For Your Sake (3 page)

              Aero was last, pausing to recognize Stash’s empty seat to the left. The club’s V.P. had pulled off the Air Force wings pin from the collar of his cut and was using the sharp point to dig into the beaten table.  The guy had the discretion Doug lacked – and a good heart, the latter having to take the back burner here.  Sparing a quick glance at Ben, he looked down at the table and nodded.  “Yea.”

              “Unanimous.” Vic verbalized what everyone knew as he regarded Ben.  “Brother?”

              The irony of that term chilled Ben’s blood. Yes, he was.  In more ways than one tonight.  But the one which sat at this table took precedence over the other.  He stood up, all six foot six inches which earned him his nickname, the weight on his shoulders feeling as large and heavy as his presence.  But he had to push it off.  The six men around this table and the two lying in their graves were counting on it “I got it.”  Three words which didn’t need further explanation.

              “We’ll wait,” Vic told him.

              The structure which used to be The Water Rock was now the Skull’s official clubhouse.  The high flying late eighties caused the former owner to go belly-up with the bar and unfinished restaurant.  But values quickly sank before the framework could be enclosed while the adjustable rate mortgage he had been sucked into escalated.  At the time, the upstart motorcycle club came along with the need for a place shrouded in privacy and the cash to bail out the sinking enterprise. 

The first to leave the meeting room where they held ‘church’, Ben detoured towards the bar which had been cut in half to allow for more common area room.  Behind it, a woman who had seen better days before spending them in service of a bunch of bikers, had shot glasses ready and filled with whiskey – one for each member – for when church adjourned.  Off to the side, several ‘club girls’ lined themselves up on a circular leather sofa to quench a different kind of thirst.  Some were young, eager, too starry eyed to realize these guys weren’t knights in scuffed leather and ink.  Others were on their last hurrah having been a fixture since the club rooted itself here back in 1989 and still carried over the high hair and spandex from it.

Ben snatched the end shot glass and downed it fast, the burn down his throat fortifying his resolve.  It shouldn’t be hard.  It wasn’t the first time.  Nor the second.  Nor would it be the last.  But this was different.  The need to emotionally separate himself in order to erase his last shred of past was crucial. 

              And tonight, the veil of darkness lit only by the brilliant September moon lent an additional chill to the sixty degree evening as Ben headed outside.  Water sluiced from the functioning water wheel attached to the clubhouse while several coyotes howled in the distance.  His boots crushed the gravel into the narrow strip of walkway which led from the clubhouse to the building next door.  The unfinished structure which the club turned into a body shop was being guarded by two young men with prospect cuts on their backs.

              Ben took several long strides until he came to the entrance, waving the prospects away without so much as sparing a glance.  Through the window, he found her still put, a momentary tightness in his chest evaporated as soon as he remembered two still-cold graves of his brothers. Reaching inside his cut, he pulled out what he needed and prepared.  His fingers worked fast, void of any adorning jewelry unlike his brothers.  Ben preferred it that way.  Clean. Simple.  Unencumbered.

              Opening the door, he saw her, sitting on the half-crumpled hood of a late model Mustang.  Ben.”  Her voice was one of relief as she pushed off and ran over to him.  Blonde with a natural prettiness under her drawn features and sunken cheekbones, Lisa Lawson possessed waifish qualities which should’ve made her appear younger than her thirty-one years.  But life on her own since that terrible afternoon eighteen years ago hadn’t been kind.  Working the streets, hopping from man to man and an addiction to pain killers to dull the circumstances of it contributed greatly to it.  His baby sister had looked like shit when she materialized back into his life three months ago.  Seeing her brought back that day in the tiny trailer home they shared with their man-happy mother, one which changed all three of their lives.  It was as if almost two decades apart weren’t even between them.  Now there was a wedge as large as a mountain. 

She threw her frail arms around his neck.  “What’s going on?”  She kept a tight hold until he gently peeled her away.  She inherited their Irish father’s fair coloring and hazel eyes, though Lisa’s looked pale blue and glassy.  Ben’s hair had a little more ‘dirt’ and light brown eyes - courtesy of his brunette mother - and skin which the sun had colored through years of riding the open road.

“Need to talk, Leese’.”  The endearment didn’t cover up seriousness of his tone.  “About what happened.”

Lisa backed up, wringing bony fingers.  “Are we still in danger?”

His brow went up.  “
We
?  This was a surprise hit on the
club
.  Why would you think
you’d
be in danger?”

Shifting body language.  A mind racing to come up with something plausible.  Nervous twitches.  These were signs Ben knew well and had often seen.  All it took was one word out of context to expose a possible lie.  His little sister had no idea how much she wore all those signs on her sleeve.  Given the way she showed up out of the blue early June looking thinner than she already was with a case of the shakes and begging for protection, he chalked it up to withdrawal.  And staying clean was the one condition he demanded in exchange for giving the only member of his blood family refuge.  Now, with the known facts having hit him like a bucket of cold water, he wouldn’t be surprised if she was still popping behind his back.

“I…..”  She paused, her possibly tweaked mind trying to do damage control.  “Well,
us
.  Ben, you’re my brother.  I finally get you back and could’ve lost you.”

“Get me back?”  His approach shifted.  “Ain’t like you never knew where I was, Lisa.  Never came to see me in jail.  Never looked me up when I got out.  You mean to tell me it took you eighteen years to make an effort?”  He paused only long enough for her to think on those words before he continued.  “No.  You showed up here for a reason and it wasn’t to reconnect in time to spend our first Christmas together in almost twenty years.”

She shook her head then stepped forward.  “No, Ben.  You’re wrong.  I’m tired of struggling, of relying on strangers.  Since,” her voice choked with remembrance, “since…….
that day
I went from foster homes, to the street to not knowing where I was going to be living month to month.  I’m thirty-one and feel like I’m fifty-one.  I know it’s my fault.  I lived hard.  I did drugs.  I got involved with too many wrong people.”

Again, that brow of his went up.  “And you’re done with all that now?  That what you’re trying to tell me?  Whoring?  Drugs?”  He paused for an effect.  “The
wrong
people?”

              She bit her lip and nodded.  “Yes.”  Her voice was a hoarse whisper.  “Being alone for so long, I finally realized, you’re all I’ve got. The only family.  You and me –we’re it.  Ever since dad got killed, you’ve been it.  You always watched over me, looked out for me.”  She then took a breath as tears began to water her already glassy eyes. “You
killed
for me and mom.  I didn’t forget that, even when you were in jail. I want to start over.  Before it gets too late.”  The tears turned to cries which had no effect on him now.  “I’m sorry it took so long.”

              He circled the body shop, his hand resting upon a toolbox before the tip of his finger played with the handle of the drawer.  “That really why you came back?”

              “Yes.”

              He squeezed his eyes shut then let out a bit of a laugh.  “You know that saying, sis?  Fool me once, shame on you.  Fool me twice……?  How’s it go?”

              She slowly backed away from him, a twinge of fear in her lucid eyes.  “Ben?”  She ended his name with a nervous laugh.  “What…..?”

              “How’s it go, sis?”  He repeated with impatience, his hand still on the drawer of the tool chest, wanting to rip it out and toss it across the shop.

              Lisa swallowed, hard.  He surmised she had not a drop of spit in her mouth.  “Shame on me,” she quietly whispered.

              He reached into his pocket and pulled out a cell phone.  “Yeah, you’re all alone, aren’t you Lisa?  But not when you showed up here three months ago.  What happened to him?”

              The hand-wringing commenced and Ben thought her bony fingers would break.  “W….w…who?  Ben, who…..?”

              The drawer came out with a hard pull before he slammed it to the greasy, cement floor. He rarely, if ever, lost his cool when it finally came down to this step.  His lapse of steady calm wasn’t because of what his sister had done, but because he let it get past him. “Stop lying to me, Lisa!  Who’s the guy you’ve been seeing?”

              She cupped her ears, clanging metal reverberating as tools scattered everywhere.  “No one!  I mean, not anymore.  It wasn’t serious or anything.  I haven’t heard from him since……”

              “…….almost three weeks ago?”  Ben filled in the blanks for her.  “That was the last time you talked to him, right.  Made a call to his cell.”

              She was in full-on panic mode, backing up until she stood on the side of the Mustang as some sort of cover.  “How…….how did you?”

              Walking towards her, he thumbed the screen of the cell, scrolling down a list of incoming calls before holding it up.  “That’s your number, right?”

              For several long seconds she stared, most likely calculating an answer other than the truth.  Ben knew she couldn’t lie here.  She called him several times since coming out of the woodwork so he knew her number.  “Yeah.  So?”

              He scrolled some more, this time calling up an image.  “This phone, it belonged to this guy.”  He held it up for her to see.  “Recognize him?”

              Gasping, a thin hand covering her mouth, Lisa let out an anguished squeal.   “
Oh my God!”

              Ben pulled it back to look at the screen.  “I’ll take that as a yes.  He was still alive when we took it.   Took a chest full of bullets, but not before his shotgun tore a hole right through Batso’s gut.  The three rednecks he showed up weren’t so lucky, but this guy……hung in long enough to tell me how he knew we were coming for them.  Thought I misunderstood when he said the name ‘Lisa’.  But then the poor bastard corked off.  Rummaged through his pockets, found his phone and took this nice keepsake. And then I checked his incoming calls and found you called him almost two hours before, right as we were leaving the clubhouse.  It was a warning call, wasn’t it sis?”

              She fell back against the car before sinking to the ground, curling her body in a tight ball as her arms came around her legs.  “No, Ben.  You don’t understand.”

              He picked her up to face him, her jaw caught tight in his grip.  “No, I think I do.  See, the club was getting reports of bodies lurking around the warehouse down in New Cumberland.  We’d been planning for weeks, waiting.  Didn’t take long because they were so hepped up on drugs that their chatter carried right to our ears.  They were going to clean out the narcotics we’d been storing.  Know the kind of shit we would’ve been in if that happened?  But when we got there, they were ready for us – with sawed off shotguns.  Now we know how.”

              She struggled against him which only caused his hold on her to tighten.  “Ben….stop…..”

              “Because
you
called him.  You warned him.”  He tugged her face close to his.  “And you were in on this.  You didn’t clean up your act, Lisa.  You’re still using.  And planning on making some cash selling that shit on the streets before treating yourself to some freebies.   I’m sure as soon as your boyfriend dropped the club’s name, you knew you had an ‘in’.  Show up back in my life after eighteen years wanting to be a ‘family’ again, then got close enough to me to find out when the hit was.”  He finally let go and pulled back.  “
That
was
my
fault.  Trusting someone who’d been off the map for years.  That’s all on me.”

              She was really left with nothing to say except to plead for what little forgiveness he was capable of giving – and right now, it was less than zero.  “You got it all wrong, Ben.  He was trying to get out.  He fell in with those guys before he realized what they were up to.  Who they were really working for. When I found out what the club was planning, I……I just warned him so he wouldn’t go.”

              “But he did.”  In a sick act of tenderness, he reached out to stroke her thin, blonde hair.  “My guess, he wanted to play the big shot by warning his crew so they could one-up us before taking off with close to a quarter million dollars worth of black market ‘scripts.  And two of my brothers are dead because of it.”

              “
Ben
.”  Her voice was barely audible. “
Please.”

              Words.  Pleading.  Regret.  They meant shit right now.  “He should’ve listened and stayed behind, little sister.  Instead he and his buddies are dead.  Buried where no one will ever find them.”  He gave her a warm smile which was oddly chilling.  “Or you.”

              Lisa turned away and began to sob. 
“Oh my God.  I’m sorry.  I’m so sorry.  I never meant to……..I really did want to see you.  I didn’t….I didn’t mean for this to happen.  Oh my God, Ben.  I’m so sorry.”