Lessons in Corruption (The Fallen Men 1)

“Don’t got any involvement other than that, Mayor Lafayette, and don’t much appreciate your insinuation. I’m an active member in this community. I’m a business owner and a father. My daughter goes to Entrance Public and my son goes to EBA. I even pay my fuckin’ taxes on time each year. I hope you’re not insinuatin’ that just ‘cause I’m a member of a recreational motorcycle club, I’d be involved in somethin’ like drug distribution?”

“I think that’s exactly what he was insinuating, Zeus,” Stella said, still standing.

“You haven’t had problems with the MC in years, Benjamin,” an older man stood up to say.

“Yeah, well, we’re having them now, John,” someone else yelled out from behind us.

“You got questions for me, Sergeant,” Zeus said, his low voice undercutting the increasing chatter. “You come ask ‘em. This public fuckin’ defamation is grounds for me to sue the city.”

I pursed my lips because I wasn’t sure that was true but it seemed like a good threat.

The Staff Sergeant stepped forward from the lineup with his thumbs in the belt loops of his uniform. He was the officer in charge of the small RCMP outpost in town and from what I heard, he was a member of the old school policing mentality. He did not like Zeus or The Fallen and it was obvious by the displeasure that creased the plethora of lines across his face that this apathy had reached new heights.

“Trust me, I’ll find a way to get you into the station for some questions,” he promised darkly, leaning over Mayor Lafayette to speak into the microphone.

“We have a list of businesses who will no longer accept your bikers as clients,” the mayor added. “You might want to spread the word to the rest of your gang. Entrance is no longer putting up with drug dealers and ruffians. Until our streets are clean, you’re the ones we’re looking at.”

“Now,” Mayor Lafayette announced before Zeus could respond. “Let’s open the floor to questions.”

As chaos erupted around us, Zeus turned to his crew and said quietly, “You heard the motherfucker, we find whoever is selling kids fuckin’ fentanyl and we end this.”

A shiver ripped up my spine like something had taken a knife to my vertebrae. I locked eyes with King and saw the violence in his, the promise to enact the kind of retribution I’d only read about in novels or seen on TV. I didn’t feel in any way prepared to deal with the side of biker life, but it seemed I had to be ready whether I wanted to or not.

Nervously, I waited for King later that night in the second bedroom I’d made into a little office. The room was cold because the entire back wall of windows extended into the room and the insulation was poor, though King had mentioned bringing in a few of the brothers to help us fix it.

I shook my head at my use of the plural. Since I’d given into his sinful temptations, we hadn’t spent a single night apart. It was strange to spend so much domestic time with a man other than William. I’d known everything about my husband and had taken most of it for granted just as he did with me. I wanted to say it was something that happened gradually over time, but that obsessive passion that made even the little moments together glow like faceted jewels had never existed between us, not even when I was young and especially eager to please.

It was not this way with King. I was fascinated, time after time, by his nightly routine. Mostly, he didn’t have one. Each evening when he arrived at my house, always after me because he had club business and his job at Hephaestus to attend to after school, we did something different. One night, he stormed into the house, literally threw me over his shoulder and took me for a ride up and down the Sea to Sky Highway, all the way to Whistler and back. The next, he brought home burgers from Stella’s because he had remembered I wanted to try them, and we watched Sons Of Anarchy on Netflix because I’d told him I was doing research and it had made him laugh. One night, we went to Eugene’s and shot the shit (a term I learned from Tayline who was my biker babe guru) with some of the guys and their old ladies, including Maja, Lila and Skell’s woman, Winona (who was horrible, but I still felt badly for her because Skell was an animal and slept with anything in a skirt).

It was only just before bed that King succumbed to routine like a normal person and it was this that I loved to watch. He peeled out of his clothes in under twenty seconds as if once he had made the decision to undress, he couldn’t bear to have the clothes on him any longer. He always left them in the same corner of the closet (because he wasn’t a pig, he’d told me when I asked him about it) and then moved into the bathroom to brush and, I couldn’t believe it either, floss his teeth.