Under and Alone Read Free Page B

ground. I backed the bike against the curb and killed the engine. As I got off I saw Ciccone roll by in his black Pontiac. I took off my helmet and put it on one of the rearview mirrors.
Game time.
    Surprisingly, considering that it’s such a dump, The Place is located in a historic building that was a Pony Express stop in the 1860s. Above the bar were five or six one-room apartments sharing a common bathroom. The inside was cramped. Carrena, the owner of The Place, had managed to squeeze two pool tables in and maintain an area for throwing darts. The two bathrooms were filthy. The wood floor looked like it was original construction from the Pony Express era, warped and aged by the constant soaking of Budweiser, piss, and puke. And of course there was the requisite jukebox full of Marilyn Manson, Metallica, and Santana.
    The walls were painted black and white, the Mongol colors, and adorned with biker paraphernalia in honor of the Mongols. Carrena was a hard-core biker chick, the “ol’ lady” of a Mongol called The Kid, who was away doing a prison sentence. She had the words PROPERTY OF THE KID tattooed on her back. Ironically, Carrena’s father was a retired cop.
    I strolled in behind Sue. The joint was dimly lit, filled with stagnant cigarette smoke and unsavory patrons, including two full-patch Mongols huddled together toward the back of the bar, beers in hand. Sue could have dropped me right in my tracks when she openly pointed at them in her death-defying effort to identify them for me.
    “Jesus Christ!” I hissed. “What the hell’s the matter with you? Settle down, before you get both our asses killed.”
    She was not only a hard-core tweaker but felony stupid on top of it. Luckily, no one saw her blatant move. I moved toward the bar, dragging her in my wake. Of course, I’d known that I was going to have to watch my back, but now I realized that if I wanted to stay alive, I was going to have to keep an eye on Sue also.
    The bartender, an older, hard-looking soldier from The Rock, looked my way. I yelled, “Two Buds!” over the guitar-crunching music and passed one of the beers to Sue. I’d planned to stay on top of things and nurse my beer for the entire evening. Apparently Sue had no such intention. In less than thirty seconds, her bottle was empty and she was hollering, “Let’s have another!” Jesus, I could see trouble coming. I gave her ten dollars to cover her beer tab for the next few minutes and watched as her beer, and my federal money, quickly vanished.
    Sue moved around the bar on her own, hugging and talking with one patron after another until she finally reached the two Mongols. My moment of truth. I watched as she reached out and hugged the first biker, then the other. Neither hugged her back. But they didn’t shrug her off either. She turned and motioned for me to come over. “Billy,” she said when I got there, “this is Rocky.”
    He frowned menacingly and tipped his beer bottle my way. I returned the gesture. “Good to meetcha, Rock.”
    Rocky looked more American Indian than Mexican, with long—almost to his butt—black hair that he wore braided like an Indian warrior. Dressed in all black, he carried a thick length of chain on his belt, along with a large hunting knife. He was on the young side, maybe mid-thirties, and had only been in the gang for about a year and change. He didn’t have that real hard-core, badass look yet, but he was working on it.
    Sue nodded toward the second Mongol. “This is Rancid,” she said.
    I tipped my Bud and said, “Good to meetcha, Rancid.”
    The moniker fit. Rancid had long, black matted hair that hung well past his shoulders. The amount of grease and dirt under his nails was surpassed only by the grease and dirt in his hair, which had turned the top rocker on his patch almost black. He had an array of tattoos that started with an Uzi on his neck. There was a big black MONGOL tattoo across his enormous beer belly, which was displayed for