Vice(4)
Three Rivers welcomes you!
You are now leaving Boles Acres.
Richardsville! Home of the King’s Cubs football team.
Truth or Consequences, population 6246.
Bienvenido a Atascaderos
La ciudad jardín de Santa María de los pobres!
I don’t even stop in these ghost towns to sleep. At night, I pull off the side of the road and disappear into the desert, until the only visible lights I can see are from the stars overhead. My tent is enough. I carry everything I need on my back. Occasionally, I’ll stop and grab a six-pack from a liquor store before I head out into the back of the beyond for the night. I sip each bottle slowly, thinking over everything that’s happened in the last seven years.
Life got real f*cking weird, real f*cking fast. It hits me sometimes, how strange things are now. I don’t even recognize myself anymore. I was meant to become a lawyer. Instead, I’ve gone from being a respected twenty-six-year-old war veteran with a bachelor’s degree to the vice president of a motorcycle club. It’s even weirder still that my best friend, Jamie, or Rebel, as he’s now called, is the president of the same club. Then again, maybe it’s actually not that strange. Our fates have been joined for so long now, that I never even questioned if he would disappear down this rabbit hole with me, on my search for my missing sister.
Name a law, and we’ve broken it.
Name a moral line, and we’ve crossed it.
Name a country, and we’ve been there.
We never meant to start the club. The Widow Makers MC was an accident, a by-product of our search for Laura. We needed a hacker, so we found Danny. We needed someone who was good with ordnance and heavy machinery, so we found Keeler. We needed someone who could fly a plane, so we scraped Carnie out of the dirt and took him home with us. Twenty-three people, both men and women, joined us over time, and none of them ever left again. Motorcycles were quick and efficient for getting in and out of sticky situations, and the cops were suspicious of so many social outcasts and ex-cons with criminal records living in the middle of nowhere out in the desert of New Mexico, so we formed the club as a front. And then we actually became one. Our genesis story is a bizarre one, and we keep it to ourselves. It’s better for us if the other clubs, cartel leaders and mafia bosses we run with think we’re simply out to make money and hoard power as they are. But in truth, we’re still looking for my sister. We haven’t given up.
Every night, I stare at a photo on the screen of my cell phone until my eyes feel like they’ve been scrubbed with sandpaper.
Laura.
My sister, crying as she stares down the lens of a camera, a leather-gloved hand wrapped around her throat. I was half dead when Jamie showed me this image. Over seven years of searching and then, out of the blue, some * motherf*cking cartel boss uses it as collateral in a hotel deal gone wrong. I wasn’t there, I had had both my legs broken and was lying in a pool of my own blood, but Jamie told me everything he’d discovered: that Julio Perez, a Mexican cartel boss we’re well acquainted with, knew where my sister was. That he possibly had something to do with her disappearance. It took me three months to heal and recover from my ass kicking well enough to ride a motorcycle, but now that I’m fit and able, I’m going to find my sister. Even if it f*cking kills me, I am going to find her.
Perez has run for what he considers safe ground, back to Mexico with his tail between his legs. He thinks the Widow Makers won’t follow him there, that it would be too dangerous for a group of twenty guys on motorcycles to go hunting for him. And he was right. It is too dangerous for the whole club to go chasing him across Mexico. Me, on the other hand? One guy on a scrambler, sticking to the back roads and keeping my head down? That’s safe enough. I plan on finding the piece of shit and hurting him until he gives me the information I need. Hence the gruelling slog from New Mexico to El Cascarero. Hence the crick in my back and the ache in my poorly knitted together bones. Hence the cold, black, murderous urge in my heart, and the single point of focus on my mind.
After five days of riding non-stop, I finally draw close to my destination. El Cascarero is a small enough place; Julio’s family live twenty or thirty miles out of the town, on a peach farm of all places. Turns out Perez peaches are quite famous around these parts. I see signs for them for hours before I eventually arrive at the mouth of the dusty, worn single-track road that leads to the farm itself. I squint into the distance, straining to make out the layout of the buildings beyond. Four trucks parked outside the main house—trucks so beaten, rusted, scraped and scratched up that it’ll be a miracle if any of them run. Still. Four trucks. Could mean a lot of people. I lose my helmet. The scrambler is hardly inconspicuous, so I kill the engine and climb off it, wheeling it away from the road and laying it down flat to the ground beside a lone Ahuehuete tree. Looks like a swing used to hang from one of the sturdy, thick boughs overhead, but now a snapped and tattered length of rope is all that remains.
The long grass, sprouting almost to my knees, should hide the bike well enough. I shuck the bag from my back and dump it at my feet, opening the zip to check I have everything I’ll be needing:
One roll of duct tape.
One pair of pliers.
One thick black garbage bag.
One meter length of fine chain.
One small handsaw.
One small container of lighter fluid.
One box of matches.