Ride Steady Read online

  “Time will tell,” Tack muttered.

  “Boy’s got secrets,” Dog muttered back.

  “Boy’s never had one thing in his life he wanted,” Tack replied. “We’re givin’ him that. First time. He’s twenty-fuckin’-five. First time, Dog. Now, we’ll see how that plays.”

  “Brother’s got dark in him he don’t bother to hide, secrets he doesn’t share. With the problems we got, Tack, that makes me uneasy,” Dog stated.

  “Had the vote, Dog, you had a problem, you should have opened your mouth,” Tack returned.

  Dog shook his head. “Saw that kid watch us, just like you. Shoulda done something then. Don’t have it in me to turn him away now.”

  “No one who doesn’t have fire walks three miles to watch men work on cars, Dog. And he wasn’t at that fence watchin’ men work on cars. He was at the shop window, empty pockets, face pressed to the glass, starin’ at what he wanted but couldn’t have. I’ll wager, to survive, he’s banked that fire. We gotta help him direct it and make sure if it flares bright, it doesn’t burn him out.”

  Dog held Tack’s eyes. Then he nodded sharply and looked away.

  The rest of the Club came in, had words, and voted.

  It was unanimous.

  Carson Steele was a recruit. A recruit that would shortly after be christened Joker.

  And if he did his time, took his shit, proved his mettle…

  He’d be Chaos.

  * * *

  It took him a year and three months.

  And he did.

  CHAPTER TWO

  All I Wanted

  Carissa

  “AARON, REALLY, I’M in a bind.”

  I tried not to sound like I was begging. It didn’t feel good to beg.

  But he’d heard me beg and I’d learned begging didn’t work.

  “You bring Travis to my house in forty-five minutes or we’ve got problems, Carissa,” Aaron said in my ear and then disconnected.

  I stood there in the filthy grass on the verge, looking down at the phone, my baby boy at my hip, the crawling rush hour traffic of Denver on I-25 in front of me, along with my old, ugly, worn out, mostly kinda still red Toyota Tercel with its flat tire.

  Aaron, my ex-husband, drove a black Lexus SUV.

  Aaron, my ex-husband, had also just refused to come and help me change the flat tire even though I had our son with me and I was on a stupid interstate during rush hour traffic.

  I couldn’t believe this.

  I should, with our history, all he’d done that I’d turned a blind eye to and all he’d done that I eventually couldn’t. Nothing should surprise me. And I was hanging on to a slim thread of hope that it still did. That I could be surprised. That I hadn’t lost that ability. That I still believed that people could be decent. Even Aaron.

  I hated to admit it but I figured I would soon lose the ability to believe Aaron could be decent. Especially after he just hung up on me.

  I couldn’t reflect on this.

  My lip was quivering and I bit it to make it stop, but I didn’t try too hard to hold back tears as I stared at my car.

  I’d cried a lot the last year and a half. And I will admit, no matter what this made me, I often cried to try to get my way. This always worked with my dad. For a long time it had worked with Aaron.

  A year and a half ago, it stopped working. At least with Aaron.

  But I needed to cry. I had my little boy with me, his little fist twisted in the platinum chain of the necklace my dad gave me the Christmas after Mom died, his other hand banging my shoulder, completely oblivious (thank goodness) to our dire situation. I didn’t know what to do with him if I tried to change the tire myself. I didn’t think it was safe to leave him in the car. Traffic was crawling but I was still on a busy interstate.

  What if something happened?

  I fretted, bit my lip and blinked away tears as I ran through my options.

  My dad was in Nebraska looking after my grandma. He, obviously, couldn’t come and help.

  He also didn’t need added evidence that I’d made a hideous mistake spending ten years of my life at Aaron Neiland’s side, eventually accepting his ring, his vows to honor me in sickness and health until death did us part (all lies, obviously). All this before finding myself pregnant with Aaron’s child while he was cheating on me (again), this time with a model. Then me confronting him, after which Aaron told me we were through and he was marrying his model.

  No, Dad didn’t need that.

  Further, I didn’t have any friends. I’d never truly had any real friends, but I hadn’t known that until it was proved true when Aaron and I fell apart and they (all of them) went with Aaron.

  And I didn’t have any time to make new ones. I had a baby. I had a full-time job as a grocery store clerk. And I had an ex-husband who was a lawyer who seemed, along with his father and all their colleagues, to have made it his mission to make my life a misery.

  He was succeeding.

  I knew what he wanted. He wanted me to step aside, give him my son so he and Tory could raise Travis, and Aaron could forget he broke my heart, shattered my soul, destroyed my dream, and ruined my life.

  Aaron didn’t like reminders of his failures. Due to his father being driven, and driving Aaron, my ex-husband did his best not to fail. But should that rare happenstance occur, he obliterated any memory of it so he didn’t have any indication in his life that he was any less than perfect.

  I was a flaw. I was a fail. I needed to go away.

  I wasn’t going to go away.

  I just didn’t know how I would do it.

  After I got my divorce, I received a settlement (that I now knew was so small it was a joke) and child support (since Aaron’s income was far more than mine) and nearly full custody of Travis (since he was only two months old at the time).

  This was good.

  It was good until Aaron took me back to court and made it bad. Since Aaron had been born into the good ole boys network of the legal world of Denver (his father being a judge), he’d managed to win (or connive) partial custody and a lowering of child support.

  Then he took me back again and won half custody with no child support.

  We’d been officially divorced for six months, the decree coming through two months after I pushed out our son (alone, since Dad was driving from Nebraska, and Travis came out quickly). In that time, I’d been to court twice and I knew Aaron was looking for any little thing that he could use to prove I wasn’t fit to look after Travis or that I’d broken our arrangement so he could get me into (more) trouble.

  I had long since run out of money for a lawyer. Dad sent a bunch but I stopped asking after the second trip to court. He worried about me. He was all I had left (except Travis), but all I could think about was that Travis and I were all he had left too and he’d been through enough. I couldn’t drag him through this with me.

  I could, however, get a new attorney.

  The one I’d had was expensive and we’d gone over things before I had to let him go. It was clear he was concerned about his ability to defend me considering the firepower at Aaron’s back.

  But when I begged (and okay, cried), my attorney had told me I could pay installments.

  However, they just racked up (I was still paying them off). I couldn’t afford more. I needed a new car. Eventually, I’d need more than a one-bedroom apartment and preferably one that was in a much better neighborhood. I needed to find time and money to go to beauty school so I could learn how to do hair. I was good at hair. I had a natural talent. I’d spent a lot of time trying to figure out what I was good at, what I could do, and that was the only thing.

  And stylists at nice salons made huge tips.

  I needed huge tips.

  I pretty much needed everything.

  So I’d tried to find a less expensive attorney.

  Not many were willing to take me on (this, I feared, was Aaron and his father’s doing too), but I’d found one. And he’d be really less expensive, if, in h
is words with that oily smile on his face, I got down on my knees (repeatedly) while he battled Aaron for me.

  I didn’t need him to explain what getting down on my knees meant. I also didn’t need to explain verbally why I got up from my chair in his office and walked out.

  So I could get a new attorney, I just didn’t like the way he wanted me to pay fees.

  But right then, what I needed most was to change my tire, get back on the road, get my son to his father before it was too late and Aaron logged that on the list of things to use to make his ex-wife lose custody of her son and hopefully go away for good. After that, I needed to figure out how to get my tire fixed, or how to pay for a new one, and finally, get to my evening shift at the store.

  I was just going to have to put my baby in the car and hope to God no one hit me or my vehicle.

  I didn’t have good thoughts about this. I hadn’t had a lot of luck in my life.

  Some of my bad luck was out of my control.

  Aaron wasn’t.

  That was on me.

  That was my fail.

  And it was a biggie.

  I looked into Travis’s little baby face with his big pudgy cheeks and his dancing eyes that had turned brown, like mine, like his granddad’s, and he gurgled up at me, his little red lips wet and curved up, his little fist banging my shoulder.

  Okay, so Aaron wasn’t a total fail. He gave me Travis.

  “We’ll be fine,” I told my boy on a squeeze.

  “Goo,” he replied.

  I smiled. “Mommy can do this.”

  “Goo, goo, gah.” Fist bump and twist on my necklace, pulling it hard against my neck.

  I smiled bigger even though I still wanted to cry and started toward the car.

  Then I heard a loud noise getting louder because it was getting closer.

  I stopped and turned my head to the side.

  That was when I froze.

  I froze because I saw one of those bikers on his big, loud motorcycle riding down the shoulder my way.

  And he wasn’t one of those recreational bikers. I knew this at a glance. His black hair was very long, too long, and wild. He had a full black beard on his face. It was trimmed but not trimmed enough (as in, the beard being nonexistent). He had black wraparound sunglasses covering his eyes, glasses that made him look sinister (as bikers, in my mind, were wont to be). He was also wearing a black leather jacket that looked both beat up and kind of new, faded jeans, and those clunky black motorcycle boots.

  He stopped as I held my breath. He turned off the motorcycle and put down the stand before he swung a long leg with its heavy thigh and clunky boot off the bike.

  Travis squealed.

  Letting go of my necklace, he twisted in my arms and was pumping his fists excitedly.

  I started breathing, feeling my heart beat fast, as the biker walked toward me, his sunglasses aimed my way, then he abruptly stopped with a strange jerk.

  He studied me, his face impassive, standing like he was caught in suspended animation, and I studied him right back.

  I didn’t know bikers. I’d never met a biker. Bikers scared me. They did this because they looked scary. They also did this because I’d heard they were scary. They had girlfriends who wore tube tops and they had knives on their belts and they drove too fast and too dangerously and got in bar brawls and held grudges against other bikers and did things to be put in jail and all sorts of stuff that was scary.

  As these thoughts tumbled through my head, he came unstuck, started moving my way, and in a deep, biker voice, he called, “You got a problem?”

  Travis squealed again, pumping his arms, then he giggled as the big biker guy continued coming our way.

  And as he did, slowly, my eyes moved to the traffic. It was bumper to bumper, crawling along at what couldn’t be over twenty miles an hour. Looking at it, I knew I’d stood there for at least ten minutes, on the phone, then not, baby on my hip, car with a flat.

  And not one single person stopped to help.

  Not one.

  I turned my head back to the biker who was now standing three feet away, his eyes downcast, his sunglasses aimed at my baby boy.

  He’d stopped to help.

  “I… have a flat,” I forced out.

  The sunglasses came to me and I felt my head tip to the side when they did because I got a look at him up close.

  And what I saw made me feel strange.

  Did I know him?

  It felt like I knew him.

  I screwed up my eyes to look closer at him.

  He was a biker. I didn’t know any bikers, so I didn’t know him. I couldn’t.

  Could I?

  “You got Triple A?” he asked.

  I wished.

  “No,” I answered.

  He lifted a black leather gloved hand. “Give me the keys, stand back from the road. I’ll take care of it.”

  He’d take care of it?

  Just like that?

  Should I let a biker change my tire?

  Better question: Did I have any choice?

  Since the answer to the better question was definite, I said, “I… well, that’s very kind.”

  At this point, Travis made a lunge toward the biker. I struggled to keep him close but my boy was strong and he tended to get what he wanted, and not only because he was strong.

  Just then, he got what he wanted.

  The biker came forward, gloved hands up, caught Travis at his sides and pulled him gently from my arm.

  He settled him with ease and a natural confidence that made my breath go funny against his black T-shirt and leather jacket clad chest and looked to me.

  Taking them in, biker and baby, for some reason, that vision filed itself into my memory banks. The ones I kept unlocked. The ones I liked to open and sift through. The ones that included making cookies with my mom. The ones that included dad teaching me how to ride a bike and how he’d looked at me when I’d peddled away without training wheels, so proud, so happy. The ones that included the Easter before my sister Althea died when she won the Easter egg hunt and Dad got that awesome picture of us in our frilly, pastel Easter dresses, wearing our Easter bonnets, holding our beribboned Easter baskets, hugging each other and giggling little girl giggles.

  He didn’t belong there. Not in those files. Not this biker.

  But somehow, he did.

  “Got the kid. Free hands, you can get the keys,” he said and I knew how he said it that it was an order, just a gently (kind of) worded one.

  “Uh… right,” I murmured, tearing my eyes away from him still holding Travis, who had become mesmerized by the biker’s beard and was tugging on it. Tugging hard. Tugging with baby boy strength that I knew was already a force to be reckoned with.

  But the biker didn’t yank his face back. His chin jerked slightly with the tugs but he didn’t seem to care.

  Not even a little bit.

  His eyes just stayed aimed to me until I took mine away.

  I dug in my purse that was looped over my shoulder and came out with the keys.

  I did this just in time to see the biker had tipped his chin to Travis and his resonant biker voice asked, “You gonna leave any whiskers for me, kid?”

  Travis giggled, punched him in the lips with his baby fist then tore off the biker’s sunglasses.

  I drew in a quick breath, hoping that Travis doing that wouldn’t anger him.

  It didn’t.

  He just muttered, “Yeah, kid, hold those for me.”

  Then he transferred Travis to my arms, took my keys and sauntered to my car.

  He had the trunk open by the time I got myself together and took two steps forward.

  “Uh… sir—”

  His head twisted, just that, he didn’t move a muscle of the rest of his body, and he said in a low rumble, “Stand back from the road.”

  I took three hasty steps back.

  He returned his attention to my trunk.

  “I just wondered,” I called, juggling an act
ive Travis, who was trying to get away since he clearly preferred leather and whiskers to his mommy, “your name.”

  “Joker,” he answered, his hand appearing from the trunk holding tools, which he tossed to the tarmac with a loud clang. I winced as he went back in and pulled out my spare.

  Joker. His name was Joker.

  No, I didn’t know him. I knew no Jokers.

  And anyway, who would name their child Joker?

  “I’m Carissa. This is Travis,” I yelled as he moved around the other side of the car and I saw the back of his jacket. On it was stitched a really interesting patch that included an eagle, an American flag, flames, and at the bottom, the word Chaos.

  Oh dear. He belonged to the Chaos motorcycle gang.

  Even I knew about the Chaos biker gang. This was because when I was growing up, Dad got all his stuff for our cars at their auto store on Broadway, a store called Ride. Pretty much everyone did who knew about cars and didn’t want folks to mess them around.

  “They’re bikers, but they’re honest,” Dad had said. “They don’t have a part, they don’t tell you another part will work when it won’t. They tell you they’ll get it, it’ll be in in a week, and then it’s in in a week. Don’t know about that gang. Do know they know how to run a business.”

  As this memory filtered through my head, at the end of it, I realized the man called Joker made no response.

  “This is really nice!” I called as he disappeared in a crouch on the other side of my car. The other side of the car meaning right by the traffic.

  That concerned me. It wasn’t going fast and I’d pulled so far over, my passenger side tires were in the turf and scrabble at the edge of the shoulder, but it was still dangerous.

  He again didn’t respond so I yelled, “Please be careful!”

  His deep voice came back. “I’m good.”

  “Okay, but stay that way. Okay?” I shouted back.

  Nothing from Joker.

  I fell silent. Well, not really. I turned my attention to my tussle with my son and did my all to turn his attention from the biker he could no longer see but very much wanted to get to.