Gods of Mischief (27 page)

I followed the Vagos from JB's garage, then we mounted our bikes and headed out on a San Jacinto Valley bar crawl to celebrate the chapter's newest patches, Crash and Big George.

That's right. I had a road name now: Big George Rowe.

That's the nickname Big Todd had always hung on me, and that's how he'd phoned it in to national without Big Roy's permission. Roy
wasn't happy about it, either. The man was of the opinion that two “Bigs” in his chapter was more than enough. He'd just gotten rid of Big Doug; now he had to deal with Big George. Far as Big Roy was concerned, I was one “Big” over the limit.

For now, though, it would be Big George making the rounds and showing off his new colors to a public that couldn't care less. They just wanted me gone with the rest of the Vagos. By the time we landed at Johnny's Restaurant, our final stop, we'd picked up a handful of patched members from some of the neighboring chapters, including a few boys from Norco—Quickie John's crew. The restaurant was practically empty when we walked in. In the year since the Vagos had taken over the place, business had dried up. The few patrons that remained watched us with nervous eyes and whispered urgently among themselves.

Look. The barbarians have arrived. Hide the women and children.

There were one percenters who would claim those civilians were showing respect for the patch. But that's not the way I saw it. If anything, what I saw in those faces was fear—fear of the patch. Of course, that was the seduction for many who joined motorcycle gangs like the Vagos. Punks like Roy and Big Todd got their rocks off on that power trip.

But there was something else I was aware of while laughing and drinking with the boys at Johnny's that night. Odd as it sounds, I felt their sense of brotherhood. I don't know. Maybe it had something to do with my past. I'd spent a good deal of it orphaned or adopted—never quite fitting in—and the Vagos offered a family where the misfit toys could find common ground and belong to something greater than themselves.

John Carr had warned me not to get chummy with that brutish clique. That's exactly what happened to Special Agent Billy Queen when he went under with the Mongols in 1998. The lawman got swept up in the motorcycle culture and found himself drifting over the line.

“Lot of times guys go under and start calling each other brother, and before you know it your focus gets lost,” John cautioned during one of our Friday-night meetings at the Little Luau.

Sparks (top) and Buckshot, who left the Bros MC to join the Hemet Vagos.

“Never gonna happen,” I assured him. “I know the reason I'm here.”

And I meant it too. I never lost sight of why I'd gone under with the Vagos. Why I'd worked so hard, risked so much and put up with such bullshit for that Loki on my back. I think it helped that I was never a greenie at heart. Guys like Hammer, who was a patch holder and bled green before turning for the feds, had a hard time breaking clean once the mission ended. For them it was gut-ripping to let go of their past, to permanently sever the closest relationships many of them would ever know.

I spent most of the night bar crawling with my back to the wall, guarding against any effort to tear that center patch off my back, which would bust me back to prospect. Crash, on the other hand, was drunk and careless—and he wasn't much of a seamstress either. Big Todd got his fingers under Loki and ripped it right off Crash's cut. Amid the yelling and screaming and finger pointing that followed, I slipped from the bar and punched the number for Uncle Johnny Law into my Nextel. I got John's away message and left one of my own.

“Hey, this is Big George calling. Don't you be giving me shit anymore, buddy. I'm a patch holder now.”

I hung up and lit a cigarette. I'd smoked maybe half that Marlboro when a call came back from 818, the Los Angeles exchange.

“You think you're the balls now, don'tcha?” were the first words out of John's mouth. “Well, let me tell you something, Big George. You're just another piece of shit Vagos to me.”

“This piece of shit Vagos is gonna make you famous, motherfucker.”

“Bullshit,” laughed John. “You want famous, ride with the Angels. Least you could have got the red and white.”

I cursed my handler good-naturedly; he gave it right back, then the bouncer came charging out Johnny's back door.

“George! I need help in here!”

The Vagos had a stomp circle going, and some unfortunate civilian was on the ground in the middle of it. With the help of the bouncer I managed to get the man off the floor and away from that crazed bunch, then I dragged him out the back door and into the parking lot.

When I returned to the bar, the Vagos were laughing drunkenly and Big Roy was wiping blood off his boot with a napkin.

“What happened?” I asked Todd.

“I told him to move, but the fucker wouldn't move.”

Roy tossed the bloody napkin onto the bar and grinned.

“He moved.”

A “Code 69” is
a war call. If a patched Vagos gets a Code 69 message at home or on his cell, it means there's an emergency and club business comes first. You drop what you're doing and get your ass to the location of that emergency. And if you don't make it, you'd better have a damn good reason why, because when it comes to ignoring a Code 69, the Vagos will definitely hunt you down.

As Big Roy so aptly described it, Code 69 is “serious club shit.”

The day after my hard night celebrating the patch, I was draining
my second cup of java and trying to ignore a splitting migraine when the phone rang.

“Code sixty-nine,” said Todd the moment I answered. “Code sixty-nine.”

“What's going on?”

“This dude just jumped my ass and fucked me up. I think my leg's broke. Code sixty-nine, bro.”

I got an address and a general direction, then grabbed my truck keys. But before I could make the door, Jenna came out of the bedroom, half asleep and fully pissed off. The call had awoken Her Highness, and she was looking to tear someone a new asshole. I can tell you from personal experience that getting that woman out of bed in the morning was akin to poking a hibernating grizzly. You almost had to cover your nut-sack, because the bitch just might grab hold and tear it right the fuck off.

“Todd's in trouble,” I told her as I rushed out the door. Whatever danger I was headed for couldn't be half as bad as facing my girlfriend in the morning.

I hopped in my truck and sped away, armed with nothing but an address. And for the life of me I couldn't find the fucking place. I finally rode across Highway 74 and went to Jack Fite's house for directions. Jack wasn't riding with the Hemet Vagos at the time. He'd grown tired of Big Roy's bullshit and left to join Nels Bloom, who we called Swede, as treasurer of a new Vagos chapter in Winchester.

There were no worries as I knocked on Satan's door. No concern about getting another broken leg. For one thing, I was a patch holder now. I could fight back. Besides, the evil one had apologized. Jack explained he'd just had a really bad day when he'd stomped me . . . and he was really truly sorry for that.

The motherfucker would be even sorrier once the takedown happened and Operation 22 Green was in the books. Because sometime later I grabbed my audio and video gear, went over to his house and bought fifteen grams of methamphetamine that he kept buried near
his backyard shed. I knew this because I peeked through a hole in the garage when I wasn't supposed to be looking and saw where Jack dug up his stash.

The man came back bragging how he had a pretty good racket going. For a thousand bucks, someone was cooking meth for him, then Jack would turn around and resell it for ten, pocketing an easy nine grand.
Well, enjoy it while you can, motherfucker
, I remember thinking—
'cause you're going down, Jack.

By this time my response to Todd's urgent Code 69 was pretty pathetic. If the brother was bleeding out somewhere, the tank had probably run dry. Fortunately Jack Fite knew which direction to point me. The homeowner who lived at that address, just around the corner, was a friend of his and one of Hemet's bigger dope dealers. At first Jack suggested I forget about the call and go home, but when I told him I had an obligation to help Todd, Jack sent me on my way with a promise to follow.

At the end of a cul-de-sac I found Todd and my ex-girlfriend Christie jawing with a long-haired mountain of a drug dealer named Dave. The story I heard later was that Todd had paid the dealer for crystal meth that was never delivered. Come to find out that was a crock of shit. Todd was trying to rip Dave off—maybe get himself another freebie like that transmission part he took after the Vagos gave Bro a beat-down at the Toy Box. Come to think of it, that was Todd's idea too. The fucker was getting real good at letting others clean up his messes. And being a Vagos was perfect for a guy like that. “You fuck with one, you fuck with all” was damn handy if you knew how to work it.

Of course, I didn't
know any of that when I jumped from the truck and ran to help my Vagos brother. As soon as I got there, Big Todd launched one of his patented sucker punches at Dave. His swing missed, but Dave's didn't. The dealer cracked Todd good.

It was the last punch he would throw.

My first strike smashed into the man's third rib, breaking it off and puncturing his lung. The dealer toppled and hit the pavement like King Kong. But I wasn't finished yet. No, sir. It was no gentleman's game when you were in a street fight. My approach was always to beat my opponent until he couldn't fight back—no different from brawling bareknuckle in a bowling alley. Dave was a big sonofabitch, and I wanted to make damn sure he wouldn't get up again. In the heat of the moment Big George was living and breathing the green, baby, and there was no separating the government informant from the street brawling animal I was bred to be.

I was still pummeling the man on the ground when someone grabbed me from behind.

“That's enough, George!” yelled Jack Fite. “You're killing him!”

I didn't end Dave's life that morning, but the man was definitely out. Way out. A few days later Big Roy called me into the Lady Luck and ripped me a new one.

“The cops have been watching me lately, motherfucker. I'm trying to keep a low profile and you go and beat up one of the biggest dope dealers in town?”

“Todd called for backup. What was I supposed to do?”

“Todd said he never called you,” Roy fired back.

I was speechless.

“I'm pulling your patch,” he said. “In fact, I want your whole fuckin' cut.”

I wasn't ready to call out Todd as a lying bastard. Not yet, anyway. I fetched my cut from the truck, turned it over to Big Roy, then drove back to Valle Vista, fuming. This wasn't the first time Todd had thrown me under the bus. When I was still a hang-around he'd done the same fucking thing at a bar we called The Bloody Bucket.

Sitting around getting hammered that night, Todd had given me a nudge and pointed out a group of twenty-somethings shooting pool. Don't know what it was about outlaws and pool tables that generated so
much friction, but trouble was coming again—with a capital T and that rhymes with P and that stands for pool.

“See that asshole wearing the Hard Rock shirt?” Todd said to me. “I hate that cocksucker. Go fuck him up.”

“What for?”

“Don't ask questions. Just do it.”

“Yeah, but—”

“What the fuck? Are you down for this club or not?”

“You heard Big Todd,” North jumped in. “Do what the man says.”

It was one of those rock-and-a-hard-place moments John would later warn me about, where I was forced to choose between the long-term success of the operation and taking part in the exact same kind of abuse I'd gone under to prevent. I held my nose and chose the mission. On Todd's orders, I beat that kid down. The poor bastard never knew what hit him . . . or why. Of course, the irony of what I'd done hadn't been lost on me. I'd gone back to being a bully again, just like the bad ol' days at Hemet High.