Ash: Devil's Crucifix MC (3 page)

“Ash! Dude! Where is your brain today?” Remmy’s voice brings me back to the present as I stare down mindlessly at the burnt support beam.

I kneel down, pretending not to care that he caught me off guard. But we both know this has been a problem for me over the last few days. I place my hand on the beam, my leather-gloved fingers tracing the black singes up the maple until I get to the end. Despite my name, I know nothing about fires. I hadn’t even been in one until the other day, and that was all coincidence. But now my entire life was revolving around flame tracks, burn marks, lighter fluid remains.

Remmy was my lead on this. He was an arsonist, twice convicted, before joining up with my motorcycle club, Devil’s Crucifix, a few months back. When fires like this started popping up around our old businesses, he was the first to jump in, offering to explain everything subtle detail that I would have never known – like a cut wire here or a burnt diesel can there.

This place, the last on our tour of three, had all of the telltale signs, according to Remmy. He knelt back down next to me as he pointed towards the metal hinges on the beam’s end. “You see those marks there?” I nod at him as I follow his path from the metal back to the wood. “Those are carpenter marks. They use them to put up these supports and this end would have been facing up, holding on to the attic.” Remmy stands up and gestures towards a gaping hole in the burnt out ceiling above us. Small gusts of wind blow through it, sending little shards of paper and ash down through the opening, and occasionally, we would hear the moans of the building as it struggles to hold itself up any longer. “Whoever did this didn’t do it from down below. They did it from the roof.”

“That’s just like the building from last week. Is it just me or does this all seem to have a pattern now?” 

“No, you’re right. Most burners don’t go through the trouble of getting up on roofs or in attics. It’s a tough job. They’ve got to know how to run fast or find a way down before it collapses in on them. But when you start from the top, the fire spreads slower, but the damage is so much worse.”

“Like a cancer. The head’s always the worst.”

“Exactly. Take out the roof and the whole system goes. If you start in the basement, you can contain it easier. Start on a first floor and it alerts whoevers living there faster on what’s going on.” He pauses as he looks around the room. Something catches his eye, a burnt out photograph still pinned to an untouched bit of wall, as he turns to ask me, “Speaking of living here, who were the residents? Did you know them?”

“No. Some family. Lost the husband, I hear.”

“So why are we here? Why do you care about this? We’re not getting into the business of burning, are we?” His voice quickens as he asks like an addict hearing about a new drug at a pharmacy. Old habits die hard, especially when they are the ones that get your fire started.

“That’s the thing,” I explain as I run my hand through my hair, “these buildings used to be owned by us. All of them were at one point. But we sold a ton of our old housing when we bought the warehouse on Oceanview.”

“What were these houses used for?”

“Club member dorms. We used to be old school -- everyone works together. Everyone lives together. But the club grew up and some of the ladies popped out babies. Nobody wanted to raise their kids in the same place you stored shipments of pure coke. And a kid or two got wind that the basements of some of these homes were where we took traitors in for their paybacks. We couldn’t exactly keep them out, especially at night when the parents were out.”

I think back slightly to those times. The Devil’s Crucifix had only been around for a few years as a spinoff of the Hell Rangers. A few guys and I couldn’t take being under control of a headquarters thousands of miles away in Cali. We wanted our own autonomy to do what we wanted, the freedom to run our own business without paying dues. We fought hard to split. A good man or two got killed just trying to defect. But we managed to make it out and, for the most part, we grew bigger and stronger by huddling together in these homes.

This one in particular was a big meeting place. We housed an old lady here we named Big Red. She took in any guy who wanted a little warmth at the end of a long ride. During the day, she did laundry and cooked warm meals. And at night, we used her in our initiation parties to get things started. She trained the other women, too -- made them into submissives like we want them. “No man is a man until he’s tried a Big Red,” we always say. She was even there for me when I got out of prison six months ago, but this time, it was back at my home in the warehouse.

I’m the only club member who lives there. As the President, I need to be present at all times while the rest of my guys, Remmy included, are allowed to live wherever the hell they choose. Most pick apartments nearby, but we have a rule that only two members can live there at one time. No one wants to be a sitting duck for an attack like this.

It’s an attack. It has to be. No arsonist, or “burner” as Remmy calls them, is just randomly running around Sterling, Oregon accidentally hitting old Crucifix places. Like Remmy said, this guy knew his stuff. He planned this out and knows the inside outs of burning buildings to the ground. And more so, he didn’t give a shit about whoever was inside.

Even if it was a hot blonde with a banging body…

There it is again. I’m back to thinking about her. Dani. That’s what that firefighter had called her when he knelt over her burnt and bruised body.

By the time I had gotten her out of that building, she was covered in black soot and fiery red bursts of red pockets along the places her arms were burnt. Her face was cut up, glass bits practically falling from her long golden hair like little diamonds. And her full, thick lips were cracked and white. Smoke inhalation and a total lack of oxygen will do that to you. But she was still as fine as when I spotted her in that window.

Skip had called me moments before I scaled the walls to her building to rescue her. He told me he had figured something out -- something we had missed. None of us Crucifix members really watched the news except for when we were wanted or one of our guys were being sent away. But he had come across a news report for a few homes and apartment buildings that were burnt down and recognized this place.

It only took a few moments calling around to some of the leaders to confirm that those buildings used to belong to us. And, as Remmy warned us, only time would tell before another building was going to get caught up in fresh flames.

I don’t know why I picked the building Dani lived in, but we all took turns keeping an eye out on the old places. It was my shift to do a check-in and I had just pulled up to the place on the outskirts of the highway. As soon as I saw it, I knew something was wrong. The place was dark, too dark. And silent, too silent. My eyes were immediately drawn to the roof where flames were spitting out like a volcano already to erupt.

I didn’t exactly run inside as soon as I saw the fire. Instead I snapped some pics as I made my way around the parking lot looking for the man who set it off. If he were anything like me, he’d be wanting to stick around to see the carnage unfold.

But I stopped as soon as I saw her -- at least the shape of her. There was this girl in the third floor window running back and forth from one window to the next. She looked desperate, determined. Her hands sort of pounded against the glass as she headed back into the dark apartment. Above her, flames raged on as I wondered what kind of hell she knew she was facing.

I couldn’t leave her alone. I couldn’t let her go through that. I found a drainpipe from one of the gutters and began to climb. I didn’t stop to let myself think about what was going on above me or how the pipe rattled and moaned as I used all of my upper body strength to pull myself forward. Even when I hit the second floor and I could feel the flames against my face from over a story up, I knew I couldn’t stop. That girl needed me.

I hopped onto the ledge of one of her windows facing her kitchen and living room. Wrapping my face with a Devil’s Crucifix bandana, I used my gloved hand to quickly punch through the warm glass. To my surprise, it shattered easily -- too easily. It felt like I could have waited another five minutes before the window would have done it on its own. The heat was too much for even things forged in fire to withstand.

A cloud of smoke hit me almost instantly as every instinct in me was telling me to go back out that window and down the side as fast as I possibly could. But I couldn’t force myself to do it. There’s that girl all bundled up behind the couch, the glass pieces causing small slivers of red patches to pop up on her face and arms. She was barely dressed, making her petite little body look even smaller when covered in chalky smoke.

To my surprise, she didn’t freak when she saw me. Most women do. I’m not exactly clean cut and prep. The leather colors jacket alone makes some women run, and when the rest find out what those patches mean, they’re not far behind. But she didn’t scream for me to get out or demand to know who I am. She knew I’m her only way out, her best option to get to safety.

I walked over to her quickly, picking her off the ground. I could feel her snuggle into me and it made me want to curl my fingers deeper into her skin. She said a few words to me as I ran straight for the door, but I couldn’t hear her. Her mouth was moving without sound even though the entire apartment building was this eerie silence you knew shouldn’t be right. Nothing should be this quiet when it’s moments away from destruction.

Whatever she said, a warning or a command, I went ahead and kicked the locked door down and moved cautiously through the flames. I eyed the other rooms in the building as we went but I was too focused on just getting her and me out of here and alive. No one else mattered. That was, until I did hear her voice. We were already down the stairs when she wagged her shaking finger towards the fire escape door and said, “... get them out... “

She didn’t know who I am. She didn’t know I went to prison for smuggling drugs across state lines or that I’ve actually killed men before -- family men with wives and children. She didn’t know I’d give anything for a fix to take me away from the hell around us. She didn’t know I have a gang of men willing to do anything and everything I set them out to do. She didn’t know I was not the hero there. I was just some guy looking to protect his ass that happened to see her on fire.

Whatever it was about her, those green eyes sparkling like jade or her weak body practically giving out in my arms, I did it. I got it done. I managed to get out three people and a cat that scratched and clawed at me as I tried to scoop it up from its home. I was a fucking fireman, a superhero.

But when I got back to her, she was gone. Curled up under my jacket large enough to be a full blanket for her, her eyes had rolled themselves back and her lips had gone from dusty gray to almost completely white. Even her skin in the pale, shaking light of the hallway looked off-color. I put her back over my arms and sped down the rest of the stairs just to find the door completely barricaded from the outside. But nothing could hold me back. With the help of another man I just pulled from his bed, we both took turns ramming our bodies into the side until the post stuck between the door handles cracked and broke and our crowd spilled out dramatically towards the firemen just pulling up.

I knew I couldn’t stay. Men like me don’t get curtain calls. They don’t get standing ovations. I wasn’t supposed to be here, so what did I tell the police chief when he sees me, “Uh… don’t arrest me, officer. I’m not here on Devil’s Crucifix business. I actually saved this hot piece of tail I spotted in a window…” Yeah. That wouldn’t fly.

I placed her down a few feet from the fire truck and headed around the corner towards the parking lot. My bandana untied itself from the force of the firemen’s hoses beginning to spray the apartment building down. I knew I needed to go chase after it. It was evidence that certainly didn’t belong there. As I turned to reach for it floating in mid-air, I paused. I could just barely hear the firemen shout her name when they recognized her.

“Dani! Jesus Christ! What happened to her? Does she live here? Chief! It’s Dani!” 

I don’t know why, but I ran. I ran like the damn wind right out of there back to the alley street and over the where I parked my bike out of sight of the road. I pulled the neck of my jacket up in hopes that if anyone had a security system, it would only catch sight of my eyes. You can’t really catch a man who is just eyes.

My feet pounded onto the pavement till it hit the treeline. I hopped onto the bike, ignoring the pain in my arms from carrying her down the stairwells and the heat that tore the hair right off of my arms, even through my jacket. I tried to focus on the roar of my Harley, but that man calling her name was still echoing in my mind, the moments replaying over and over again as if on some broken record player. Dani. Her name is Dani. And I’m going to do whatever I can to find out who in the hell did that to her.