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Gia arrived fairly early for a Saturday night, a little before eight, but No Place was already jumping. Live country music throbbed through the rough-sided walls and bounced off the bodies of the vehicles stuffing the gravel lot. She added her bike to the few lined up near the door. She didn’t recognize any but her own.
The Horde who still had a mind to party on a Saturday night (her father was no longer often among them) were no doubt at the clubhouse yet. It was tradition to start there and make their way to No Place later in the evening. But at least a few would show up soon enough; the club was responsible for security and protection in town, and all the businesses paid them for that service.
That wasn’t like the ‘protection fees’ collected by the Mafia or some street gang; the Horde actually performed the service they were contracted for. They protected local businesses from crime and mischief, and they also paid to cover damage they couldn’t prevent. No Place wasn’t paying the Horde not to fuck up the place, they paid the Horde to keep others from fucking it up.
There was no police department or sheriff substation in Signal Bend because the people of Signal Bend, taken as a whole, neither needed nor wanted one, and the crime statistics bore that out. The Sheriff’s Department couldn’t justify the expense because there was virtually no crime reported in Signal Bend. Complaints went to the Horde (or to the mayor, who then went to the Horde), and the Horde took care of things to everyone’s satisfaction.
Those who had to be corrected were sometimes corrected in ways that would fall under ‘police brutality’ if cops had done it, but, well, they knew better than to complain. Anyway, most of them figured a beating was better than an arrest record.
Under that regulatory framework, No Place had thrived for generations as a honky-tonk where things regularly got scrappy but also stayed within the peculiar lines of Signal Bend: bar fights were almost de rigueur, often becoming full-out brawls, but everybody knew to push breakables out of the way first and to fight fair and not pull anybody in who stayed to the side. Those who didn’t know those rules were taught swiftly. Those who knew and broke them anyway were corrected sternly.
Recognizing that the way Signal Bend worked was not the way all towns worked, because most towns didn’t have something like the Night Horde MC at their heart, was the first switch that flipped in Gia’s head to send her on a path toward anthropology.
Though she understood better than most, considering her field of study, that the general public would be appalled by the rowdy, pugilistic culture of No Place, and of Signal Bend itself, Gia thought her hometown served as an exemplar of how well the whole country could work if the police state were defunded. Shift about sixty or seventy percent of the funds currently devoted to police departments’ riot gear and military-grade weaponry to public schools, mental health support, and community service organizations, give communities the support to take care of their own, and watch them thrive. Institutional policing had a role, for major or large-scale crime, things that transcended community issues. But it had no place in community-level concerns.
Okay, yes, many communities would balk at an MC being in charge of things, but those communities could decide on other means of enforcing their rules. That was the point, in Gia’s mind (and she was not alone). Community involvement. Enforcement by the people who understood the context of their home, who knew the people in it.
As she reached the front door, it swung inward, and three unfamiliar men, around her age or a little older, surged out, laughing. They were all dressed like country boys on Saturday night: faded jeans, well-worn cowboy boots, big belt buckles, button shirts (two plaid, one chambray). One wore a Deere hat, clean enough to be his ‘goin’ out’ version; no doubt he had a crushed, filthy thing for everyday wear. The other two were hatless, their short, basic cuts slicked down. Country boys on Saturday night.
Local country boys were all familiar to Gia. The locals she didn’t recognize had all moved in at Signal Bend Station, the ever-expanding housing development on the outside edge of town, and were all more of the suburban type. She pegged these three for true outsiders and stiffened a little, ready for them to be idiots.
Sure enough, Goin’ Out John Deere, leading the trio, pulled up short and made a big show of looking her up and down. “Goddamn! Look at you, baby girl! Look at this hot piece!” That last, he said to his friends, who were already looking.
If they’d all stopped there, Gia would have stepped back, waited for them to clear the door, and gone on inside. But Mr. Deere reached for her, like he meant to grab her and pull her closer.
Gia didn’t enjoy fighting for fun. She enjoyed sparring, in a ring, she enjoyed practicing and improving, but when shit got scrappy here at No Place, she usually collected her drink and moved out of the way. However, she always fought back, and she never let someone touch her without her permission.
She shot her hand out and grabbed Deere’s hand before he reached her. All in one move, she clenched his thumb and twisted his arm up and around so it was folded and his thumb extended in the wrong direction. She stopped just before she’d yank that digit from its socket, and she held there.
Mr. Deere yelped in pain. He tried once to fight her hold, but stopped as soon as she tightened her grip. His friends froze, too stunned to know what to do. None of the three had expected such a reaction to what they, no doubt, would have called only flirting, geez, you can’t even give a chick a compliment anymore.
“I didn’t say you could touch me,” Gia said, keeping her voice completely normal. Like he’d asked for a light and she’d told him she didn’t smoke.
Inside, however, adrenaline churned her blood into a froth. She’d reacted instinctively, grabbing this guy before he grabbed her, but now she faced three not-small country boys who surely had done their share of scrapping, and despite the nickname that had dogged her since middle school, she was not a female John Wick. She could not take on three men and win. She was good, but not that good.
But she was in this position now, so if they came for her, she would do as much damage as she could until they completely disabled her. That the Horde would hunt them down and make them pay tenfold would ease the pain of whatever these assholes did to her.
So far, her first day home had been ... complicated.
Deere’s eyes lit up with rage. “Let me go, you stupid cunt, or I’ll show you how we touch a stupid cunt like you.”
Oh look: words that deserved violence.
Her only remaining chance not to get beaten bloody (at least) was to make them see she wouldn’t go down easy. Gia shaped her expression to convey You think? as she pulled a bit more on Deere’s hyperextended thumb, still not sharply enough for dislocation but enough to increase the strain. His eyes went wide. The rage didn’t die out, but pain flashed through and diluted it. In her periphery she saw his friends shake off their shock and start planning an answer.
“That would be extremely stupid,” came a deep voice from behind her. A man had come up behind her without her realizing it, and that was extremely stupid on her part. Fuck, had she let another of their friends flank her?
She couldn’t spare the shift in attention to look back, so she did a flash-quick scan of what she knew. Deere and his friends looked more shocked, not less. Worried now, in fact.
That would be extremely stupid, the voice had said. Would be, not is. Not something that was already happening—what she was doing—but something threatened—what Deere had threatened. The voice was warning them, not her. And these three buffoons were intimidated by one man.
There was a patch behind her.
One of her own. But she hadn’t recognized the voice, nor had she heard a Harley engine come onto the lot, a sound as familiar to her as her own breath, and one loud enough to overwhelm even pseudo-Travis Tritt inside.
A patch who rode an electric bike.
