Chapter Five #2
Fear flashed for just a second, but the kid had balls and shoved it down. “You’re an enforcer, right?”
“You might know biker culture,” I assured him with a slow smile. “But you don’t know me and you don’t know biker life.” I didn’t raise my voice. I didn’t have to. Men who needed to shout to get their point across didn’t usually last long in our world.
“Ow, fuck!” he shouted when Dagger grabbed him by the back of his neck and pulled out his knife. With wide, panicked eyes he spoke through clenched teeth. “What the shit, man?”
I shrugged. “It’s called extracting answers. Who the fuck is Syko?”
He shrugged, matching my posture as much as he could. Asshole thought he was a big man. I knew it wouldn’t take much to scare the kid into talking.
“Suit yourself.” It was my turn to enforce some shit, and I picked up the tattoo gun Dagger handed me. I turned to the kid and said, “I’ll give you a choice, you can have ‘pedo’, ‘pussy’, or ‘snitch’ tattooed across your fucking forehead.” .
“You wouldn’t.”
“Try me,” I said as I put my foot on the pedal and the tattoo gun buzzed to life. The idea of being publicly branded might be enough to make him talk. But if not, I had other methods I could use.
In a big, dramatic display his legs shook, and he shrieked like a little fucking girl. “Asshole! Stop. Is that a dirty fucking needle?”
It wasn’t. Dagger had put in a clean set, but I smiled. “Don’t know. Is it?” I flicked the switch again.
“Stop it!” he shouted, voice loud, shrill and filled with panic.
“Tell me about Syko and maybe I will.”
When that got no response, I put down the tattoo gun.
I eyed his body carefully as if I was contemplating what to do next, but I already knew.
“I don’t hear you talking,” I told him in a low, calm voice.
It was the voice Vandal called my serial killer tone.
Pain wasn’t the goal. Fear was. But pain was just the tool that got us there faster.
“Look man, I don’t know.”
“That’s not fucking good enough,” I told him, stepping closer and grabbing his face with one hand.
His breathing was shallow and his eyes were wide with the anticipation of pain. “He’s really fucking crazy.”
I frowned. “Does that mean you’re more scared of him than me?” I asked. “Because that would be a really bad fucking mistake.”
He looked away.
“Suit yourself, kid.” Dagger and Rebel held his shoulders as if they could read my mind.
“Come on man,” he said barely above a whisper.
“Talk.”
He grunted but otherwise said nothing.
It wasn’t my favorite thing, torturing people, but this asshole left me no choice. “All right, pants off,” I said calmly. “Let’s stop pretending.” I turned to Vandal and held out my hand. “Knife.”
The kid went totally still, so still he even stopped breathing.
“Is ten grand worth your balls, because if it is just tell me now because I’ll happily take this problem off your hands.”
He swallowed and then shook his head. “Look man, do what you want but this guy is bad fuckin’ news. He threatened my sister. She’s sixteen man, sixteen.”
Something cold and ugly twisted in my gut. Threatening kids was a line that never blurred.
“And if I kill you right now, what’s stopping him from going after her anyway?” I felt for the kid, but not enough to let him off the hook. “Tell me whatever you’re keeping from me, and I promise you won’t die here today. Deal?”
He stared at me, weighing his options. I saw him trying to calculate if I was more dangerous than whoever the fuck Syko was.
I searched his pockets until I found his wallet and tossed it to Falcon. “Send his name to Slate and find out where I can find this sister of his, maybe then he’ll talk.”
His eyes went wide. “You wouldn’t,” he gasped. “Word is that you’re asshole outlaws, but you don’t hurt innocent people.”
“When we can help it, yeah, we prefer to leave civilians alone. Right now though, I need intel. I need to find out who the fuck is targeting my club and you’re standing in my way.”
Falcon was already on the phone, loudly spelling the kid’s name. “Yeah, he said she’s sixteen.”
“Fine! Fuck! Okay!” He was breathing hard.
I did. “Now talk.”
“He didn’t tell us his name, and he wore a bandana over the bottom half of his face. It was clear that he was trying to hide his identity.”
“Why do you say that?” Dagger asked.
“It’s been hot as fuck lately and he had on a leather jacket. It was plain though, which I thought was weird since he rolled up on a big-ass Harley. But when he pulled out the cash, I saw it, a patch that said Syko, and I remember thinking is it psycho or sicko. That’s how I knew his name.”
“Any clue what MC he was from?”
“Nope. His orders were to fuck this place up as much as we could.”
That didn’t make sense. Out of all the places we owned, why the tattoo shop. “Anything else?”
He hesitated.
I groaned. “Kid, do you really want more pain? Just fucking tell me.”
“Okay,” he sighed. “It’s just, I don’t know, I didn’t get the sense that he hated you or that he cared about what we did.”
“Elaborate,” Rebel demanded.
“I’ve done this kind of shit before, ya know? People pay us to make a mess, usually to convince people they need protection. When that happens the person givin’ the orders is explicit, angry, like they want us to do a lot of damage. Syko said it but it was like he didn’t really give a fuck.”
Like someone paid him to do it. “You ever heard of Chaos Raiders?”
He frowned and shook his head. “No. I swear, never heard of ‘em.”
I nodded once. “See, that wasn’t so hard now, was it?”
The moment I stepped back, my brothers released him and he fell to the floor.
Dagger bent down, grabbed him by the hair, and yanked his head back. “If I see you or your friends around here again, I will personally rip your balls off and feed ‘em to you, feel me?”
He nodded. “Yeah. I got you.”
“Good, because that’s just the start of what I’ll do to you and your buddies. Spread the word.” He patted his face a little too hard and shoved him towards the door.
“I’ll let Rocky and Diesel know what we learned,” Rebel offered, already on his phone and giving us his back.
Falcon, for his part, was already rounding up prospects to come clean up the shop.
We left the shop as a group and headed back to the clubhouse just to make sure everybody had the new intel.
I did some thinking while on the road. Some of the pieces had started to slide into place but there was still a lot of unknown information.
Once we got back, I updated Diesel. “Sounds like somebody is targeting us and I have a feeling it’s not the Chaos Raiders.”
Diesel nodded. “Agreed. Slate will see what he can find online, everybody else, keep your fucking eyes and ears open. Learn what you can through any source you have.” He eyed each of us and then with a nod, dismissed us all.
I took some time before I headed home, needing to clear my head before I went inside to hug my little girl. She was the best fucking part of me, and I wouldn’t do anything to harm her progress.
Including getting in deeper with the woman who seemed to think her job was to do more than babysit.