Page 1 of Iron Hearts
CHAPTERONE
Striker…
It was a sun-shining and beautiful fuckin’ day in St. Augustine as I breathed in deep the salty sea air of the Atlantic, looking at the steel-gray waves coming in from the far distant horizon. I felt better than ever about being out here.
I’d had some trouble back in my rearview with how my last chapter had been going about doing things. I was lucky enough that the big dogs had taken pity on the situation enough to throw me the bone of laterally transferring here to help with the start-up of this new chapter under Renegade.
I’d found that we thought along the same lines, and there wasn’t a better fit for me if it’d been custom made. The beach life suited me just fine, too.
I leaned way back in my creaking old desk chair and rocked a little, satisfied with thecreak-clack,creak-clacksound that it made. I was sitting up top above the garage in the office space of the clubhouse for the St. Augustine chapter of the Royal Bastards MC.
It was a good building – strong bones, enough to withstand the worst kind of weather. With steel girders along the ceiling down below and a series of chains and pulleys – enough to lift the bikes out of harm’s way should any of the more brutal weather that was prone to pop off during hurricane season decide to put a bullseye on the oldest city in the continental US.
By day, the floor below operated as a custom bike shop specializing in new builds and bitchin’ skins to meet the dreams and demands of any motherfucker with enough coin to afford what we were offering – which was sicker than any other bike shop out there was capable of producing as far as we were concerned.
There were shelves up near the ceiling with dust-covered trophies from just about every bike week and fuckin’ expo all over the US and some even international, too.
Renegade had an eye for making wicked sick and beautiful bikes and kept quite a few of us employed – at least on paper.
Above the garage was the office space – partially for the business downstairs and partially for the clubhouse upstairs. Upstairs is where it was at, though – a full bar, couches, a couple billiard tables and a row of dart boards. Even one of those arcade rock ‘em sock ‘em games where it measured how hard you could punch the speed trainer bag. It also measured speed depending on the setting.
We had weights and other equipment up there, too, and a room or two dedicated to the odd fuck, or some slap and tickle.
Best part about it, like down here, it was roofed, but the whole side of the building was open to the salt air and cooling breeze off the water. The ceiling fans spun lazily above to move some air on the more humid and stagnant days.
A lot of us spent the majority of our time here, working days and wild nights – like me. I handled a lot of the logistics for the shop below – inventory and the like, in charge of ordering supplies and keeping stock up to standard. I was also in charge of the books, taking payments, shipping and delivery of products. Shit like that.
For the club, I was the road captain – putting together runs and keeping the rides cohesive and safe.
Yeah, I was here more often than not, but I was good with it. I never got tired of it, that’s for sure. Not with a view like that.
Some of us worked outside the shop, like the Butcher Brothers – our sergeant-at-arms and enforcer. They were born-and-bred bayou boys, transplant gator hunters from out in the Louisiana swamps, set on making a name for themselves hunting invasive species out here in the Glades.
They did pretty good for themselves, but they did even better working at the Gator Farm tourist attraction around here, which was kind of a trip for me. Those two, hanging around gator enclosures, wasn’t what was weird to me. No, it was the thought of those two entertaining the kiddies and families from all over. That part was just fuckin’bizarre.
I dragged my eyes away from the preserved gator head chilling, sticking out from the wall above the archway that led out to the open deck with the view of the Atlantic beyond it, and sighed. My gaze fixing on one of the Bucher – pronouncedboo-shay– brothers’ trophies had drawn my thoughts to the brothers.
Skull, government name Jacques Montrose Boucher, never hesitated to correct you if you mispronounced his name. He said it was pronouncedJoc-keestand not like Jaque Cousteau or whatever. The “Montrose” was where his great-granddaddy had been born.
His taller, lankier, and more unhinged younger brother, Bones, was Luis orLoo-eeseCarentan Bouche – and had been named after where their great-granddaddy haddiedsomewhere in Normandy.
It explained a few things. It seemed like their whole fuckin’ family was a pack of morbid weirdos. Didn’t help that the boys were only ten months apart and in the middle of the pack of something like seven kids.
Like their father and mother – their favorite pastime was fucking – either a pair of best friends or, most of the time, the same girl at thesame time.
It reeked of some deep-South cousin-fucking type of shit to me and gave me the willies. Still, even with their weird-ass sexual proclivities and the fact they were both certifiably and deeply unhinged, they weren’t bad guys.
I mean, they were, butwe allwere, at least by citizen standards. That just was what it was.
The world hadn’t done many of us any favors, and a lot of us were pretty muchfuck the worldin response. We did things our way, and that’s just the way we liked it.
I was an Army veteran, and my moment where the wool was stripped off from over my eyes came when I got back stateside after my last tour. My battle buddy, he wasn’t doing as good as me with processing all the shit from over there. Tried like a motherfucker to go through all the proper channels through the VA, but they kept giving him the run-around. They kept putting him off, declaring parts of his body and mind failing him werenot service-relatedwhen it had every-fucking-thing to do with what we did for this country over there.
He tried, man. Tried like a motherfucker to get them to fuckinghelp him, which was what was fuckingowedto him. He sacrificed everything and then some on the altar of Uncle Sam – his mind, his body, his fuckin’ spirit – and they just wouldn’t fuckinghelp. Wouldn’t give him the care that he was owed.
He died on his bathroom floor of an OD that was entirely preventable if they’d just fuckin’ done what they were supposed to fuckin’ do – butno. Three fuckin’ tours, and he died of an overdose of some street drug he’d started on just to get some fuckin’relieffrom the monsters in his head and the pain racking his body.
He was still active duty when it’d happened. The Army quickly declared it a suicide and stripped his wife of survivor benefits, and had put him out bad with a less-than-honorable discharge or whatever.
