Vulnerable (Barons of Sodom) Read online

  by Abriella Blake

  A Hearts Collective Production

  Copyright © 2014 Hearts Collective

  All rights reserved. This document may not be reproduced in any way without the expressed written consent of the author. The ideas, characters, and situations presented in this story are strictly fictional, and any unintentional likeness to real people or real situations is completely coincidental.

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  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Epilogue

  Chapter One

  From the archives of Jericho County Courthouse

  The Federal Deposition Tapes of Bridie Louise Calyer, April 5th 1997.

  Conducted by Detective Wilson Ramirez

  DET. RAMIREZ: Just speak into the microphone, Bridie. It's alright.

  BRIDIE: I'm sorry, fellas. I get a little nervous in front of crowds. Bunch of tall drinks of water like yourself, too. So I just talk into this?

  DET. RAMIREZ: Why don't you just take your time? Can someone get Ms. Calyer a glass of water?

  (static)

  DET. RAMIREZ: So how's about you start at the beginning, sweetheart. Would you tell us about Caroline?

  BRIDIE: Caroline...yes. My aunt Caroline used to have my back, before she fell down the rabbit hole. That was how she put it, too: “I'll always have your back, sweet potato pie.” Then she'd get out her “fixings” and set to cooking up the meth that would eventually take her life, right there in our piddly little living room.

  My mother had left me with my aunt sometime before I turned seven, and no one had heard from her since. I never knew my father, so my aunt was my only family. Aunt Caroline liked to refer to Mama in the hushed tones often reserved for the dead, but I did wonder...for a while. I invented stories in my mind about all of the adventures that had taken her away from me—perhaps Mama was riding the rails with a hobo bandwagon, eating beans out of cans. Perhaps she was dancing for grateful miners at a Vaudeville show in the midwest. That's right—in all of my stories, my mother was part of a glamorous, distant past. And in all of my stories, she was trying to get back to me—like some kind of Odysseus. I remember Odysseus from eighth grade English. Wasn't good for too much back then, but I did know my way around a book.

  It's a funny thing, having a childhood so thick with tragedy that every worst-case scenario begins to feel inevitable. I got smart around the same time I grew breasts (eighth grade again)—I learned hope was a dangerous drug. More dangerous, even, than Aunt Caroline's nasty, yellow-colored crystal. I learned that people are consistently cruel to the skinny, poorly dressed girls from the trailer park part of Waco—even the other skinny, poorly dressed girls from the trailer park part of Waco. I didn't learn all of the things little girls are supposed to learn from their mothers. But most useful of all, I learned that sadness—that getting sad—was wasted energy. So, I got tough instead.

  DET. RAMIREZ: You got tough, huh? Will you tell us about that? What did that mean for you, 'getting tough?’

  BRIDIE: Now hold your horses, cutie! I'm telling the story, I tell it my way. Southern Belles, however tenuous a 'belle' they may be—we gotta have some idea of decorum, right? Would someone freshen this up?

  (Sounds of clinking glass)

  Thank you.

  Now before Aunt Caroline made a full-time job of staring at daytime television through her veil of vapor, she used to teach pottery at Santa Lupe Community. She used to wear her hair in thick braids and dress herself up in bangles and turquoise jewelry. She showed me a picture of an artist once—Frida something—and told me, “this is what I'm going for, sweet potato pie. You see how serious she looks?”

  We lived in that house together until I was two days shy of eighteen. It was pretty boring, for the most part; I'd go to school, where I was quiet, confused and miserable—then I'd come home. If Aunt Caroline was sober that day, we'd maybe head into town in her rattley old truck and get groceries, or bags of linen for her various sewing projects. More often, she'd fumble around in a stupor and I'd explore the outskirts of the park, going a bit further each day. I got to know that land well.

  For a while, Aunt Caroline entertained a few gentlemen callers—at whose behest I was always forced to leave the perimeter and look around the park for girls my own age to play with. Her men were West Texas versions of the literary type, mostly. Drifters. I remember one sweet-faced young kid who spoke in a high voice and said he was a roadie with Uncle Tupelo. But for the most part, I spent my time alone, wandering, getting to know the plains in a particular way. West Texas isn't swampy like the East; it's not bayou. All those cracked, dry spaces, the color of nothing, were hard to love—but then, so apparently was I.

  When I was two days shy of eighteen, my aunt brought home a man who said he taught gym at the local high school, though I'd never seen hide or hair of a Mr. Reginald before, and our “local high school” only had about two hundred students. That was his name: Wilbur Reginald. And boy, was he the limit: the physical epitome of a tall, dark and handsome stranger from an old movie. My aunt made a big flutter over Mr. Reginald. She talked about him the whole week long, before he showed up on our doorstep with a bunch of wilting daisies. “Cary Grant is coming, Cary Grant is coming!” she said. She put on some make-up and her best jewelry. She got close to looking the way she used to look, in old photos, all for Mr. Reginald.

  My aunt was something of a beauty queen before the rabbit hole. Long blonde hair the color of corn and a round, smiley mouth. Mrs. Robison at church said I got all my beauty from her—though I always figured I'd taken after my long lost pops, what with the dark hair and the dark, wide eyes. It didn't matter either way. At school, I could only tell I was good-looking when the boys said ugly things to me as I walked past—and though I didn't give a one of them the time of day, I did get to thinking that beauty was just another liability for a poor cou
ntry girl. And the girls? They were just so mean. I kept to myself, remember.

  Oh laugh it up, that's right, I was vainly beginning to suspect that I was a pretty girl. I would look in my aunt's crusty old magazines and compare my figure to the models'—and I suppose I did take a bit of secret pleasure in the rounded curves of my hips. My long legs. My thick hair. But it was something I couldn't enjoy in front of other people, so I stuffed my beauty away. Tried to snuff it out behind dumpy clothes. I was trying, at that age, to hide from the world.

  But back to Mr. Reginald and his wilting daisies. He was the tallest man I'd ever seen up close—had to stoop low just to cross our trailer's threshold. He smelled of some kind of fancy cologne, which was unusual in those parts. Most of the truckers and riff-raff we called neighbors preferred a potpourri of Old Spice and tobacco. But Mr. Reginald, he was refined. Flat abs visible beneath a freshly pressed blue shirt, the color of a Waco afternoon sky. His hands looked manicured—they were soft in my palm, like they'd been all lotioned up. And I'll never forget the way that man looked at me. Poor Aunt Caroline, looking her damn best right beside me—she must have known right then that she'd picked the wrong suitor. Just as I shoulda known from the moment he walked in the door that this tall, dark, handsome stranger wanted me, me, me.

  She put the daisies in a “vase,” or the closest thing we had to it—one of those Mickey Mouse Happy Meal glasses they used to give away at McDonalds. She'd spent all day making pasta in our cramped excuse for a kitchen. The whole three rooms reeked of spaghetti. “Bridie, you go play on the stoop until dinner now—y'hear?” She said to me, all cold and distant. Meanwhile, I didn't want to leave the room. You have to remember that I was this lonely little girl, and I'd never touched anyone, had no friends to speak of—and there was something about this towering man. Oh! I remember he had one green eye and one blue! Imagine that. I remember the feel of his five o'clock shadow on my face as he brushed my cheek in hello. The smell of the oil in his hair. The thick, muscular feel of a man's body—not a boy's body, but a man's—just the aura of the thing, as I stood beside him in our kitchen. So when my aunt Caroline told me to go play outside, you bet your ass I didn't want to. I wouldn't have put it this way at the time, but I wanted Mr. Wilbur Reginald. That, I must admit: I wanted that man something fierce.

  Chapter Two

  Tucker LaRouche dropped the kick on his humming Harley, letting the machine purr to silence beneath his powerful legs. Though his beloved bike was finished in a mustard yellow, it looked golden now from the recent rain. He'd driven through a summer cloudburst on route 66—the kind of downpour that pelted the earth, made mud of the plains. The biker ran a cracked hand through his glistening hair (thick as a lion's mane) and shook his hand free of clinging droplets. He heaved a sigh of relief: finally, here in the garage, he was dry.

  LaRouche was a tall man—6”4, when he didn't slouch—but less than lanky. Strong. His legs were trunk-like. His trim waist was defined by a bulging six-pack, which now puckered through his clinging t-shirt. Tuck carried himself with an almost intimidating sense of gravity, which those who knew him intimately might have attributed to the famously enormous member swinging between his legs. “Tuck couldn't tuck if he tried,” ran the joke. Whatever. The man himself didn't pay much attention to gossip.

  His skin was a golden, weathered tan, occasionally blemished by a scar. He'd seen plenty of battles, and each mark on his body told a story. Curved comma print slithering from the edge of his jeans up to the fuzz around his belly button? Rusty nail. Raw scrape on the back of his left shoulder? Vindictive old lady. Gash on the right knee? Bike accident. Splash of acid (just a few drops, but still) dancing towards his ankle? Club initiation rites. Proof of his mettle. Tribal tattoos covered plenty of other dust-ups.

  At long last, Tuck dismounted. The bike had grown cold beneath his frame. He could hear wafting strains of Motown moving across the garage, growing louder and louder as his ears re-adjusted to the close space. Clarence Carter—Slip Away.

  “You're late, bitch!” called a familiar voice. This voice, in fact, belonged to Athena Sark, head of the autobody shop that catered exclusively to the Barons of Sodom MC. Athena had been Tuck's unlikely best friend for most of both their lives. Like him, A was thirty, tough as nails, and a foul-mouthed. She could also handle all American-made transmissions, a Colt .45, and her whiskey.

  “Would you believe me if I told you I hit another armadillo?” Tuck said, rubbing the stubble on his jaw.

  “Fuck you, asshole,” his friend snapped. But Athena smiled, just before she lowered herself onto a skateboard and scooted below the body of a beat-up looking Coup de Ville. Tuck cherished the brief flicker of affection. Athena reserved her rare smile for sparring with Tucker, preferring to scowl most of the time.

  His best friend had a fountain of springy dark curls (courtesy of some deadbeat father, lost to the four winds these days)—though she often wore her hair below a blue kerchief when she worked. She was a tiny, compact little woman. Most of the other Barons had fallen in brief, violent love with Athena at some point. They loved her toughness, and her wit, and especially the cantaloupe-sized breasts she'd struggled all her tomboyish life to hide. But Tucker had never touched those breasts. And under pain of death, no other rider had or would while he was Lieutenant at arms in the Barons of Sodom MC.

  “You know the meeting's at midnight, right?” Athena hollered from beneath the car. “All the boys have been making a big fuss about it.”

  “Uh-huh. And since when do I go to meetings?”

  Athena yanked herself back into his sight—Tuck noticed a smudge of oil grease spattering the freckles on her left cheek. “Since they're set by the man upstairs, tough guy.”

  Tuck lit a cigarette. He was just beginning to feel dry again, in his boots. “What are you talking about, A? G never calls meetings. Not since...nope. Never. Drag?” He proffered his Newport, but Athena waved it away.

  “Well he's called one TODAY, Tuck. And it's at MIDNIGHT.” Then Athena cast one of her withering glances in the direction of the hot-rod. “And your ride's a mess. It'll take a night's work to clean those headlamps...”

  “Oh, you just love to bitch.” Tuck stooped low to give his best friend one of the sloppy cheek kisses she'd always claimed to despise. He extinguished his light, gave his long, dirty blonde mane a final shake, and moved out into the moist night. It was a few moments to midnight yet.

  Below the callow moon, Tuck peeled his clinging T-shirt off his back. He stretched his arms wide before gazing up at the stars. That was one nice thing about West Texas: you dried fast. Tuck felt a warm tickle of summer breeze move across the hairs on his chest, ridding him at last of all the remaining rain on his skin. Then, into the night, he howled. He spread his mouth wide and howled up at the moon like a wolf—then he listened sharply for the echo his noise made. When the bellow reverberated back, he raised his arms and laughed. Probably looked and sounded like a crazy man, to anyone who should have happened to see or hear—but Tuck put a lot of stock in his lupine qualities. He wanted the world to know, always, that he was a wild thing.

  All this week, Tuck had been racing the plains in fits of evening insomnia. It had been a mere four months since he'd accepted the eminent honor of club Lieutenant at arms (a.k.a. right hand man to the club leader himself), but there'd been little action for the Barons since their recent re-location to the Lone Star State. The club had moved to this slightly higher country from low Baton Rouge, where the Barons had spent a few profitable seasons flipping property and strong-arming the black market. The swamps had made for poor riding, though, lacking the most important thing for a man on a bike—solid, serious racing grounds.

  When the leader had learned of a particularly lawless slice of Texas, he'd picked up his troops and moved them South. We'll find plenty of business to drum up in Waco, the man upstairs had promised. Only now, four months had passed as the Barons merely twiddled their powerful thumbs. The most restless in the club spent
their nights chasing poon at local dive bars. Tuck himself spent many nights just like this one—zooming over dark, flat earth until his mission terminated in Athena's garage. They'd shoot the shit (meaning, she'd bitch about the various injustices that had befallen her in the last twenty-four hours) and split a pack of menthols before turning in, near dawn.

  Though he saw the attraction in routine—and would never admit as much to the man upstairs—Tuck found the low country boring. There was no nearby New Orleans, with its sweet, endless streets of booze and women, that feeling of constant celebration. There'd been something so sexy about the humid air in that town—every night by the swamps made a man want to fuck. Plus, he'd come up in New Orleans—it was his first real home, after he ran away from the one he was born into.

  Tuck had become a man on Chartres Street, busking, grifting, taking odd jobs, frequenting the bar where a then underage Athena had conned her way into a job—until one fine day a man with a face like a craggy mountain had said, “son, you'd make a helluva gun for hire.” It hadn't taken a whole lot more than seeing a series of the bikes lined up in a Rider garage—each of them bright, beautiful, heavy with the promise of adventure. “If you come with me, you'll get one of these first thing,” the leader had said. So Tuck had packed up his one bag and his best friend (she was so handy with a pair of pliers) and brought them both into the folds of the Barons of Sodom—and for his surrogate family, this the most loyal of all possible families, Tuck laid down his life as often as he had to. To date, he'd done absolutely anything that the chief required without questioning—he'd stolen, he'd intimidated, he'd broken things, he'd started fires. He'd killed. Tuck was the perfect soldier, and in return he was often rewarded with first-hand knowledge of the club's inner-workings. He was trusted.