Chaos Chapter 1
I packed up the truck, making sure we’d left none of our tools behind and cleaned up any scraps of material from the brand-new Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC) system we’d installed at a downtown office building.
The old one had conked out yesterday. We warned the building’s owner, Sylvia, three months ago that the system was on borrowed time and was about two years past due to give up the ghost. We recommended a whole new system.
Sylvia had insisted on playing the odds.
I knew she was overwhelmed. Her husband had managed the building.
She had nothing to do with property management, only him.
That ended two years ago when he died unexpectedly.
After he was gone, everything fell to her, both at home and for the various properties they owned.
I managed Heathen Heat & Air, our club’s HVAC repair and installation business.
I had discretion in what I charged customers, within reason.
I felt bad for her and offered a discount months ago.
Sylvia said no, just to repair it and move on.
Well, it was three months after the repair.
The entire unit had died. There was no patching it together with bubblegum and duct tape.
I didn’t say it that way to her, but it was how my facetious mind thought.
I’d still given her a ten percent discount on a job that cost five hundred and ten thousand dollars for a four-story, thirty-thousand-square-foot building.
That was for a basic system. I warned her that, for a building like hers with office spaces, she needed a mid-range system to complement the modern controls and ductwork and improve energy efficiency.
She said she couldn’t afford to pay up to seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars for one.
I didn’t tell her that a highly complex system would be even higher.
She should thank her lucky stars she didn’t have to do that.
That level can cost as much as nine hundred thousand dollars.
After paying for materials and labor and applying the discount, we’d still make money, but not as much as she probably imagined.
I couldn’t discount all the time, but sometimes I did when I felt it was necessary.
I felt sorry for her, which was why I offered it to Sylvia.
She had zero family to help her. Zero, as in none willing or able to help, not that she had no family.
It was the reminder of a crappy family that made me feel bad for her.
Forge rounded the HVAC unit on the roof. He scanned the rooftop. When he saw me, he came toward me.
“You find anything we missed?” I asked.
He was my right-hand man at Heathen. Others worked for us who were civilians, regular citizens. We were the only Pagans at the moment.
“Nope, not a thing. The guys have everything loaded back into the trucks. They’re ready when you are unless there’s anything you need them to do,” Forge replied.
“I can’t think of anything, and it appears all clear to me. If you say the same, then let’s get out of here. It’s Friday, the end of the workweek. Everyone wants to go home.”
“I don’t know about you, but I’m ready to kick back, have a few beers, and relax. This week has been a killer,” Forge stated as we made our way to the rooftop access door.
“I wouldn’t mind a few beers,” I agreed.
As we walked down the four flights of stairs to the street, I thought about our week.
Forge was right. It had been a killer. It was good for business, but exhausting when so many big jobs hit all at once.
Usually, we have more HVAC crises in the summer and winter, but for November it hasn’t gotten too cold yet, and units are dying left and right.
Minor repairs that required replacing small parts weren’t a big deal, but whole units were.
The drive back to our office didn’t take long.
The company’s trucks and vans were parked in a garage attached to the business, so there was no need to unpack them fully.
It saved time. By the time we waved our workers off for the weekend, Forge and I had about half an hour of work left.
We got paid a salary, so letting our hourly workers go made sense.
When everything was straightened out and in order so we could start next week clean, he and I set the alarm, locked up, and got on our bikes.
Winter was coming closer, but we still refused to stop riding our bikes.
And being where we were in Georgia, the number of days we’d be tempted not to ride was few.
For us, the days normally still got up into the upper fifties and the nights into the middle-to-lower thirties.
Rain was common for us. Any substantial snow or ice was rare.
We occasionally had light, powdery flurries, and if anything accumulated, it melted fast. I loved Georgia because we got all four seasons without tons of snow and freezing our asses off for months at a time.
The sun had set a while ago, so daylight was gone as we made our way through town and out of the limits toward home.
?
The music was thumping. It was old rock ’n’ roll songs tonight. All the single guys, including the prospects, were here, as were some of the couples. Not all of them, since the kids needed to be watched over, and it wasn’t a night when babysitters would be brought in.
In addition, we had the club’s four club bunnies and several hang-arounds—women from town and beyond who came to party and have sex with bikers—here. Three of the bunnies—Silk, Shandi, and Cheeks—had been with us for a good while. The fourth, AnnMarie, had joined us back in April.
AnnMarie wasn’t a typical bunny. She wasn’t with us all the time.
When she approached the club and told us she wanted to be here only part-time, we offered to have her be a hang-around.
They came and went whenever they wanted.
However, AnnMarie explained her home situation, which led us to make an exception.
AnnMarie was a caregiver for her dad after he had a stroke.
However, she couldn’t be with him all the time without risking burnout, so another caregiver came in.
When that person was there, the only other bed in the house was taken, leaving her with nowhere to sleep.
She didn’t make enough money to afford her own apartment.
The solution was that she would be here only on Friday and Saturday nights, the only consistent nights the bunnies and hangers were at the clubhouse.
On any other night, they were there only if the club or an individual brother requested them.
The bunnies, unlike in most MCs, didn’t live on our compound.
The setup worked for AnnMarie. There was a place for her off the compound that she could use on the weekends.
Since it was Friday night, they were all here.
Some were hanging on to single brothers, while others danced or put on a show, acting as if they were playing pool.
But in actuality, they were draping themselves over the tables, showing off their barely there clothing, trying to tempt one or more of us to take them to bed.
Or to fuck them right there in the common room.
With a bar that served almost any alcohol you wanted, inhibitions were lowered, and that made things rowdier.
I wasn’t paying any attention to their antics.
I was kicking back, nursing a beer—only my second of the night because I wasn’t in the mood to get drunk or nurse a hangover tomorrow.
Forge, Mishap, and Eagle were sitting with me.
We’d been shooting the shit about work and just things in general for the past hour.
Troublemaker, Mishap, and Eagle were our latest members to be patched in.
Eagle patched in a year ago last month, and Troublemaker’s one-year anniversary was coming in December.
Mishap had come from our Cherokee chapter not long after he started prospecting for them.
He’d moved back into the area he grew up in.
He started in Cherokee because he was friends with two of the guys who were members, Rough and Tumble, but he found he wanted to return to Georgia.
Technically, he should still be prospecting, but not long ago, he had saved our president Wrath’s old lady, Jalisa, and daughter, Dora, from a group of ragtag bikers who thought they would establish themselves in our area.
They thought it would be smart to go after the president’s family to prove themselves or some stupid shit. None had survived to tell us why.
They made their move on a mostly deserted road when Mishap, Jalisa, and Dora were coming home. The bikers put hidden spikes in the road and blew out the tires. When Mishap went out to check what was wrong, they tried to storm the vehicle to take Jalisa and Dora.
Even though Jalisa held her own in the ensuing fight, including shooting a couple of the other bikers, Mishap, or Rawley as he was known then, had been beaten and shot.
He refused to stop until the last of them fell.
It had been six against two and a toddler.
When Wrath and the rest of us heard about it and had ensured that no one else from that group remained, we’d voted to patch Rawley in early.
He kept referring to what happened as a mishap, so that became his road name.
All of them were solid brothers, just like the rest. To make it through the prospect period and earn your road name and permanent cut, you had to prove yourself in several ways. It was why we made most guys prospect two years, or thereabouts, to see if they had what it took to be one of us.