Dead Men Motorcycle Club Read online

  Dead Men

  Motorcycle Club

  The Novel

  by

  Angelica Siren

  © Angelica Siren 2014, all rights reserved.

  All Romance Edition

  Contents

  Learning to Ride

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Epilogue

  Tell No Tales

  Paying the Price

  Learning to Ride

  Chapter 1

  My dad always said that my veins run half blood and half engine grease. That might be a fanciful way of saying what he really meant, but I had enough under my fingernails most days that it seemed almost likely. Ever since I was little, I'd helped my dad in the garage. While other girls were still playing with dolls, I was learning about timing belts. When other girls were mooning over cute guys, I had my hands deep inside an engine. Some girls arrive to prom in a rented limo. I insisted to my boyfriend at the time that I drive us in the old Charger I'd been working on for half a year. It was a safe bet that I was pretty different from the other girls. It's not that I didn't know my way around feminine things. I don't want to give you the impression that I'm all rough around the edges or anything like that. I can clean myself up and put on a dress when I need to. It's just that wherever I go and whatever I do, if I'm not working on an engine, I feel like I ought to be.

  After high school, I spent the next four years working in my dad's garage. He was an old grease monkey and he taught me everything I know. He'd been a biker, back before I was born. My mom told me that when she met him, he was halfway through a ride across the country with three of his buddies. The way she told it, he was so smitten by her beauty that, once they reached the coast, he turned around and rode back solo to find her, a thousand miles away. I was never sure of the truth of all that, but it made for a great story and my dad never contradicted it. My mom died when I was eight, and after that my dad gave up most of the trappings of his outlaw life. He opened the garage and set out to make himself a pillar of our Midwestern community.

  Two months ago, dad died. He was my whole world, but I didn't let it get me down. He went out surrounded by family and friends and had a smile on his face. You really can't ask for much more than that. Unfortunately for me, the business he built wasn't doing so well, and there were medical bills to pay for. My dream of taking over the business when he was gone went up in a puff of smoke. I'd spent the last six weeks talking to lawyers and negotiating the sale of the business in order to pay off dad's bills. When all that was over, I looked around and found that I didn't have much in the world. I had my car - that same old Charger from the prom - and I had my tools. I was only two days into puttering around my little apartment before I realized that I didn't have anything holding me in place. I was free to go wherever I wanted.

  And so I drove. I packed up all the clothes I wanted along with a few photographs, and gave the rest away. I got rid of all my heavy coats and scarves and pointed myself towards California. Along the way I tried to do the tourist thing for a while. I was halfway through my second monument when I stopped taking pictures, wondering who would ever care to look at them. The rest of the drive was hard and fast. I had a mission and I wasn't going to get held up by some obligation to explore the tourist traps of the western states.

  My goal was to make it to the little town of San Viero. You've probably never heard of it. I wouldn't have either, except that my dad made me watch a documentary about mechanics and the film told me that the first auto mechanics trade union was established in San Viero in the early part of the 20th century. The union was long gone now, absorbed into other, bigger organizations. None of the shops from back then existed either. Still, it sounded like a nice quiet town and a perfect place to start my new life.

  I rolled into town at about six in the evening. One of the best things about small towns is that they've still got Main Streets. I'm not talking about the big city blocks with fancy office buildings, either. I'm talking about having a stretch of road where almost all the business in town happens. You can drive from one and to the other and get yourself a near-perfect understanding of what the place is like. In that regard, my first drive through San Viero was quite informative.

  On the way into town, I passed a couple of fast food places with names I didn't recognize. Next up were the bars. There were only a half dozen - a pretty crazy contrast to the city I was born and raised in - and every one of them had character coming out of the ears. These were places where the same people had been coming to drink every night for forty years. There would be bar fights, but they would always end in the winner buying the loser a beer. It was just the kind of place I was looking for - quiet with an edge.

  Block after block, the small town charm was winning me over. An ice cream parlor here, a local bank there, and everywhere I went, the people looked like they were happy to be living in San Viero. I couldn't blame them. I had just driven out of a winter wasteland where the temperature wouldn't go above freezing for five months out of the year. Down here in Southern California, people were wearing shorts. It was a dream come true.

  There was just one thing missing. If I was going to make a go of it here in San Viero, I'd need to find a job. There was only one thing I'd ever been good at, and I wasn't about to learn a new trade when I had a perfectly employable one already. When I saw the garage at the end of main street, I knew I'd found my real target at last.

  The Peasant Motors garage might have had an unfortunate name, but it was by no means a small operation. As I drove by I slowed down and counted seven garage bays and more than a dozen cars in various states of repair on the lot. In addition, there were half a dozen motorcycles lines up in front of the business office. My dad had made sure I knew my way around a bike as well as a car, though he'd forbidden me to ever ride one. He told me too many horror stories of friends he'd seen dashed all over the road, and said he counted himself lucky to have given up riding before he'd broken something serious - or worse. I loved my dear old dad too much to disappoint him by riding a motorcycle while he was alive, but now that I was on my own, I felt somehow released from his protection. I was my own woman and I could make my own decisions about what was and wasn't safe. Part of me had always wanted to ride, but I'd never had the nerve to rebel against my dad like that. He'd given me more freedom through high school than most kids get, and it was hard to throw that in his face by taking a joy ride. Still, you always crave the things that are held just out of reach. When I saw that line of bikes in the lot at Peasant Motors, I saw a fruit that had been forbidden to me for a long time.

  I parked the Charger on the street in front of the garage and looked at myself in the mirror. I'd been on the road for three days and I looked like it. That suited me just fine. You might not realize it, but there are a lot of differences when it comes to getting work at a garage versus finding work in some office. If you're in an office, they expect you to be clean. If you're too clean in a garage, the mechanics get nervous. At my dad's place, we used to call some of the customers "clean hands". The implication was that they'd never bothered to do their own auto work and relied on us for even something as simple as an oil change. Some of them were too proud of their hands to so much as check their tire pressure. If I was going to head right on in and ask for a job, I wanted to look like I knew what I was doing.

  It's hard enough to simply convince another mechanic that you know what you're doing. It's worse when you're a woman. This is not an industry that has an abundance of women working in it. Even in this day and age, there are plenty of men out there who think fixing engines is purely "man's work". I took a deep breath before I got out of the car and silently praye
d that here in San Viero I'd get a better reception. Peasant Motors was the only garage in town as far as I could tell. If I couldn't make it here, I might have to give up on the whole town and find a place that would actually hire me.

  As I walked through the lot, I admired the collection of cars that were scattered around. I was pleased to see that it wasn't just American makes, either. There were a couple German cars, some Japanese models and one that I didn't even recognize - some Eastern European monster from back in the cold war. Whoever they had working here, they were no novices. They knew their way around foreign cars as well as American ones. I was still confident that I could impress, but pleased to know that if I did get the job, at least I would be in good company.

  I stepped into the business office - the door to which had Peasant Motors stenciled on it, along with a handful of stickers from various business organizations. Inside the small room, a desk was jammed in amongst filing cabinets, cupboards and an angry woman screaming into a telephone.

  "If you want it back, you're going to pay the bill. If not, we're keeping it. That's not a threat, Harvey, that's a fact. We'll give you 'til the end of the week and then it's ours. It's taking up space and we don't want the damn thing," she yelled at the phone in her hand. She listened for a few more moments before answering back to her conversation partner, "You can turn it into a little metal cube for all I care. Just get it out of here and cut me a check." She slammed the phone down onto the receiver with a long ring and made a painful sigh of resignation.

  I felt awkward for a moment, unsure if she'd seen me enter the room. I didn't want to startle her with my presence, especially after hearing the way she talked on the phone. Without looking at me, she said towards me, "You gonna stand there all day or what?"

  I blushed slightly and stepped towards the desk. She was busy organizing the pile of papers that seemed to stretch from one wall to the next. I cleared my throat as I sat down, hoping she'd acknowledge me sooner rather than later. To my eternal thanks, she set aside her filing and gave me her attention.

  "Well, what can I do for you?" she asked.

  "I'm looking for work. Just got into town, but I'd like to stay here. Seems like a nice place and -"

  She cut me off quickly, obviously uninterested in what I thought of San Viero. "We don't really need anybody in the office here. I take care of things just fine, thanks."

  "No," I told her, completely prepared for this kind of response. "I'm not here to do the office work. I'm a mechanic. I'm Emma Percy. Fixing engines is what I do."

  Her posture changed when I told her that and she gave me the strangest look I'd seen in a long time. People were often reserved and sometimes just downright rude when it came to a woman claiming knowledge of engines. She was looking at me like I was a two-headed calf or something. Maybe I'd underestimated just how strange a female mechanic would be out here on the coast.

  "Is that so," she said, finally, "Well that's a horse of a different color. A decent mechanic is always welcome around here." She leaned forward in her seat and got a view of my Charger down on the street. "Is that yours?"

  I nodded. "Yep," I told her, "I've been working on it since I was 16. It's my pride and joy."

  She got a nostalgic look in her eye as she peered out the window. She leaned back in her chair and turned her attention back to me. "I had one a lot like that back in the day." I could believe it. She carried herself well and she had a lot of fire to her, but she couldn't have been a day under 40. She had the look of a woman who wasn't ready to give up on being the popular girl, and probably never would be.

  "How long have you worked as a mechanic?" she asked.

  "I worked in my dad's garage back in Minnesota for six years, officially."

  "Officially?" she asked with a raised eyebrow.

  "Yeah," I told her, "I mean, I couldn't say I worked there 'til I was 16, cause of labor laws and all, you know… but I've been in that shop since I was 8, helping my dad with everything there is to do on a car."

  "You know your way around a bike, at all?"

  "Sure, we worked on plenty of bikes, too."

  "Good. I'm sure you noticed the line out there. They boys are a bit rough on their rides and they need to keep things in good working order. They're mostly too proud to have anybody else work on their own bikes, but sometimes there's no choice. I get to make sure that everybody who works here at Peasant knows how to get them back on the road," she said. I could tell that she was extremely proud of the garage and her mechanics, but there was something else in what she said that took a moment to turn over in my mind.

  I looked around the room at the various pictures that littered the walls. I looked at her. I looked at the line of bikes parked outside the office. This wasn't just a garage. This was a clubhouse. I'd seen enough TV shows to recognize one when I came upon it in person. Without knowing it, I'd stumbled right into a motorcycle club garage.

  Now, while I hadn't expected to find an MC garage in my perfect little adoptive town, I wasn't entirely put off by it either. An MC garage meant two things - first, you never knew quite what you were getting mixed up in when you went to work for one. Second, there would always be plenty of work to do. The thought of the second pushed me forwards without another thought. I hadn't been ready to admit it, but one of my greatest fears was that I'd find a decent garage but there wouldn't be much work to be had. I can't seem to go for a whole day without getting my hands dirty on an engine, even if it's just tightening this and loosening that for a few minutes. Now that I knew a little bit about who was really in charge of Peasant Motors, I was sure my concerns were unfounded.

  "Well, Emma," she said to me, "I tell you what - we really could use another set of hands around here. I'm not going to lie to you, though, it won't be easy. I'm not just talking about the workload, either. Between you and me, most of the guys here... well, they're not exactly known for progressive values. I'm certain not one of them has ever worked in a garage alongside a woman before. In the office? Sure. But building an engine beside them, no way."

  "I can handle whatever they're dishing out," I told her. "I've been dealing with guys like that all my life."

  "I'm sure you have," she said, "But it's not just dealing with it. See, I'm in charge of the books and I do the interviews, but you're going to have to impress them in the garage. I'm sure you're going to have to work twice as hard to make them think you're worth keeping around. Do you have a place to stay?"

  "Not yet. I literally just got into town," I said flatly.

  "Okay, well, there's a motel out on Rotwood - the Oceanside," she said, grabbing one of the business cards out of the tray in front of her. She scribbled something on the back and handed it to me. "You tell them I sent you and you'll get a decent room. If you decide to stay on, I can ask around about some place to rent. Get yourself settled in at Oceanside and come in tomorrow at 9 and we'll toss you to the sharks."

  "Thanks so much," I said with a smile.

  "Don't mention it."

  I stood up and gave her a final nod as I left the room, but she was already re-engaging with the paperwork that littered her desk. I realized I'd never gotten her name and looked down at the card. On the back she'd written her name - Karen Waits. I had to restrain myself to keep from skipping and jumping as I made me way back to the car. The last thing I needed was for someone in the garage to spot me and spread the story before I'd even arrived tomorrow.

  I found the motel easy enough. San Viero's not big enough to really get lost in for long. Judging by the state of the motel, the hospitality industry wasn't exactly booming in San Viero. The sign was one strong gust away from falling over, and the innkeeper was one strong drink away from the same fate. I told him that Karen Waits had said I'd find a decent room here. For a moment I thought maybe Karen had played me false and was sending me to this fleabag as a bit of a hazing ritual or something. However, when I got to the room, I realized it looked a lot better on the inside than the outside. The sheets were clean, the lights
were bright and the carpet had been installed sometime in the past decade. Maybe having Karen watching out for me wasn't such a bad thing.

  I laid down on the surprisingly comfortable bed and realized suddenly just how exhausted I was. I'd been driving all day and sleeping in my car for the past two nights, and my muscles were feeling it. I barely had time to get my boots off before a deep, dreamless sleep enveloped me.

  When I woke, it was early in the morning. I'd managed to sleep the whole night away on top of the sheets. The rays of the rising sun poured through the window - which was decidedly not an ocean view, despite the name of the motel. I stripped off my clothing and tossed it in the end of one of the bags I'd brought with me, and then headed for the shower.

  The old plumbing sprang to life and I managed a halfway decent - and halfway warm - shower. It was at least refreshing to be out of my clothes after so long, When I decided I was clean enough, I got out and wrapped myself in a towel I'd brought from home. I wiped away the fog from the bathroom mirror and stared at the reflection I saw before me. I was pretty enough. My dirty blonde hair was cut short - so much better for not getting tangled in engines - but it could use a trim. My eyebrows were starting to look a bit less than perfect and I found myself wondering whether there was a decent place to get waxed in San Viero.

  I stepped out into the room and tore through my bags, looking for something to wear. I settled on a pair of tough black jeans and a faded grey t-shirt. I was extremely happy that, in mid-January, I didn't have to bother picking out a sweater or a coat or something like that to keep me warm. No wonder people had been braving the journey across the country towards California for the past couple hundred years.

  Once I was dressed, I grabbed my purse and slung it over my shoulder, across my body. Before I could even think about checking out the town, I needed to find some breakfast. I had little doubt that in a place like this, a decent breakfast was one of the things you could always count on. I hopped into my Charger and drove back towards Main Street.