Hard Ride Home (Tiger Snakes Motorcycle Club) by Tamara Knowles Page A

but that alone wouldn’t have landed him a job in Melbourne. What was more important was that he was Harvey Johanson’s grandson. The Johansons only ever grudgingly associated with their daughter and her husband, but Ronald was blood, and blood rules in a small town so they vouched for him and helped him get started.
     
    Maybe it was that outside job which held Ron get closer to the 99% than the other Snakes. Or maybe it was that he got to individually know so many people in town as he built their homes and businesses. He grew even closer some of them as he did scab jobs on the side—small repair or remodeling jobs which he could complete in a weekend or late at night.
     
    Or maybe it was that Ram, his immigrant father, had instilled an intense sense of honor in him. “Just because people look down on you,” his father would often tell him, “does not mean that you have to consider yourself low. You are only as low as you act. Act like a king and people will treat you as a king. And if they do not, it does not matter. You are still royal in your own eyes.”
     
    It was that attitude which enabled Ram to greet people cheerfully in the store whom he knew called him a “mud-nigger” behind his back. His parents had been called worse back home in India, but knew that their son would rise above that. It nearly broke his heart when Ron refused to abandon the Tigers as they became more and more outlaw. He stopped speaking with Ron when he became Vice-President of the club and its primary recruiter.
     
    Building things was not Ron’s only talent. Ron also had a gift for sales. He could sell anyone anything, and membership in a motorcycle club was just one more thing that Ron could make people want. Soon it wasn’t just young men and women from the wrong side of the tracks who were joining the Snakes. Young men were “throwing away promising careers” to become Snake heads. Young women were “abandoning promising lives” to debase themselves as a 1% momma.
     
    Why the 1% clubs tend to treat women as sex objects is something that sociologists have tried to understand for decades. Why women willingly join such clubs and allow themselves to be treated as not much more than meat has baffled everyone for even longer.
     
    When it came to women, the Tigers lived down to the expectations of an outlaw club. The initiation of a new momma was a debasing public spectacle that most people in town openly decried, but privately looked forward to. When they heard that one of the little princesses from a leading family in town had fallen under the club’s influence, they would gather in the shadows to watch or even record these humiliating and blatantly pornographic events.
    Ron did not attend those initiations. At least, he did not participate in them. Instead, he always volunteered for security duty. He and a few other members kept the townies and the law at a safe distance from the actual initiations. If someone from town was taking pictures, he normally would not interfere, but if it was a stranger —especially a stranger with a cop look—he would politely ask them to lower their cameras. He was always smile-and-say-please when he confronted someone, but “please” sounds a little hollow when there are four fully-garbed Tiger Snakes standing behind you who are definitely not smiling.
     
    Since one of the primary duties of the Vice-President was security, it was logical for Ron to move into that position. You would assume that becoming an integral part of the leadership would have more deeply involved Ron in the club’s nefarious actions, but in reality, it helped to isolate him.
     
    As Vice-President in charge of security, he did not make the runs into Mexico for drugs because he was monitoring police radios and internet activities and directing the pack away from roadblocks and checkpoints. He was not at illegal arms sales because he was providing diversions that would keep the police guessing where the buy was actually