Chapter 8
Chapter Eight
Red and blue lights flashed in my side mirrors.
I hadn’t even made it three blocks before the little pencil dick from that stupid fucking office building contacted the cops. Too bad I couldn’t have made it closer to the clubhouse. If they were chasing me down, I was probably going in the back of their cruiser. One thing I quickly filed away was in this particular neighbourhood, their response time was impeccable. I would need to remember that the next time we did any business in this community.
At least they didn’t use the siren.
Not wanting to give them any further ammunition, I pulled over to the side of the road, removed my helmet, and waited for the officer. From the mirror, I spotted two male officers exiting the cruiser. Both of them were over six feet tall, and built. Definitely no donut dunkers in their car. One of them remained at the front of the cruiser. He actively surveyed the situation with his hand firmly on his service weapon, while his partner took a couple of steps forward, mimicking his hand placement.
Hopefully, they weren’t too trigger happy.
“Turn off the ignition, swing your right leg around to get off, then take off your helmet and step to the side. I want you to face away from me,” he commanded.
Great.
I complied without saying a word. Two steps later, he was barking out more commands. It wasn’t the first time I had been in this type of situation, but the way the sound of his voice irrationally attracted me to this cop was making everything worse.
This wouldn’t be a re-imagination of my wildest dreams.
“Get down on your knees and put your hands on your head.”
Once I was down, he approached. Placing his knee just above my tailbone, he held me in place while putting my wrists in handcuffs behind me. He placed his hands under my elbows and helped me back up to my feet. Then he marched me back to the cruiser.
“What are you arresting me for?” I finally asked. Making eye contact with the officer, I schooled my features.
“Lean on the hood,” he responded.
Not exactly the kinky night I was looking for.
“Shouldn’t you be calling for a female officer to do the pat down?”
“Something tells me you don’t mind having a man’s hands on your body,” he whispered. “After all, they call you Hellcat, don’t they?
He was needling me to try to get a rise out of me so I would do something stupid. Sucked to be him because I wouldn’t fall for it. Stupid cop thought I was born yesterday or some shit.
“I don't know what you're talking about.”
“Right. Okay. If you want to play it that way, then we will.”
Asshole.
“Look, I don’t know who you think I am, but you’ve got the wrong person,” I told him. The last thing I needed was for his partner to ask the wrong questions. There was a reason I didn’t interact with the police that often. I didn’t want to find myself on their radar.
“I’m pretty sure I’ve got the right girl,” he told me with a smirk. “Let’s go to the station and find out.”
Of course I knew who he was the moment he arrested me. I wasn’t stupid enough not to put two and two together. This wasn’t my first run in with Officer Erickson, only when I met him he sure as hell wasn’t a cop and he went by the name Axel. We were introduced a couple of years ago while I was completing a contract with another club up in River City.
We had several passionate nights before he dropped off the face of the earth. This was the first time I had seen him in a year. Exchanges like ours rarely involved numbers changing hands. Considering he was wearing a badge now, it didn’t surprise me. Seeing him now, I realized he must have been working undercover, but holy hell, he played the part well.
“Fine by me,” I replied. “I’ll be out in less than an hour.”
“You seem pretty sure of yourself for a biker’s bitch.”
“I’m nobody’s bitch,” I responded with ire. “Do me a favour. While you feel me up, have your partner move my bike off to the side of the road. I’ll be beyond pissed if someone wrecks it while I’m in lockup for absolutely no reason. Unless you’ll let me call someone to pick it up?”
“How about you say please?” he asked me.
I fluttered my eyelashes. “Pretty please, Officer Erickson, could you let me call my brother so I don’t lose my shit over my bike being fucked up?”
He rolled his eyes, then called out, “King, do you mind moving her bike off the road while I finish patting her down?”
King. Interesting. Must be one of the police chief’s kids.
“Are you gonna be okay with her?”
“She’s not gonna try anything.”
“Sure thing,” his partner called out.
I glanced to the side as he walked over to my bike. Keeping one eye on him, I tried to avoid thinking about how it felt to have hands roaming my body. There was something seriously wrong with me getting turned on by a pat down. Ice filled my veins as he discovered my matriarch. Thankfully, the extremely sharp, four inch stainless steel blade, was folded into the black handle. I wouldn’t have to worry about adding assaulting an officer to whatever list of charges he had.
So stupid.
It should have been in my pack, but since it was an extension of myself, I forgot I had it on me.
“Well, well, well. What do we have here?” he whispered in my ear as he discretely pulled it out of my jeans and pocketed it.
What the hell was he up to?
“Keep it,” I told him, feeling brash. “It’s only my backup.”
After I called Kujo to come get my bike, the cop placed me in the back of their cruiser and shut the door. He wasn’t going to let me wait around for my brother to show up, but I didn’t blame him. He already thought I was some biker bitch, so who knew what would come up behind him if he stayed until Kujo showed up. Lucky for him, we weren’t that type of biker club.
Unless he became a problem, we had no reason to remove him from the chessboard.
The only good thing about the back seat was how clean it was. In my experience, most of the cruisers I had been in smelled as if they hadn’t cleaned them in years. At least at this time of day, there likely had been no drunkards to vomit back here, but there was still a chance for some piss and shit. They molded the hard plastic seats at the back to allow for arms to fit comfortably, but the leg room forced my knees against the back of their seats.
Even though I was positive I could get out of these cuffs, they had nothing to fear from me in the back. The clear Plexiglas divider between the front and back kept them safe from less than savoury passengers. As we drove back to the station for booking, the radio crackled to life a couple of times with calls for backup and the like. The scent of coffee drifted through the tiny holes at the top of the barrier.
The ride gave me some time to stew about how he talked to me. I tried not to let men like him get to me, but something about having someone I found attractive just seeing the slutty biker chick got to me. If there was anything that drove me mad, it was men who thought they knew exactly who I was from one look at me. They always judged a book by its cover, or rather a biker chick by their club. I kept a pretty low profile by working as a bartender at the club. Not too many people expected a female to be a patched member because they were so used to the traditionally male dominated clubs.
Even if I was the only woman in the history of the Reapers who had been fully patched in.
The other thing people didn’t expect was for me to be educated beyond high school. They expected some inbred hick to be a part of the club. Not only did I almost have my degree at nineteen, but I also planned to be an excellent lawyer. After all, someone had to defend these people if we ever got caught doing what we did. Until then, I would continue to work as a manager of the club and make sure everything ran smoothly around here.
I had been blessed with the features and body of a shitty egg donor who was drop dead gorgeous when she wasn’t shooting up between her toes and a father who liked to spread his seed a little too freely and indiscriminately with multiple partners. It was something that came with being part of a club. We were on the road frequently. The men liked to play the field, unless they had settled down with an old lady. The women that liked to frequent the clubs didn’t mind, so what should it matter?
There were some men who continued to pretend they were single. There was the mentality of what happened on the road stayed on the road. I recalled the time I approached the Prez and brought up what I had seen. He told me to mind my own damned business. When I pushed the issue, because I was concerned he had done the same thing to his wife, he told me he couldn’t be bothered with policing the rest of the guys, but that none of my brothers thought cheating was acceptable.
When they were younger, they had agreed if they settled down, they wouldn’t follow in our father’s footsteps. We all loved each other with everything we had, but none of them wanted for the future mother of their children to suffer the same lonely existences as our mothers did.
Sometimes I still got glimpses of what I felt as that sad, scared little girl who couldn't wake her momma up. When I had to pick up a phone and call my brother, a perfect stranger, to come save me. Then I squashed the feeling down and channeled it into making sure that no more little girls, or boys, ever had to experience the anguish and uncertainty I didn’t in that moment.
I was five years old when I picked up the phone and called my brother Erik to come get me. Now that I was older, I understood my mom overdosed following one of her shifts at the strip club she worked at. She always used to leave me alone to go there at night, then she would bring back guests for a private party. Most of the time, they would drink, but sometimes they would get high. It all depended on the guests. To this day, I didn’t know if it was a bad batch, or just a little too much fun that ultimately killed her.
Either way, she was gone too soon, and even though she wasn’t much of a mother, part of me missed what she could have been to me.
It was normal for her to sleep through the next day after an exceptionally good party, so I didn’t worry when she hadn’t come out of her room the next day. However, when she didn’t wake up three days later, I was concerned. I went upstairs to check on her and no matter how much I yelled in her ears, she wouldn’t wake up.
She was cold to the touch, so I covered her up with more blankets, and then I went to get the number for the clubhouse so I could call. She kept it in her empty jewellery box, along with my birth certificate. Maybe there was something to be said about my mom selling all of her jewellery, but placed those two things in the box. My whole life that was one thing my mom drilled me on, was to memorize the number. She told me if anything happened to her I should call that number and ask for my brother Erik. She told me that my dad was dead, but that Erik would take care of me because I had his eyes.
The man on the other end of the line wasn’t my brother, but he told me he would give him the phone, so I waited.
“Hello,” he said when all the movement noises stopped.
“Is this Erik?” I asked.
“Yes,” he answered. He probably thought it was too late for me to be awake.
“My Momma told me if something ever happened to her, I’m s’posed to call you.”
“What’s your mom’s name?”
“Starla,” I told him.
“And what’s your name?” he asked.
“Harleigh Rayne,” I replied.
“Okay, Harleigh. Can you tell me what happened to your mom?”
“She won’t wake up.”
“How long has she been sleeping?” he asked.
“I counted three sleeps since mom was awake,” I answered.
“Okay. Is there a neighbour you trust?”
“Uh uh,” I replied.
“Where do you live?”
“Granville,” I answered, then he said a naughty word.
“Harleigh, if I sent one of my friends over there to stay with you, would that be okay?”
“You’re not coming?” I sniffed.
“I’m not gonna be able to get there until just after lunch.”
“Okay,” I answered.
“Great. I’m not gonna hang up while I call him, but I’m gonna set down the phone for a minute, okay.”
“Okay,” I told him, even if it wasn’t.
Just as Erik had promised, he got in his truck and rode the ten-hour drive it took to get me.
When I called Erik, I waited on the phone while he called one of his friends to come and stay with me. When Weyland showed up at the door, all I remembered was this enormous giant of a man with colourful drawings all over his skin. Just knowing my big brother had sent him to rescue me made it all okay. He was just this big teddy bear of a man and he was going to make everything okay. Another reason he didn’t scare me was because he didn’t act or smell like any of the other men my mom had brought home. The drunks that pretended to choose my bedroom door instead of the bathroom door across from me.
Only two of those assholes entered my room without me noticing right away, but I made sure the pitch of my scream was loud enough to scare them away before anything happened. When I told my mom what had happened, she said it must have been a dream or my overactive imagination. Then, my little five-year-old self learned about door jams. I snuck one from the grocery store one day when the neighbour lady took me with her. She passed away shortly before my mom overdosed.
Harriet was the only person I missed from my old life.