Running On Empty_Crows MC Read online

  I’d almost miss them if it weren’t for all the brain cells that I was sure had burst into flames, as well.

  God damn, it was hot!

  Almost hot enough to make me resent the sight of my V8 chopper. Almost! The sharp contrast of the smoldering flame decals against the navy blue body rippled with the waves of heat swirling off the concrete of the parking garage. The chrome shot back a warped reflection of my approach, and it took me a moment to realize that my face was dragged down in a sneer. Whether it was as far along as the shimmering mockery of Droopy Dog I stared back at or if that was just a trick of the curved surface was something I dreaded checking in the mirror. Slipping my helmet off the handlebar where I’d left it, I set it down on the concrete—letting it serve as a placeholder for me and the chopper in our absence—and then keyed the bike to life and welcomed the waking roar.

  “Atta girl,” I praised her, slipping into gear and starting out of my parking spot. “Good to know you didn’t croak in this heat.”

  My grip slipped on the clutch as I said this, throwing the chopper into a momentary sputter, and a stab of panic twisted in my throat as I imagined my words jinxing me at that moment. Regaining control, I gave the bike some gas and gasped at the gust of not-so-refreshing air that rose up to slap me in the face.

  As I pulled out into traffic and started up the road, I couldn’t help but feel that the day might have been cooler—maybe even all-around better—if my (wife) stereo had survived the morning and I’d gotten my fix of Morrison.

  A strange sort of dream always comes over me whenever I ride. It’s like that one where you’re falling, except all of the familiar sensations—the pull of gravity at your insides, the air whipping around you, the casual resignation of your very life to powers you’ll never come to grips with—are aimed ahead instead of straight down. The fear’s there, too, but it’s a crazy, “try it if you dare”-sort of fear; the sort of fear where, like in the dreams, a part of you knows you’ll wake up before you die. Whenever I ride, though, it’s the other way around: I find myself wondering if I might die before I “wake.” In this dream, unlike the other, I see the road ahead of me—I feel like I can see everything when I ride, even (especially) the stuff I don’t want to see—and, just far enough away to make it hard to be certain, I see her.

  She’s always standing dead-center in the road. Her belly’s still round, one hand hooked around the bottom of it, and her other hand’s held up in a still wave. Smiling; she’s always smiling, or at least I think I see her smiling. A part of me wants her to be smiling, and I know that desire could be motivating the sight; altering it. Another part is certain and lectures the rest of me at great length for doubting it for a moment—Just LOOK at her! it says in my head, Of course she’s smiling! She sees me, and she always smiles when she…

  But then there’s the other part of me—the part that, for better or for worse, hasn’t lost its mind—that knows she isn’t there, knows it’s crazy to think she would be.

  Why would she be standing in the middle of the road?

  Why would she be waiting for us in a spot that’s always, always, always just out of reach?

  And, inevitably: Why would she be anywhere but six-feet under where you last saw her?

  Then, every single time, the other parts soak in the logic of those questions and are forced to answer them. And all the parts, the crazy and the not, came up with the same answer: She wouldn’t be.

  It happened again as I rode out to meet with Danny and the boys, the crazy heat throwing mirages off the concrete and making the subject of my waking dream dance in a painfully tantalizing manner in the middle of an intersection. Then a semi, belching diesel-fumes in its wake, smashed through her and she was swallowed by a reeking black cloud and cast into a distant place called “Not Real.”

  I sighed, shook my head, and convinced myself that the moisture dragging back from my eyes and closing in on my earlobes is from the hot, stinging gusts of air striking my face. When that thought didn’t quite take, I blamed the stereo and the resulting ruination of my waking routine.

  That one stuck to the walls of my mind a bit better.

  Gritting my teeth, I ran a red and leaned too hard into my turn.

  Danny, had he seen it, would have called it a suicidal move; I told myself it was dramatic and abandoned the thoughts at the curb…

  A part of me knew that curb should be smeared with the contents of my head.

  The vision of her was already waiting for me—round belly supported in the hand that wasn’t raised towards me—at the end of the new street.

  For what was very likely the thousandth time since I woke up, I caught myself muttering “fuck.”

  “Got some good news an’ some bad news fer ya, Chase,” Danny drawled after watching me pull up to the open doors in the back of our shop.

  While the front said “MERCURY’S MOTORS & MECHANICS” in massive, legitimate-looking letters, the rear of the building is littered in cracked-open crates of just about everything except motorcycle parts. Big, plastic-wrapped bricks of marijuana, fireworks, bootlegged DVDs, and stacks upon stacks of counterfeit everything—starting with thousand-dollar handbags and ranging all the way to molded porn star body parts that, surprise-surprise, weren’t molded from the actual porn stars.

  Some poor sap will never know his pocket pussy is more Granny Smith than Bonnie Rotten, I mused to myself as I passed by a crate featuring some (in my opinion) sloppy-looking packaging for a “life-like” replica of the name-sake’s no-no zone. Still smirking at my own joke, I called back to Danny, “Give me the bad news first, I guess. That way I can at least end on a good note.”

  “Fair ‘nuff,” Danny said with a shrug. “The bad news is ya look like shit.”

  I rolled my eyes at him and said, “I probably smell like it, too. It’s hotter than Hell out here and I’ve been riding through the steaming bowels of this city twenty-miles over the damn speed limit to get here.”

  “R’mind me not to go sniffin’ ‘round ya anytime soon,” Danny said with a laugh as he turned to head inside.

  I followed after. Inside, despite the “CLOSED” sign on the shop’s front entrance, the vast space of the rear storage area was bustling with activity. Close to three-dozen of our crew were toiling over the crates, moving them inside and working to pry the lids off. While the boys’ prowess for productivity was impressive, I’d seen it enough before to tune them out as I continued after the gang’s second in command.

  “So what’s the good news, Mercury?” I pressed.

  As he passed it by, Danny snatched a series of stapled pages off of one of the crates that had already been brought in and held it over his shoulder for me to accept.

  I did, but I didn’t bother looking it over, knowing its contents would be explained to me soon enough.

  “Order came in exactly as we wanted,” he went on, slapping the side of yet another crate. “Seems the boys’ve decided to go green or some shit. Changed the way they pack their stuff, so what’s normally two-hundred of these sons’ve bitches”—another slap was thrown against the side of the crate—“was cut down to one-fiddy.”

  “How economic,” I said with a smirk. “Then we’re good, right? No problems?”

  Danny wagged a bushy eyebrow back at me and said, “Ye’re asking if we still gotta figure a way to put the scare in the boys without killin’ them?”

  “Actually…” I corrected, leaning against another crate and nearly falling back as it skewed slightly under my weight. “Shit!” I groaned, steadying myself and regaining my composure, then, going on, I said, “I was asking in general: as in, ‘no problems’ with anything.”

  Danny shrugged at that and said, “Ya still look like shit.”

  “So you told me.” I gave a half-hearted roll of my eyes, then stopped when something caught my eye. “What the hell are these?” I demanded, starting towards an already half-emptied crate.

  “Oh…” I didn’t need to see Danny to know the color was drai
ning from his face. “Those.”

  “Yeah,” I growled, snatching one of the pistols by the barrel from the crate and holding it out to him like a piece of rotting fruit. “Mind telling me what the fuck these are doing in our shipment.”

  “They’re… uh, getting shipped,” Danny answered, trying to sound coy but only sounding nervous.

  “You’re hilarious, smartass,” I shot, seething. After a quick glance, I saw that the numbers had been filed away. I wouldn’t have been surprised if further investigation told me they’d been modified, as well. “Since when do we deal guns?”

  Danny gave a look that would have been more appropriate on the face of a teenager trying to explain the concept of email to their grandparents. “Since the Carrion’s started dealin’ guns, Chase. Either we keep up with ‘em and try to cut ‘em off at each turn or we hand ‘em the city. An’ if they get everything then these”—he snatched the gun out of my hand and waved it back to me—“will be the least of our worries.”

  “How do you figure?” I demanded.

  Danny rolled his eyes. “The ones who would be buyin’ from the Carrions are the ones who are currently buyin’ from us,” he explained. “If the Carrion’s say that they can get untraceable guns an’ we don’t get untraceable guns, then the ones buyin’ from us who want untraceable guns start buyin’ from them. Then they’s got an edge on us. Then they start bringin’ in bigger, badder merch with all the cheddar they’re makin’ off our old buyers. Next thing ya know, the Carrion Crew’s got the leverage and the firepower to smoke us for good.”

  “So you’re telling me this is a necessary evil?” I shot at him. “Fucking Michael Kors knockoffs, pot, and fake pussies ain’t enough to run things? Now we gotta smuggle in weapons and deal in death?”

  “I appreciate that ye’re sticking to yer old man’s morals in how we used to run things,” Danny said in a lecturing tone, “but don’t ya think that ye’re lettin’ yer past cloud yer judgement here?”

  I shot him a glare that was all fury, and, judging from the flinch and the wide step he took away from me, he got the message. “And if I was,” I said slowly, challenging him, “would you say I was being unreasonable?”

  “I… I…” Danny wiped his face with a calloused, oily hand and shrugged a single shoulder. “Dammit, Chase, I don’t think anybody could say that—nobody who knew ya, least. But… shit, man, ya know what the alternative is, right?”

  I did.

  Damn it all, I really did.

  Screaming, I hauled back and drove my foot into the side of the crate, knocking it over and spilling out the remaining contents across the floor. The display wasn’t as dramatic as I’d hoped; I’d envisioned an airborne crate exploding into splinters against the wall and sending shattered gun parts raining down over awestruck and terrified workers. It was as unrealistic as…

  The phantom face, smiling, of a waving beauty cupping her round belly burned behind my eyes.

  Exploding aerial crates of guns: right there in the realm of “Not Real” with her.

  The back room went quiet as all the workers, diligently working to unload and stockpile the shipment, looked over to see what was wrong. They’d just seen their leader—God! I hate being called that!—throw a tantrum and kick over a bunch of handguns; they probably thought I was about to start shooting next. Granted, the majority of them knew that the Crows wasn’t that sort of gang—my father and, after him, my older brother had seen to it that things were done differently with us—but with the Crows “under new management” and half of us disbanded and working to bury the other—literally!—I figured they wouldn’t be surprised to see the other shit-covered shoe drop on our way of life.

  “Damn…” I grumbled.

  “Feel better?” Danny asked.

  “Not really, no,” I admitted.

  Danny sighed, folded his arms across his chest, and leaned against a stack of crates. I wasn’t proud to admit to myself that I was inwardly jealous of his success at doing so without having the stack betray him and nearly topple him as my own crate had done to me. “Ya know,” he began, stretching out his already lengthy drawl into something almost comical. Almost! “What ya need is a—”

  “I swear, Merc,” I cut him off, “if you’re about to offer to buy me another prostitute—” Seeing him already shaking his head, I stopped and sneered. “Or if you’re going to suggest I buy my own…”

  Danny rolled his eyes and planted his hands on his hips in a manner that gave away his sexuality in spades. Not that he cared, I knew; anybody in the Crows that wanted to try to take a chance at jabbing their second-in-command for being gay either had a death wish or half a brain. And since we didn’t recruit the suicidal or the stupid, it was a safe bet that Mercury could do whatever he wanted—even parade about as the neo-trucker incarnation of RuPaul—and most wouldn’t even bother to quirk a brow in his direction. The only case of somebody actually saying anything in regards to Mercury’s lifestyle was still, to this day, called “Pee-Bag Ricky.”

  And, as my old man had put it so many years earlier, “Let’s just say we didn’t call Ricky that before he decided to open his big, dumb mouth.”

  “Whores’re fine and all,” Danny drawled, “but what ya really need, Chase”—I could practically hear the suspenseful percussion rolling in his own mind as he paused for dramatic effect—“is a date!”

  I blinked at him. “So… a prostitute.”

  “BAH!” Danny waved a dismissive hand, clearly losing hope in me, our lives, and likely the entire human race in that instant. Whether it was a gay-thing or just a Danny-thing, there was something to be said about the flare that punctuated just about everything he did. “Ya’ve let yerself get too far along if ya think datin’s as simple as ten minutes and a crumpled twenty… or as cheap!” he finished with a loud, barking laugh.

  I sighed and shook my head, turning away. “I’m already tired of this conversation,” I informed him.

  “How can ya be tired of a conversation that’s only jus’ started?” he asked, his heavy footsteps starting after me.

  It was my turn to laugh. “‘Cause it’s a conversation we’ve had before, Mercury! And many times, I might add. And, what’s more, it always ends with you giving up, tracking down some prostitute, and throwing a wad of bills at her to ‘show me a night.’”

  “An’ do they show ya a night?” Danny asked.

  I stopped in mid-step, sighing heavily, and gave an exaggerated shrug so that I could be sure he’d see it from behind. “Yeah. Sure. I guess.” I turned to face him and asked, “Is that what you want to hear? That I accept your little gifts?”

  He shrugged back. “Better’n thinking I was wasting my money.”

  “You are wasting your money,” I told him. “I just don’t let it go to waste. There’s a difference.”

  “How ya figure?” he demanded.

  I raised an eyebrow at him. “You never bought anything for yourself that you knew you didn’t really need?”

  Danny opened his mouth to argue, thought better of it, then shut it again. A moment later he opened it again and said, “Least I know I got some enjoyment out of whatever it was.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Well I get about as much enjoyment from your ‘dates’ as I do from a band-aid. I get one, use it, regret it the instant I peel it off of me, and then forget about it until the next time I get one.”

  Danny sneered. “That’s disgusting.”

  “Says the guy who once lectured me on the finer points of eating ass during a drunken rant,” I fired back.

  He furrowed his brows, confused, and then shook his head. “Must’ve been a tequila night,” he mumbled. “That shit does not agree with me.”

  “And I don’t agree with prostitutes,” I said, turning away again. “So let’s just skip this whole tired song-and-dance and just leave me to my—”

  “Jason Andrews Presley,” Danny threw my name at my back like a weapon.

  It made contact like one. The muscles of my back ached
as I tensed and once more stopped in my effort to retreat.

  I turned to face my old friend, second-in-command, and the closest thing I had left to a parent.

  “If I thought all ya needed to bounce back from this shit-show ya’ve been callin’ yer life was a whore I’d’ve buried ya in price-tagged pussy months ago!” he lectured, closing the distance between us. “But Anne wasn’t no whore, an’ it’s time ya got back to—”

  “Shut the fuck up, Dan,” I said, my voice low, even, and laced with an acid edge that seemed to cut the very air between us. The sting of the words meant little, though, as my eyes narrowed on him.

  He flinched and backed up. “Chase,” he started, “all’s I’m tryin’ t’say is—”

  “I don’t want to hear it,” I told him. “I want you to get your ass back to work unloading these crates. I want you to keep these men working on doing the same. I want you to go about business as usual, and I want you to throw all of those”—I jabbed finger in the direction of all the guns that I had spilled across the floor—“into the fucking river.” I swallowed a growl that, despite the effort, still managed to make itself heard and took a step towards him. “And I want you to promise me you’ll never say that name again. In fact, I want you to promise me you’ll never have this conversation again. The subjects of Anne, prostitutes, or my life—past or current—are officially off limits. Got it?”

  Danny sighed and looked away, dragging a shoulder back in a dejected shrug. “The boys and I will finish up around here,” he assured me before giving a lazy shake of his head. “But ya can’t expect me to turn a blind eye to yer wellbeing, Chase. I made a promise to yer daddy that I’d look out for ya, an’, with all due respect, he was my boss first.”