Ryker by Jeneveir Evans

Chapter 8

The first step to be a good man is this: You must deeply feel the burden of the stones someone else carrying.

~Mehmet Murat İldan~

Ryker

September 26th, 1999

South Dakota

Glancing at Brawn, I asked, “What happened?”

Brawn stretched his legs out and took a pull off his beer before he responded, “King had a ‘secret’ Church yesterday while he had you, Tor, and T-Bone check out that warehouse in Brookings. He also sent Crusher, Rage and Taz to Belle Fourche to pick up six kilos of meth.”

Brawn cut his eyes toward me when I didn’t immediately start ranting and get pissed off.

“Fuck, you knew about it.”

“Yeah. I knew.”

I was worried. It bothered me that the six of us had been sent away while King held an impromptu Church with the rest of the brothers. I fucking hoped that didn’t mean he had an inkling that these men were behind me. I did have one more man behind me that none of them knew about and, when they found out, it was going to shock the hell out of them.

“What bullshit did he have to tell you?” I questioned.

Before Brawn could answer, we heard a bike coming down the road.

What the fuck?

He knew better than to come here. I watched T-Bone pull in, kick his stand down, get off his bike, then the fucker started stripping in my front yard. When he was buck naked, he started toward me.

“Fucker, get some damn clothes on before your ass gets on my porch,” I yelled at him.

He turned back to his clothes, picked up his boxers and headed my way without putting his underwear back on. He strode up the steps and dropped his shorts on the deck and stomped on them. While he was doing that, Taz pulled into the drive, parked his bike, and seeing T-Bone standing naked as a jaybird and stomping his boxers on my porch, he started stripping. It was only minutes later that Crusher, then Rage, followed by Draven pulled into my driveway and started doing the same damn thing.

“Have you all lost your ever-loving minds?” I exclaimed to the five damn men standing before me. Their naked asses visible to anyone who might come by.

“What the hell are you doing?” I challenged them. “Are you fucker’s high?”

“Wanted you to see my ass isn’t wearing a wire, not even under my balls,” T-Bone growled and proceeded to lift his dick and move his balls around to show he didn’t have a listening device on him.

Every one of the assholes followed his lead. I heard a noise at the front door and damned if Bronte didn’t open the storm door and lean against the jamb. All of the naked fuckers in front of me immediately stood up tall. She started at T and worked her way over each man, staring at their junk.

“Jesus Christ, Bronte. Get your ass back in the house,” I snapped.

“Just checking out the merchandise, Dad. Might want to sample it one day and need to know what I might be getting,” she purred.

I glared at the men in front of me.

“If one of you fuckers gets a hard-on because she is looking at your damn cock, you’re gonna be a dead man and that’s after I beat the shit out of you.”

“Fuck, Ry,” T growled. “You can’t expect that not to happen when she is standing there licking her lips as she’s staring at my damn dick.”

“Bronte. House. Now.”

“Damn, Dad. I just wanted to have a little fun.”

She sent me a naughty smile. I arched a brow at her and she let out a huff. “Okay, fine. I’m going. But before I do, I just want to say that you boys all look damn fine. You’ve all got some pretty impressive packages. T, didn’t know you had your nipples pierced. I was trying to see if your cock is too, is it?”

“Bronte,” I thundered. “Get in the god damn house now.”

I looked at all my fucking brothers standing in front of me and spit out, “For fuck’s sake, put your damn shorts on.”

Tor was standing behind Bronte with a smile on his face and shaking his head at the exchange between his sister and me. He pushed past her to come outside as she stepped back into the house and shut the front door. I watched silently as all the men put on their damn boxers.

“What’s going on?” Tor questioned.

“I’m still trying to find that out,” I replied. “What the hell are all of you doing here?”

“Needed to talk to you,” T muttered.

“About?”

“This horseshit that King is trying to get the club into. Plus, he’s trying to keep some of us in the dark about it until this damn shit is a done deal,” he snarled.

“Christ. Did you all leave the clubhouse and drive straight here?” I queried.

“Nah, Ry. We all left at different times. Hell, Rage and Crusher left last night after returning with the meth,” Taz stated.

“Yeah, Ryker. Wanted out of there. King started handing out baggies of meth like it was fucking candy. You know Rage and I aren’t into that shit. He’s not about to get us hooked on damn drugs. We saw plenty of what that crap can do when we were kids and our parents were on that shit. You know we swore to each other that we’d never do any type of drug,” Rage remarked.

“We never will either,” Crusher vowed. “That bastard deliberately makes us do drug runs because he knows how we feel about it.”

All five of them found a place to sit on the porch facing Brawn and me. Tor leaned against the porch rail with his arms and legs crossed. I looked at the young men gathered around me.

T-Bone was thirty-seven. By the age of thirty-one, he’d served twelve years in the Army and decided he didn’t want to retire from the military after all. When he came home, he’d come to me and asked to prospect. Hell, I hated to encourage anyone to join the MC, much less T. I’d warned him that the club was bad. That I wouldn’t recommend not just him, but anyone joining it. He’d insisted he wanted to join.

I’d known T since he was a kid. Trina, Taron and Raiden’s mom, was his cousin. What I hadn’t realized was that she had told him she was worried about me. She was scared King was going to try to have me killed. She wanted me to have more men at my back. While we weren’t a couple and never had been, I was the father of her sons and she considered Tor and Bronte hers too. She had only been doing what she thought was the right thing. I was fucking glad she did too.

After learning that information, he and I talked hard and heavy. It was decided that if King allowed him to prospect that he’d act like he could care less about me and if he managed to patch in, then he’d continue in the same manner.

He’d strolled into a Friday night party, walked up to King and asked if he could prospect. All King saw in front of him was this big, buff ex-military man. Someone that was trained in warfare. He’d immediately said yes. T had kept his head down and did what he was told and was a shoo-in when his prospecting time was up.

I was thankful for the man. I knew he had my back and I knew that I could count on T for anything, just like I did with Brawn.

I looked at Draven. He was thirty-five. He was another one that King thought he had in his pocket. There was one major thing that King didn’t know about Draven, he was a buddy of T’s from the Army.

Five years ago, Draven had called T and told him he’d just mustered out of the service and wanted to join the MC. T came to me and we talked about it. Brawn, T and I went to meet with Draven and it was decided that Brawn would bring him in as the son of one of his buddies that he served with in ‘Nam. Again, we didn’t want King to know that Draven was connected to me. Brawn and I were doing our damnedest to make sure that we had men who would stand behind me if things went south between King and me.

Rage and Crusher were in their early forties. They despised King for supplying the drugs that turned their parents into junkies. Their dad had been a dealer for King and he’d generously offered them free samples of the products that came in. It hadn’t taken long before all the money his dad had made either went up his parents’ noses or through a vein.

Both men had sworn that one day they would take King down. They were in their twenties when they’d come to me and we’d talked. While I didn’t set out to make it known, it seemed that everyone in our area knew how much I hated King and that was what they were seeking, someone who wanted to snuff King as bad as they did.

I’d let them know how the club was, how things would play out if they tried to take out King or even if they managed to do it. I told them that would get them both killed faster than they could blink. After more conversation, they’d sworn loyalty to me and wanted to be there when King was finally taken down.

When they asked King to prospect, he’d done as he always did and assumed that he had more men at his back. He thought since their dad had been one of his dealers that he was adding to his army of men. He had no idea how much Crusher and Rage hated him. His arrogance wouldn’t let him see that there were men other than me who wished him dead.

Taz was one more man that had my back. Twenty-six years ago, his mom Regina had come with a group of her high school friends from a couple towns over to one of the MC’s parties. They’d all thought it would be fun to party hard with bikers. His mom had gotten more than she bargained for and ended up pregnant by one of the men. She had no clue which one.

Her brother had approached me one night at the Hell Hole. They had wanted to know if there was anything I could do to help them out. Without telling anyone what I was doing, I’d met with him and his sister Regina the next day. I’d asked her what she wanted to do. I told her that I’d help her anyway I could. I let her know if she wanted the money for an abortion, that I’d give it to her. She didn’t want that.

Regina claimed it was her stupidity in believing the party she attended would be something she could handle, when it hadn’t been. She had never done drugs before and some of the men had gotten her stoned. She said she had no clue who the father was. She said she did remember the faces of the men she’d been with but she’d been flying too high to care how many it was.

She informed me that all of the girls who had gone to the party had gotten together later and none of them could remember what had exactly happened. They had all agreed not to ever talk about it with anyone, they didn’t dare let it get back to their parents what they had done.

Regina said she was taking responsibility for her actions, she was keeping the baby. She didn’t want anyone to know that the father of her child was one of the men from the MC. Both her and her brother had wanted to keep everything secret. I agreed. I assured her that I hadn’t been one of the men at the party, that I wouldn’t ever do that to a woman. She said she knew I wasn’t one of them, that was the reason she let her brother approach me.

I had felt bad for the girl. Her brother was the one supporting her and her mother and he was barely out of high school himself. I told her I would claim the baby as mine if she wanted me to, but she didn’t. We’d made an agreement between the three of us that they would never tell anyone and I’d support the child. I’d had to do it, I couldn’t stand the thought of them struggling to feed and clothe the baby. I’d taken care of both of them just like they were mine.

Taz had grown up knowing I wasn’t his dad but that I did support him and his mom. I would take money to Regina once or twice a month. When I did, I would spend time with Taz. The day after he graduated from high school, he’d turned up at my front door. He told me he wanted to thank me for taking care of him when it really hadn’t been my place.

He wanted me to know how deeply he respected me for taking care of them when there hadn’t been the remotest possibility that I was his father. Our relationship had changed that day. I was no longer just the man who had helped support him and spent time with him a couple times a month, I became his friend. No one knew what I’d done for all those years, not even Brawn.

When he was twenty, Taz decided he wanted to be in the MC. I tried my best to discourage him. I let him know that if he was looking for his biological father that he wouldn’t find him. That I was fairly sure who his dad was and he’d been killed years ago. He’d let me know real fast that as far as he was concerned, there were only two men who were father figures in his life, his uncle and me.

After his unrelenting pressure, I’d reluctantly agreed he could try to prospect for the club. We’d had a heart to heart talk about how bad the club was. I’d hoped that would put him off on joining, it hadn’t, if anything it had only made him dig his heels in deeper. He said I needed men at my back. We had come to the same agreement I had with the other guys, no one was to know he was loyal to me.

“Alright, let’s start all this shit again. Brawn, what went down?”

“The bastard pitched his idea of human trafficking.”

“Fuck,” I snarled. “How was it received?”

“Around half of the fuckers were all for it,” growled Draven. “I swear to God I don’t think I’ve ever been around more depraved men in my life. They were talking about kidnapping young children, for Christ’s sake, children as young as four or five. Then King said they’d need to be trained. Trained to be sex slaves.

“God dammit, Ry, he wants us to rape and torture young kids. That’s fucking sick. I don’t care if I get a bullet between the eyes, I’ll kill any son of a bitch that orders me to do that. Hell, I’ll kill anyone that does that. We have to stop this shit somehow.”

“Christ,” I muttered as I ran my hands up and down my face. I looked back at Brawn. “Tell me it wasn’t voted in?”

“Not yet, it wasn’t. There was some pretty loud resistance to it. King backed off and told them to think about it. He said he’d give them three weeks and bring it up again. Then he let everyone know not to say a word to anyone that wasn’t in the room. A few didn’t like that you weren’t there and wanted to know why it was brought up without the entire MC being present.

“King managed to sidestep the question but, hell, Ry, if he has three weeks to whisper into these men’s ears, he’ll convince them to go for it, especially when he lets them know how much money they will make.”

“Ry, we’ve got to think of a way out of this. I feel it in my gut that he’s going to do this. I won’t be a part of it, I just won’t,” T snarled.

“Nor I,” Taz muttered.

“Us either,” Rage and Crusher added.

“You know I’m not fucking doing it,” Draven spit out.

“Dad already knows how I feel about this,” Tor stated. “Any more beer in there, Dad?”

I opened the cooler, handed everyone a brew and grabbed me another one. When I glanced back up, I saw all eyes on Brawn. I turned my gaze toward him and he was returning their stares.

“You didn’t say you were against this shit, brother,” T’s gravelly voice uttered.

“Jesus, you guys don’t seriously think I’d stand for this, do you?” he snapped at them angrily. “For God’s sake, I have a thirteen-year-old daughter. I’d kill any motherfucker who laid a hand on her.”

“All I know is he’s your uncle. We all know he asked you to spy on Ry,” T elaborated.

“How the fuck do y’all know that?” he queried.

“You’re dodging the question,” T continued. “Ry, are you completely sure he’s not playing you?”

“Listen here you fucking little pissant. My hatred of King runs deep. He fucking forced my mom to be a prostitute. He made money from her submitting to any man’s pleasure and when she was killed by one of them, he didn’t do a god damn thing. He took no revenge for his own sister. The man has no remorse.

“So don’t you fucking dare question my loyalty to Ry. I’ve been by his side before any of you little shits were born and I’ll be by his side until the day I die. God dammit but I ought to kick your ass for even questioning my allegiance to Ry.”

“Alright, that’s enough. T, I understand where you’re coming from. I get that we are all frustrated. None of us are going to do that shit, even if it comes down to a war within the club. You all know I won’t stand for it. I trust every one of you. Every. Single. One.” I blew out a breath. “We need a plan.”

“Dad,” Tor spoke up, “didn’t you say you had a few ideas?”

“Yeah, son, I do.”

“What are they?” Draven asked.

“Either one of you work with explosives in the Army?” I inquired of T and Draven.

“No,” both of them voiced.

“Hell, I was afraid of that. I’ll have to do some digging into this.”

“What are you thinking about, Ry?” Brawn asked.

“Mass murder,” I replied.

I saw everyone’s eyebrows raise at that comment. I smiled.

“When I have it worked out, I’ll let you know what the plan is. For now, you fuckers need to get out of here. We don’t need anyone seeing you here and, for fuck’s sake, each of you take a different route. Keep your wits about you. Don’t trust anyone else other than the men here. Keep your eyes open and be listening when you’re at the compound. You know half those assholes can’t keep shit to themselves when they’re drunk or stoned.”

After receiving affirmatives from the group, all of them but Brawn, got up, went to their clothes and got dressed, then they left. Tor continued leaning on the porch rail.

“What’s eating you, Brawn?” I asked and took another swallow of my beer.

“Ry, you don’t think I’d betray you, do you?”

I looked into the eyes of my best friend. He’d been with me through thick and thin. I honestly couldn’t see him doing that, and if he did, then he would have played me good.

“No, Brawn. I don’t think you would betray me.”

“Sorry, Ry. Them questioning me, shook me. You’re like a brother to me. I’d rather you kill me if you thought I’d ever double-cross you.”

“You know some of the brothers suspect him, don’t you, Dad?”

My gaze flew to my son’s. “What do you mean?”

“Overheard a couple of the men. They were saying that King was a fool if he couldn’t tell how close Brawn was to you.”

“Fuck,” I muttered.

“Ry, we need to figure out something I can tell King that will make it seem like I’m still in his corner.”

“Know something you can do.”

Brawn and I looked at Tor. “We’re all ears, son.”

“I rented a storage space in the next town over. Been filling it with fertilizer and shit. Stuff to make a few bombs. Let Brawn tell him about the unit. He can say he doesn’t know what you’re planning on using it for. That would keep King off his back and make King think that Brawn is still his puppet.”

“Why the fuck you have that shit for?”

“What’s in that unit is diluted. Won’t blow nothing up, but most wouldn’t know that. I keep the real shit somewhere else.”

“Christ, Tor. When were you going to tell me that you were doing this?”

“When I needed to, Dad. Figured at some point, we were gonna have to blow some shit up to get rid of a few people.”

“Hell, you’re too fucking much like me,” I uttered.

He grinned wickedly at me. “Learned it from the best, old man.”

“I’ll old man your ass.”

He laughed as he stood up and headed toward the door to the house. “I’m game any time you want to bring it, old man.”

I shook my head in amusement as he walked into the house.

“Damn, Ry, he’s just like you. His plan will work too. Let me know when you want me to tell him,” Brawn remarked as he got to his feet.

“Will do. Let me think about it some more.”

“Alright. Talk to you later.”

“Later, Brawn.”

I thought about each one of the men that had sat on my porch today. I trusted each one of them. They had proven their loyalty to me time and again. Those six men were the other people I couldn’t handle losing.

~***~