposition the sticky notes on the board that he used to keep track of operations. Moving the colored notes into new configurations as he tried to visualise all the moving parts of an operation. I think this was something he did to calm his nerves.

The man always seemed on edge, especially so when an operation was reaching an end point. All of us respected him greatly and he was the steadfast rock that all of us needed in our line of work.

The captain looked at me with a serious look on his face. Shit he is going to chew me out for not saving the homeless man last night. He rubbed his chin and then started to talk “First things first, sterling work last night. That scumbag deserved nothing more then to be taken down by an officer of the law. I am putting you up for a commendation from the powers that be. That was some damn fine police work officer.”
 

He cleared his throat and looked down at a manilla folder in front of him on his desk. “I know that standard procedure after being under cover is some desk time, well we are going to have to bend our rules a little. You have to go under again and this time it could be for a long time. We are talking about months, and it is a real possibility that it could be for as long as a year”.

Simultaneously my stomach lurched with a sickly feeling while my thoughts raced ahead. This is what I lived for, but so soon after a case made me nervous. I knew there was no place for weakness in this unit. My brothers and sisters put their life on the line every time they walked out that door and assumed a new identity.
 

Captain Travers pushed the thick folder across the desk to me. “You will be infiltrating one of the most secretive and tight knit motorcycle gangs in this country. These guys are real special, they are suspected of having links to the Korean gangs, the Mexicans and the Columbians. They are suspected of drug smuggling, gun running, kidnapping and extortion. You name it and this bunch of boy scouts has done it. In the folder you will find info on all eight members of the gang and any known associates. You have to set your sights on the leader Jack Stone. We believe thats an alias, we have no records on him at all. He goes by the name “Blackjack”, we suspect because of his taste in women. He is only ever seen with an african american woman either in public or on the back of his bike. We think its some sort of twisted viking style status symbol. Thats where you come in. You fit his type exactly, young, athletic, smart and black. Your goal is to infiltrate the gang so that we can build an iron clad case against these fuckers. You have all of today to absorb the material and then you start tomorrow. These guys are some hard hitting fuckers and once you gain access to the group you may not be able to contact us for long periods of time. This is the big leagues now, I hope you are ready to play”. The captain jotted something down on a sheet of paper and passed it to me, “Thats the bar they hang out at most of the time. It is a cesspool of debauchery and violence. Some of the lowest forms of criminal scum hang out there. Its also the most likely place where you can force a natural meet with the leader.”

I tucked the note into the folder and stood up squarely. “I wont let you down captain” I said. We shook hands and I headed back to my desk to absorb the information in the folder.

This was one of the parts of the job I loved and which I was good at. I could memorize huge amounts of information and every scrap that I stored away might help me in future dealings. I could never predict when some random piece of history might help me insinuate myself further into my cover.

I spent the whole morning reading and rereading the file. I had
 
all the crimes and various run ins with the law filed away in my memory for seven of the gangs members. I knew them as much as possible from the files on my desk. BlackJack was different, he was a cypher, a man with no history. It was if he walked out of the fog to start this gang and everything else about him was nothing but street chatter and urban legend. The guy had never even got as much as a parking ticket, but his gang where now on the radar. Expansion had alerted the powers that be and I was going to be the first attempt at building a case against him and his reprobates.

By lunchtime my eyes ached and my stomach felt sour from one too many cups of shitty reheated coffee. I got up and left the office knowing this would be the last time I would see this place for a while. The tradition when going undercover was you got up and walked out without saying a word. No big emotional farewells, you just left quietly. The belief was that we would see each other again on our return.
 

Back in my apartment I filled a heavy tumbler with some scotch and got to work going over the files once again. As my eyes scanned over the pages again and again I started to build up the backstory for my undercover identity. Layer by layer I built up personal details, anecdotes and traits. The easiest solution was to be as close to yourself as possible and to use as much of your own information as was safe, so that you could never get caught up in a tangle of lies. I drifted off to sleep as images of hulking men on motorbikes made of flames pulled me down into sleep.

The following day I locked up my apartment and stood staring dumbly at the front door for a second as a strong feeling made me think I was never going to see it again. Out of habit I gently tapped my hip so that I could feel the comfortable weight of my pistol in its holster. The gun was bought from a shady pawnshop a few weeks ago and the serial number was filed off. Strapped to my ankle was a knife. I felt a lot safer with both of them and they fitted with my new character who's skin I was slowly inhabiting.
 

My face was still aching and the cut above my lips had stopped bleeding. When I had awoken this morning I filled a sock with a bunch of spare change. I swung it hard against the soft flesh under my eyes, once, twice, three times. It began to swell nearly immediately. My eye was bloodshot above the puffy and darkening skin. I gritted my teeth and swung the makeshift bludgeon hard against my lip. The skin split on impact and bright red blood ran down my chin and spotted the tiled floor. My lip began to ballon and swell. It wasn't enough. I swung the bludgeon hard against my lip and it split again and blood ran down my face in rivulets. I dropped the sock filled with change and gripped the sink tightly as the pain turned everything black for a few seconds. Once the bleeding stopped I cleaned up and surveyed my work. It looked like i’d been dealt a couple of nice punches. My face was swollen below the eye and my lips had darkened and bruised beneath the soft skin. I popped some pain killers and winced as I swallowed them.

Once I was out of my apartment I walked a couple of blocks from my place and then hailed a cab. “Take me here” I said showing the driver the piece of paper with the address on it. He looked at my face with a concerned look on it “Are you sure you want to go here? This place has a bit of a reputation”. “Drive” I said gruffly and the cab pulled away from the curb and headed towards my destination.

The bar was located thirty minutes out of town on a deserted back road. The bar was a solid and grey concrete building with a blue neon sign flickering “The Pit”, and hanging slightly askew. This building looked like it had never seen better days, it had the look of something that came fully formed into this world as a blight on the landscape. In front of the building where parked a couple of beat up old junkers with faded paint jobs and broken tail lights, no sign of any motorbikes yet. I paid the cab driver and he eyeballed me in the rearview mirror as I counted out the money.
 

I got out and breathed the country air. The romantic view was that the air should smell crisp and clear. I smelt nothing but decay and rotting trash. The switch flipped inside me and I was ready to become another person. I pushed down all the fear that was exploding like flashbulbs in my head and telling me to run away. I strode toward the bar door, and each step as I crunched loudly on the rubbish strewn parking lot calmed me and put me in the headspace I need to live in for possibly the next few months. By the time I put my hand on the door to push it open I was no longer a police officer, I was now Linda Lake and I was ready to catch BlackJacks attention.

The door creaked open and I entered. It was dimly light with a pool table in the corner. The light above the table flickered on and off. In the corner was an old jukebox and it was currently playing some sort of rinky dink country and western music. The bar was small with a row of stools in front of it. As my eyes adjusted to the gloom I could see a few men sitting at tables off in the corners. Most sat alone nursing a beer. All eyes in the bar turned to me as I strolled towards the bar.

The bar man was a huge fat guy, if this was Japan he would easily make the national sumo team. He looked at me from squinty piggy eyes. His massive arms where folded across a black T Shirt with a cobra on it. Sitting at the bar was a man with long greasy hair and his face buried in a newspaper and he was taking notes as he read the sports section. I had him pegged as a degenerate gambler straight away. He did not look up or pay me any attention as I sat down.

The fat barman gave me a yellow toothed smile and said, “What can I get you hot stuff”. His voice dripped with condescension. “A beer and a shot of bourbon” I said. He poured me a beer in a glass which still had a lipstick stain on the rim. I downed the bourbon in one fiery swig and followed it up with some deep gulps of my beer. I looked in the yellow liquid and thin tendrils of blood broke apart between the bubbles. I reached up and my lips was bleeding again, I had reopened the wound knocking back the shot. The barman threw me a dirty rag and said, “Here you go hot stuff. Did your old man give you the once over?”. I didn't like the tone of his voice and he seemed to be enjoying my pain. “Something like that.” I said and muttered under my breath “and he wont be doing that again”. My hand visibly shook as I dabbed at my busted lip. I pointed at the shot glass and the bar man filled it up again.

At first it was a low rumble in the distance and then I could hear the full throttled roar as a motorbike pulled up outside the bar. I continued to drink my beer knowing this could be BlackJack and some of his cronies pulling up outside. The door swung open and a pair of heavy boots walked across the stripped wooden floor to a vacant table in the far corner of the bar. The bar man looked in the new arrivals direction and gave a nod of recognition. He poured a fresh beer and this time the glass was gleaming and clean and brought it over to the man in the corner.

I had to play it cool, I couldn't make a move at all. He had to come to me, I had to be discovered by him to remove any suspicion. I could not make the first move, if anything I had to act completely disinterested in my surroundings, a woman crushed under the weight of her current predicament. It might take weeks of me propping up this bar before contact was made, it usually did. Until I looked like another fixture and word of my fabricated story slowly spread by bar room gossip, then the moment might come where I could naturally cross paths with BlackJack.

I sipped my beer with me head down looking at the thin tendrils of my blood dissipate in the frothy liquid. The bourbon had sanded off some of the rough edges of my pain but it still hurt to drink.

The greasy looking guy reading the paper moved over two seats and sat beside me. He rolled up his newspaper slowly and slipped his notebook into an inside pocket of his stained and rumpled suit. His hair hung hank and lifeless and he smelt sour and dirty. I concentrated on my beer knowing this was not going to go well. The man bent close to my ear and his fetid breath filled my nostrils. “Why don't we get out of here my ebony queen?” he asked as his lips brushed close to my ear. I moved away from him in my chair, shifting my weight subtly. “Leave me alone,” I said through my busted lips.
 

“I will treat you nice” he slurred as he put his hand on my arm. I looked down at his grubby hand on my arm, dirt encrusted under his fingernails and then I glanced at his crotch. He had his trousers opened and his stiff cock pocked out. A wave of disgust and revulsion hit me and then I acted on pure instinct.

I grabbed his hand by the wrist and slammed it onto the bar top, with one smooth movement I freed my blade from its ankle sheath and like liquid silver it coursed through the air in a flashing arc as I buried it in the back of this sleaze bags hand.

For a split second nothing happened as if the moment was frozen in time. The knife stood straight up like an obscene exclamation point jutting from the back of his hand. The man’s mouth opened in a wide O and he made a panicked puffing sound as he pulled air in and out rapidly. Then the blood came and it ran over the back of his hand and along the bar. I looked in the man’s widening eyes and just as swiftly as I had stabbed him I pulled out the knife. “Don't touch me again, next time it will be your cock I cut off.” The greasy man fell to the floor backing away from me and whimpering. “Get him out of here” boomed a voice from the back corner of the bar. I cleaned the knife with the dirty bar rag and slid it back into its sheath.