Page 26 of Riding the Edge
I wait for his reaction, but his face remains neutral. A sure sign he’s wearing down his maker. Knowing his sanity is fragile, I debate on continuing.
“Give it to me,” he demands.
As I stumble to find the right words, I realize I may have purposely procrastinated with this revelation. I don’t want to be the brother who tells him the man he held on a pedestal is the same man who used his debilitating illness to ruin our club.
“Cain didn’t give you the nod for the chair in good faith,” I say hoarsely. “He and that Russian cunt played on the loss of your son and the fragility of your mind. Yankovich knew all about your maker and they never expected you to keep her at bay. Cain set you up to fail, thought it was only a matter of time before you were committed. The plan was for Yankovich to sweep in and take control of the club’s territory, including the docks. He could move all the girls and drugs he wanted if we weren’t on the map anymore.”
Rising to his feet, he lifts his hands to the sides of his head and paces in front of me.
“Brother, you proved them wrong. We all gave you shit, but you saved this club. You breathed life into every man with a fucking patch and made them part of something they could be proud of. You made us all part of your family and that’s the biggest fuck you, you could’ve given those pricks.”
Turning around, he drops his hands and stares back at me. Taking in his disheveled appearance, my body fills with regret.
“If that was true we wouldn’t have a stack of bodies in Green-Wood Cemetery,” he roars.
“We’d all be dead, Parrish,” I argue. “And while we might not have saved every innocent girl that motherfucker harmed, we saved Ally. Now, I know this is a hard pill for you to swallow but you need to reign it in because once this shit gets out, we need to be ready for war.”
“Does Pops know?”
“I don’t know if he knows about the tapes and there was no time to ask. I only found out right before the shit with Pipe and Brantley. When the dust clears you and Blackie might want to take a ride down to Georgia.”
The silence stretches between us as I try to find the words to make this right. Before I get the chance, the transformation between manic and sane commences. Composing himself, Jack straightens his shoulders and combs his fingers through his salt and pepper hair.
“Thank you for giving me that,” he rasps. “I understand why you kept it to yourself.”
“Do you?”
“You don’t want to admit it, or may you don’t even want to see it, but Cain and Yankovich were right. I am a liability. You didn’t want to tell me the truth because you knew it might throw me over the edge.”
Stepping closer, he places a hand on my shoulder and pats the other as he levels me with an intense look.
“I won’t give that motherfucker the satisfaction. It’s going to take a lot more than bad blood between me and a corpse to drive me mad,” he says roughly before taking a retreating step back. “Oh, and just to be clear, there is no we, Wolf,” he says, pausing for a beat. “There is me and there is you. I’ll get a handle on the crazy, but you get a handle on life,” he says, dropping his hands.
“And for fuck’s sake, that don’t mean go and plant more fucking vegetables. A man survives a massive heart attack, drops half a person and instead of getting his dick sucked he goes and becomes a fucking farmer,” he says, handing over more truth in a fashion only a man like Jack Parrish can… crass and to the point.
Just the way I like it.
