KNOW ME (DEFIANT Motorcycle Club)(4)

drive a long way to get beyond the reach of the SF Outlaws.  I had no money.  Even my

phone was left behind.  Anybody I could think of to turn to would only be endangered by

helping me and going to the cops would have been useful as going to my third grade

teacher.
I found Interstate 5 and kept driving south.  It was just starting to grow light

outside by the time I reached Los Angeles.  The sun and the hundreds of miles of

distance made things seem slightly better, or at least my heart stopped threatening to

thump right through my chest.  I pulled into a rest stop and started poking through the

glove box.  Perhaps the car’s owner had stowed some food somewhere.
There was no food, but an oily clump of bills added up to $40.  Enough to put some more

gas in the tank and get something to eat.  
In the restroom, my wan reflection stared back at me in the mirror.  I would be twenty

next week but knew I looked younger.  I pushed my dark blonde hair behind my ears and

patted my face with a coarse paper towel, weighing my options and shoving away the

agony which threatened to swallow me.
Later there would be time for grieving.  Right now I needed to remember that I was

Crest Tolleson’s daughter.  And I would figure out how to survive.


Chapter Two


Of course returning to Berkeley was out of the question.  The SF’s would either be

waiting or would show up soon.  My mother lived in San Diego with her husband but even

if I wasn’t afraid of imperiling her, I couldn’t be sure that she would welcome me in

the first place.  And all the brothers of the club, my father’s friends, the men who

had helped raise me, were dead or likely soon to be dead.
Except, maybe, one.
His name was seldom spoken.  He’d been my father’s best friend since they’d grown up

together in a rough Oakland neighborhood.  Two tough-as-nails white boys trying to make

it out of there alive, they were natural allies.
I remembered Orion Jackson as an impossibly large man with startling blue eyes.  He was

one of the few Warlocks who didn’t choose to wear a beard but the set of his jaw and

the tense outline of his broad shoulders was fearful enough a picture.  When I reached

back into the deepest origins of my memory, Orion Jackson was there alongside my

father.  He used to make me ice cream sundaes with piles of colored sprinkles and read

me fairy tales in his raspy baritone.  Still, Orion wasn’t the stuff of rainbows and

butterflies.  Once I saw him nearly rip a man’s arm out of the socket for being a

suspected poker cheat.
It had been ten years since I’d seen him, since that awful night when I woke up to the

rough sounds of a struggle in the clubhouse and hid in the shadows, watching as my

father beat his best friend bloody.
I had thought it odd that Orion didn’t fight back.  He stayed on his knees and let

Crest pummel him again and again.  Every once in a while he spat out a stream of blood.
“Take it off,” my father growled and without a word Orion removed his cut and tossed

it across the room.
My father picked it up and handed it off to Talon, another original club member. 

“Burn it,” he ordered.  The he reared back and punched Orion so hard a spray of blood

landed on the wall next to me.
The man I thought of as practically an uncle rose once more, blood dripping from his

battered face. His blue eyes locked on mine and he gave me a terrible grin which

haunted my dreams for years.
“Now,” said my father in a voice which was half a sob, “you’re f*cking gone, Orion.

You get that? You were my brother.  And now you’re f*cking nothing.”  Crest turned

toward the wall but I could hear the misery in his voice.
Orion got painfully to his feet.  I still didn’t understand why he didn’t fight back.

My father may have been the leader but Orion was larger, stronger.
Crest continued to stare stonily at the wall as Orion spat a mouthful of blood one more

time.  The other Warlocks watched with identical pitiless expressions.  Orion finally

tipped an imaginary hat in farewell and left the clubhouse.  A moment later I heard the

roar of his bike.  He never returned and my questions were never really answered.
“He did something bad, right?” I’d asked Crest.
He only looked off into the distance and nodded.  “He did.”
And for a long time that was all I knew of Orion Jackson.  He had crossed Crest

Tolleson in some way.  His punishment was expulsion.  It could have been worse.  I was

under no illusions about my father.  I knew damn well he had done more violent things

to other men.
Then a few years ago I heard Talon and Crest speaking in low, slurred voices.  I heard

the name ‘Orion’ and the next day dared a question.
“So Orion’s alive?”
My father’s eyes narrowed and he poured himself a shot.  “He is.”  Crest took the

shot and stared into the glass. “He’s in the Mojave desert, outside Quartzsite, got