“It’s true, then?” Disgusted, Deuce closed his eyes and shook his head. “You fuckin’ knew that kid came from crazy.”
Deuce was referring to Franklin Deluva Jr., better known as Crazy Frankie, the only child of the late Franklin Deluva Sr. and his wife, Maria, also deceased. Preacher had taken Frankie in after both his parents had died and raised him as his own.
“It might’ve been Eva who put that blade in Frankie’s neck,” Deuce continued angrily. “But it was because of you that she had to do it! You let that messed-up fuck into your house, into your club, and into her mother-fuckin’ bed!”
Preacher gritted his teeth and attempted to push himself upright. “I don’t need you to remind me that I failed my daughter,” he growled. “But what you’re not understandin’, you self-righteous piece of shit, is why I didn’t know what Frankie was doing to her. I was lettin’ Eva be. I was lettin’ her do her own damn thing, become her own woman. I was givin’ her the chances my old man never gave me. Hell, I did everything I could to make sure she had friends outside of the life. I woulda paid for any college she wanted to attend, too, didn’t matter if it was on the other side of the world. I gave her every out and she didn’t take a single one of ‘em. She refused to leave the city, refused to leave the club.”
Preacher paused to catch his breath, and the painful-sounding rattle in his chest grew louder.
“I thought she was always hangin’ around for Frankie. I thought someday I’d be handing the club to them both. I didn’t know enough, I know that now. And because I didn’t know enough, I never saw it. I never saw what he was doin’ to her. I just thought… I just thought she was…”
Shaking his head, Preacher glared up at Deuce. “In hindsight,” he spat, “I think maybe she wasn’t leavin’ because she was waitin’ on you, Deuce. You ever think of that?”
It was an accusation meant to give Deuce pause, and it worked. But fuck if Deuce was going to let Preacher know he’d struck a nerve.
“She wasn’t waitin’ on me,” Deuce shot back, “She knew she coulda had me. Hell, she did have me whenever the fuck she wanted me, and every damn time it was her who walked away.”
Walked away and went right back to Frankie.
Deuce’s heart rate shot up, and his chest grew uncomfortably tight. Just because he’d learned to live with Frankie’s ghost, didn’t mean he’d ever get over what that lunatic had done to Eva. Frankie’s brand of crazy had left a mark on everything it touched. You could cover it up and ignore it, but that mark was always going to be there, just below the surface, burning a slowly growing hole through whatever peace you thought you may have found.
“Eva is just like us, you fuckin’ asshole.” Deuce pointed between him and Preacher. “She’s lived and breathed the club from day fuckin’ one. And not one of us ever had a fuckin’ chance.”
As the two men continued to stare at one another, the anger in Preacher’s eyes began to slowly fade.
“You’re wrong,” Preacher said, sounding resigned. “I used to think that… but I was wrong. We had choices. I made the choice to bring Frankie into my home, and Eva chose to marry him. You made the choice to knock up another man’s wife and then drag her off to Montana with you. We all made our motherfuckin’ choices, and we’ve all been living with the consequences of ‘em ever since.”
Seeing red, Deuce’s nostrils flared. Drag Eva to Montana? Fuck that and fuck Preacher. He hadn’t dragged Eva anywhere. She’d come home with him because she was his. She had always been his.
“Preacher,” Deuce growled, feeling like crushing someone’s skull with his bare hands. “Forget fuckin’ Frankie and tell me about Frank.”
Preacher closed his eyes and let out a ragged sigh. When his eyes reopened, he stared out across the room. “Joe was tellin’ the truth. It was Frank who killed my parents.”
“Yeah, but when did you find out? Fuck, how did you find out? Was Frank at the rally?”
“He musta been. But no one knew he was there, no one saw him. As far as we knew he was in Philly.”
“Why’d he do it?”
When Preacher finally spoke, his tone was pained, his every word sounding as if it were being physically pried from his insides with a rusty blade. “Took me a long time to figure that out.” He swallowed thickly. “Even longer than it took me to find out it was him who’d done it.”
When it didn’t look like Preacher was going to elaborate further, Deuce switched topics. “The accident on the expressway. Was that your doin’?”
Preacher choked out an ugly laugh. “No. That woulda been too easy. Frank, that sick shit—he needed my hands on him.”
Preacher’s gaze suddenly swung to Deuce, glowering with the hate of a thousand deadly men. “My only regret is that I could only kill him once.”
Had Preacher not been lying in a hospital bed, knocking on death’s door, Deuce might have taken a step back. Because this was the Preacher who’d turned The Judge’s motorcycle club into an empire that rivaled most mafias. This was the man who didn’t think twice about taking a life—even the life of a friend.
This was the man other men both feared and envied… and with due cause.
Part Three
“Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.”
- Haruki Murakami
“Pain is power. It’s what drives me.
Suffering is what happens to those that cause me pain.”
- Damon “Preacher” Fox
Chapter 26
Parked on a one-way street in East Village, New York City, seated in the driver’s seat of a dirt-brown Monaco sedan, Agent Donald Willis of the Federal Bureau of Investigation glanced over at his partner. Thirty years Willis’s junior, Agent James Parker was fidgeting in his seat, pulling irritably at the wool scarf wrapped around his neck.
“It’s fucking cold in here,” Parker complained. “My coffee’s gone cold.”
“Roll up the window,” Willis replied. “You’re cold because you’re sitting here with the goddamn window down, letting all the cold air in.”
“Wouldn’t be sitting here at all if the cops did their fucking jobs.”
Willis glanced across the street, eyeing their target—the Silver Demons’ clubhouse—and bobbed his head in agreement. It was no secret that the local police department tended to look the other way when it came to the Silver Demons. The Bureau had long suspected the Demons were paying off the police, but they hadn’t been able to prove it… yet.
There was nothing Willis hated more than a dirty cop. A former police officer, Willis had taken his oath seriously and expected the same from his fellow peacekeepers.
“I don’t blame them.” Parker rubbed his hands together before blowing on them. “Someone offered me the right amount, I’d be looking the other way, too.”
Willis glared at Parker and the younger man laughed. “Kidding. Take a fucking joke, will ya?” Rolling his eyes, Parker slouched down in his seat and resumed pulling on his scarf.
“Once we get these guys,” Willis muttered, “then it’ll be easy pickings. They’ll be clamoring to tell us which officers they’ve got in their pockets, and their house of cards will come tumbling down right on top of ‘em.”
Parker shot Willis a skeptical look, silently conveying what Willis was already thinking—that the Silver Demons were too damn good at what they did. There were no holes in their operation—if there had been, the Bureau would have found them by now.
The telltale rumbling of a motorcycle approaching drew their attention to the street. The heavily bearded rider slowed to a near stop as he passed and flashed a grin—and his middle finger—at the agents.
Wearing matching sour expressions, Willis and Parker watched as the rider turned down the alleyway beside the clubhouse and disappeared from sight.
Willis didn’t need to leaf through his stacks of files to identify the rider; he’d long ago memorized all their names and faces. This particular man was Robert M. Schneider, age 31, known to his family in Queens as ‘Bobby’ and to his brothers in the Silver Demons as ‘Hightower’.