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The sex-tourists attempt to cross in front of me, but I roll the throttle of my modified Harley Davidson chopper, rumbling my heavy engine and speeding up just in time to leave them in my dust. Don’t know if I’d be able to handle watching them giggle and jiggle their way past me. It’s been almost a year since I’ve been in a serious fight, and there’s a dangerous restlessness burning in my core. Sex and violence run off the same engine in a man, and it’s been a year without any satisfying outlet in either of those directions.
Which means I need to be fucking careful tonight.
Way too easy to pick a fight with a dangerously connected guy down here.
Because everyone is connected down here.
Especially where I’m going tonight.
Juarez is a hotbed of organized crime activity thanks to its status as a border town. Goods ranging from fentanyl and meth to heroin and opium all get shipped up north via these crowded border crossings, smuggled through in trucks and cars, shoved down trousers and stuck up buttholes, whatever it takes to access the most lucrative drug market on the planet.
Of course, drugs aren’t the only goods sold in these underground markets.
My breathing quickens as I rumble my growling bike towards a gray-painted concrete building with barred windows and tinted glass. Fucking hate coming to these places, but it’s where I’m meeting Durand, one of the San Antonio Skulls MC officers, a club elder who lives down here, handles Club business with the Cartels and sometimes the Russians.
Durand’s Harley chopper is parked outside, the Skulls MC logo flashing white and red from the gas tank. My bike, however, is clean black paint, unmarked just like my leather jacket these days.
Because these are new days. After a decade wearing the Skulls MC leather cut decorated with patches designating my status and ranking, the only leather I wear now is pure black Texas rawhide.
No patches. No logos. No artwork.
I ride alone now.
Or at least I will soon.
“You alone, hombre?” says a grinning pimp strolling past the red-painted metal front door of the unmarked concrete building. “Not for long if you got money.”
I park my bike out front, heave it onto its stand, glance at the pimp who just spat a wad of tobacco juice on the dusty ground close to my front tire. “Careful,” I snarl up at him. “One drop of that gets on my bike and you’ll spend the rest of the night looking for your teeth after I knock them out of your ugly head.”
The pimp loses the grin, his face darkening. He gathers a mouthful of spit, is about to call my bluff, then understands the look of deadly seriousness on my face and decides not to fuck with me. He takes a step away from my precious bike, then continues his sidewalk search for customers, shooting his sticky load into the dirt between my bike and a shiny silver Range Rover that I already know belongs to Kazi the Russian.
And if Kazi is here, it means there’s an auction going down tonight.
“Damn it, Durand, you know I don’t like coming to these things,” I mutter under my breath as I reach into my bike’s hardshell side-carrier and pull out the leather satchel stuffed with fifty thousand dollars in cash.
It’s the final installment of my exit fee. There aren’t a lot of options for leaving a club like the Skulls without a bullet in your head, but the club elders can approve a buy-out if they trust the guy enough to be certain he isn’t a snitch, isn’t going to show up on a witness stand pointing a finger at the Skulls leadership for decades of dirty deeds ranging from gun-running to murder-for-hire.
Yeah, we do some bad things. But no drugs. And sure as hell no sex-trafficking.
Not until last year, when Durand started doing deals with Kazi and the Russians down here in Juarez.
And that’s a line I couldn’t cross.
I’m no fucking saint. Way more devil in me than angel. I’ve lied, cheated, stolen. I’ve killed enough men that hell’s already got a place reserved for me. For years I was the MC’s designated hitter, sent out when a rival gang member or a double-crossing dealer needed to be put down quietly. Brock “Killer” Murphy was my handle. In fact that’s why the Skulls MC leadership trusts that I’ll never be an FBI or ATF informant—because no way the Feds give a killer like me immunity.
But although there’s a dangerously violent streak in my dark heart, I still have a moral code, lines I will not cross for any amount of money.
No women.
No children.
I don’t kill them.
I don’t sell them.
And I sure as hell don’t buy them.
“You looking to buy something, biker?” comes a Russian-accented voice as the red-painted front door screeches open, the doorway exhaling a dark aroma of the smoke-filled atrium of this Russian-operated meat market. “There is private auction later tonight. But invited guests only. Show me invitation.”
