Chapter 2
Bear
T here were exactly two hours before a rare mid-week “prayer” meeting at the club.
Enough time to slip in a run. I scanned the clouds.
The day started ominously and marched vindictively toward the promise of a late season downpour spurred on by moisture coming up from the south and a hard-edged cold front creeping down from the north.
This far west in Pennsylvania the remnants of most fall hurricanes were gentler than if I lived on the gulf or the coast east of here, but lately it seemed as if the planet wanted humanity washed off its surface.
Or blown off. I could appreciate the sentiment, as long as it wasn’t aimed at me.
The wind picked up.
I tied my running shoes and prayed no one saw me.
At six-five and pushing two hundred and eighty pounds, it was hard not to see me, but what I really wanted was for no one to take one look at my tattoos, my mohawk, my bulk, and then see the bright as fuck neon pink running shoes and laugh their asses off at me.
Slow . I didn’t mind being called fat because I could have another eighty pounds of beer gut and still kick the speaker’s ass. But slow? That was a death sentence. And I loved living too much to be a corpse any time soon.
So , I’d started… slow . Fuck , I hated that word.
That meant a treadmill tucked inside the safe room in my basement.
When that got boring, I toyed with the idea of jogging the multi-purpose trail behind my house.
And with that fool notion, I’d let some idiot salesman talk me into bright pink running shoes.
They were an embarrassment of epic proportions.
One that kept me from starting any public workout until it was almost too late in the season to make a habit of it.
With two hours to kill and a storm keeping everyone inside, I slipped onto the bike path behind my house and ran away from the city.
The first leg was easy. Then the asphalt ended, and gravel took its place.
Whatever . I’d keep going for twenty minutes, path or not.
Then come back, take a quick shower and haul my ass to the impromptu Wednesday night meeting at the Destroyers ’ club house tucked into a junkyard across the river about two miles north.
What ? You thought I meant a Christian prayer meeting in a church?
Hell , I’d be struck dead walking into one of those.
I was a proud pagan follower of Odin and Thor .
I wore a heavy silver hammer pendant around my neck like those folks wore crosses.
And despite my wild black hair that I kept braided in a stripe from forehead to neck, I was biologically, and more importantly, animalistically, Norse .
I was born an ancient soul in the modern world.
That’s why I’d found a home with the Destroyers MC .
They were the right kind of drunken, pillaging idiots I enjoyed.
But if they saw me in pink shoes, damn. My reputation would go right into the shitter.
I pounded out those thoughts as the gravel crunched under my feet.
The path took a turn toward the river, avoiding the industrial park where the club owned four warehouse buildings that brought in over ten grand in lease income each month.
That was another thing that had changed in the last few years.
It used to be that the Skilletsville Destroyers barely had any legal cashflow outside of dues, the junkyard, and accompanying automotive or motorcycle repair shops.
But then the dumbest idiot of the bunch slept with his half-sister…
not biologically his half-sister, mind you…
but damn that whole concept was kind of ball-shriveling for some of us, and then, fool that Sprout was, he married her.
At least there was a perk besides sex. She inherited almost nine-hundred-million dollars and didn’t mind sharing it with her husband or his club.
I know what you’re thinking, no fucking way. And yes, way .
Now we were not only rolling in dough, but appointed as the people responsible for building this town beyond its little steel industry roots and straight into gentrification. I hated it. One day, this running path would be finished, and all the wildness would be gone. That hurt.
But the money was great, so I shut the fuck up and did my part. And just to make sure no one invited me to any groundbreakings or soirees, I added more tattoos to my skin, piercings to anything that could get pierced, and gave up wearing anything normal.
Fuck normal.
And fuck pink. I slapped my foot into the middle of a puddle, turning a neon abomination into a muddy one. I searched for another puddle to complete the set. That’s why I didn’t notice the surroundings until the flash of lightning silhouetted a?—
Was that chick naked?
I froze in my tracks.
She stood on the end of an old boat dock. We were supposed to tear that down next week as part of the park renovation. It wasn’t safe .
Neither was standing over water during a lightning storm. But I’d be damned if I said anything.
Did I mention she was naked ?
And she had the longest hair I’d ever seen in person. It wrapped around her and swirled like a living thing. The kicker? Every few seconds, there’d be a flash of boob. Or ass.
Oh , and those delicate little divots of flesh behind her knees. They lured me like a siren.
I wanted to possess her.
A lesser man would have. She had to realize how dangerous this was, didn’t she? Any predator would love to nibble their teeth into a chunk of that.
I stared down at my singular pristine pink shoe and crouched so the weeds would conceal my monstrous form. No sense in scaring her once she turned around. But if anyone else came down this path, I’d fuck ’em up. Whoever she was, woman, or nymph, she had my protection. Whether she liked it or not.
And she had my attention.
She cocked her hand back and screamed something into the storm. The object flashed white for a moment, then splashed into the river half a second later.
That wasn’t a rock. I knew a binding spell when I saw it.
Whoever was on the other end of that curse was a dead man.
Assumptions aside, no woman pisses off another woman that hard.
Nope . If the rare instance happens, most women do one of two things, well, most of the times both.
First , they get quiet. That’s because they are plotting murder.
Then they admit whatever plot they’ve concocted to their sister in spirit to compare notes and viability, and all’s forgiven and forgotten.
It’s a damn fine thing that women are not the fragile creatures men think they are because one serious cat fight would have wiped out the planet.
But when that anger pointed at a man? Well …
that’s when there’s an edge to the pain.
Instead of theory, desperation takes over.
Because while women aren’t fragile, they can’t take down a man my size and still have enough left over to slice his neck.
Not without losing a piece of their own hide in the process.
Which is why I assumed whoever this creature was, it was a man who’d made her angry.
All the more reason to keep my ass hidden until she left.
The rain began to blow sideways. It would be a pain in the ass to run face first into it to get home, but I’d made the dumbass choice to pick tonight for my first foray into outdoor jogging, I’d deal with it.
She struggled up the bank, wrapping the length of her hair around her arm at least three times. Her wet clothes were tucked under the other.
The dress she slipped into was homespun.
Odd . But it gave me a clue. There were Pennsylvania Dutch settlers in this region.
Varying religious sects made this area home, too.
From Quakers to Amish , there was a hodgepodge of “folk” who made their own clothing.
And then there were the new cults popping up among the Evangelicals who believed in trad-wives and that stuff.
It fit with the long hair. Or , she could be one of the homespun pagan types who created their own ritual dresses.
That was a puzzle piece I’d figure out later.
She shrugged a man’s utility coat on. The color might have been pale orange once, but age had frayed the cuffs and faded it to a dull tan.
And it was soaked. She was soaked.
I was soaked.
Despite that, I crawled to a break in the grass so I could watch her climb into her car… Gods damn it. I ducked back behind the weed cover.
I knew that car. It was not hers. There was only one F8 green Scat Pack Dodge Charger R / T in the county.
And while we all “heard” Carl Windgren boast that he had a woman, no one I knew had ever seen her.
No one in their right mind would ask him if he was lying, either. Because Carl had a reputation.
A weird one.
He moved at least 100K of our product every year.
Had done so for at least five years straight.
He was solid, careful, and meticulous. He rarely overindulged, and had a head for numbers.
His house was a rathole in one of Harrisburg’s worst neighborhoods, and he didn’t do flashy.
Except for that damn car. And everyone knew if you touched it, you’d die.
Well , the assumption was you were dead.
He had an uncanny knack for making people disappear.
Permanently . Even the Destroyers respected that.
He was soft-spoken, rarely bragged, and didn’t hesitate to word his threats in such cold, calculating phrasing that you just knew he already had your murder plotted and it was all a matter of semantics at that point.
Carl was our homegrown Norman Bates of the drug trafficking industry.
And he really had a woman. One he hadn’t made disappear like so many others around him.
I didn’t know if I felt sorry for her or not.
But I smiled as the woman drove away.
He’d pissed his woman off.