8
SAINT
It’s five in the morning before I fall back to sleep, and when the alarm on my phone goes off at nine, I’m in a foul mood. I turn it off quickly and lift myself from the floor to check on Briar. She murmurs in her sleep but rolls over away from me. I stand to give her space but can’t help noticing the way her pajamas hug the curve of her ass.
Could I be more morally bankrupt? The last thing she needs is me noticing how fucking juicy her body is, even if that’s God’s honest truth of it. It would take nothing to lean forward and take a playful bite.
I get up and head to the kitchen to make coffee. Outside the window, the yard is a mess. It represents everything I’m not. It’s disorganized and chaotic. There’s nothing good about it.
Maybe I’ll ask King if I can get a handful of the prospects to come over one weekend and give it a makeover. If all they did was deal with the junk, edge the borders, and repair the fence, it would be less of an eyesore.
But then I remember I have Briar here.
For now,I remind myself.
I have a feeling that when she leaves, I’m gonna need to know she’s okay. Last night she was ... vulnerable. That dream really shook her. I don’t know her well enough to know if death by suicide is something that would ever be on her mind. Hell, there are two people I knew their entire lives, people I’d swear would never make that choice, but then they devastated the fuck out of me by doing just that.
As I sip my piping hot coffee, I think about my former ATF friend Johnny.
At his funeral, people were talking about how the night before, he’d been laughing and smiling and throwing back whiskey.
I climb in the shower and shave my chest. Whenever Spark and I have to share a room, he always rips me for my manscaping. But how could I tell him I do it because the tape of the mic I sometimes wear sticks better?
I apply it today. Weicker has been on my ass for not capturing more evidence of the money laundering that goes through the club, and today is the day someone will be dropping off the cash.
I pray it’s not Spark or King. Not that I want any of the guys to go down.
I need to go.
I scribble a quick note on a piece of paper with my details and leave it near the coffee machine. I tell Briar to help herself to whatever’s in the fridge. And to let me know if she decides to leave so I don’t worry about her.
The ride to the strip club is brief and gloomy. The fall weather in full effect. I’m not usually here this early, but I’m also interviewing a woman this morning.
When I open the rear door to the club, I see it with different eyes. King gave me the club to run, thought I’d be kinder, as a former army chaplain, to some of the women. And I’d like to think I have been. But last night I started wondering about the girls who work here. How many have gone into those private rooms, only for something unexpected, unplanned, and unwanted to happen? Did they feel like they could come talk to me about it? Did they knowIwould take them seriously?
How many of them have woken up in the middle of the night like Briar did, reliving some horrific moment?
I make a promise right there, under the neon sign with the strip club’s cheesy name, the Gold Pole, on it:No girl is going to get abused in my club.
I’m going to increase precautions every step of the way. From how I hire, to the security in the building, to making sure the girls know their word will be taken over any punter. We’ll make a formal protocol for reporting any jackass who tried to hurt them. I’m gonna clean this place up so tight.
And here I go again with the false belief that I am actually Saint, a member of the Iron Outlaws, and this club is mine to run forever. I’m just an ATF agent currently losing his grip on reality, who will be undercover with some other group twelve months from now.
I scrub my hand over my face, pressing hard.
This simply means my goals have a time limit. I want to leave the club safer than when I joined it.
I’ve done shit I should never have done as an Outlaw. There are ATF rules. You’re not supposed to do drugs. Ever. If you do, you’re meant to call it in and act the same way as if you’d been shot. You’re considered medically compromised.
Six months ago, at the big cross-country MC meet-up, Spunk, a brute of a man from the LA chapter, put me in a situation where I felt I had no choice but to do a line of coke. I did it but was really fucking grateful when King stepped in explaining why, as a chaplain, I got a pass.
And, like the Bible says, thou shalt not kill. As an ATF agent, you’re meant to get the hell out of Dodge. Defend but never attack. Not pour what a guy thinks is arsenic into red wine and make him drink it. Sure, the dude was a pedophile. He touched up Whip’s niece’s thirteen-year-old kid, Laney, but the cops had let him go. Lack of evidence.
So Vex helped Whip set up an online sting. The guy thought he was meeting a young girl. Instead, he met thirteen Iron Outlaws, one for each year of Laney’s life that he’d ruined. And my defense? Everyone had to do something fucking awful to him. Clutch and King were going to take his fingers so he couldn’t touch another kid. Bates, his testicles. But I was to go first. I got an old chalice and told everyone it was arsenic when really it was heavy-duty morphine and codeine in red wine. Wasn’t sure the pain relief would help all that much, given what the guy was facing, but it was the best I could come up with. Showing up was an order from King, participation was not optional. Whip went last and put a bullet square between the guy’s eyes.
Then I uttered the Rite of Committal as he was buried in the Pines because I was expected to by those who think I’m a preacher.
And there’s my other dichotomy. I had always believed innocent until proven guilty, that the courts were the right legal process. Now I’m a vigilante, however I decide to wash it. Because, honestly, I was happy to bury that fucker.
