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DC
The tattoo was almost complete. It was an amazing piece, if I had to say so myself. Colin “Raj” Chetty had asked for a metal dragon and that’s exactly what I gave him. It was made up of overlapping metal plates with screws, rivets and springs. A mechanical dragon. It was going to cause a riot on the website. And not all of the uproar was going to be about the dragon. Raj was seriously gorgeous. Dark golden caramel skin, long black hair, very handsome with exotic green eyes and he was seriously ripped.
Raj was a member of the Road Warriors MC, my dad’s club and he was an ex. Our split had been inevitable because he wanted more than I could give him. Plus he’s a touch too controlling.
Today was our last session with mainly shading and touch ups. His skin was great to work on and I was honoured that he had chosen my ink to decorate his body. But I couldn’t wait to finish.
And the reason wasn’t that I didn’t want to work on my ex’s skin. No, that wasn’t it at all. We were still friends, ending our relationship hadn’t changed that.
The reason was Deena, my horribly spoilt little sister. The little bitch had totally played me.
She was supposed to be spending part of her school holidays with her two best friends but, with their help, she had run off with some guy. A guy she had picked up in a club. A club she wasn’t legally allowed to enter because she was sixteen and underage.
I’d had no idea that she had run off until I tried to call her last night and got her voicemail. She knew that was a total no-no. No calls from family were allowed to go to voicemail, ever. It was one of my dad’s unbreakable rules.
I would have been freaking clueless had I not found her dismal report card stuffed under the couch cushions. Unable to reach her I had called her friends. They had tried to cover for her but I have been in the secrets business too long to fall for their stupid excuses.
It was only after I involved their mums that her two partners in crime revealed Deena’s gushing texts. She had apparently found the love of her life and asked them to cover for her until Sunday. She would be home before her daddy got home from his business trip.
Doc on a business trip? What the hell was she telling her friends about our family?
Unfortunately she hadn’t told her friends where she was. The mum’s and I got the entire story in drips and drabs from her two accomplices.
On Wednesday night the three of them sneaked out and took an Uber to a club in Fourways. Deena had supplied the fake ID’s that got them into the club.
And whoever had given them to her was in deep shit when I found him or her. I had the fake ID’s of the two girls and would definitely investigate their origin once I had the little bitch safely back home.
Deena met some guy at the club and left with him. The little bitches didn’t get a name, or if they did they forgot it in their drunken state. All they could remember was that it started with a D, he wore a leather waistcoat thingy, and he had a big bike.
Bloody hell, hopefully he was just looking for fresh pussy and not for a way to get to Doc.
Doc was going to blame me for her disappearance. And he was going to rain hellfire down on my head. When he finds out she had run off with a biker blood was going to flow and I would not be exempted from that bloodletting.
She went missing on Wednesday night, today was Friday and I had to find her before Doc came home on Sunday afternoon. Good freaking luck to me.
My dad, Mark “Doc” Michaels, was on a run visiting some of their club chapters. Doc was the president of the Johannesburg chapter of the Road Warriors MC and had a seat on the National Council, the ruling body of the Road Warriors MC.
But worrying about my dad wasn’t important right now. What was important was finding the little bitch so I had called in back up. I had Rico and Skinny, two club brothers I trusted, checking camera footage at the club in Fourways while I finished Raj’s tattoo.
Late Thursday evening I had called our half-brother, Derrick Townsend. When the bastard answered his phone he was knee deep in vagina and before I could explain he blew me off with “I’m busy, I’ll call you back later”. And here I was, hours later and still waiting on that call. So typical of the men in our family. After all these years why the hell did that still surprise me?
“DC!”
I heard my name called out over the music pumping through the speakers and looked up and over the half wall that surrounded my station. Rico and Skinny were walking towards me.
I watched their approach with narrowed eyes. Shit. My insides clenched at the look in their eyes. I wasn’t going to like what they had found.
“Give me a minute, Raj. I just have to take care of this quickly.”
I turned off my machine, ripped my gloves off and dumped them in the hazards container before leading the way into the office. I parked my ass on the edge of the desk as Rico closed the door and leant back against it.
“You found her.”
“Yes.”
Nothing more, just yes. They were pissed off though.
“Where?”
Then Rico gave me the information I did not want to hear.
“Iron Dogz compound, she’s found herself an outlaw biker, DC.”
“Fuuuck!” I slid my hands over my face and into my hair, clenching my fingers on the strands.
This shit was going from bad to worse. Doc was going to have a fucking heart attack and then he was going to kill me.
“What the hell is this guy thinking? She’s only sixteen.”
“You know she doesn’t look like a sixteen year old, DC. I’ll put money on it the poor bastard doesn’t know she’s jail bait or that she’s Doc’s little princess.” Skinny snorted angrily.
Skinny was right. My little sister looked years older than what she was. She was model beautiful, tall and slender with long blonde hair and clear blue eyes. She easily passed for twenty when she tarted herself up, and she did that shit regularly.
“Okay. Let me finish up with Raj, and then we’ll go fetch her and bring her home.”
Both Skinny and Rico shook their heads, denying my plan.
“This is going to cause shit, DC.” Skinny said. “We can’t just walk in and drag her out. You have to call Doc. He finds out about this after we clean it up he’s going to fucking kill us and then take our patches.”
“Let’s at least call Tiny and Skel, we need their help to get this done without getting beat to shit in the process.” Rico tried.
I shook my head.
“None of them can find out about this. Deena is Doc’s little princess and they will storm the Dogz clubhouse and it will drag us into a war, and we really don’t need that shit. Let’s try and fix this with as little blow back as possible. I promise I’ll tell Doc as soon as we have her back and locked up in a freaking nunnery.”
Gods, I knew deep down in my gut it wasn’t going to be that easy.
Skinny and Rico looked at each other, sighed heavily and then shrugged. I let out a small sigh of relief. If they had insisted on calling their VP, Tiny, my plan would have been toast. The only reason they agreed to help me was because we worked together on club shit all the time and they trusted me.
My gut churned as I returned to my work station. I avoided Raj’s too interested eyes. I couldn’t tell him about the shit that was going down with Deena. He would definitely call Tiny and Skel. And I couldn’t allow that to happen.
This was another Deena mess that I had to clean up. Like I’ve been doing for bloody years.
I have been taking care of my little sister ever since the day her mother dumped her at the front gates of the compound and disappeared. She was a pretty four month old baby and I was thirteen, almost fourteen. I might have been only thirteen but by that time I had seen a lot and wasn’t a naïve little girl at all.
My dad travelled a lot for the club so it was left to me and two old ladies, Liddy and Zelda, to raise my little sister. Over the years I gave up a lot for her. My dream of going to University to study fine art crashed and burned. The career I had been dreaming about became just that, a dream. And I changed, hardened and slowly became part of the life. The biker life.
I only slipped Doc’s leash once but it didn’t last long enough.
As soon as I finished High School I signed up as an apprentice tattoo artist with Pixie Maingarde of Mainline Ink in Cape Town and Doc exploded. He wanted me home, looking after Deena. I tried to explain but he refused to hear me. Our arguments where loud and fierce and shook the compound. I refused to budge and it was Tiny and Liddy, his old lady, who convinced Doc to let me go. I moved to Cape Town for two years to learn my craft.
The move didn’t take me away from the club though. It just transferred me to the Cape Town chapter where I became Freeze’s responsibility. He and his brothers took me in and were good to me while I was down there. Being away from my dad and his over protective brothers allowed me a freedom I had never had before. I experienced quite a few firsts while living in Cape Town. Rooster being the man who delivered many of those firsts. We didn’t last and luckily our break up hadn’t been nasty. Our relationship had just naturally run its course. And he became one of my best friends.
At the end of my apprenticeship I returned to Jozi to work at Mainline Ink II. And I picked up right where I had left off. Taking care of Deena.
I had been doing it for too many years and I was tired of it. So damned tired. Don’t get me wrong, I love my sister and would do anything for her. But I had reached the end of the line. I was tired, just so damned tired of my life not going anywhere.
Pissed that I had to raise a child while I was a child myself. Sick of always being the bad guy when Deena pulled one of her stunts. Something she did on a regular basis. Deena’s latest escapade just made me realise how fed up I was of being the responsible adult. I never had a chance to be irresponsible, to act out and do stupid shit like the other club kids. None of the men who showed an interest in me stuck around when they realised Deena was part of the deal. And I really couldn’t blame them.
I was tired and done. So totally done.
It was time for Doc to step up and take responsibility. He got away with being the fun guy for way too damned long. He gave Deena anything she wanted, sometimes even before she asked. When I said no he said yes. When I insisted on good grades and an education he laughed it off, saying she would never need it. Her husband would take care of her. Deena sucked it all up, believing it was her destiny to be pampered and taken care of by a man.
I never believed in that crap. Growing up in a MC will do that to you. Deena and I had lived at the clubhouse until shortly after my fourteenth birthday when things suddenly changed.
My half-brother Derrick, who I never knew existed, came looking for his father and finding us living in the clubhouse insisted that we had to move out and into a real home. I went from being an only child to having two siblings, one a little baby, the other an angry young man. Derrick’s mum had raised her son away from the club’s influence, but it had been obvious from the start that he was a force to be reckoned with, just like our dad.
Intense, focused and very determined to get his sisters away from the club and into a house.
I hated him for interfering. I loved living at the clubhouse where I had a lot of friends who helped with Deena. The house my dad moved us into wasn’t far from the clubhouse but I was left alone with a surly housekeeper/nanny and a screaming and demanding baby. After ruining my life Derrick disappeared again and only visited intermittently over the years.
Doc had been a loving but a mostly absentee dad. He was too busy with his club, his brothers and his women to pay much attention to me. Liddy and Zelda, Tiny and Stoney’s old ladies, raised me with Doc flying in and out of my life.
Living in the clubhouse I saw a lot of shit that a little girl should never have seen. Spoilt by the brothers and running wild in the clubhouse I turned into a little hellion.
I learned damned quick that to most of the brothers a bitch had only one worth. They were pussy and not important, they were interchangeable and disposable. So I set out to prove I wasn’t a girl, something that got me into a lot of shit. I got into scrapes, fought and rode bikes with my best friend, Jake Stoddard, Tiny and Liddy’s eldest son.
I wore little biker boots, jeans and club t-shirts the same as Jake and refused point blank to wear dresses. Doc had to find a school that would allow me to wear pants and not the obligatory little skirt. It was the only reason why I ended up in a school with no uniforms and art as a major subject. The only concession I made to being a girl was keeping my hair long, and I only did that because Stoney’s hair was long. He became my mentor and surrogate dad, a man I loved and looked up to.
While we were kids Jake and I were inseparable but he stopped hanging out with me around his fifteenth birthday when he discovered his power over girls. I was pissed at him but it did have one good side effect, I turned to art as an outlet and found a whole new world.
I was firmly in the friend zone and with my focus on art was totally okay with it. When we were both older and Jake became “Skelly”, a patched member of the club we reconnected and picked right up where we had left off. He is one of my best friends and my only confidant.
Derrick kept in contact, not constantly but he always tried to help with Deena.
Just not this time. And right now I really needed him.
Deena had been acting out the last few weeks. But this was way over the line of teenage rebellion. Unfortunately I knew why she was going off the rails.
Misty, her bitch of a mother, had suddenly reappeared and had tried to see Deena on several occasions.
According to Misty she had come back for her little girl because she wanted to give Deena a better life and save her from becoming a biker bitch. Her little girl had a great future ahead of her as a model and a movie star, just like her mother.
It was damned laughable. The bitch used to be a stripper and porn star, many, many years ago, before her lifestyle and age took care of her looks. Now she was a used up, saggy bottomed bleached blonde drug addict trying to get her claws into a meal ticket. My baby sister.
The crazy bitch wasn’t going to get anywhere near Deena.
Was. Not. Going. To. Happen.
I would end her before I’d let her get her claws into my sister. I already had her under surveillance. It was only a matter of time before she made the wrong move. Only a matter of time.
I hated that my thoughts the entire day had been taken up by reliving the past. The past was just that, the past. It was done and couldn’t be undone, however much we might wish we could.
I shut it all down as I closed up the shop. Taking in a deep breath I walked over to where Skinny and Rico were standing next to my shiny black F250 double cab. My beast. I loved the damn thing even though it was a giant petrol guzzler. It was big, heavy and strong enough to pull a fully loaded bike trailer and high enough to go bundu bashing. Perfection.
