Tarnished Steel Read online

  This is a work of fiction. Any names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons--living or dead--is entirely coincidental.

  Tarnished Steel copyright @ 2014 by Carmen Faye. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Four Years ago

  Derrick Unger and Hank Park pulled up to the liquor store at ten in the morning and parked their 450 thumper dirt bikes against the wall of the building where the cameras didn’t have coverage, according to Derrick’s scouting. Hank still wasn’t sure about the reliability of Derrick’s planning. What was bothering him most was if the plan took Derrick into account.

  Derrick was twenty-eight. Hank was thirty-three and feeling like he was getting to be a little too old to mess around knocking over liquor stores. However, the steadiest thing Hank had going on in his life was the Steel Riders MC, of which Derrick and himself were patch holders. So, really, a good robbery like this might be just the thing to give him some insights into what to do with his life — besides robbing another liquor store.

  This liquor store’s owner was under the impression that driving all the way to the bank to drop off his money more than once a week was a hassle he couldn’t be bothered with. Derrick knew where the man kept his extra safe, and knew that it was opened by a key on the man’s chain rather than a combination. It was the size of the weekly drop, and the knowledge Derrick seemed to possess about the owner and his ways, which made going in on this heist with him sound like a good idea — until he saw oil. Something told him right then to get on his bike and ride away.

  “Derrick, you are leaking oil,” Hank told him.

  “What? Where? Oh, shit,” Derrick said, and he knelt down to check where the leak was coming from. “Fucking little hole in the oil reservoir, can you believe that shit?”

  “Let’s call it; we can do it next week. No good with bad equipment,” Hank told him.

  “Oh, come on, fuck that,” Derrick told him. “It’s just a little leak. I’ve still got more than half in the reservoir, which is plenty to get this baby to where she needs to go,” Derrick said, standing and giving the thumper seat a loving pat.

  Hank looked the six-foot, lanky, blond, blue-eyed man over, and didn’t like what he saw. “If that engine blows—”

  “I’ll jump, and ride bitch on yours. These are 450s. Plenty of power to get us down the trail and up to the clearing, just as we planned,” Derrick assured him.

  Which was probably true, Hank figured. These little monsters were fast, powerful, and ate trail like nothing he had ever ridden before. A far cry from his Harley Low Rider, but that was apples and oranges, really. No, these were the best trail monsters, by far, that he had ever been on.

  “Look, Derrick, the plan is already changing for the worst and we aren’t even inside yet. Fix the fucking hole, and let’s go next week.”

  “Fuck that, fuck that, no! I’ll fucking go in myself, then,” Derrick said and began to turn to walk away.

  Hank’s instincts told him to let him go. But some fucked up partner thing inside him had him off his bike and moving after him. “This is bullshit Derrick.”

  “Maybe, but fifteen grand of bullshit,” Derrick told him.

  “Which I suppose will be a bit of cash on our books in prison,” Hank hissed. “Don’t go further than you have to, Derrick. Keep it tight and get the fuck out of here.”

  “Shit, I can handle myself,” Derrick said.

  “No one suggested you can’t, but with the oil leaking, we don’t have time for delays. No fun and games.”

  “No fun and games for me,” he said, and then as they crossed the threshold, Hank swept the store for anyone else inside, which, as luck would have it, there wasn’t, because Derrick didn’t wait for Hank’s signal.

  Derrick’s .45 went off, blowing a hole into the counter top beside the cash register. “Don’t put your hand there!” Derrick ordered the man behind the counter.

  Then: Boom! “Back up!”

  Boom! “Back up!”

  Boom! “Back up!”

  Each shot blew apart bottles on the shelves next to the man, forcing him to move away, further down the counter toward the entranceway and into the corner.

  Boom! “Back up! Good, now kneel,” Derrick said and boom! shot the bottles above the man’s head, making him reflexively crouch down, at which point he knelt.

  “Perfect.” Derrick smiled under his mask. “Keys, please. Just give them up. You don’t want me trying to blow them off you. Did you see how close I came to shooting you a couple of times there? I’m not that good of a shot. So just give them to me.”

  The man tossed him the keys on his belt.

  Derrick tossed them to Hank, who moved as fast as he could to the back where the weekly drop safe was supposed to be. Finding the safe, he lucked out on finding the right key. He opened it up and found — less than five grand. Probably closer to four grand.

  Motherfucker!

  But now wasn’t the time to hash it out with Derrick. Now was the time to get this crazy fucking idiot out of the store and back to the club house, where he would give him all of this money, and then beat the crap out of him.

  “We’re out! No more shooting!” he said as he passed Derrick.

  Apparently Derrick didn’t hear him, because he emptied the rest of his clip into the bottle display around the man, pouring broken glass and liquor over him.

  Then he stopped, opened the register, and pulled out the few twenties that were there, while also setting off the alarm.

  The alarm was local and loud. Hank was on his bike and had it started. Derrick finally came out of the fucking store, laughing and dancing.

  “Fucking get on your bike or I’m leaving you!” Hank said it, and he meant every word of it.

  Derrick seemed to get it too, because he quit dancing, got to his bike, and got it started. In the process, he dropped his gun. Hank saw him drop it — Hank didn’t miss details — but he revved the thumper and took off down the getaway route they had planned. Derrick could follow or get his fucking gun.

  Derrick chose to follow, Hank saw in his rear-view mirror. “I’m so going to kick his fucking ass when we get back. What an amateur, childish display of bullshit!” he said to himself.

  Derrick really had come close to shooting that man! And for what? Nothing! If they were caught then, that was an automatic ten years tacked onto the sentence.

  Making it to the first dirt trail, which was more like a dirt access road, Hank was making the turn with a skid and a slide when there she was, a sheriff’s deputy. What he could not have known was that she was in fact off duty and using her patrol car to go home since her car was in the shop with a blown head gasket. She lived in a small house just off this dirt access road. She was the single mother of two children, a boy and a girl, neither older than six.

  Witnessing the two dirt bike riders speeding and driving recklessly up what amounted to her driveway, she hit the lights and hit the gas, aiming to run them down.

  She only heard the call out for the liquor store robbery when she was about fifteen yards behind the last one.

  Derrick reached for his gun to shoot that fucking sheriff’s deputy, but then remembered he dropped it, and it was empty anyway. Whoever she was, she was good on this road, because she was running them down and gaining speed.

  Then the unthinkable happened. Derrick’s engine seized. With several jarring, deep, knocking explosions inside the engine case, the bike lost power so fast, the
deputy’s car almost ran him over without stopping. It was a testament to her skill that she didn’t wind up thrashing both him and his bike under her bumper. She did hit him, which sent him sprawling, but she managed to stop the cruiser before crushing him.

  Liquor store robbery in mind, she came out of the car with her shotgun, jacking a shell in the chamber and bringing it to bear on Derrick, who was pinned under his bike. His bike was pinned under the front fender of the car.

  “Move and I blow a large hole in you. Questions?”

  “Fuck you!” Derrick shouted at her. “Shoot her! Fucking shoot her!” he screamed, looking up the road. “She can’t cover me and you! Fucking shoot this bitch!”

  She spotted the other rider at the top of the rise, about twenty yards away, through the clearing clouds of dust and dirt. She saw he had a gun in his hand, but his was arm hanging down his side. Through the sun-shaded dirt-bike helmet, he was studying her and the situation. He checked the skies, but she knew that she hadn’t called in her merry chase yet. No chopper would be coming, no backup coming fast up the hill. And this asshole under her shotgun was right. She couldn’t cover him and this guy on the hill at the same time. Besides, he was just at the edge of where she believed a shotgun would be effective, anyway. He could take his time, take careful aim, and this would be her last act on earth.

  “What the fuck are you waiting for?! Shoot this cunt!” the blond man screamed.

  God, she wanted to pull the trigger, and she decided that if that gunman lifted his arm, she was going to. She wasn’t going out like this! Not with two kids just over that rise and down the drive. No! Not a fucking chance. But tears were watering her eyes as she decided on this last act of defiance.

  Then the man’s gun arm moved, very slowly, as if he wanted her to see what he was doing, and he put the gun inside his jacket. He watched her for a moment longer, and then gave her a nod. In that nod, she saw, “Good game, you win. Well done.”

  It was all rogue-class bullshit, of course, she decided, but her heart swelled with a bit of pride anyway.

  Then with startling speed, he was gone, past the rise, and all she had of him was the sound of his engine going down the trail.

  She looked down at the blond man, the man who called for her murder, with murder in her eyes. He must have seen it, because he shut up.

  With her hand radio, she called for backup and said she had a possible suspect for the liquor store robbery. She gave the general direction of where number two had gone, but if he knew those trials and knew where he was going, they weren’t going to catch him. He was gone, and privately in her heart of hearts, she hoped he would make it.

  ***

  Hank took the stairs up to the office of the president two at a time. Gripped in his hand was his leather patch vest. He had defeat in his shoulders but no shame in his eyes.

  After knocking on the door and hearing the summons, he went inside the office, which always struck him as being too large for the space, and closed the door behind him.

  Knight, the president of the Steel Riders, and Ben Tailor, the VP, were there. Knight was washing a broad leaf of one of his plants on the cabinet behind his desk.

  Hank felt that it was best just to get this over with. He walked forward, and with only a slight tremble in his hand, put his patch vest on Knight’s desk. He was about to turn to leave without a word.

  “Wait,” Knight’s voice said. It didn’t sound like a command, but it was one.

  Hank turned and looked back, not sure he was going to get through this without a tear if his elder kept him too long. Ten years he had ridden with this man, and the men downstairs, and the nearly two hundred others.

  “Tell me,” Knight said.

  Hank started with the oil leak, and then it just poured out of him. Every detail, every turn of events, all the way to him sitting on the hill with his gun in his hand, looking down on the deputy. It was a clear shot. He could take it in his sleep. There was no cover for her, and she couldn’t get him with the scatter gun. That was a bad choice on her part. She should have stuck with her revolver.

  “Derrick called out for me to take her,” Hank told Knight and Ben, “but I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t. It wasn’t self-defense, and it certainly wasn’t war.” He took a long breath. “So I left him. I left my brother.” He looked to Knight. “Can I go now?”

  “No,” Knight told him. “No, you can’t. And you can’t give me your patch, either. Now, if you would have come in here and told me the story with murder on the end of it, then you could have given me your patch. Because that’s what it would have been. Not a killing, not self-defense as you already suggested, but a simple murder. And for what?

  “No,” Knight continued, and as he sat down he picked up his phone. “I got this. I’ll call Larry, Larry will do his Larry thing, and we’ll have Derrick back with us in no time at all. All Derrick has to do is sit tight for a couple of hours and keep his mouth shut. No worries.”

  Hank’s hand was shaking when he picked back up his vest. “Thanks. Let me know what to do to cover Larry’s cost. Any job the club needs, consider it done.”

  “Coming from you, that’s quite an offer, but one I accept. There is something, as a matter of fact. Sit down, let me call Larry and get Derrick taken care of, and then we’ll talk about it. Ben and I were just discussing who might take care of this problem for us.”

  But Derrick didn’t sit tight, and he didn’t keep his mouth shut, and he did two years in Chino for robbery.

  ***

  Knight was expanding the Rider’s distribution and connections network, and he used Hank as his rider. Hank rode to Texas, to Florida, down into Mexico, up to Seattle, and into Canada. He rode all across the Midwest. For the next three years, Hank rode with, met, drank with, and occasionally fought with bikers all over three different countries. With the Internet, he kept in touch with many of those he befriended along the way.

  At the end of it, Knight had a resource network far greater than a club their size would be expected to have. He could move dope and stolen goods with effortless speed. Several times, through this network, he invested club funds into drug deals other clubs were investing in, allowing greater buy-ins with much greater profits.

  Then Knight came to Hank with a real job, a job that would take all his skill, all of his observation talents, and some fucking amazing luck to accomplish without dying.

  Hank accepted the job with a nod, took off his vest, and rode away for eight months.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Current Day

  Cynthia "Cyn" Palmer pulled her red Lowrider up to the club and scanned the bikes outside, recognizing several. She spotted Larry’s blue and white Heritage and slid in beside him. She liked Larry. For a lawyer, he was alright. Sure, he was old enough to almost be her father, but he was easy to talk to, funny, intelligent, and had great blue eyes that sparkled like sapphires. To top it off, even with his age he had a nice ass in his blue jeans.

  So, yeah, a few too many drinks and Larry saying the right words, it could happen. Thinking about it, she wouldn’t mind it at all, and could easily play the scene all the way through. In the morning, they would likely be slightly embarrassed about the whole thing. For the next few chance meetings, they would give each other smiles and waves and keep on going. After a couple of weeks, though, they would settle back down into the comfortable friendship that they enjoyed together right now — and hell, then it could happen again.

  She brought her Lowrider down on its stand, pulled off her helmet, and shook out her thick red hair, running her fingers through the mane to fluff it out a little. Then she got off and headed for the club door.

  So far, Larry was the only one she thought it could happen with. There were plenty of good men in the Steel Riders MC, having over two hundred members in the San Diego area. She had met Ben the VP, James, of course, and Halo, and even Rick — and all of their beautiful wives and girlfriends.

  Randy, a prospect, was more than a little cute, bu
t he was a prospect still, and she got bad vibes from the way he looked at Daphne, her best friend. Daphne was with Derrick, and Derrick sponsored Randy in, so it seemed to Cyn that Daphne would be way off-limits for Randy — if he had any respect in him, but Cyn wasn’t sure he did.

  That aside, it was honestly difficult to think of Derrick with respect. She just didn’t believe that Derrick would have her back when the chips went down. He talked a lot, too.

  Most of what came out of Derrick’s mouth was mean, and normally about someone in the club. He just said shit, and it was constant. She had only been coming around here for two months and she had witnessed Derrick get the crap beat out of him three times for saying the wrong shit about the wrong person.

  Derrick wasn’t that big of a guy. About six feet tall, yes, but he didn’t have a great build. His shoulders were alright; his body was more or less in shape. The muscles of his arms were defined by hard labor, not gym groomed. His shock of blond hair and those blue eyes of his were his best features, but they didn’t help much in a fight.