Jerry Langton Three-Book Biker Bundle (23 page)

“Yes.”

“Well then, I just don't think you have enough evidence to bring this case to trial,” the judge said. “The controlled substance could have been anyone's. Case dismissed.”

Ned's defense attorney looked him in the face and grinned broadly. “See, I told you everything would be all right.”

On their way to school, two twelve-year-old boys decided to take the long way to school. Seventh-graders new to New Aberdeen Middle School, they had already been targeted as nerds and subjected to a great deal of bullying. Security was pretty tight at the schoolyard, but they knew better than to take the obvious way home.

They walked through an alley they had walked through many times before, when Brian noticed a refrigerator box on its side. Of course, both boys said they were too old to play in a refrigerator box, but they just couldn't resist poking it.

Sunil, the bolder of the two, looked inside first. He fell to the ground and started gagging. Shaking, Brian peered into the box. Then he ran all the way home.

When he got home, he told his mom what he had seen and she didn't believe him. The police did. They eventually recovered the body of Daniel “Bamm Bamm” Johansson from the alley. It was nude, bound, and every inch of it except for the face was covered in burns the coroner later determined were inflicted by acetylene torches.

Lara called Clegg. She was working on one of those stories that she knew would be e-mailed around the country once it was published. Two kids tried to rob a warehouse, and they would have gotten away with it, but two other guys were trying to rob it the same night. The kids saw the older guys and fled. Their only means of escape was to climb an eight-foot fence with barbed wire. One made it over; the other didn't. The one who didn't—a sixteen-year-old named Rodney Morgason who had a number of prior arrests—managed to make it over the crest, but got his shoe caught in the wire on the top of the fence. Unable to extricate his foot from his high-top sneaker, he was still hanging there a half-hour later when the police arrived.

It was one of those stupid criminal stories people loved. She knew it would make its way around the world just minutes after it was published. Since she had grown quite fond of Clegg, Lara thought it would be nice to let him come up with some kind of witty quote that would make him—at least momentarily—world famous.

But he wasn't up to it.

One of the things Lara liked about Clegg was that he was always upbeat, always ready for a laugh. It didn't matter how horrifying, how heartbreaking the situation was, Clegg could always say something that would either make her laugh or at least want to. But he couldn't today, despite the fact she had served him up a situation that was just begging for a punchline.

“What's up, John?” she asked, suddenly realizing it was the first time she had ever called him anything other than his last name or “sergeant.”

“Sorry, kid,” he said. “Got a lot on my mind . . . with the bikers.”

“What?” she asked, confused. “Bouchard's in jail. The bikers are over.”

He sighed audibly. “It's the fact that he's in jail that makes me think there's gonna be a rain of shit over there in Martinsville and that Springfield is gonna get caught up in the storm.”

Bouchard was in a common room watching
Cops
on TV with some guys he knew. Those seated closest to him were members and prospects of the Sons of Satan and neighboring puppet gangs. The others in the room were hoping they soon would be.

Five heavily armed guards walked in. The oldest one—huge, bristly-haired, with a prominent moustache—barked out, “Bouchard, boss wants to see you.”

“Can't you see I'm busy?” snapped Bouchard to general laughter in the room. “I'll get to him when I can.”

“Uh uh, you have to go now,” insisted the top guard. “In fact, you'll want to go.”

After being released from jail, the first place Ned went was Steve's. When he got there, he found that Steve was delighted. But he wasn't excited about Ned's liberation—he'd predicted that would happen sooner or later; he really wanted to tell someone about his new house.

Steve lived in a pretty nice place in a quiet residential neighborhood, but he was very excited about moving up and out of it. One of his dealers—a former federal agent who'd changed allegiances to become a big-time importer and distributor—had gone down for twenty years, and his wife was desperate to sell their huge mansion. It was just out of town and it stood on its own grounds surrounded by a stone fence. The original part of the house was over one-hundred-and-fifty years old and made of fieldstone, but it had been added onto so many times that the new, shiny, aluminum-clad part of the house increased the total floor area fourfold. It had six bedrooms, four fireplaces, a horizon pool, and two hot tubs (one indoor and one out). It was, for Steve, a dream come true.

It would be owned not by Steve himself, but by an escort company officially owned by his great-great aunt, who was ninety-four and lived in a nursing home back in New York. She had Alzheimer's and didn't speak much English, but Steve had managed to get her to sign a will that left all her possessions to him.

Steve explained all of this to Ned as they sat on the couch in his living room, then checked himself, remembering Ned's situation.

“Oh hey, man, you just got out, I'm sorry. I wasn't thinking,” he apologized with what Ned took to be sincerity. “Deerhunter, go get Ned a beer—a real beer, none of that cheap shit I let you shitheads drink.”

Ned noticed that Martin “Deerhunter” Krentz hadn't said a word since he arrived. Ned knew Krentz well because they were both Death Dealers prospects and they had run a few errands together. Nobody ever told him so, but Ned surmised that Krentz earned his nickname because of his slight resemblance to a young Christopher Walken. Ned was surprised that, when Krentz came back, he offered the Stella Artois to him wordlessly, like a prospect must to a full member, and went back to his seat by the window. Ned had always considered Krentz slightly ahead of him in the pecking order, but now, he assumed, things had changed.

After opening his beer and taking a long draw, Steve started enthusing even more about the house. He seemed most excited by one particular plan he had for it.

“I'm gonna make pornos!” he shouted.

Steve sent Krentz out to buy more beer so he could explain his plan to Ned. He told him about Joel Greene, a young man from Martinsville who wanted to be a filmmaker. Joel's dad paid for him to go to the best film school in the Midwest and bought him a lot of equipment, but refused to pay for his big project. He had planned on financing his son's film, until he found out what it was. Joel wanted to make a documentary about how big corporations and brand names were responsible for all of society's ills. Of course, since the old man made his money distributing top-dollar sneakers and sportswear—for a big corporation that depends on the sanctity of brand names—he cut the boy off.

Joel had a dream, training, equipment, and a ton of friends who would work for nothing, or next to it. All he needed was money. The banks wouldn't talk to him. In fact, nobody with any real money wanted to talk to him. He was about to give up on his plan when he found himself discussing the plan with Rico, the guy who sold him and his friends weed. Rico laughed at him, and told him that only stupid and lazy people couldn't find money. Joel took that as a job offer and refused, telling him he didn't want to do anything illegal. Rico laughed again and promised to introduce him to a good friend of his.

Eventually he did. This friend, another drug dealer, passed Joel onto the guy he got his drugs from. This happened a few times, until Joel found explaining his idea to Steve across a table at a medium-priced steak house. Joel, a vegetarian, had a salad, which Steve found hilarious. Steve told him he liked the idea and offered to front him the entire production costs up to $250,000, but would not pay a penny for distribution and marketing. That, he said, was Joel's job. And, in the unlikely event that the production didn't make Steve his money back (along with a reasonable-sounding ten percent after one year), they would work something out later. “Nothing illegal, of course,” Steve told him. Joel readily agreed, and left the meeting thinking of clever “guerilla marketing” ideas.

Steve was as good as his word. He paid for every part of production quickly and politely. He never complained and even insisted the crew be paid union rates, despite the fact that none of them belonged to any union. He'd sometimes drop by the sets to solve a problem with police or other regulators or to calm down one of Joel's creditors. And best of all, according to Joel, was the fact that neither Steve nor any of the men he sent down to help out ever gave an opinion as to what should be in the movie. They just let Joel and his friends make whatever they wanted.

After the film—
Branded for Life
—was done, Joel entered it into a few festivals, but drew few viewers. He rapidly lost money traveling to attend the premieres. After a long and exhausting search, he couldn't find a single theater within two hour's drive from Springfield to show his film. He eventually rented an old porn theater in Chinatown with the last of Steve's money and started showing
Branded for Life
four times a day until two bikers came to the theater and told him he had to see Steve.

They escorted him into Steve's office. After a personable exchange, Steve got to the point. “I need you to pay me my $275,000.”

Joel shook his head as though he did not understand. “I don't have it,” he stuttered. “The movie only grossed about seven thousand.”

“Well, I guess you owe me a lot of money then . . .”

“Are you going to kill me?”

Steve laughed. “Don't be ridiculous; look, I just want my money back. I don't want to hurt anyone,” he said.

Joel looked like he was going to drop.

“I know you don't have it,” Steve eased up. “And we both know there's no way you can get it.”

Joel didn't know what to say.

“Maybe we can work something out—something that helps both of us,” Steve said.

Joel managed a weak smile.

“You know why you failed, Joel?” Steve said. “It was your movie. and you were wrong. You think the big corporations are to blame for everything in the world, when it's actually puffed-up little shits like you who run their mouths off without knowing shit.”

For perhaps the first time in his life, Joel kept his opinion to himself.

“You blame your father for everything wrong in your life when all he did was pay for the right to have his son tell him he's an asshole,” Steve said. “Just doesn't seem right to me.”

The other bikers (two more had come into the room since Steve had started) laughed. One playfully punched Joel on the left bicep. Joel put his head in his hands.