Chapter 8
CHAPTER EIGHT
R arity…
Tension rode my shoulders and tightened everything along my spine the more these yahoos danced around fighting each other. It wasn’t a matter of “if” but “ when” – the one with the name flash Striker had pretty much said as much. I didn’t know how I felt about that.
On the one hand, a heads-up was always nice… on the other, all I could think was could we just… not?
I swear to God, it was a confusing scene in front of my bar. The men in red and black, their crowned skull of a logo on the back of their cuts, were fairly respectful. I didn’t pay any mind to the one who tipped me by way of telling me not to be a bitch. That was banter at its finest around here, and besides that, Striker had made up for it. Honestly, I think his brother had been trying to be Striker’s wingman.
I glanced up the bar to where Striker had left his place, wandering back to his little knot of fellow Royal Bastards.
He was older than me – but in that way that made it hard to tell if it was a lot, a little, or somewhere in between.
He had a good smile, all of his teeth in his head, but imperfect – a guy who had definitely never done the whole braces thing like I had, for which I was a little jealous. He had good teeth, too, just a couple crooked in the bottom set, and nothing crowded or gapped up top.
Checking a guy’s teeth around here was almost a necessity. There was a lot of hardcore drug use in the area, and no fucking thank you .
I didn’t ever want to hook up with some meth, ice, or worse – a budding flakka user.
I didn’t want to end up like that poor homeless man with his face eaten off. Florida man was a real thing down here and I wanted no part in that crazy.
Judgmental of me? Probably more than a little bit, but that’s how things had to go if you wanted to stay safe in this day and age.
About the only thing I liked about watching Striker sidle up to my bar was watching him go . He had a fine ass, and he knew how to wear his jeans. Wranglers by the look of them, and they fit him like a fucking dream .
He was ruggedly handsome with chin-length brown hair and a set of keen hazel eyes that leaned more to green than any other color. His white tee underneath his dirty, patched vest hugged all the right places, and he had a nice set to his shoulders and swell of his chest.
Made me want to lift the tee and see what was under the hood – which was kind of obnoxious. I didn’t have time to date or for a fling or any of that. Not with Mom and the boys depending on me. My family was my whole world, and with Dad gone, I felt wholeheartedly like it fell to me. You know?
I know, my mom was supposed to be the adultier adult, but it’d taken two adults to keep things going and together when Dad had been alive. Even though his going had hit me hard – and I do mean really hard, my mom? It’d all but destroyed her. So, with him gone, a lot was my responsibility now. There were three boys who would someday need to go to college and live their best lives. While we’d set some chunks aside for them in some high-yield savings from Dad’s life insurance, it was only a drop in the bucket with things going up, and up, and up.
I automatically contributed a hundred dollars a month to each account, and that was a chunk of change times three.
Their future was everything … just like mine had been everything to my parents as I’d been growing up. I had no problem putting college on hold for a while to make sure the boys were taken care of. The plan was that things would get easier, and I would be able to do the whole school thing when they got into elementary school, which was only next year or, at worst, the year after.
Until then, I would work, work, work, work, work.
There was no way I could even pull in half of what my dad had when he was alive. Hell, I didn’t even think I pulled in a third of his salary between both my jobs and tips, but something was definitely better than nothing .
It was scary and frustrating, for sure, but what else was there to do? It was like wading through quicksand anymore.
I focused hard on keeping both Gemma and me behind the bar as much as possible. If these idiots didn’t throw down, it would make for a big fuckin’ mess to clean up later and would keep us here well past closing to do it. But this was definitely the safer option.
The cops didn’t really respond to bar fights here anymore – as long as things stayed to just fisticuffs. The bikers sure as hell wouldn’t be the ones to call them in, and the staff didn’t if we didn’t have to because our employment depended on the bar remaining operational. Too much violence or too many calls into PD would get our liquor license suspended.
The only time we called the cops was if we had to call an ambulance, and even then, it was iffy on if we called the cops, too – generally preferring to white lie and say whatever altercation took place outside the bar behind the gas station up front and out at the road.
No, the cops didn’t come unless shots were fired, which was a very real possibility tonight with how the vibe felt. If one of these assholes from either side started popping off, I wanted to be behind the bar ducking and covering behind the thick planks and steel refrigeration units back here.
I hadn’t had to deal with more than just fists being thrown. There was one night, a knife came out, and a dude got his arm slashed bad enough that the wee-woo wagon had to be called in. But that was because he couldn’t ride and our bouncer was holding his arm basically together and keeping the pressure on through three blood-soaked bar towels, and that was with an emergency tourniquet applied to his upper arm.
Had to hand it to the dude that got slashed, though.
None of us were really the wiser that anything was serious down on the ground where it’d happened. He didn’t scream, cry, or holler at all. He just sat patiently and waited while Big Dawg held his shit together, and he puffed on a cigarette, waiting to get taken away.
That was the wildest thing to go down, and that was in the thick of Bike Week and Spring Break. Not this past year, but the year before.
This was my third summer working the outdoor decks. I usually found seasonal retail and stock work in the winter months when they stripped back the employment around here to the main indoor bar space up front.
“We’re out of Jack!” Gemma called. “I have to go down!”
“Don’t!” I called back. “Radio down to the boys. They need to bring some up! Neither one of us is wading through that.” I jerked my head in the direction across the bar and to the thickening crowd up here.
She nodded and got on the radio.
The boys were generally runners and gophers anyway. Their main objective was to keep the trash chutes and garbage bins emptied, run liquor up here, or tap new kegs or new boxes of syrup for the soda machines when we ran dry. All of that was on the ground level and let us do what we were supposed to up here which was smile, flirt, and serve customers.
Neither of us was in a flirting mood up here today, though. Not with this crowd.
It was a tightwire act on a good day, and today was definitely not a good fucking day.
The feeling was palpable and indescribably dark. The energy shifted from wary to a careful circling of two hissing and spitting wildcats. The verbal barbs were sharper, the hatred so thick, it oozed up between the cracks in the boards and rolled out underfoot, climbing up each and every one of the bikers in a miasma of negativity.
It was such a thing, it was almost physically visible to the naked eye.
The biker, who was older than me but still hot, caught my eye from where he stood in a knot of his brothers and gave me a serious look and a wink, dipping his chin just so to let me know that this symphony of discord was about to hit its crescendo.
I nodded, imperceptibly enough, I hoped, and then it happened – a ruckus at the far end of the deck, between our bar and bar number three. It started with shouting, then devolved into shoving. I looked from the turbulence in the bodies to Striker. He made a hand gesture in my direction to get down, and I grabbed Gemma’s wrist and pulled her down with me.
“Oh, shit,” she said, and I nodded. We huddled small behind the bar and did the only thing we could - radioed downstairs to call in the cavalry… if they weren’t too chickenshit to get their asses up here and throw down.
I didn’t have high hopes for that. Clearly.