Blood Lines

4

›› Tawny Kitty’s Bar and Grill

›› South End

›› Charlotte, North Carolina

›› 1705 Hours

“You ask me, Victor, this is just wrong.”

Victor Gant glanced at Fat Mike Wiley and said, “Ain’t asking you, am I, Fat Mike?”

Fat Mike shrugged and sighed. His broad, beefy face turned down into sadness only a basset hound could show. “No, I guess you ain’t. But if you woulda asked, I’d have told you I didn’t like this none.”

“Don’t expect you to like it. Just keep my back covered while we’re having this little set-to.”

“Ain’t got no problems with that. I been there for you over thirty years.”

Victor knew that was true. He’d met Fat Mike in Vietnam. They’d hunted Charlie in the bush, blew him up when they found him, and partied hard in the DMZ next to Charlie. Those had been some crazy times. Some days-in a weird way he didn’t quite understand-he missed them.

In those days Fat Mike hadn’t been fat. Lately the man was starting to earn his name. He stood an inch or two over six feet and tipped the scales at nearly three hundred pounds. Back in the day, Fat Mike had been called Fat Mike because he rolled his marijuana joints thick as sausages when he blazed.

Now his biker leathers didn’t fit him quite so well. But he wore his hair long and sported a Fu Manchu mustache like he’d done when they’d been in the bush, even though the first lieutenant they’d had at the time had tried to keep his troops disciplined and clean-shaven.

One night, while the lieutenant was sleeping and probably dreaming up new ways for his men to risk their lives out in the jungle, Fat Mike and one of his buddies had rolled a grenade into the lieutenant’s tent. Three seconds later, they’d needed a new lieutenant. The one they’d gotten had been a little smarter than the last one and knew to stay out of their way.

Victor was gaunt and hard-bodied. No spare flesh hung on his six-foot-two-inch frame. He was sixty-seven years old and was still whipcord tough. He wore a full, short beard that had turned to pewter over the last few years, but he’d kept his hair, and it hung down to his shoulders in greasy locks.

He wore his colors, and his jacket covered the two Glock. 45s he carried in shoulder holsters. His jeans were clean but held old mud, blood, and oil stains. Under the jacket he wore a sleeveless black concert T-shirt featuring Steppenwolf. Square-toed biker’s boots encased his feet.

Fat Mike sat astride his Harley next to Victor. There were a lot of other sleds in the gravel parking lot. Tawny Kitty was a biker bar and not a tourist attraction.

There were a few cars there too. Victor swept them with his gaze. Some of the vehicles belonged to college kids still in town for summer classes who thought slumming would be cool. Or they belonged to young women looking for bad boys.

The bar was a rough-cut square of stone and wood. Neon lights promising “Beer” and “Live Entertainment” hung in the windows. Another sign advertised Open. The sign advertising Tawny Kitty showed a young blonde in revealing clothing with a saucy glint in her eyes. The years had faded the colors of the sign, but it still drew salacious attention.

Victor stretched and reached into his jeans pocket. After a moment of digging, he brought out a crumpled cigarette pack. He unfolded it and stuck a cigarette in his mouth, then lit it with a skull-embossed Zippo lighter.

Without another word, he swung his leg over the motorcycle and stepped toward the bar. As always, Fat Mike was right behind him.

›› 1707 Hours

The interior of the bar was a little better than the exterior but not by much. Tawny Kitty was twenty years out of date. Two dance stages equipped with brass poles and backed by mirrors divided the large room into distinct areas. The long bar serviced both areas.

The stench of beer, cigarettes, reefer, sweat, nachos, and cheap perfume hung in the turgid air. Victor barely noticed it. He’d spent more time inside places like this than he had outside of them.

Young women-their bodies hollowed out by drugs and years of having their pride stripped out of them to leave only hard-edged anger or dulled acceptance-gyrated on the stages to an old 38 Special song. Nearly two dozen men and a handful of women sat around the stages. None of them appeared especially entertained.

Victor swept the bar with his gaze and didn’t see the man he was looking for. He wasn’t surprised. He and Fat Mike had arrived a little early. Victor did that when he was meeting with people he didn’t particularly trust. Staking out the terrain first was important. That had been one of the first lessons he’d learned in Vietnam.

A petite hostess approached them. She wore immodestly cut jean shorts and a chambray shirt with the sleeves hacked off and tied well above her waist. Her dishwater blonde hair held a green tint under the weak light. Tattoos covered her arms and legs and ringed her navel.

“Can I get you boys something?” the waitress asked.

“Beers,” Victor said.

“Domestic or imported?” the waitress asked.

“American,” Victor said. “I fought for this country. I’ll drink the beer that’s made here too.”

“You want me to take you to a table?” the young woman asked. “Or do you want to pick one out for yourselves? It’s early yet. Got plenty of room.”

Victor waved her off. “When you get those beers, we’ll look just like this.” He walked through the tables and took one against the back wall that gave him a good view of the room. Then he dropped into a chair.

Fat Mike sat at another table nearby and to one side. They always left each other clear fields of fire in case they needed it. If the waitress thought the seating arrangement was odd when she returned with the drinks, she didn’t mention it.

›› 1717 Hours

Minutes passed as rock and roll pounded the bar’s walls.

Victor drank his beer and gazed around the bar. Other bikers lounged nearby, but none of them were Purple Royals. The Tawny Kitty was a neutral zone, a lot like the DMZ back in Nam.

“You seen your boy today?” Fat Mike asked from his table.

“A little.”

“A little?” Fat Mike shook his head sadly. “Don’t he know it’s Father’s Day? He should be hanging with you. A boy should be with his daddy on Father’s Day.”

“This ain’t exactly something I want Bobby Lee hanging around for.” Victor took another sip of beer. “Boy’s got enough problems.”

“That beef with them jarheads down in Camp Lejeune?” Fat Mike waved the possibility away. “If they was gonna do something, they’d have done it by now.”

“They been looking for Bobby Lee.”

“Well, they ain’t found him.”

“We met a lot of jarheads while we were doing our bit,” Victor said. “You know the problem with jarheads.”

“Ain’t smart enough to know when to give up on something. I know. Bobby Lee shouldn’t have left any witnesses behind when he jacked that car. Me and you wouldn’t have done that.”

“Me and you wouldn’t have jacked no car.”

Fat Mike shrugged. “Me and you was always too smart for that. We learned what we needed to know back in the Army.” He grinned like a sly old hound. “But you got to cut Bobby Lee some slack. You wasn’t always there. He’s learning the best way he knows how.”

That rankled Victor. He hadn’t even known Amelia was pregnant with the boy until he’d gotten served with the papers. He’d married her while on a weekend bender, then come to his senses when he was sobered up back in South Korea. He hadn’t come home again.

He’d told himself that Bobby Lee wasn’t his, that Amelia was just sticking it to him for the child support the Army made him pay. But then he’d come back home after the Gulf War and seen the boy. There had been no denying it then. The boy had been the spitting image of him.

Victor could remember how weird that had felt. With everything he’d done, everything he’d seen, he’d never once thought about being a daddy. He didn’t run with guys who had kids-in the Army or out. He remembered his old man, but there weren’t any fond memories there. His daddy was the reason Victor had joined the Army at eighteen and quit high school midterm to go to Vietnam. Fighting the Vietnamese made more sense than trying to fight his daddy.

At first Victor and Bobby Lee had only grudgingly admitted the other existed. Victor hadn’t held that against the boy. He didn’t hold it against him now.

He could remember when the child support had been pushed through and the Army had given a big chunk of his pay to Amelia every month. Victor hadn’t had much love for Bobby Lee then. But things were different now. Victor liked the idea that the boy was a lot like him and that there was some part of him that would continue existing after he was gone.

He just wished Bobby Lee wasn’t so reckless. That carjacking in Jacksonville had been boneheaded. But Victor figured the apple hadn’t fallen far from the tree there either. If Uncle Sam hadn’t covered Victor’s mistakes, then found a use for them, he might have ended up the same way.

“Bobby Lee and me are gonna hook up later,” Victor said. “Gonna be down at Spider’s. I’m buying Bobby Lee a new tattoo.”

“Boy’s got a fetish about them, don’t he? I’m surprised Spider can find a place to put a tattoo on him.”

“Been saving a place right over his heart. For when he was in love.”

“Bobby Lee’s in love?”

“Thinks he is. He’s got a girl pregnant who says she loves him. She ran off from her folks and they’re thinking about getting married.”

“Is the kid his?”

“He thinks it is.” Victor could barely remember having the conversation with his son. They’d both been blitzed at a recent cookout when the chapter had gotten together to celebrate the prison release of one of the members. Victor couldn’t even remember the girl’s name.

“Be good if it is.”

Victor nodded and sipped beer.

“Hey,” Fat Mike said, “I just realized he’s about to make you a granddaddy.”

“Yeah.” That concept was still new to Victor. It sat among his thoughts like a poised rattlesnake and made him feel uneasy. He was just now starting to get comfortable with the idea of Bobby Lee. Adding to the confusion wasn’t a good idea.

And there was no telling what Amelia might try to do. Back when Victor had mustered out and come home, after Bobby Lee had started coming around when he was twelve or thirteen, Amelia had tried to stop it. She’d even taken out a restraining order to keep Victor from the boy. The problem with that was that Bobby Lee was coming to see Victor, not Victor to see Bobby Lee.

Then Victor had gotten busted on the manslaughter charge. There hadn’t been any way around it, and he’d been lucky they hadn’t gotten him stuck with murder one. Time inside the pen hadn’t been easy, but he’d done it standing up.

When he’d gotten out three years ago, Bobby Lee had ridden up with the other Purple Royals like he belonged. Fat Mike had even given him the keys to Victor’s ride, and Bobby Lee had ridden home behind his daddy for the first time ever.

Of course, that hadn’t fixed everything between them. There was too much history that had been bad, too much time that had been lost. Bobby Lee’s own arrogant rebelliousness-honed to a razor’s edge fighting his mama and stepdaddy-had kept him from getting too close to Victor.

The fact that Victor didn’t want the boy in the Purple Royals was another stumbling block. It wasn’t to keep Bobby Lee from a life of crime. Bobby Lee’d had a long history with juvie even before he met Victor for the first time. There was no keeping the boy out of trouble.

The attack on the Marine in Jacksonville was going to be a problem sooner or later, though. The best thing Bobby Lee could have done was leave North Carolina. Go out West to California.

The reason Victor didn’t want Bobby Lee in the Purple Royals was because he didn’t have enough of what it took to be a member of the gang. Bobby Lee was too independent and boneheaded. Victor had seen a lot of young men like him. He’d seen them blown up and shot down in the bush.

Maybe in time Bobby Lee would change.

“You a granddaddy.” The thought seemed stuck in Fat Mike’s mind. Thoughts often got that way for him. He was rattlesnake smart and junkyard-dog clever, but his mind tended to run in the same track when left to itself. “Means only one thing. Me and you are getting old.”

“Speak for yourself. I intend to stay young until they scrape me off the highway.” Victor upended his beer and drained the last of the bottle’s contents.

Then the door opened and the man Victor was waiting for entered the bar.

He was young, and his appearance was rough. His road leathers were scarred and dusty. His black hair hung wild and tousled to his shoulders. When he lit a cigarette, his jacket separated long enough to reveal the semiauto pistol tucked into his waistband.

Most people, Victor reflected as he looked at the guy, would have been surprised to learn that the man was an undercover FBI agent.

His true name was unknown to Victor, but on the street he went by Thumper. He even had a tattoo of the bunny from the Disney film on one shoulder. Except that the image wore biker’s leathers and breathed fire. One guy had made fun of the tat in a bar, called him Bambi, and Thumper had put him in the hospital.

Whoever the federal agent truly was, Victor knew the man had been around the track.

Thumper nodded at Victor, then crossed the room and dropped into a chair on the other side of the table.

“How’s it hanging, bro?” Thumper asked.

“I’m not your bro,” Victor said. He moved his hand on his thigh slightly. The butt of one of the Glocks was only inches from his fingertips. “I’m here to do business. Not make friends.”

Thumper smiled slightly. “I can live with that. So tell me what’s on your mind.”