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  “June,” she said. “It’s nice to meet you. Ram?”

  He chuckled. “You don’t know anyone else named Ram, I take it.”

  “Do you?”

  “It’s a sort of a nickname. I’ll tell you about it some time.”

  She smiled, cocking her hip just slightly. “Oh yeah? How’s that? You gonna follow me home?”

  “Maybe. You’re gonna need a ride.” He pointed to his truck. “I can help you out, if you want. I make it a point to help out folks who need it, especially in Marlowe.”

  “We’re not in Marlowe.”

  He shrugged. “No, but you’re from there. You want my help or not?”

  Not a man who wanted his time wasted. She licked her lips just slightly, imagining herself in the truck with this man. Wondering where his hands might wander. He didn’t seem like a man who heard “no” very often…or at all. Not the sort of man who paid attention if he did hear it. The kind of man who always knew best…and could back it up.

  Her heart fluttered.

  “Thank you,” she said, “but no. I have family I can call. They’ll want to see me anyway. I haven’t been with them for quite some time.”

  He smiled. “I’ll see you around, then, June. I’ll see you real soon.”

  It almost sounded like a threat, coming from him. But if it was a threat, then why was her heart beating so fast—and why did she watch his large frame so intently as he walked inside the diner?

  Chapter 3

  Out of the heat and in the diner, Ram put his colors back on. After the brawl and the shootout last night, there was bound to be a hell of a lot of heat on the Wrecking Crew, and as much as he loved his club, he wasn’t stupid enough to ask to be pulled over.

  The design of the vest was simple; a wrecking ball on a field of fire. “Wrecking Crew” on top with “Marlowe” on the rocker.

  He had meant to put it on the second he got off the road. When a brother walked around, he was supposed to wear his colors no matter what. The girl had distracted him.

  Goddamn, she was a classic beauty. His dick was still pulsing, threatening to get harder and harder, just remembering the tight curves of her body, that white shirt she was wearing plastered against her breasts from sweat.

  For all he knew, she was the reason the day felt so damn hot.

  He didn’t give a damn if she was single or not, he was going to make her his business. There was no way someone like her would shack up with him for long—too clean cut, too goody-goody. Probably a college girl, to hear her talk.

  But goddamn, those legs. She was a vision, standing over that steaming car. He’d had trouble not pouncing on her then and there.

  The diner was the standard roadside fare. Vinyl seats, uncomfortable stools at a counter with their cushioning seeping through cracks, an A/C unit at each end blowing with small ribbons tied to the vent. It was not heavily populated: a few truckers sat at the counter, half of their thick butts hanging off the sides of the stool as they downed greasy burgers and fries.

  In the back of the diner were the party he had come to meet. Four men, his brothers, all representatives from the Wrecking Crew.

  The sight of them pushed the image of the tempting June from his mind and brought his mind around to more serious affairs.

  The Hammerin’ Nail. Beretta. A war with the Black Flags.

  As much lust as he felt in himself building for June—and after so short a time—that passion had a long way to go if it wanted to meet his desire to smash the Flags into the dirt and grind Beretta under his boot for days.

  His brothers at the booth waited for him to sit before saying anything.

  Cattleprod, the Wrecking Crew Secretary. He managed the accounts and kept a clean record; the guy who talked to the cops and arranged bails when brawls got too heavy. He was a small man, but thickly built with a dome head and a long black and gray beard.

  His sense of humor was more macabre than even most of the other outlaws could handle. Last Halloween he had decorated his house with roadkill to keep trick or treaters away.

  Next to him was Rowdy, their Road Captain. A man nearly as wide as he was tall, but none the worse for wear for it. He swore by his diet of bacon and whiskey and breathed every breath for the life of the club. Four times a year, the Wrecking Crew made runs—two that stretched out into other states and two that crossed the length of Texas—and it was Rowdy’s job to keep everything running smooth on the road.

  All the Wrecking Crew hated cops—cops hassled outlaw bikers nonstop, finding any reason to pull them over and write out citations—but Rowdy in particular hated them.

  When he had first started biking, he’d landed in a brawl with some local police and they confiscated his bike. When he earned enough scrap to pick up a new one, they confiscated that one too. Ever since, he’d run his own private guerrilla campaign against the cops, availing himself to the world of the internet to become well-versed in traffic and automotive law. Every citation he got, he took to court, and usually fought it until it got up to the county, where it would inevitably be thrown out because the county court had things like murder and grand larceny to worry about.

  “Freedom ain’t shit if you ain’t fighting for it,” Rowdy would always say.

  And he had his pettiness to him too. He had a small bottle in his lap for spitting tobacco juice. The only reason he had started chewing tobacco at all was that so when a cop pulled him over, he could spit heavy on his shoes.

  Mikhail was there as well, having beat Ram to the diner. He didn’t look any the worse for wear after the brawl last night outside of a fresh shiner on his left eye. A good soldier. Mikhail had been a patch holder for a little over three years now. It gave Ram a great deal of pride to give him the patch himself, and to lead the vote on the matter. A lot of folks thought Mikhail wouldn’t make it—almost nobody in the club came from a family as well-off as his—but the man had carried himself as a righteous brother in too many scrapes to deny him the patch.

  And then finally, Hugh “Howitzer” Maddox, Ram’s father and the President of the Wrecking Crew. He sat in the corner of the corner, presiding over the table like a lord at court. Thick forearms leathery from years of riding under the open sky sprouted from his body like the appendages of a gorilla. His hair was silver and thick, thick like Ram’s was thick, and he wore a heavy handlebar mustache.

  Howitzer shared Rowdy’s dislike of cops, though for a vastly different reason. He was a widower because of the cops; Ram had no mother because of the cops.

  There had been a raid on Howitzer’s home when Ram was less than five years old. Howitzer had been the President of the Wrecking Crew for ten years at that time, and was viewed as a high-danger target by the police. When they came in at the dead of night, they kicked in the door ready to shoot—and Ram’s mother was caught in the crossfire.

  The cops ended up finding nothing. Howitzer wasn’t dumb enough to keep anything illegal in his own house, which the police probably would have known. It was a scare tactic, a form of hazing that they used to keep the criminal element under control.

  It hadn’t worked.

  When Howitzer was angry—and he was angry often, like he was angry now, an easily stressed titan of a man managing a club in stressful times—it was like watching a painting move.

  “You all right?” Rowdy asked as Ram sat down next to Mikhail, across from the other three.

  “Sure.”

  “No damage or nothing to you?” Rowdy pressed.

  “No, nothing,” said Ram. “Look at me. I’m fine.”

  “Is Ace all right?” asked Howitzer. “Heard his bike was stolen.”

  Ram set his jaw and sighed. “How much do you know?”

  “We know you’re in a pile of shit with everybody from us to the cops.” Howitzer cracked his knuckles. “Where’s Ace’s ride?”

  The waitress approached, hoping for Ram’s order. Mikhail gestured for her to fly away quick. The tension was like glass, transparent and heavy.

 
“It was gone when we tried to break out from the brawl. Maybe the Black Flags took it. We don’t know for sure. He rode out with me.”

  “He rode bitch on your bike?” Cattleprod snorted. “I expect we won’t hear the end of that.”

  “What’s all this about?” asked Ram. “I got in a brawl with some Black Flags. Big deal. Motherfuckers deserve a beating. I’ll go in tomorrow and pay up to Manuel, he’ll forget all about it. It’s nothing.”

  Even he knew he was stretching the truth, but he figured playing it down was the only card he had.

  “Nothing?” Howitzer had a way of making himself seem like he was shouting even though his volume remained steady and low. “You call ruining a truce that’s been running for two generations just nothing? You call losing a man’s bike nothing? You call sparking a fucking war with the Black Flags nothing? You call a dead cop nothing?”

  Ram’s mouth twitched. He had been hoping he had seen that wrong, that cop getting shot in the head. A dead cop was bad for everyone’s business.

  Beretta’s fault, Ram silently insisted. It could all be traced back to that traitorous shit.

  “That truce was going to end one way or another.” Ram began ticking off his fingers. “Ace can buy himself a new bike. He’s wanted to for a little while now anyway. War was coming with the Black Flags one way or the other. And last I heard, a dead cop’s a good cop, or did I join some other fucking MC without knowing it?”

  “Dead cops are fine, you ingrate,” said Howitzer, “but not when our colors are seen at the crime. Not when there’s witnesses.”

  Mikhail leaned in to Ram. He had a way of making a conversation seem intimate even when there were three people watching right close by.

  “You know that I’ve been talking a lot with the Black Flags lately. Sounding them out.”

  Ram shrugged. “You said that you were trying to find out how much heat they were packing.”

  “I was. And I did. But in doing that, I also found out they were willing to negotiate. We were close to striking a deal. Cutting the trade routes in half between us.”

  “In half? Fuck that.” Ram shook his head. “That’s not—”

  Mikhail continued. “They’ve got access to every cartel south of the border. That would mean a lot of money flowing through here. We’d be making more than twice what we make now, and have peace with them. But…” he spread his hands. “Not anymore.”

  A slow spread of doubt and guilt entered into Ram’s belly. He didn’t care about starting a war, didn’t mind fighting. Deep down, he loved it.

  But less money for the club, for his brothers, meant a harder life for them. There was no worse crime for a Crew member than to fuck up the spot of his brother.

  Anger kicked in, pushing away the guilt.

  “What the fuck?” said Ram. “You saw where I was going in the bar. Why didn’t you stop anything?”

  Mikhail raised an eyebrow. “Sure,” he said. “And then, for my next trick, I’ll stop this oncoming train with my pinky finger. And while I’m doing the rest of your chores for you, I’ll pick up your laundry, how’s that?”

  Ram was quieted by that, fuming to himself. A part of him knew Mikhail had a point—that every man’s actions were his own. But goddamn if he would admit out in the open of these others, or even to himself.

  There was a way to pin all this on Beretta, and he would find it. He would nail that fucker’s ass to the wall and make him pay. The war would be a good thing, they’d see. They’d double their territory and halve their enemies.

  “You’re fucked, Ram,” growled Howitzer. “And you’ve been fucked for a while. The Flags’ll shoot you dead next chance they get. Rumors are going around that the cops want to pin this on some Crew member, and you’re the most high-profile member we got. No one wants to see you on the roads anymore. I hate to say it, kid, but you need to take a break for a long while.”

  Ram’s tongue made a slow circle inside his bottom lip. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “You’re flying off the handle every chance you get. You’re fucking your way through half the town’s broads. You’ve got into more fights in the last six months than I can even count, and that’s the ones these lazy fucks will actually tell me about when they’re not protecting you.” He waved a hand at Rowdy and Cattleprod. “I know you protect him. I’m not blind.” He leaned forward, shaking his fist. “You think you lost the election to Ace because everyone just wanted to ‘give him a chance?’ We’re scared of you, Ram. You’ve gone off the reservation.”

  Six weeks ago, Ace had run for Sergeant-at-Arms—Ram’s position—at the annual election. He had won handily, but not unanimously. Ram had accepted the change in position graciously, getting Ace drunk as hell and dunking him in a nearby pond.

  This was just tradition. Any change in office had to be accompanied by a little bit of good-natured rowdiness.

  But to think that it had been arranged, that his father and Ace had conspired…that was a blow. That was a deep blow. And it would explain a lot of things. Ace had been distant as of late, and had insisted on going out with Ram more often than not.

  Keeping an eye on him? Trying to make sure Ram didn’t get out of hand?

  But if that was true, then why the fuck didn’t Ace put a handle on the situation last night? What kind of Sergeant-at-Arms was he being then? Why was Ram the only one responsible for shit going wrong?

  Even his own brothers moved against him.

  But he would show them.

  “It’s not that bad,” said Ram. “We can take the Flags. You know we can. If you’ll—”

  “You. Started. A war. Do you have any idea what that means? Actions have consequences, Ram. We’re down on men and you want a war. How many more do you think we can spare to lose?”

  Now that, Ram had to admit—though he would never do so out loud—was a solid point. The police had taken several of their number off the road over the past six months. Most of the time on drug charges, which meant those brothers were fucked for a long time unless they could get a retrial. The Sheriff’s Department definitely had it out for the Wrecking Crew lately.

  Howitzer shook his head. “You’re off the road. Probation. This is an executive action I’m taking as Prez, got it?”

  “You can’t do that.” Ram, somehow, was even-keeled in his voice. There was a heavy, hard temper throbbing at his forehead, begging to be unleashed, but he kept it at bay. “You can’t.”

  “Why, because you’re my son? Fuck that. I didn’t raise you to be such a fuck-up.”

  Ram bit down hard on the litany of insults that wanted to spring up, deriding Howitzer’s ability to “raise” anyone at all. Raising children didn’t involve leaving all the work to your oldest daughter and then shoving your son into the life of an outlaw motorcycle club at the age of thirteen, last he checked.

  Not that he minded that much.

  “No,” said Ram. “Because you can’t make decisions like that on your own. Not unless we signed up with a dictatorship. Did we, boys?”

  Rowdy, Cattleprod, and Mikhail exchanged glances. It was clear that they—Rowdy and Cattleprod at least—were already on board with the idea of probation. But they knew Ram was right.

  “It’s got to be put to a vote,” said Mikhail. “That’s the charter.”

  Howitzer’s face was boiling red—especially because even he knew that was how it had to go. But the redness retreated, a cold gaze leveling on Ram.

  “That’s fine,” he said. “It won’t be no problem for a loose bolt like you to be put on probation.”

  “Take a week or so,” said Rowdy, “to get people in town. Lots of folks traveling right now.”

  “Make the calls,” said Howitzer. “He goes out or I do.”

  From the looks in Rowdy and Cattleprod’s eyes, he could tell Howitzer wasn’t lying. This was going to happen in a week’s time, give or take a day, no matter what Ram did. Unless he could prove he was trustworthy somehow. Unless he could…could come up with
something.

  “I’m better than you think I am,” he said.

  Howitzer sighed, some sadness entering his gaze. “I wish you were, kid. But something’s turned in you. I don’t know what. You’re going after violence and pussy like it’s some kind of currency. If you’re let loose for too long, this whole gang’s due for armageddon. I can’t let that happen. I can’t—”

  “I’m better than you think I am,” Ram said again. “I can be calm. You want me calm? You’re talking about tossing me to the curb. I’m the calmest motherfucker here. I even—”

  He watched, at the other end of the diner, as June walked inside. An idea struck him, immediate and unstoppable. The words were out of his mouth before he even had time to think on them.

  “—hell, I even got an old lady.”

  Mikhail snorted on the coffee he was drinking. Silverware clattered in front of him. None of the men looked like they believed Ram.

  “You got an old lady?” said Rowdy. “One you ain’t been bringing around to the club?”

  “Yeah. We wanted to keep it quiet. And you know me. I got a reputation. I don’t want to…you know, disappoint the fellas.”

  The lies were coming more easily now. One beget the other, a clean chain of logic resting on one insane premise.

  “There she is now,” he pointed to June, who was talking to the waitress at the counter. “Maybe you saw me talking to her earlier outside. We bumped into each other, coincidence. I guess now’s as good of a time as any to have her meet you. Hang on.”

  Chapter 4

  Shortly after the hunk went inside, June took a few minutes and finally gathered up the courage to call her family for help, and discovered promptly that her phone was, of course, out of power. So, she decided the best course of action was to ask the diner for theirs.

  Would that there was a single person in Marlowe she knew and trusted outside of her family. But growing up under John Colt, it had been tough to make friends, and those spare few she had made had all moved far away from Marlowe. June kept up with them online, but that was all.