Hell on Heelz (Asphalt Gods' MC) (4 page)

He told me on the way to the Roost, I was going to church, not to a house of God but to a sacred ritual nonetheless. That night I swore my life to the Hell on Heelz MC. The Banshee had me simply promise, “Ride with us, party with us and defend our lives with yours.” It’d gone unspoken, but I already knew there was much more to it. I’d learn it like they all did, in time. She wasn’t poetic. She didn’t call us sisters of the wind or nothing, but she did say the devil was a man but women were meaner. That there was a special place in Hell for women who didn’t support each other. Then we partied in spite of the murder that happened just hours earlier and maybe harder because of it, to forget it. We forgot it, hard.

A typical Saturday night at the Roost meant our private club was busting at the seams with those who wanted to get drunk, get high and get laid. The Banshee and her girls had their favorites over. Some of the men were from other clubs but just riders tonight and then there were the stragglers, the men who the girls had brought in off the street. Me, I didn’t invite Ripper, but he was a regular here anyway. He wasn’t a looker either, but he had more than two brain cells which was a rarity around here.

“I’d say we’re perfect for each other.” He chugged his Bud Light, clutching my leather-clad knee under the table.

Good lord, this was not what I’d fixed my face for. Jerking my knee away from him, I barked, “Don’t tell me how I’m supposed to feel.” I didn’t feel a damned thing for Ripper. I sure as hell didn’t want a boyfriend.

Ripper smiled, the rare site almost making him dashing. He wouldn’t give up.

On my sixth drink, I didn’t want to talk about us—I wanted to fuck. It didn’t have to be Ripper. My chin resting on my hands, I searched around the Roost for another option.

Hearing Pepper’s voice screech over the noisy crowd, my neck snapped back to see her pink hair go flying over a man’s shoulder. That girl was so thin, she could hula hoop in a cheerio. Amazingly enough, she’d run away from a circus, used to be a contortionist before she started working at the Banshee’s shop.

Keg headed up the stairs behind the bar, taking a dangling Pepper to bed. I remembered when all I wanted was the man of my dreams to come along and throw me over his shoulder just like that. I imagined Ripper trying it and landing us both on our asses.

A young stud, Keg was Ripper’s younger brother. Both men had dark hair and light eyes, but Keg was fine, strong. Ripper looked like Keg minus the fine and strong part. They both worked at the paper factory where my girl Boots was foreman. They headed up the local riders’ club in Seville.

Where Keg was full of life, Ripper was broken, just like me. That’s why he thought we’d make a perfect pair, two broken people, fixing each other bullshit. I didn’t want to fix Ripper. I didn’t give a damn if his wife had died. I had my own demons to quell.

My demons needed a long ride, a half bottle of Jack and a hard cock on a good day. On a bad day, they itched for trouble, a fight. The Heelz provided everything I needed. I didn’t need a man to come rescue me.

“My house is awfully lonely, hon…” He put his arm around me, trying not to call me honey, sweetheart or darling. He knew better than to start with the terms of endearment.

“And it’s probably a mess,” I slurred. I still had my cleaning business, though my client list had dwindled. Club life and jobs for the club took up a good chunk of my time. I’d cleaned Ripper’s house a time or two before I was a Heel. His wife had had Cancer, on her deathbed when I’d been hired.

Fuck, that was two years ago, before I’d left Neil. Before, Kelly... I stopped my train of thought with another drink.

“You could come home with me tonight,” Ripper went on, thinking we could be something more.

I rolled my eyes before a crash from behind me took my attention. DDD and Twink were having it out, again. “Cat fight,” Boots hollered before a shot rang out. The Banshee had done shot another hole in the ceiling. Someday she was going to kill whoever was using the stables. That’s what we called the upstairs, where we took the men we didn’t want in our homes. Anyway, our president had stopped the fight. DDD let go of Twink’s silky dark hair and stomped off. Both only prospects, DDD and Twink were as different as night and day.

Dede, had been her real name, but we called her DDD for her triple Ds—she was a know-it-all beach beauty, like she’d stepped off the set of Bay Watch, but she wouldn’t get the reference because she was a young online college student with a nose problem, in other words, a drug habit. Twink, an ex-whore was a middle-aged Korean woman, who liked her racial slur of a road name. The Banshee had given her a place to hide from her pimp, and she liked Harleys and ink so much, she’d wanted to stay. Differences or not, Twink and DDD were both in the same boat now, like all of us.

Hell on Heelz wasn’t just a rider’s club like Ripper had founded. His club, the Seville Slayers was made up of mostly respectable blue-collar men who wanted to get away from their nagging wives on the weekend and put Harley decals on their pick-up trucks. They rode with us sometimes and ended up here. They were the sizzling meat in our biscuits.

Hell on Heelz, on the other hand was an MC, a motorcycle club with roots in the one percenters. Although Shirley, I mean the Banshee, wanted her club to be different than the men’s clubs, no prostitution, no sex trafficking and the like, she was no saint. The Banshee wanted us to be outlaws like the club she’d come from, the Asphalt Gods’ MC, which like many others struck fear in the hearts of regular folk. She’d picked us girls, all of us because of what we were capable—what we’d done, or in my case, what I was about to do. It was like she’d known it, seen something in my eyes that had been off about me.

Us girls weren’t regular people. I wasn’t a regular person like Ripper. Sure, he had a cool name, but he hadn’t murdered someone like I had. The only thing he could kill was an 18 pack of beer on a Friday night. He hadn’t been biker brats like Locks and Topper who played pool with some fresh blood, two hawt volunteer firefighters visiting us for the first time. He hadn’t escaped being an MC’s clubwhore by burning down their clubhouse like Miss B who had the attention of Squid, a bodybuilder who’d been in the Navy. He’d come to visit with a couple of Slayers tonight.

Every other member here tonight whether they be older, fatter, younger, a gay man or just plain dumb, Legs, Duchess, Butterbean, Sugar Hips and Short—in that order, seemed to be on to someone new. Here I was stuck with Ripper who stared at me like I’d be his salvation.

Why did I get the used up ones, the ones like me?

Ignoring him, I scrutinized my sisters and I knew why. They were happy. The booze and the drugs made them smile. Ripper wasn’t smiling. Like me, he was coping. He breathed on my neck before whispering in my ear, telling me again, “I’d like to take you to my home tonight.”

Ripper would do, for tonight, but he’d be coming to my cabin. I really didn’t feel like using the stables and listening to Pepper and his brother getting it on upstairs.

I stood, putting my knee on his chair, right against his balls and grabbed his shirt collar. “No. You’re coming with me.”

Ogling my exposed cleavage, Ripper nodded his head and about drooled. He obeyed just like the dog he was, following me through the room. I stopped at the bar and grabbed a handful of condoms on the way out. Girls talk, so I knew he’d been with Dixie the last two weeks—bitch had more crabs than the beach. And to think he was asking me to come home with him!

Men, they were all alike—dogs. Ripper was on all fours over me on my bed. He didn’t know that last Saturday, it’d been his brother Keg in his place. But it seemed Keg had moved on and would probably move through all my sisters who were single and willing.

In the morning, the sun shined through my thin curtains illuminating Ripper who tried to wake me, holding a plate of pancakes. I pushed him away, trying to see the clock.

“You’ve gotta go. I’ve got work.” I’d told Shirley no later than eight, and it was ten now. I wiggled into my slacks and found an old t-shit. “Let yourself out, Larry.”

Out the door, I climbed on my bike with my backpack full of cleaning supplies. I wished for coffee. Hell, it was a Bloody Mary morning, but the crisp air would have to get me by.

He called from my door. “What’s more important than breakfast?”

“Being up to my elbows in shit!” I replied, taking off.

The more things changed, the more they stayed the same…

“Dixie, crack a damn window.” I’d been scrubbing so hard, my arms were about to give out. If I didn’t get some decent help, Shirley could forget about me taking on any more
jobs
.

“Dixie,” I yelled again. My nose started to run from the fumes. I rose from my hands and knees, leaving a pink tinged hand print on my khakis. I snapped off my yellow gloves and walked to the window. Grabbing the collar of my t-shirt, I pulled it up to my forehead to wipe the sweat away. I drew the cord to bring up the blinds, unlocked the window seal, lifted it open just a hair and then I shut the blinds again. It’d do me no good to be seen.

I had no idea who’d killed this man, but after seeing the mess they’d left, I didn’t want to run into them either. At least, the body was gone when I’d gotten here. That wasn’t always the case. Hell, I didn’t know if it’d been a man who had been killed or not. Was usually a man, but we all died the same, or at least left the same kind of mess.

Oh
, I found a great long brown hair stuck to the blood splattered wall. Studying it, I shrugged. Could mean anything—I wasn’t CSI. I bent to dunk it in a bucket of bleach water and wiped my fingers on my pants. Cleaning up a crime took finesse, knowledge, patience and a shit load of elbow grease. Dixie didn’t have what it took to wipe the shit off shoes.

“Dixie,” I tried a lot louder this time, going into the other room.

There she was, passed out on the sofa. Her hair hung off the couch, real long and brown like the hair on the wall. I shook her shoulder until her eyes opened.

“A lot of help you are. Get your ass up and grab a brush, looks like they slaughtered a pig up in here.”

Sitting up she yawned, taking the time to make a show of it.

“Where were you last night, anyhow?” She hadn’t been at the Roost, leaving Ripper for me again.

“I was here with the Mutherfukers who did this,” she bragged. Dixie wasn’t talking about regular ol’ assholes. The Mutherfukers were of the Miami Mutherfukers MC, a scary as fuck outlaw club. What they were doing way up here around Shirley’s stomping grounds was anyone’s guess. I hadn’t been told about it.

“Something I should know about this one?”

“Oh, you wouldn’t know any of it, would you?” Dixie stood straightening herself. “Hashtag—you the maid.”

She knew good and well I was Road Captain. She didn’t need to be jealous. Dixie had been Treasurer of the club since she started working as Shirley’s receptionist at the shop. She always wanted to move up to Vice President, but she couldn’t even keep the books straight. I’d had differences with some of my sisters before, but Dixie who was a real basic bitch, was the only girl I couldn’t make peace with. The others, my sisters, I thought of as sisters these last two years, but Dixie and I had more issue’s than Woman’s Day. First off, she annoyed me, “hashtag this”, something was always, “on fleek”. She had a mouth on her too. One day, I knew I wouldn’t be able to control myself. Balling my fists then relaxing them, I threw her the gloves I had hanging from my pocket.

“Get to work. I don’t have time for your shit.”

The gloves landed on the floor and she looked down at them like she wouldn’t bend to take them. She stomped her foot. “I bring in plenty of cash. I don’t know why I’m here helping the likes of you?”

Most of the girls had a way of making money, other than their legal means. This was my way. The Banshee hired me out on behalf of the Heelz to anyone who needed a discrete cleaning. The club got its cut first, and I got the rest. I was saving all I could. If I needed help with a job, the Banshee told one of my sisters to help me. She picked them. I didn’t know why, but it was usually because they owed her some green.

Dixie, like more than half of the girls had a sugar daddy or two. They weren’t exactly whores, at least not in their own eyes. They thought they were just kept women. So their extra contributions to the club came from the gifts men bestowed upon them for being available sexually—not the men who came to the Roost, mind you, the working men—they were harmless and more or less our own male whores. The men who kept Dixie in designer clothes were usually dangerous, one way or another. She was just asking for trouble.

Dixie finally picked up the gloves and after struggling with them, she threw them back at me. “I’m better than this. I’m out.” She turned around to leave.

I snatched her long hair, stopping her dead in her tracks. She yelped as I dragged her into the other room like a rag doll until her face was over the wash bucket. I didn’t even think about threatening her. I dunked her face right into the pail of bleach water and blood but held her there for less than a second.

She gasped when I drew up her head. It took all I had in me to let her go, so she could flail around on the floor, screaming. I chuckled to myself before I told her, “Don’t be calling me a maid, bitch! I’ll wipe this mess up with you, you bedazzled cunt!”

On her hands and knees she wailed, “You crazy bitch! I could be blind. You could have killed me! Wait until I tell the Banshee.”

“Go on and go tell her.”
I thought about throwing her a towel or telling her there wasn’t much bleach in the water ‘bout like being in a swimming pool, that I’d been fixin’ to drown her in it but decided she deserved to suffer. I went back to scrubbing and eventually Dixie left.

Good riddance.

I knew she’d be waiting for me when I got back. Dixie was at the bar, all cozied up to the Banshee when I walked in wanting nothing but a shower. I knew I had to report in first though. I was a good egg.

“All done?” the Banshee asked, her hand on Dixie’s knee.