Gods of Mischief by George Rowe Page A

underestimated Terry the Tramp in his time and learned the hard way that looks could be deceiving.
    I stood and observed the man they called God, watching as he paused to feed coins into a slot machine while his security team stood dutifully at their posts, ever vigilant for would-be assassins.
    It was goddamn ridiculous.
    When Tramp ran short of coins, he would tap the shoulder of the monstrous, mullet-headed human being that headed security. This was a signal for Rhino, the Vagos international sergeant at arms, to start gathering donations from the various chapters so his boss could continue feeding the slots.
    But Rhino was more than Tramp’s faithful change chimp. The forty-year-old was a feared ex-con who’d earned his road name for an obvious reason. The man was constructed like one of those four-legged African tanks, with a powerful body and a neck as thick ashis head. As chief enforcer for all of Green Nation, Rhino was the baddest motherfucker in the neighborhood. Nobody was safe from that brute, not even those closest to him. Rhino had shot and killed his first wife “accidentally.” I’m sure wife number two was understandably nervous.
    As I watched Rhino hurry through the casino collecting tribute for his boss, Big Roy appeared and kicked me off the casino floor. Because I was a hang-around I wasn’t supposed to be having fun like the big boys. My job was a supporting role, and for the rest of my time at Buffalo Bill’s that meant I would be babysitting one of the patched members who was bedridden in his hotel room.
    R&D Steve was an Army vet who worked as a designer for R&D Motorcycles in Hemet. He was close to fifty years old when I met him but looked twice that age—that’s how bad cancer had beat the man up. So there we were, me and Steve in that hotel room with the heat cranking full bore. My ass was sweating, but that poor bastard was shivering like we were in Nome, coughing up chunks of mucus the size of golf balls.
    I swear you could smell death in that room.
    Poor R&D. I could almost relate to what that man was going through. I had experienced my own personal hell with the big C. Almost ten years earlier, after I was diagnosed with colon cancer, the surgeons snipped out thirteen feet of my intestines. Then they ran me through that particularly brutal brand of medieval torture called chemotherapy and radiation.
    My skin was so fried I could peel it off. My guts were boiling, my eyebrows were burning, my throat was on fire. I couldn’t keep food down. My waist-length ponytail disappeared, and my hair fell out in clumps until I was bald. For three years I couldn’t take a decent shit . . . it was diarrhea every goddamn day.
    Five different times, for three months a stretch, I endured that hell. And each time the cancer returned. Finally I’d had enough. I told the doctors I was through. There was nothing left to give. If cancer was goingto end me, so be it. I figured I could deal with the pain of dying, I just couldn’t handle the torture it took to survive. The doctors sent me on my way with pain prescriptions for Vicodin and morphine—but those pharmaceuticals just made me fuzzy-headed and depressed, so I stockpiled the pain meds instead and put my life in God’s hands.
    Is the cancer gone? I don’t know . . . and I don’t want to know. I’m still here, and that’s good enough for me. But R&D Steve wasn’t so fortunate. Three months after our long night together at Buffalo Bill’s, that Vago was dead and buried.

7
Happy Trails, Motherfucker
    I n the weeks following the New Year’s Run I began spending more time with the Vagos, hanging around the Lady Luck or drinking at bars the Hemet boys frequented. By all appearances George Rowe was “down” for the club. With the exception of North, who was still sniffing around me like a fat hound, I was considered one of the boys. I was in. As Special