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After closing the store for the day, Brody climbed the outside stairs to a one-bedroom apartment above his bookstore. There was only minimal furniture inside—a bed, a nightstand, and a kitchen table with two chairs.
He’d slept in the bed the previous night and made it when he got up. It was a habit he’d learned while incarcerated.
He wondered if Alice had taken the furniture with her or if the marshals had removed it. Onderdonk said someone would be by in the coming weeks to help him select new furniture. The lawman asked him to be patient, promising to outfit his apartment with something acceptable.
Brody didn’t care, though. He’d had less than this when he spent time in juvenile hall, jail, or prison. He could live in this sparsely decorated apartment quite nicely.
For what he had now was something he didn’t have in those other places. Freedom. And peace. In fact, he had neither when he was with the club. Someone was always watching him.
But no one watched him now.
Except maybe the Marshal Service, and they only wanted him to abide by a simple set of rules.
Do not contact people from your old life.
Do not visit places from your old life.
Do not develop habits from your old life.
He was to discard anything that had to do with Beau Smith. Only Brody Steele could survive now.
This whole mess, he had decided, was his doing. His actions and selfishness caused this life of loneliness, this life of hiding, this life in Pleasant Valley. Federal Agent Max Ekleberry might have been the architect, and Marshal Ted Onderdonk built the structure, but Brody laid the foundation for this life.
His house of cards began to fall when his grandmother ended up in financial problems. To get out of a bind, she mortgaged the house she had lived in for almost sixty years. Unfortunately, she fell behind on her payments and didn’t tell Brody about her troubles until it was almost too late. She wasn’t the type of woman to ask her grandson for aid. He only found out about her predicament when he visited and discovered the foreclosure documents on her dining room table.
Brody did the only thing he knew how to do—he went into action. At first, he threatened a bank officer. This only got him into trouble. Realizing too late that he couldn’t bully his grandmother’s problems away, he did what every citizen in the world must—he paid the bank what it was owed. Then he paid off the rest of her mortgage.
Afterward, Brody hired contractors to improve her home, fixing things that had gone unrepaired for years. It felt good to assist the woman he regarded as his true mother, the only person he had ever really loved.
Unfortunately, Ekleberry and his team had been watching the Satan’s Dawgs. Brody’s threatening of the bank officer had not gone unnoticed, and it led the FBI man to his grandmother. When the federal agent discovered Brody was using illegally gotten gains to not only pay off his grandmother’s mortgage but to upgrade her house, he had found his leverage point.
Ekleberry approached Brody’s grandmother and explained who and what her grandson indeed was. This shocked her as she had never known he was in a motorcycle club. She had always thought he was in a rock and roll band, just on the cusp of making it big. Every grandmother wants to believe her grandson will someday be rich and famous. The idea that her grandson was a criminal broke her heart. When the agent had her in his pocket, he met with Brody.
That’s when the big man threatened to kill Ekleberry. It was yet another mistake Brody made along the way. The G-Man explained that the U.S. Government was preparing to seize his grandmother’s house due to his use of illegal funds to pay off its mortgage and to increase its value through improvements. They would argue that Brody had laundered money through his grandmother’s home.
Brody wrongly claimed there was no proof of the illegality of those funds and then stated no one had been arrested. Therefore, he argued, the government could not go after his grandma’s house. It was at that moment that the FBI man read him his rights and put handcuffs on him.
The arrest of the remaining crew soon followed. Everyone was arraigned and assigned a lawyer, but the feds were really going after only one man that day—Beauregard Smith.
It didn’t take long for Brody to roll on his brothers though. Partially it was because his grandmother asked him to do so, but there were other circumstances at play.
The club had stopped being the family he searched for when he was younger and was now a machine for greed. They were running drugs and guns and had gotten into a variety of deadly alliances around the country. His skills as a bookkeeper were recently lent out to other charters. What he did was for the club. It wasn’t some sick service to be provided to others for whom he had no loyalty. Therefore, he had already been looking for a way out.
Even before their arrests, the brothers in the club were turning on one another. There was too much money at stake for loyalty to remain the most valuable thing. Brody believed the end was near when the current president began a systematic witch hunt of his own, demanding repeated loyalty oaths to himself followed by tests of faithfulness. He had already proven his faithfulness by being the bookkeeper. Jumping through hoops like a trained puppy wasn’t something he would do.
Yet he did exactly that for the FBI and then the U.S. Marshals.
He lay on the bed and stared at the ceiling, listening to the occasional slow-moving car passing along Main Street. Now and then, a horn from a boat sounded in the bay. These were the sounds of his new life.
Admitting that I like being here wouldn’t make me less of a man, would it?
Besides, it was Brody Steele who liked the sounds and aromas of Pleasant Valley, not Beau Smith.
Brody Steele was also intrigued by the cute bookkeeper who worked at the grocery store. Beau Smith would never have known what to say to her, and she would never have given the rough biker the time of day.
Brody Steele had enjoyed the casual walk along Main Street with sweet, older people smiling at him. Beau Smith would never have experienced that.
But at the Italian restaurant, Il Cuoco Irato, it was Beau Smith who identified the true nature of the restaurant. For bookstore owner, Brody Steele, it would have been only a place that served a moderately good Caprese salad and a below-average meatball sandwich.
What should he do about the restaurant then?
Should he tell the police?
Or call U.S. Marshal Ted Onderdonk?
Or worse, should he notify FBI Special Agent Max Ekleberry?
No, Brody decided. He wouldn’t tell anyone.
The motorcycle club’s unofficial motto was Do Unto Others Before They Can Do Unto You.
Now he was going to survive by a new motto—Live and Let Live.
Except the club wasn’t going to let him just live. They would never forget what he did. For immunity for his own crimes, he rolled on the club. A few guys went to prison, but most of them avoided a single day behind bars. Turning into a rat did one positive thing for the club though.
It galvanized them behind a single purpose.
The Satan’s Dawgs were now solely focused on hunting Beau Smith, their former bookkeeper and once-loyal brother.
Brody Steele rolled over, closed his eyes, and went to sleep.