Chapter One
Meadow
Well this is a fine spot you’ve gotten yourself into, Meadow.
It’s my father’s voice that echoes inside my head as I lay shivering on the concrete floor.
My ass hurts and my shoulders ache from having my hands zip tied behind my back. There’s a shitty mattress on the floor which probably has eighteen kinds of STD’s and pandemic viruses crawling all over it and now me.
I gag at the thought shifting my weight off my hip, trying to get blood flowing into my left leg which has fallen asleep and is burning and tingling from being in one position too long.
My father always said I had a talent for getting myself into trouble. That’s ironic, because he and my mom worked their whole lives helping other people get out of trouble.
What did it get them?
Dead.
That’s what it got them. No good deed goes unpunished, as they say.
“Fuck.” I grimace, attempting to throw my body sideways but ending up flat on my back instead, looking up at the leaky, cracked-cement ceiling. There’s an extension cord coming from under the metal door and it’s duct taped to the wall and across the ceiling to where a single florescent bulb buzzes in a rusted white shop light, hanging crooked above me.
Chunk, chunk, chunk.
The pipes that are part of the heating system come to life behind me. Jesus, somebody needs to do some maintenance around here.
And on the topic of maintenance, it fricking stinks in here too. There’s a drain in the center of the small room and a hint of sewage and vermin death has my stomach on a hair trigger.
The musty, dirty air is doing nothing for my asthma and the god-damn zip ties are cutting off the circulation in my ankles and wrists. My fingers and feet are cold, but for the first hour I was in here, I yelled and screamed, and it did nothing but get me a sore throat.
Every once in a while, I hear low voices and movement outside the door. I can’t make out words, or much more than that it’s men. Maybe the same ones that tackled me and threw me in here, but it’s impossible to know.
The cramp in the center of my back burns deep into my muscle, and when I try to ease it by trying to stretch my arms jolts of pain shoot down from my shoulders, taking my breath away.
It’s strange, but I’m not really afraid even though I know I should be. I’m being held in the basement of motorcycle club bar after they caught me with their safe open, filling my trusty canvas bag full of cash and jewelry. All of which I can be fairly sure they didn’t acquire lawfully, yet it seems they don’t take kindly to having what they took from someone else taken from them.
I cruised into Seneca, Nevada three days ago in my usual fashion. When it was time to leave the previous town, I simply took out my phone, pulled up the map, closed my eyes and touched my finger to the screen.
Seneca, Nevada was my next mark. I’d snuck out of Temple Bluff about a hundred miles south of here, in the middle of the night after taking the local corrupt mayor and his shitty police chief for around 50K in an easy grift that they should have seen coming.
Still fascinates me that a good set of tits used properly can create one of the best distractions.
I packed up my one duffel bag, my two laptops and scooted my ass down the road in my trusty, rusty 1999 Ford F-150.
It’s reliable, non-descript with a modified engine that can get me out of sticky situations at zero to sixty in in under eight seconds
By now, I know that the mayor and police chief are seething, knowing I took them hard. But I never feel bad. I take from the takers. The lesson I learned watching my parents give and give was that in the end, we all get taken, so I’m just trying to exact my own bit of quiet justice to the overlords and the takers of the world.
MC clubs are some of the worst. And the easiest.
Well, they usually are.
The Heartlands Motorcycle Club caught onto my take faster than most. Maybe it was luck, maybe something else, but the other thing I know is MC clubs like to deal out their own sort of justice and I have a feeling, this time, my tits aren’t going to save me from whatever is about to happen.
My heart races as voices seep from under the door. They’re sharper now, louder, and I think about the faces and people I saw yesterday in the club bar when I was posing as a utility worker checking on their electric meter, saying they needed a new meter as well the wiring needed work.