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Chopper
Dahlia was a good worker. Once Chopper laid out his expectations, she seemed perfectly happy to come into the Outlaw compound, subject herself to a security search, and then sit down at the table in the war room and pore over the binder full of Spike’s financial transactions. Many names and dates had been left intact, but great sections of the book were blacked out by charring, or simply missing altogether. Dahlia used her incredible memory, and sometimes her own journals, to fill in the blanks. When Chopper asked why she kept such detailed records of her time with Spike, she answered nonchalantly, “I guess I never really trusted him.” Then she added, “And I thought some of this money would be mine someday. Little did I know, right?”
On her first day, she’d brought in a list of locations where Spike could potentially be found, ordered from most to least likely. The first few were outposts belonging to allies; he could expect to meet resistance if he went there. Those further down were family homes, places he would seek refuge as a last resort. Depending on how many Mongols Chopper and his men had killed, Spike’s favored hideouts might already be defenseless or severely weakened. This was both good news and bad news. Good news, because it meant that he had fewer places to go. Bad news, because Chopper knew he’d prefer not to deal with family members at all. He knew Kelsey wouldn’t like the involvement of potential innocents. He wasn’t too sure how he felt about it himself.
Needing time to think, he retreated into his personal quarters and lay on the bed, staring at Dahlia’s list like a teenage boy with a picture of his first girlfriend. Many of these places were shockingly close by, but he supposed that made sense. Spike had to have expected a violent confrontation with him sooner or later, and his contingency plan needed to mesh with the possibility of severe injuries—which, Chopper noted, Spike had indeed suffered. There was no way he could get very far at all without the use of an airlift, and that would’ve attracted too much attention. So, it stood to reason that Lawler the rat was hiding more or less in plain sight.
Chopper went through the list yet again, mapping each address on his laptop and striking off the ones he judged to be too far for Spike to reach in his injured state. Then he marked out the area encompassing those that were left and sent his altered map to Dean. Thirty seconds later, a call came through.
“What am I lookin’ at, Chop?” Dean asked. “New drug route?”
“Better,” Chopper said. “You see those pins in there?”
“Yeah.”
“I got it from a real good source that those are all the places where Spike Lawler might be. I need you to get some boys together and ride on by. See if you can catch anything, you know what I mean?”
“How good is this source?” Dean said. “No disrespect, but we haven’t seen a hair of Lawler in weeks.”
Chopper grinned. “Did Red teach you how to backtalk, too? The girl was Spike’s old lady before he got fixated on Kelsey. She knows everything.”
Dean whistled. “I guess he really fucked up, huh?”
“Yeah,” Chopper said. “I guess he did.”
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FROM HIS SEAT AT THE workbench in the garage at Bike Out of Hell, Chopper heard his boys peel out onto the road. He got up and wandered out just to watch them ride away, their outlines shrinking into the distance. It felt just like old times, except that in old times, he’d be the one at the front, not Dean. And he was always flanked by Red and Hoss. Chopper stood quietly in the early afternoon sun, hands shoved in his pockets, squinting into the light.
His chest felt tight. There was something lodged in his throat. He swallowed, blinked, ran his hand across his face. All of a sudden, emotion had leapt upon him like a tiger in the night. He didn’t know what to do. The losses he had suffered before were understandable, justifiable even. But this time, Spike took two of the greatest friends he had ever known, two men he’d naively considered among the ranks of immortals. Never had he thought to envision a future without them. Now, that future was his reality, and the weight was so great that he needed to be alone.
He went back into the garage, told the mechanic on duty that he was taking off for a bit, and walked back out. On any other day, he wouldn’t have thought twice about taking his beloved bike for a spin, but on this afternoon, Chopper Slater decided to walk. He knew he made an awkward, perhaps even suspicious figure ambling down the side of the street, but he didn’t care. For once, he needed to separate himself from the identity that had defined him since he was a young man. He had to take a step back and see what Kelsey saw — a vicious cycle that only claimed lives.
Would it be enough to keep him away forever, or even for more than a few hours? No, that was too much to ask. Chopper knew himself better than he knew anyone or anything else. He was set in his ways now, too far gone to ever really come back from the choices he’d made. Sometimes, late at night, he tried to imagine himself doing other work, and he couldn’t. Even the shop would seem hollow if he gutted it of its true nature, and what would happen to the money? He could not deny that most of his living came from activities that were not legal. Did he know how to make an honest living? Chopper’s guess was as good as anyone else’s, and that was not something he wanted to discover as he began to sneak up into middle age.
Some people were just bad apples for life. Chopper supposed he was one of them — even if he wasn’t rotten to the core, even if Kelsey had picked him up and polished him a little bit. She was the best thing that had ever happened to him, but she could only do so much. He hoped she knew that.
As he walked toward town, kicking rocks on the side of the road like a surly teen, cars flew by him without a second glance. He, Chopper Slater, who had long been notorious within the city limits, was no more than a rough-looking man with grease on his shirt and hands, tattoos splashed across his arms and crawling up into his rolled sleeves. How many passing motorists would even know who he was if they stopped to look at his face? How many would care? Maybe that number was less than he might have previously believed. The thought was oddly freeing. Chopper found himself smiling, walking slower, listening to the crush of his boots on the graveled shoulder. In that moment, he was no one except the person he wanted to be. And who he wanted to be was a friend in mourning.
His feet eventually took him to the cemetery, a serene but badly overgrown plot of land hovering on the outskirts of downtown. It had grown some in the years since Chopper took his place at the head of the Outlaws’ table, and vast tracts of it still stood empty, waiting to receive the dead. Some parts, the richer ones with tombs and mausoleums, were meticulously cared for by families whose loved ones lay in the ground, but most of it grew fairly wild. Off the path, the grass came up to the middle of Chopper’s shin. He wondered idly if the caretaker’s old mower would even work on grass that long, or if the machine would simply choke and die.
Red and Hoss were buried beside each other, their graves marked with simple stones that stood out only because of their newness. Chopper sat down between them. He looked for a long time at the way the granite gleamed. Over time, it would become dusty and dull just like all the other markers around them, but for now, the stone was as fresh and bright as the wound in Chopper’s heart. He turned his eyes away.
Hoss had a flower on top of his grave, a long-stemmed thing with a yellow blossom. Chopper thought maybe it was a daffodil, but he couldn’t say for sure; he’d never been good with that sort of thing. Kelsey would know. He almost took a picture to send to her, but the very action seemed somehow sacrilegious. Instead, he just sat in the grass and wondered who left it there, who was missing Hoss besides him. The only family Chopper had ever known him to have was the one he’d spoken of in their last phone call — his estranged wife and their lost baby. Chopper smiled mirthlessly at the parallels he drew between them now. But he was alive, and he still had Kelsey’s love. He had not died a quick, yet brutal death.
“I’m sorry, Hoss,” he said. “I don’t know what you deserved, but it was better than this.” He wasn’t surprised to feel a tear tracking its way down his cheek. This was, after all, the first time he had taken to grieve for real, possibly in his entire life. So much of Chopper’s existence had been treated as a given, a gift that could not be taken away. The dead were inferior, the living either lucky or skilled. It was a view that could be charitably described as ignorant. He was paying for it now. This much, Chopper understood, was not Spike Lawler’s fault.
But that didn’t mean that the Mongol was absolved of all his debts. Chopper just needed a minute to get his shit together, and then he’d take the walk back to the shop and wait for his scouting posse to give him the news. A vengeful fire still burned inside him. He was still the same man he’d always been.
Spike Lawler would never be safe from him. Not even in hell.