Total pages in book: 57
Estimated words: 54059 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 270(@200wpm)___ 216(@250wpm)___ 180(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 54059 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 270(@200wpm)___ 216(@250wpm)___ 180(@300wpm)
A warning bell in the back of my head starts ringing. My life is not one where an innocent can slide in and be safe. There’s a reason Bam said we don’t bring girls back to the apartment. What he meant was that we don’t bring girls into our life. There are Riders, adult ones, with long-term relationships, but those are rare. Most of the time, your only entanglement is the one you’re born with. The family that shares your name but that’s only if you’re unlucky. The lucky ones have no ties to hold them back or hold them down. Family means you’re not alone, which to some might seem nice, but for a Rider, it means danger. Family members can be used against you. They’re levers and points of weakness.
I’d do anything for my sister and my mom. That’s how I got into the Riders in the first place. Being a Rider meant protection, and I needed that for Julie. The Rider network helped me find her before anything worse than being locked up in a dog kennel happened to her. The Riders themselves helped me mete out punishment to the scum who had taken her. From that day on, they owned me. I would do anything for them, for the organization, for the boys and men who became my brothers.
My decision helped my family, but there’s danger there too. You can’t traffic in violence and crime without it reaching your doorstep. Then you’ve got to beat it back. I’d make the same decision again, but Mom and Julie were already targets. I can’t drag another innocent into this world.
I let my eyes course over her still, small frame and burn that image into my memory. There will be other nights, lonely, dark ones, and this moment will help me get through the hard times. I roll off the bed and grab my phone, silently padding out of the room.
The phone beeps a second later, and I see a message from Clark.
Got a rush job for you. Double pay
Bam’s occupied do i need a second
For anyone else, yeah, for you no. I’ll send a newbie to watch your back just in case. Sending you the address. You don’t need to collect anything. Just deliver a message. The Riders are watching
I wait for the address to come in and then delete all the messages. Clark uses a different stolen phone every day just in case he’s caught and they subpoena his phone records. From the gossip, it’s said that the only people he texts from his main phone are his mom and his school.
I shove my feet into my work boots, steel-tipped of course, and cover my shaved head with a skull cap. I don’t carry any weapons in case I get picked up. There’s always something at the destination I can use, whether it’s a bottle, a brick, or the dumbass mark’s own possessions.
The location is a gaming room just on the edge of Riders territory. Or I should say, territory that the Riders want to make their own. With the Pipefitters and Smoke Crew battling out the neighborhoods above Sixth Street, the buffer space between Sixth Street and Thirty-first, where the Riders territory south of Sixth Street starts, has been ignored.
Whoever runs the Riders thinks that we should start exploring that area, beginning with the high school on Thirty-first and Templeton. High schools are rich for recruits. Pipefitters became powerful because there were three high schools in their region with two of them being filled with rich kids. Rich kids love their nose candy and have plenty of funds to pay for it. The not so rich kids were filled with envy for everything their peers had and found a way to live that Benz, Canada Goose, Supreme sneaker, Thursday drop lifestyle by selling school tests, drugs, and even themselves. Everything south of Sixth Street was poor and rough and sprawling. Even if you wanted to sell, there wasn’t any money to buy it. But there were a lot of us. I’ll never know why, but us poor folks always like having kids, so there were teens everywhere with very little to do. A few years ago, rich people decided they wanted to live along the river, and the nicest parts of the river were in the southern part of the city. As money flowed downstream, Riders numbers increased right under the Pipefitters’ noses.
Rumors are that they are big users of their own product, and that’s why they couldn’t sense what was happening. I don’t really know. That’s above my pay grade, as they say. I’m a soldier, not a lieutenant.
As a good soldier, I find my way to the gaming room. The person at the front desk is half asleep. She gives me a bare nod as I walk in, not even bothering to ask for payment before putting her head back on her arms. There are a group of kids in the back. I count five guys and two girls sitting in a semicircle around a single guy, who is in the gaming chair. They’re all smoking despite the non-smoking signs, and there are several beer cans on the floor. The girls immediately stop laughing as I approach. Their sense of danger is more refined. I jerk my head, and they murmur something to their companions, probably about using the bathroom, and scuttle away when I reach them.