With Doyle in jail, the police are reeling from lack of support up top. The rest of the club that was arrested gets released along with me, given that Doyle’s entire operations in Bayonne were invalidated in light of his corruption. Besides, pressing charges now for the stuff they might actually have on the club would only bring more heat down on them. They want to take care of this as quietly as possible.
I get news from Mikhail that Marty Chandler died silently around the same time Doyle was smugly arresting me in the warehouse office. By all rights, it looked like a car accident, and neither Doyle nor the county sheriffs knew anything about it as it pertained to us. With that information, we don’t waste any time in busting up all the illicit rings Doyle spent so long raking in profits from.
We start where it all began, at the dockyards in Bayonne. While the police who’ve been on the take for years watching their superior officers get away with murder get to finally arrest all the dock bosses who’ve been taking part in the human trafficking ring, the club and I team up with some medical personnel to free the immigrants locked up in the freighter.
Me, Cherry, and the rest of the club personally help unload them all as the medical staff on hand start tending to their injuries—the healthiest of them are dehydrated, but catching this when we did has saved a lot of lives, one of the paramedics informs us.
A few hours into the rescue, Cherry makes her way over to me as Genn and I help lift an older man onto a gurney with one of the paramedics.
“One of the nurses who speaks Spanish was able to talk to one of the victims,” she explains as we finish and turn to her. “Between the two of us, we were able to interpret that Doyle’s had a hand in facilitating these operations all up and down the seaboard. There’s a ton of operations like this one taking place.”
“Shit,” Genn says, “so what, there’s a string of Agent Doyles keeping these rings up and running?”
“On the contrary,” Cherry says, and I see a spark of investigative fire in her eyes that makes me want to kiss her, “with Doyle’s arrest, any other corrupt federal support is going to go into hiding, fast. This could be the one moment in a long time all those trafficking rings are vulnerable to being busted, hard.”
A smile crosses my face, and I fold my arms, looking out over the Bayonne public servants working together with the club to make a real difference in these people’s lives. I exchange glances with Genn, whose expression tells me he’s thinking the same thing I am.
“If that’s the case,” I say to Cherry, “then there’s no time to lose, is there?”
“Think you’re right, Prez,” Genn answers with a grin. “I’ll go look for Eva and get the club riled up. Think it might be time for us to expand out?”
“We’re not the only town that’s been hurting because of Doyle’s trafficking, and without the club, this would’ve been a lot worse. I think it’s time.”
Cherry watches him go with a satisfied look in her eye at the prospect of the club taking action again, but there’s something in that gorgeous face of hers that’s bothering her.
“What’s the matter, something up?”
“Hm? Oh, no,” she gives her head a shake. “I mean...if you and the Union are headed out to ride, that means ‘goodbye’ again, doesn’t it?”
I laugh out loud, throwing my arm around her and yanking her into my side to her surprise before pressing a deep kiss into her. She yelps, but then her body relaxes and gives a soft moan at my kiss.
“Are you kidding?” I finally whisper when we break apart, but I keep her in my grip. “You’ve done more investigative work for us than anyone has been able to in all the years we’ve been protecting this town. We’ll need you to help us bust up these fuckers. And besides,” I add with a wink, “I think it’s about time you really saw the States from the back of a motorcycle anyway, and I don’t have any intention of letting you leave my side. And hey, should make one hell of a story: reporter travels up and down the coast, busting human trafficking rings and rallying the underdogs.”
Her mouth starts to spread into a smile as I speak, and she bites her lip to try and hold it back, but by the end of it, she just puts her hands on my face and pulls herself up into another deep kiss while Genn explains the situation to the rest of the club not far from us.
We ride the very next day.
The wind whips across my face, my knuckles are bitten by the dust of the road, and my kutte flaps around me as I lead our pack of bikes down the interstate, heading south. Men and women I can trust with my life are behind me, the open road is ahead of me, and if that weren’t enough, the most brilliant and gorgeous woman I’ve ever met has her arms wrapped around my waist, her heart beating furiously at the first taste of real freedom out here.
We carve a path from city to city, county to county, state to state, starting south in Delaware and Maryland before whipping around north across New York and onward to Connecticut. With each stop, Cherry gets more shrewd at gathering information for the club to use, identifying crooked cops, bought judges, and fat-cat bosses after each lead.
The immigrants rescued from Bayonne didn’t know much, but a laptop Mikhail confiscated from Marty Chandler’s house provided more than a few leads for us to go on. The nearest connection the slimeball had was just a few towns over, and that proved to be only the beginning of a long string of rings. Every local crime lord had tangential connections nearby just like Marty, and once Cherry was able to establish a pattern to fill in the blanks left by Mikhail’s evidence, the rest was just a matter of the Union Club doing what it does best.
The first bust goes down just a few towns south of Bayonne. After Cherry’s secured a solid lead to a warehouse down by the docks, our bikes roar out to the site on a night a shipment’s supposed to be made, according to a dock worker with a conscience. The moment our headlights shine on the armed men bringing in living cargo around midnight, shots start going off.
As it turns out, most of the goons hired to ship the immigrants in aren’t paid well enough to stick around once we’ve turned up the heat. Our club knows how to handle itself in a firefight, and it isn’t long before most of the creeps go running for the hills, leaving us to take the law into our own hands with the dock owners who make it all happen. But not before we put down a few of their men, and they give us a few injuries in return. Anya’s going to have her work cut out for her over the next few weeks.
The situation is dealt with, and just as expected, when we call the hospital in to tend to the immigrants, there’s no voice up top telling them to hold back; the feds are in hiding, and we’ve struck while the iron is hot.
One of the locals tips us off about a brothel a few towns further south, and we’re off again. It’s an even simpler job—our bikes come roaring off the interstate, surround the house where the sex slavery ring is operating, and before the pimps know what’s pulled up on their front porch, we’re kicking down the doors and taking over the place.
It doesn’t take long for us to get a reputation. After a few more towns, bosses and crime lords alike start getting nervous at the news of our kutte being spotted on the roads nearby. The sounds of our engines tearing into a dock or a warehouse district sends the slavers running, and the ones that put up a tough fight quickly find themselves outmatched.
Part of that is because as news of our work starts to spread, other bikers start paying attention. A few trustworthy guns for hire start snowballing into our ragtag pack of ex-dock workers, and as we fan out north, we’ve nearly doubled our numbers.
The whole ride takes over a month. By the end of it, we have a reputation as one of the most feared clubs on the eastern seaboard, but the only ones cowering are the human traffickers. Just like the crooked opportunists took advantage of the FBI’s presence in town, word of our vigilantism emboldens the workers from town to town, and before long, we start hearing about miners and factory laborers and dock workers organizing themselves and pushing out internal corruption on their own, before we even hit the town.
But after a long and hard streak across New England, the time comes for us to head back to where it all got started—back to Bayonne, where the townspeople greet our ride into the city with a celebration.
Eva heads off to lead one of the branches of the Union Club that’s cropped up in upstate New York, and I give her all the best as she does. Genn sticks by my side, despite having the chance to do the same, but he just laughs the offer off and says his place is right here in Bayonne. Since Eva will take up the rank of President at her own branch, I give Genn her old spot as Vice-Prez, and Vasily takes his place as my Sergeant. Anya will have an officer’s rank with her name on it too, if she can keep her hands off Officer Samuels long enough. Well, it isn’t ‘officer’ anymore since he quit the force to join the Club, but the boys seem to like it as a nickname for him.
But I’m most impressed of all with Cherry. She’s a natural at this, to the point that she loses herself talking about leads and new connections even during our downtime. Now that we’re back in Bayonne, though, I’m forcing all of us to take a little downtime in our own ways.
And my downtime with Cherry is what I’m looking forward to more than anything.