I called. I got the girl at the reception desk. She asked me what it was concerning. I gave her all the gory details right up to my gut feeling about things going to hell that very night. Then she put me on hold, and another person picked up, a man, obviously the one who was in charge of giving the bad news because he did it the band-aid way- quick and painful.
Fixers, it seemed, only fixed things after they went to hell.
He told me he would relay the message to ‘the boss’ when he got back in the morning, but not to get my hopes up.
I hung up feeling so desperate that it was nearly enough to bring me to my knees.
I couldn’t protect myself with a dog who barely liked me, let alone enough to protect me, baseball bats, and bear spray.
Desperate times and desperate measures. There was a reason that was a idiom.
I took a deep breath, corralled the dog into the front room, slipped on a leash, grabbed pepper spray, and made a walk down the main street toward a place I would never have walked into willingly before.
I had seen enough movies and TV shows about bikers to know they generally saw women as beer-servers and spread legs.
But, if the rumors were true, they were where I could get a gun without any kind of trail leading to it.
The Henchmen MC compound was long and windowless with giant fences and scary-looking men walking the grounds at all times.
“Hey baby,” the guy at the gate said, giving me a quick once-over. “Can I do something for you?”
I wasn’t so wrapped up in my terror, and impending possible rape and murder that I overlooked this guy. Scary? Sure. But hot also. Tall and fit, he was covered in tattoos that snuck out of his sleeves, and up above the leather cut he was wearing with The Henchmen MC logo I knew was on the back from seeing them riding around town all the time. He had dark hair, classically attractive bone structure, and gray eyes.
I wasn’t exactly sure how one went about criminal activities, never having done something illegal; not even downloading music for free or streaming a pirated movie online. I figured blunt was generally the way to go about such things. “I need a gun,” I said, lifting my chin a little, trying not to be offended when he laughed at first.
“You’re serious?”
“I’m serious,” I agreed, trying to keep my face blank, not wanting them to see any of the desperation I felt.
“For what?” he asked, interested.
“If I wanted to do a background check, I would hit a legal gun store,” I said, squaring my shoulders, pretending like I wasn’t at risk of turning and running at any second.
“Fair enough,” he said with a casual shrug. “You got the cash?” he went on.
That really depended on how much the damn gun was, but I figured that guns, like any purchase, had a wide range of prices. I didn’t need the ‘holy shit’ gun. I just needed the ‘can put a hole in someone if they are charging at me to rape and kill me’ type.
“Yes.”
“Low or high end?” he went on, doing another once over. If he were a woman, I would figure he could tell that my jeans were from a cheap box store and my heels had spots that were colored in with permanent marker where the fake leather had scratched. But being that he was a man, I figured all he saw was hips and ass and boob. Oddly, I somehow preferred that.
“Low is fine. It’s… just for home protection.”
His smile went a little devilish then, eyes brightening. “If you need home protection, baby, I can protect you in your home. From your bed…”
I felt my lips curve up, but it was sarcastic, not amused. “Just the gun, thanks.”
“Offer stands,” he said, waving a hand at one of the other guys, then giving him a couple orders and the guy ran off.
“What will I owe you?” I asked, hoping that what I had in my back pocket, literally every last dollar I had to my name, was enough.
“Tell you what, since you’re so pretty and the fact that you need it for home protection means you don’t got yourself a man, I will shave some off the top. Let’s call it an even two-hundred.”
Two-hundred?
I had grossly overestimated the cost of a gun.
Suddenly, I was worried that maybe low end meant that the damn thing wouldn’t fire or would like… backfire and take out half my face or something. But what was done was done because the other guy was running out, doing some slick kind of move that obviously somehow deposited the gun on the other bikers’ person because the other guy ran back off again.