Forged: A Devil's Spawn MC Novel (15 page)

In Covina, about thirty-five minutes from where we lived in, Burbank, is a known biker bar called Broken Road. I’d driven past it with friends a few times on our way in or out of town, but we’d never been inside. Not to mention if we had we’d have been kicked out for being underage and too clean cut. The guys we’d seen hanging around outside leaning on Harley’s, Triumph’s, and Indian’s were covered head to toe in denim and leather vests, and looked like they’d eat teenagers like us for breakfast. Long hair, bald, beards, goatee’s, tall, broad shoulders, covered in tattoo’s, these guys weren’t guys you messed with, but they were exactly who I needed now.

There was no working up the courage to go inside, I just did it. I was past having fear for my safety. My sister was gone and whatever would happen to me paled in comparison to the pain of losing her, so I was all-in no matter what it took. The inside of the bar was exactly what I expected. Dark, musty, the smell of beer, leather, and cheap perfume hung heavily in the air. Rickety looking tables filled the space the booths weren’t and a long, abused, timber bar ran most the length of one of the free walls. Old road signs, framed Harley prints, and neon tube lighting was scattered throughout the place haphazardly, and the floors were sticky with spilt alcohol and fuck knows what else. All-in-all it was the perfect place for me to find what I was looking for, or should I say who.

Scanning the dimly lit interior, my eyes narrowed in on a group of three men who looked more imposing than the rest of the patrons by far. They all looked to be the same age, in their early forties, with dark hair and over six-foot tall. The one of whose hair was cropped short on the sides with a three-inch Mohawk down the center was the most menacing. He was giving hard looks to anyone who walked within a two-foot radius of their booth. They were also hugely muscled and not from working out, or not entirely. Their bulk was honed from working and living hard, not exercise machines and weight lifting like most of the men I knew.

What I noticed on a secondary sweep of the booths inhabitants was the leather vests they were wearing. In the center on the back was a large skull with pistols crossed in front of it and a scythe behind. The writing above, which I figured identified the club they belonged to said Devil’s Spawn MC, and what I would later learn is the bottom rocker stated they were from, Blackwater, Colorado. I had no clue where that was, nor did I care. I was there to get a job done not get a lesson in geography.

As I approached the table the menacing guy took one look at me and growled,

“Fuck off.”

I didn’t have any idea what the etiquette for dealing with bikers was, but I doubted crossing my arms over my chest or being disrespectful would go down well, so I left my arms at my sides and widened my stance to a shoulder width apart saying,

“I need someone to do a job for me and I’m hoping you’ll be interested in taking me up on my offer.”

The guy with the longest hair and a kickass goatee chuckled, telling the menacing dude to calm the fuck down before turning his laser sharp eyes to me.

“And what could we possibly do for a preppy little asshole such as yourself?” His voice didn’t carry any threat, but it did become immediately apparent this wouldn’t be as easy as I first thought.

The third guy, the one who had yet to say a word but you could see was listening regardless of his relaxed position, which had him leaning back against the booth with one arm outstretched behind him looked between the men and nodded to the free seat beside him.

“Sit down, Boy.” That’s it. The three words that changed the course of my life.

“I’m not saying you’re bad parents, I’m just saying

some people should have to fill out an application to be parents first.”

-
                    
Rotten eCard

After meeting Priest, Pipe, and Reaper, and getting their agreement to look into Aaron, I found myself feeling lighter. Not a lot, because nothing would remove the heavy weight of sadness from my soul after losing Finley, but I felt a slight reprieve from the helplessness of not being able to seek justice for her death. That reprieve didn’t last long, a month at best, but when I’d had it, it had made an impact. An impact that would lead me to Blackwater, Colorado, only months after our initial meeting.

As you’d expect, my parents’ grieved the loss of their only daughter, and they did it hard. They did it in very different ways, but neither way was less damaging to our already deteriorating family. Mom shut down completely. She didn’t do this the same way Tilly does, by going into her head though. No, what she did was way fucking worse. Her actions started the downward spiral our family took and ended up tearing it apart. She wasn’t the only one at fault, but she definitely was the one who held the majority of the blame in my eyes. What she did was unforgivable. It was also why I left, and why I joined the MC. Looking back on it, I’m not glad she did what she did, but the family I got when I joined Devil’s Spawn went a long way to lessening the devastation I felt at losing her and dad.

Mom’s downward descent into a chemically induced stupor started slowly. Slow enough that for the first few months after Finley’s funeral we didn’t even realize she had a problem. It began by her being prescribed something to help her sleep. Like me, Mom suffered from horrific nightmares. Ones that she’d wake from screaming and crying. I didn’t blame her for needing something to help her get some much needed peace from the demons in her head, but when that turned into a totally different monster, a monster of addiction, I couldn’t sit idly by and watch her destroy herself anymore.

She couldn’t work. Couldn’t get out of bed. Fuck, most days she was barely coherent and conscious long enough to say hello. The prescriptions she was taking, mixing, and self-medicating with were turning her into a zombie. Her heart might have been beating, but it wouldn’t be for long if she kept that shit up. I was scared for her. For me. For my Dad. We’d lost enough when we lost Finley, we didn’t need to lose her too. We needed her. I needed her, and she didn’t care. She didn’t care about anyone other than herself and the pain
she
was feeling.

Six months later she was still taking shit she shouldn’t need anymore, and the doses she was taking it in were completely out of control. At that point dad stepped in and tried talking to her. All that managed to achieve was the two of them yelling at each other for close to an hour, mom accusing him of not understanding or caring how she felt, and it eventually concluded with mom breaking all the good china, and then collapsing violently sobbing about her baby and how unfair it was that she had to go through this. That was also when I realized the mom I knew was gone. Long gone. The woman in front of us was not the same woman who loved us with her whole heart. This was a woman who was so focused on her own pain everyone else had become irrelevant.

Dad didn’t try talking to her again, not that I ever saw anyway, and what would’ve been the point? She wouldn’t admit she had a problem, because to her what she was doing was completely normal. I’d say I don’t blame him for giving up, but the reality is I do. He had the maturity, the presence of mind, and the resources to get her help and pull her from the junkie status she was rapidly declining into he just didn’t. He was lost himself. Lost in the sorrow of losing a child, and ultimately his wife too. And I get it, I do, but that didn’t excuse him from doing the right thing. Shit, one phone call and he could’ve had her in any one of many rehab centers right here in California. It’s not like they weren’t a dime a dozen. Throw a fucking rock and you’d hit one. So no, I didn’t forgive him for turning his back on her and in turn me, then surgically attaching his mouth to the bottle. Fuck that, and fuck him for being weak.

I didn’t know the man I’d called my father for nearly eighteen years anymore. We didn’t talk, we passed each other in the kitchen or halls only acknowledging each other with a grunt or raised hand. Seriously, that was about the extent of communication we had in the weeks before I left. By the time I packed my shit and was leaving, dad was borderline alcoholic. He wasn’t a violent or angry drunk. He wasn’t funny or talkative either. The best way to describe him would be to say he was a solemn drunk. Quiet. Serious. Brooding. All attributes dad picked up along with his bottle of scotch.

If a few friends I occasionally kept in touch with for a few months after I left home hadn’t told me he’d come looking for me, I’d say they wouldn’t have even noticed I was gone. When I left the house at all hours they didn’t ask where I was going, and I didn’t tell them. They didn’t call worried about why I hadn’t come home yet. It could be days between us seeing each other, and they still didn’t give a shit. That was what helped me make my mind up to get the hell out of there. I was leaving and I wouldn’t be looking back. I was leaving my crumbling family behind and making a new life for myself. One I’d be proud of living. One Finley would be proud of me for living.

In the first weeks following my leaving home, I slept on friends couches and borrowed their guest rooms. I even paid for a room in a run-down motel for a few nights before deciding where I was going to go, and what I was going to do. I’d saved enough to buy a beaten up, scratched to hell Harley from a guy advertising it on a diner’s front window, and money to live for a few months but that was about the extent of it. Well, that along with the four thousand dollars I found stuffed in the back of one of Finley’s drawers. I was just hoping it was enough to get me wherever I wanted to go.

What I needed to do was make up my mind where that would be exactly. And before you say it, no. My sister wouldn’t have minded me taking her rainy day fund. She would’ve been proud of me for getting myself out of a fucked up situation like the one I was in at home. If she’d been alive she would have given it to me herself. I know that much.

Sitting in a tiny motel room in a bad neighborhood, the conversation I’d had with three guys in a shitty, hole in the wall, biker bar came flooding back to me. I’d turned eighteen the day before and had celebrated by buying myself a leather jacket to use when I rode my new-old bike, and I’d never missed Finley more. What the guy, Priest was his name, told me filtered into my mind and took hold.

“You ever need a place to get your shit together, you come see us. I’ve got a daughter only a little younger than your sister was, and I know if I lost her I’d need the support of my brothers. That’s what we are, Son, a brotherhood. You ever find yourself needing some men to have your back, you look us up.”

The next day I got on my piece of shit bike and rode the thousand and eighty miles to Blackwater, Colorado without stopping, and without looking back. It ended up being the best fucking decision I’d ever made. Not only because I’d gained an entire family of brothers, a best friend like I’d never had in Glock, but because that’s where I met my wife. And that was something I’d be forever grateful for.

I won’t lie, I occasionally find my mind wandering to how my mom and dad are doing. If they’re still together. Whether they straightened themselves out and got sober. But then I remind myself it’s not my problem. I’ve got my wife and girls, and that’s all I need. Their shit was toxic in the end, I didn’t need that and neither did my family.

I also thought about Finley, a lot. Every day in fact. I wondered if she was looking down on me smiling. Would she be proud of me for what I thought I’d done with Stacey? I knew the answer to that one, no. But I also know she’d would have forgiven me for it, just like Tilly had, because she loved me unconditionally like that. Not to mention she couldn’t hold a grudge to save herself. My memories of Finley weren’t painful anymore. Sure, I still felt her loss with every fiber of my being, but remembering her wasn’t as debilitating as it had been. My memories were of her smiling, laughing, telling the lame jokes she used to love so much, and her telling me she’d always love me no matter what. That’s how I liked to remember her most. The beautiful young girl sitting on the edge of my bed, telling me stories about who was dating who, throwing her head back laughing when I only grunted at her in response. 

Where I thought I’d put the hardest part of dealing with Finley’s death behind me along with the loss of my family after and the only home I’d ever known, one call from my dad brought it all rushing back to the forefront like a fucking tidal wave. With it came the latent anger, disappointment and heartbreak I’d carefully locked away, and tried my best to forget ever existed.

The display of my phone telling me no caller ID was available wasn’t uncommon. I didn’t give my number out, so whoever got hold of it either needed the clubs’ services or desperately wanted to reach me. How did I know this? Because the avenues they’d have to go through to get it weren’t easy, they were ones only desperate men or ones with huge balls would use.

Answering gruffly I bark,

“Yeah?”

“Ah, um, is this, Saint?” I knew the voice before he got the second word out. I’d know that voice anywhere.

“Yeah. What can I do for you?” I wasn’t going to let him off easy and tell him I knew who he was. Fuck that. If he wanted to talk to me, he’d work for it.

Clearing his throat he pauses before asking,

“The Saint who used to go by, Tobias Phillips?”

Obviously my old man doesn’t recognize my voice as an adult, but why would he? He hasn’t bothered to pick up the fucking phone in fifteen years, so there’d be no way for him to distinguish my almost a man timbre from my older, more gruff one.

“You’ve got him. You’re answering my question though. What can I do for you?”

Stuttering a little he manages to get out,

“This is your, Dad. Jack.”

Is he fucking serious? I know his name’s Jack. Jesus. I didn’t get amnesia just because I crossed a few state lines to get away from them.

“I know who you fucking are, I just don’t know what you want? And I can assume you want something, or you wouldn’t be calling me after fifteen years of fucking nothing. Am I right?”

He needs to spit this shit out, because I’ve got a woman who is pissed as hell to deal with, and to be honest, even a pissed off Tilly is a more attractive option than talking to my Dad.

“I’m sorry I haven’t called. I’ve wanted to. I wanted to tell how…”

Cutting him off I say,

“I don’t want to fucking hear it. I don’t give a shit how sorry you are, or what you wanna tell me. All I want is for you to tell me why you’re calling, and what the fuck you want.”

His sniffling into the phone tells me he’s crying, but I honestly don’t have it in me to care. It’s been too long, and there’s too much that was left unsaid between us for me to give one single fuck about his feelings.

“I, um, I mean we, your mother and I, are in Colorado, and we would like to see you.”

He doesn’t say anything else, leaving the question hanging between us like a lead balloon. For a second I sit there stunned. Does he really think I’d forget everything that’d happened after Finley died? That they’d left me to suffer through my pain alone. That when I needed them mom was so checked out on pain meds, anti-depressants, and tranquilizers, and Dad with his head at the bottom of a bottle they didn’t know I existed most days. I don’t fucking think so. I remember every miserable fucking day of it.

“Yeah? And why the fuck would I want to do that?”

“We’re sober, your mother and I. We’ve both been sober for almost fifteen years, and we’d like a chance to meet with you. To see you again. Even if it’s just once, so you can see for yourself we’ve straightened ourselves out. Cleaned up our lives. We want to tell you how sorry we are. ”

Glad that me leaving had some impact on them. Even if it was too little, too late.

“That’s not going to work for me. Like I said, I don’t give a shit how sorry you are, or her. What’s done is done. There’s no going back and changing it, and I don’t think some half-assed family reunion is going to net you the results you’re looking for either.”

Dad’s voice is stronger when he replies this time. His frustration at not getting the answer he wants is evident.

“Son, please. Just an hour. Two at the most. Your mother needs this, and so do I.”

That makes me laugh, not a little chuckle either, an honest to God belly laugh.