Through A Glass, Darkly (The Assassins of Youth MC #1)(62)
It was probably around four in the afternoon when a knock sounded on my front door. Vonda had stayed after school to play basketball with her new friends and I was waiting for the call to go pick her up. Kimball had taken her kids downtown to rent a movie from a Red Box, a thrill they’d never known. I’ll never forget, I was reading a slim volume of Lawrence Ferlinghetti poetry. Gideon had trained me to look through the little peephole when someone was at the door, and that’s what I did.
It was just some delivery guy. I could see his truck behind him, a pickup with one of those slap-on magnetic signs saying he was with a florist. He even had a large bunch of flowers in his hand, so who was I to argue? I mean, who would be skeptical of that? No one.
“Flowers!” I cried, holding out my hands for them. “I assume these are from Mr. Gideon Fortunati?”
“Yes, ma’am,” said the delivery guy, who was starting to look awfully familiar. Had I ever stopped in to his flower store before? “Courtesy of Mr. Gideon Fortunati.”
As I accepted the bunch of flowers from him, he lunged at my stomach with his other hand. A loud, sharp crackling like a live wire flailing on the ground filled my ears. A strange, unfamiliar but all-encompassing pain wracked my body. He pressed something against me that sent out electrical shocks so strong they zapped my brain, and I fell on the ground like a twitching epileptic.
My brain felt scrambled—I was no longer able to think in a linear fashion. I’m pretty sure the fake flower delivery guy stunned me with his Taser again, and again, maybe when I showed signs of coming to life. The next thing I knew, I was in the back of his king cab pickup truck, my hands bound behind my back with something like a zip tie.
“You’re taking me to Allred,” I yelled. I sounded drunk, though I’d never been drunk in my life.
“Sure as shooting.” He sounded terribly cheerful for a guy who had just kidnapped and tased a woman.
“You won’t get away with this.” I didn’t realize until later that I sounded like bad movie dialogue.
“Oh, yes, we will.”
“Who are you? I know you.”
“You don’t remember me? I’m Monte Brough. The Prophet sent me back from Texas just to take care of you.”
Monte Brough. Monte Brough. The name sounded familiar but I couldn’t place it, with different hemispheres of my brain wrangling for control. “So there really is a Texas compound?”
“Oh, there’s a Texas compound all right. Why’d you doubt it?” Monte Brough adjusted his rearview mirror so he could look at me. “The Church of Good Fortune is twice as big in Texas. I think he aims to send you back with me.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
GIDEON
The sit-down with Papa Ewey and my brothers went as well as could be expected.
It was a sober meeting. I sat next to my man Yosemite Sam. We hadn’t even brought to the table the issue of him and Sledgehammer coming with me to form the new chapter. The main agenda item wasn’t even the new chapter. It was the disappearance of Tim Breakiron.
Papa Ewey bracketed his hands on the table. “I’ve already discussed this in full with Gideon here. I wanted you all to hear it from his own mouth. You all know I sent Breakiron up north with Gideon last month as penance for the error he made in dealing with a member of the Bent Zealots.”
Men nodded and murmured. “Yeah.” “Fucking rape, man.” “Sort of twisted.”
Papa Ewey went on. “And I sent Gideon with him as penance for getting too handsy with my old lady.”
The mood in the chapel instantly lifted. Men chuckled and said shit like, “Who wouldn’t?” “She’s a hot mama,” and “Can you blame him?”
“In the interim, Gideon has made a good name for himself up there in Utah, establishing solid connections, getting in good with the fundies that we need to funnel our iron. Breakiron wasn’t in on any of this, because the main polyg only wanted to deal with Gideon. He even managed to get full title to a productive working mine. Don’t ask me how. But I stand behind that sort of tactic, whatever it was. Now we’re all wondering what happened to Breakiron. Seems he went a little off his rocker when he heard I wanted Gideon to establish a new chapter up there.”
“I had to shoot him in self-defense,” I said to a table full of mean, nasty, lowdown bikers. My brothers. Standing, I lifted my shirt to show them the bullet wound where part of my liver had been removed. “He busted in in the middle of an iron transfer on fundy property, waving a piece around. He started to shoot a woman I’m in love with, and I happened to get in the way. So I shot him.”
I figured it would be simpler this way. Clean and direct, to the point, like my bullet wound. Most men looked to Papa Ewey for guidance now. I figured that. They wanted to know his reaction before letting me know theirs. Yosemite Sam was the only one nodding and murmuring on my behalf. That was because I’d already told him about Breakiron’s demise.
Papa Ewey said, “While of course I don’t approve of brothers burying brothers, it appears Gideon acted as any man would. His gunshot wound is evidence. And we’ve all known Breakiron has been capable of some loose cannon type of behavior.”
Now that it appeared Papa Ewey would stand behind me, men nodded and looked at each other. “Yeah.” “Damn straight.” Wishbone even said, “Remember that Mr. Magoo murder in Laughlin? Breakiron did that for the fun of it. I was there. Mr. Magoo was just coming out of a Target with a bag of M&Ms and a cheese grater. Breakiron just popped him in the head for the hell of it.”