Running On Empty: Crows MC Read online

But, as the old song goes, you can’t always get what you want. Sometimes an eighteen-wheeler called “LIFE” runs down your lovely list of wants and leaves you in a diesel-reeking cloud of darkness with nothing but a bumper sticker that says “SHIT HAPPENS” to look back on.

  And that was it.

  Shit happened.

  Shit happened, and in a truly horrible and bitterly ironic twist of fate, the shit that happened to me wound up hurling me into the life I’d once wanted with a fresh and ongoing resentment of everything that life represented.

  And I actually thought that some trinkets that reminded me of Mom and Dad were going to help me through the breakdown. What in the actual fuck was the matter with me?

  Roaring through the streets, dodging the ghostly vision that lingered at the end of each one, I’d spotted two hookers on the corner of Church and Lyle. They were pretty enough, one certainly more than the other, but she’d been on her phone at the time and the glow on her face might’ve had something to do with the strange, nearly angelic glow I remembered her with. Danny’s words, all of them in their entirety and the full weight of what they represented, had come over me at that moment. I’d been considering pulling over at that moment, less intrigued with the notion of paying for some strange and more about how certain and how confident they looked at that moment. I envied them for that. Both professionally and personally, I’d come to know a few prostitutes throughout my life, and what I’d come to learn was that they were never without their surprises. Society rarely gave them second glances, and when they did it was never to consider the person but, understandably, the profession. And, for the most part, they were just fine with that. Ambiguity, anonymity, and, surprisingly enough, privacy were among the limited benefits that came with the job. They could be whoever they wanted to be; could be, and very often were, geniuses hiding behind heavy eyeliner, fishnets, and exposed cleavage. It wasn’t an absolute certainty that the hooker you were eyeballing was the next Albert Einstein or Emily Dickinson, but they were almost certainly more interesting than the typical girl you’d be bumping into in your daily routine. And the girls on the corner of Church and Lyle really seemed to have their shit together; it invoked my envy and curiosity alike.

  Then I saw the phantom from my past waving at me from the end of the street and I veered off and decided what I really wanted was to get drunk.

  Completely and utterly shit-faced.

  So I didn’t stop for the hookers at that corner. Whether I would’ve picked their brains or just gone the route that Danny had been suggesting, I wasn’t sure, but, instead, steered myself towards a far greater mistake.

  Then, completely and utterly shit-faced, a seemingly charming, seemingly confident, seemingly suitable means to sate what I felt Danny believed I wanted—or what I needed; who knew?—came shambling over. She called herself “Amy,” called me things like “perfect” and “yummy,” and said she wanted me to be her next day’s “big mistake.”

  So I brought her back to my place, played the part, and then had sloppy, sweaty, “it’s too hot to be having sex”-sex. She told me things I wished were lies, like “that was incredible” and “I think we could be amazing,” and I answered with “it was great” and “I think we could be, too:” things I wished didn’t sound too much like lies. Whether or not the thing called Amy believed them had no obvious impact on her as she mopped between her legs with the first piece of material that met her hands (my shirt), pulled my very expensive sheet up to just below her sweat-glazed breasts, and instantly went to sleep.

  What should have been her next day’s big mistake was the prolonged, nightmarish abortion of my self-respect.

  Who knew the embodiment of Irony would be so gassy?

  “Sorry, Dad,” I whispered, my words warping inside the mouth of the bottle I’d been blindly chugging from whilst living and reliving the horrible events in my mind. Then, knowing my list of victims stretched on further, I said, “Sorry, Mom…”

  Then I named my brother…

  Then my dead wife and our unborn daughter…

  Then the names of every member of the Crow Gang who probably wished I was my father or my brother.

  Somewhere in the darkness, I heard the thing called Amy fart again.

  And that seemed to say it all.

  I’d been here before.

  I’d be here again.

  On my old bike, a toss-away Honda with a clanking exhaust and worthless shocks, and peaking the needle. It still wasn’t fast enough. Piece of shit was never that fast to begin with, but on the night I needed it to be even halfway decent it was a miracle I got it over fifty.

  Not that it matters.

  I didn’t get there in time.

  And I never would.

  Blacktop pavement. Blacktop sky. Even the edges of my vision were going tar-black; tears streaking the only thing that wasn’t black: the flashing blues and reds tailing me.

  Cops.

  Fuck them.

  I might’ve been inching along at a pitiful and painful sixty-three, but they’d still never catch me. Not on that night. And not on any of the times I came back to it.

  Sixty-three miles-per-hour…

  I told myself I might’ve made it if I’d reached sixty-five, but really I was lying to myself. Best case scenario: I might’ve wound up watching it happen. Still, I told myself—as I’d keep telling myself—that I could’ve done something.

  Sixty-three miles-per-hour…

  I knew that because of the pursuing officer who’d tried to make the speeding charges stick. He’d said I was doing sixty-three in a thirty-five. He’d said I’d run stop signs, screamed through red lights, endangered other motorists, and even nearly run down a pedestrian making use of crosswalk. He’d said all this while I watched a mortician’s gurney roll on squeaky wheels from my home; a round, familiar bump swelling upward at the halfway point. I remembered thinking that she always looked better on our bed and under our sheets, but the sight was oddly serene all the same.

  Then I caught sight of a few red dimples as they kissed the bleached whiteness of the sheet and began to grow, expanding across the clean cover and staining it. Then I was screaming, shrieking in blind, raw terror, and clamoring to make it to her side even as they were hoisting her into the back of the…

  … the back of the…

  Christ!

  Somebody’d called it a “meat wagon.” They hadn’t known I’d heard, but they’d called it a “meat wagon”…

  It took me a long time—too long—to realize I was being held back; held down; held away from going after her.

  Then, assuring them I was fine—“I’m good. I’m cool. I’m… I’m cool.”—they let me up again, loosing me onto a world that wasn’t quite level; let me stand up on a ground that wasn’t quite flat. In my mind, I could still see the spreading stain across the plain white sheet of my life, and standing seemed downright impossible.

  Then the cop said “sixty-three” again.

  He said “sixty-three,” and I punched him.

  I heard “sixty-three” echo in my mind, watched the words marry the vision of the spreading stain, and suddenly I knew—fucking KNEW!—that if I could turn that cop’s face into hamburger I might turn the clock back a few minutes and coax that fucking Honda to do sixty-five, maybe even seventy. If I could just beat every last “sixty-three” out of the face that had been assigned to the badge and gun I might never have to see those stains at all.

  Then I was being held again. Then I was being beaten.

  And—sweet Jesus!—nothing had ever felt so goddam good in all the world!

  Then, too soon for anybody’s liking, some cop with an actual brain between his ears tore his buddies off of me, reading them the riot act about the scene we’d all just rolled up to—“Chris’sakes, you assholes! That’s the man’s wife! His wife! And, in case you fucking nitwits can’t see for shit, either, that wasn’t a Thanksgiving dinner she was carrying in her belly, either! Get the fuck off him before you get the whole
force sued!”—and I was alone with nothing but the emptiness.

  The emptiness and…

  And a voice.

  The voice!

  Over the din of everything else, I heard my name.

  “Hey! HEY! Jace? Jason Presley? That you, you son-of-a-whore?”

  None of the cops seemed to notice the random figure standing amidst the chaos until they all heard that last part.

  I guess they figured very few people would be throwing around words like “whore” in the middle of a scene like that.

  But then, just like that, they were all looking.

  I was a bit late to look, and maybe that’s what saved my life.

  Suddenly, Mister “Sixty-Three”—likely trying to make up for his fuckup—was coming at me like a bullet.

  No…

  Not like a bullet. I suppose it was the bullet that was coming at me like a bullet. The bullet was faster. Of course. Cop could’ve been an Olympic runner—could’ve been running sixty-three miles-per-hour—and he still would’ve been too damn slow. But the sight of all that uniformed authority barreling at me gave me a start; nearly knocked me right on my ass without laying a hand on me. And that was how a shot that should have built a lovely little retirement home right in my heart was, instead, forced to settle in the meat of my shoulder a few inches off.

  “T-BUILT SENDS HIS CONDOLENCES, PRESLEY,” the shooter had cried out at me as he was dragged away towards a flashing Cruiser. “THE CROWS IS DEAD! LEARN IT, KNOW IT! THE CROWS IS DEAD, PRESLEY, DEAD! THE CROWS… IS… DEAD!”

  Turning away from my would-be murderer, I watched the “meat wagon” holding everything I’d known as my life pull out and begin to put distance between us.

  “The Crows is dead…”

  “The Crows is dead…”

  “The Crows is…”

  The Meat Wagon’s brake lights burned, it rolled to a lazy stop at the end of the road. There, seeming to tease me, it lingered—it’s right blinker winking knowingly at me—and it finally turned and vanished into the night.

  There, at the end of the road, standing where the “meat wagon” had been waiting a moment earlier to wink at me, her ghost stood.

  She stared back at me.

  She held her round belly in one hand, supporting its great weight and all the potential it represented.

  She waved—a casual, lazy gesture aimed more towards the home we’d built and everything we could have had than at me.

  She stared back at me… but she did not smile.

  There’d be time enough to smile at me from the end of the road in the years to follow. But nobody smiled on the night that they died.

  Nobody.

  “The Crows is dead…”

  “The Crows is dead…”

  “The Crows is…”

  Naturally I couldn’t let the Crows be dead. I knew that I’d never be like my father or my brother, but to let everything that they’d worked to build turn to ash would have proven that I wasn’t even a Presley. It was a tough role to take—occupying the shoes of the two men I’d most admired growing up—but taking it was the only way to keep the Crow Gang from being dismantled.

  It was tough enough to compete with the opposing Carrion Crew and their ongoing effort to swallow up our entire business, but that their founder was my father’s old partner—a fellow Crow—and the bulk of their starting crew had been our own, it only made things that much harder. Practically overnight, Tyler “Papa Raven” Kapurton had scooped up a bunch of our best and flown the coop…

  So to speak.

  What had started as a mild disagreement between Tyler and my brother had, as it turned out, escalated into a full-on Crow Gang civil war. Business records were stolen, clients redirected, and traps set. Deaths became more and more frequent.

  More of our boys and more of our boys’ families fell victim to the growing hostilities. Between the threat of death and the promise of more money and protection, the Carrion Crew’s numbers continued to climb while ours continued to dwindle. They took on jobs that we wouldn’t: guns, heavy drugs, human trafficking, and even mercenary work; bringing the very element that my family worked to keep out with the work they did. And when Michael told me that Tyler had a new second-in-command, a man known only as T-Built, who appeared to be the walking personification of that element, we knew something had to be done. And I, having only been an occasional runner for my brother’s gang, had no reason to say “no.” After all, their civil war had yet to show up on my front step. I was just a spectator, a casual player for a team I was otherwise rooting for.

  Sure, I didn’t want to see my late-father’s old gang fall to pieces. And I sure-as-hell didn’t want them to be replaced by some jacked-up copycat gang who were making it a personal mission to turn our city into a cesspool just as I was settling down and starting a family. I had my beautiful, pregnant-as-hell wife to wake up to every morning and an honest, unionized day-to-day gig to go off to. While the extra cash I earned running a delivery of laundered money, a few pounds of pot, or the occasionally forged documents was great and all, it was the threat that the Carrion Crew represented to the city I intended to be raising a daughter in that really pushed me to get involved.

  And that this T-Built asshole was supposedly converting one of our old shipping yards into what sounded like an all-out drug factory was all the reason I needed. I mean, it’s bad enough when you know your neighbors are cooking meth in their basement—pretty risky when the house next door can go up at any point in time—but when that same sort of threat is multiplied and expanded across an area that’s roughly equal to four square blocks it stops being an issue for the neighbors and starts being a concern for anybody in the city.

  And, just like that, I found myself dragged into the spiraling shit-storm just as it went from bad to worse.

  Not that I had a level enough head to know it then.

  I’m sure T-Built thought that going after me and my family at our home was a good way of getting back at me for my involvement in taking out his little operation while it was still being built. A part of me did feel an awful lot like Luke Skywalker at the end of ‘New Hope’ as I rode off into the night with Michael at my side and the “factory” collapsing into rubble behind us. It only made sense that the guy running the place would go full-scale Emperor on me.

  And, props to him, he went out and blew up my whole world.

  Then, before the dust had settled, I found myself an only child—Michael adding himself to the list of casualties to the Crow-slash-Carrion civil war—and the responsibility of upholding the Crows’ legacy fell on me.

  Much as I hated the idea of doing much of anything at that point, a deep, raging fire in my chest simply wouldn’t let it end there. And, as long as we’re being honest, I made up my mind because of what my would-be shooter said to me the night that Anne was killed. I told the rest of the Crows—Danny especially—that I was doing it because I wouldn’t let the proclamation that “THE CROWS IS DEAD” be true; that I couldn’t let it be true. Honestly, though, it had very little to do with that—honestly, it was the other thing the shooter had said that had driven me to quit my job and take up the mantle as leader of the Crows:

  “T-BUILT SENDS HIS CONDOLENCES, PRESLEY!”

  Long as we’re being honest, I’d decided long before Michael’s death and the shift of control that my time as a good-ol’-boy and a family man had come to an end. My vendetta against T-Built had been a strictly professional one, one that said “I won’t let you do this in my town, so don’t try.” Then he’d gone and overseen the destruction of my life by murdering my wife and leaving one of his strung-out lackeys to wait for me so they could finish the job. I couldn’t care less that I was the new leader of the Crow Gang—I’d never wanted the job and I still didn’t want it—but there was no denying that there were perks to the job that made my other mission—my real mission—much easier to follow through on:

  I was going to track down and kill T-Built.

  Amy woke
me up, shaking me with such a frantic desperation that I came to certain that something was wrong. Visions of broken appliances, cracked windows, and scorched bedsheets flooded my mind.

  “What?” I demanded, “What is it?”

  “Oh!” Amy blinked at my tone, seeming startled at my being startled. “I thought… well, the way you were screaming and crying, I just thought it would be better to wake you. Are you okay?”

  I blinked at the question. Screaming? Crying? Fading scenes of memory that had served as last night’s dream echoed on the dwindling horizon of my unconscious mind, and I wondered just how much I’d inadvertently confessed to…

  Catching sight of Amy’s face, I suddenly felt like an asshole.

  There was concern—deep and genuine—glazing her eyes, and, judging from the way her tensed body was shaking, she’d been moving quite fast from the bedroom to see an end to my cries.

  And here I’d been calling her a dragon and thinking of her as nothing but a mistake; going so far as to leave my own bedroom just to not have to sleep by her.

  “I’m cool,” I lied, making it worse by adding, “I’m fine. Thanks.”

  Amy’s brow creased, disbelieving, but she didn’t say anything as she stepped back so that I could stand up from my chair. I did, and my knees buckled. Catching myself, I chuckled—remembering how they’d done that before in my sex-numbed haze—and shook my head at her as she moved to catch me. I repeated my whole “I’m cool. I’m fine”-mantra, sure she still didn’t believe a word of it, and forced myself into an awkward, half-balanced stand.

  “How long were you out here?” she asked, looking suddenly ashamed. “I didn’t… I hope it wasn’t long.”

  “No,” I lied again, shaking my head. “I got thirsty a little before morning, came down here for some OJ and must’ve dozed off watching the sunrise.”

  “Oh…” Amy’s voice sounded distant and hollow—a bell tolling from a deep, distant tunnel. I tried to ignore her eyes darting to the table where my now-empty bottle of booze rested. “Right.”