Smoke and Mirrors (14 page)

I walked over to her and sat beside her on the damp grass, and brought my legs up so I could lean my elbows on my knees.

“What happened?” I asked.

Her orbs were full of tears, her face streaked with the water that gently fell from the sky and mixed with the salt water from her eyes. “He’s dead,” she cried, turning her face away from me, almost as if she was ashamed.

“Hey, don’t look away. There’s no shame in cryin’.”

She turned her head to look at me. Her big, brown eyes were so red and raw, and the love flowing from her for this dead, mangy dog just hit me. And hit me fuckin’ hard.

“Was he your dog?” I asked as I pulled a smoke out and flicked my lighter.

“Can you please not do that?” she asked, pointing to my smokes. I put the smoke back in its pack and put them in my pocket. “No, he wasn’t mine. But I used to give him half my lunch. Even though he didn’t have a home, he still deserved to eat and be loved.”

And that was the sentence that made me crumble. Made me want to be better and stop being such a trouble-maker all the time. Because if she could feel love for a useless, mangy dog, then maybe there was still hope for a mangy, useless man like me.

It was quiet between the two of us for a while. She kept patting the dog, and I sat beside her. The sprinkling of the rain eased, but we were already drenched to the bone from sitting out here for so long.

Not much needed to be said, but when she finally stopped patting the dog, I stood and held my hand out to her. She’d been patting that flea-infested animal the entire time, but I didn’t give a fuck that it had made her dirty.

“Can I take you home?” I asked as her eyes travelled to my offered hand.

“Um,” she hesitated. And I got it, because I was the bad shit-head kid in school. I smoked pot, got drunk virtually every night, didn’t give a flyin’ fuck about classes, and I rode a motorbike.

To me, life was a party.

But now, with Nadine, I wanted more than a party.

“It’s cool, don’t fuckin’ stress it,” I said as I dropped my hand and shrugged.

“Can you please not do that either?” she murmured and rolled her eyes.

“What?”

“Smoke or swear around me. I don’t like it.”

I could feel a smile pulling at my lips at her audacity. She had balls, I had to give her that. No one else had ever dared to ask me to do that shit, ‘cause they’d usually end up with a fat lip, black eye, or broken ribs.

“I’ll try and be more careful around you.”

Her smile was beautiful. It lit up her entire face and did this really magical thing to her eyes. Her smile softened them, and the sadness evaporated, just like that.

“Sure, I’d like a lift home,” she said shyly.

We’d been sitting there with that stupid dead dog for such a long time, the light in the sky had begun to fade and the school grounds were deserted.

That night, when I went home, I sat in my small ‘projects’ room. I lived in the worst part of town, in a shitty apartment all on my own. I worked part-time at the local garage, fixing cars to pay my way. School was something I had to do. Well, not literally, but seeing as I could barely string a written sentence together, I still needed to go. Although I fuckin’ sucked at it, I tried…well sometimes.

I lay on my tiny bed and looked up at the flaking paint on the ceiling while listening to the neighbors fighting. Police cars were flyin’ around down below on the street, and I listened to the native sounds of the shithole I lived in.

My mom was a junkie and I had no idea who my dad was. One day she took me to a supermarket, gave me fifty bucks, and asked me to buy milk. I was thirteen years old.

When I bought the milk, I went outside to find her old Toyota was gone. The thing was full of rust and barely ran, so I thought she may have gone home.

I walked the twelve blocks home, only to find I no longer had a home.

The place was empty.

Everything was gone.

And so was she.

With fuck-all family, fuck-all money and nowhere to go, I did the one thing I could do – I stole.

First few months were the hardest, tryin’ to go to school and find somewhere to sleep each night. But I managed. And I grew up real fast.

I started hanging around down near the garage attached to the side of the gas station and soon became friends with Slick.

Slick was a hard fucker, but we got along. He showed me the ropes, started training me to work on bikes and cars. I knew a bit about bikes, ‘cause I’d work on mine whenever something went wrong with it. But he led me down the right path to being a mechanic.

I ended up droppin’ out of school and working with Slick, but Nadine continued in school and went on to college to eventually become a nurse.

It took her four months to let me kiss her.

And every night I’d go home and jerk off to the thought of her.

In those four months though, her skin cleared and she did some shit to her hair to make it less like a fuzzball.

“Your hair’s not so fucked up any more.” I caught myself too late saying something that I shouldn’t have.

“Pardon?” she asked as she whipped her head around to glare at me. Man, she was fuckin’ cute when she was pissed off.

But I knew I had to try harder if I wanted to keep her.

I even stopped getting pussy from other girls, because Nadine was who I wanted. And not for a week or month, but a lifetime.

“I meant, your hair looks nice like that,” I said.

She let out a snort and shook her head. “Thanks,” she said as she put her hand over mine and linked our fingers together.

“Nadine, I really wanna kiss you,” I blurted out.

Her eyes looked into mine. As we sat in her old, shitty, beat-up car at the drive-in, she leaned over and kissed me.

That was the end of me. Her softness was all around me, and I needed to be as close to her as possible. There was something about her, her innocence, her gentle, shy nature, and her pure heart fuckin’ took me and twisted everything inside.

And then I knew. I knew I loved her with all my heart, with everything I had.

Three nights later, there was a knock on my door. Nadine was standing there, with a small plastic bag in her hand and tears streaming down her face.

Her stepfather tried to rape her, and when she screamed, her mother came in and blamed her for flirting with him and threw her out of their home. That’s how Nadine and I moved in together.

Six months later, Nadine and I got married. We were young, but we made do.

I worked with Slick and Nadine went to school. It was perfect.

Until it stopped being perfect.

A shady guy Slick knew rolled up on his Harley and wanted to hire me to do some work on his bike, privately.

I told Slick ‘cause I didn’t want no trouble, but the money was too good.

Soon, he offered me a position on his crew, just as a prospect, doing low grade, shit jobs. But I knew what MCs were about. Family and loyalty.

Or so I thought.

The work on the bike turned to carting packages around.

I’m not a dumb motherfucker. I knew what was in the packages, but I did it to get us out of where we were, and so Nadine could finish school.

But it all turned to shit the day I was beat to almost within an inch of my life, and the package was stolen from me.

Although I ended up in the hospital, my boss didn’t believe it was a robbery. He thought I’d had orchestrated it all for what was in the package.

And killin’ Nadine was the payback for losing him his package.

Nadine was eight weeks pregnant with our child. Neither of us knew, ‘cause she wouldn’t have kept that shit from me.

It took every ounce of control in me to not kill him the night he put a bullet in her head. Instead of just killing him, I carefully planned my attack.

And one by one, I fuckin’ annihilated them all. Playing them against each other, and then finally slitting my boss’s throat. Slowly.

That MC had been small, nothin’ fancy. Just muling some shit here and there.

And I fuckin’ got rid of each and every one of those fuckers, ‘cause not one of them cared that their Prez killed my innocent wife.

That was a long time ago.

Many years have passed since then, and now I ain’t no small-time kid no more.

I just turned forty last week, and I’ve seen a lot of shit in my day. I’ve killed a lot of people, and I’d do it all again in a heartbeat.

I vowed to myself to never step foot inside another MC, but I found one that’s all about loyalty, all about brothers and all about the old ladies. I call it home.

“NO!!!” Lina screams as she sits up in bed.

“Shhhh, baby it’s okay,” I say as I move to enfold her in my arms.

Lina’s gone through her own shit, all in the name of club business. We took care of the cunts that did this to her and Jaeger’s old lady, Nix, but it’s been five months and she’s still struggling with what happened to her.

“Are they gone?” she asks me as I kiss her forehead and stroke her damp hair. This is what she asks every time she has a nightmare and wakes up frenzied.

“Yeah, they’re gone.”

Her arms always tighten around me, and she rarely lets me go.

“I think you need to see someone to get you the help you need,” I say. A repeated plea she always ignores.

“I just need you.”

“Lina, I can’t give you therapy, baby. All I can do is kill any motherfucker who tries to touch you.”

“I hate it when you swear.”

I smile and know. “I love you so much.”

They say you only have one true soul mate in the world, and you’ll be very lucky to find them. But I think that’s a crock of shit.

Because I’ve found my soul mate, twice.

Tyler Lewis stood outside his superior’s door and took a deep breath. He had to remember he’d worked damn hard, and he was so close that to give up now was not really an option.

He took another calming breath, and he knew no one else really saw or would understand the real Tyler Lewis.

How amusing. He’d been going by that name for so long it now rolled off his tongue, like it was actually his name.

He tried to think back to his childhood and the name he was given, but he couldn’t actually remember a lot prior to the age of fourteen. And even then, he was never addressed by his given name.

Now what was it again? Aaron? Andrew? Aiden? Who knows? His upbringing was ‘unique’ from that of most kids. What he does remember is when he was eight, his junkie mother befriended a man who liked to shoot her up with heroin and while she was spacing out, high on her drug of choice, he took great pleasure in sexually abusing her little boy.

By the age of nine, the poor boy had been passed around to all his mother’s boyfriends’ friends too. He was so well-used he knew exactly what would happen to him when each weekend rolled around.

This continued for years, until the little boy grew much older, much bigger, and finally, much stronger.

Then one day, when the pedophilic boyfriend tried to rape him, he grabbed an old, heavy-based lamp with a torn and useless shade, and smashed it against his head.

The boy used so much force, and hit a particular spot (accidently – he just wanted the rape to stop) on the man’s temple that struck him unconscious instantly. The boy, tired of being used, did what any rational person would do in that kind of situation. He fucking killed him. Smashed his fucking skull in, and didn’t stop hitting him with the lamp until there was nothing left but pulp.

The boy robbed the man of all his valuables and took off with blood still on his hands and a fresh image of the man lying on the ground, beaten and dead. Good. He deserved a much worse death, but that would have to do.

The boy re-invented himself in another town. For a while, he hid whenever he saw a policeman, sure they’d catch him for killing his mother’s boyfriend. He went to the library, checking his home town newspaper for the next few weeks, looking for news of the murder and any subsequent investigation. But that news never appeared.

Feeling safe, he went to school, worked his butt off and got top grades. So much so that he even got a full academic scholarship to one of the top universities. He held a steady job, working thirty plus hours a week, and working his ass off in college, too.

Friends, I hear you ask. No freaking way – he simply didn’t have the time, the energy, or even the desire to make any.

He had an agenda. As a matter of fact, he had several.

With all his hard work studying in the field of criminal justice, certain law enforcement agencies had him on their radar. He was not the typical teenager, or even a typical boy. He wasn’t interested in partying, or girls, or drinking or any of that – he simply worked and studied and worked. Image was everything, and he wanted – no,
needed
a squeaky clean profile, because he never wanted anyone to know what had happened to him as a boy, or the fact he’d killed a man.

The boy, now a man, was approached by a representative of the local police force, and he jumped at the opportunity because he knew they could train him to be lethal. And that’s exactly what he wanted.

But the training he was so desperate for didn’t come from the police force. Their training was, in fact, tame.