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

going down. And he was not a part of the direct management of the illegal houses of prostitution which the club ran because he had to keep his sheet clean so that he could come to the station house and bail out the girls on a regular basis.
     
    At least, that’s what he told himself and the other members of the club. The truth was that he was not involved with the drugs and guns and girls because he was not, at heart, a one-percenter. And he was not hellbent on pulling society down to his level. Instead, he somehow held himself to the personal code of honor instilled in him by his father.
     
    Sooner or later that insolation from the heart of the club would have created problems for him, but before that could happen came the raids and the arrests. Someone within the club had turned informer, or was perhaps an undercover cop from the beginning. Australian tiger snakes are very dangerous when cornered. Their counterparts in Melbourne, Nevada were no less dangerous.
     
    The raids did not go well. Ron was not at the clubhouse when feds in full body armor kicked in the doors and came in behind SWAT shields. Almost all of the Snakes there were armed and there was heavy-duty weaponry available at the clubhouse. By the time the “clear” was given over the tactical radios, twenty-seven people were down. Nine Snakes and two officers were dead. One of the officers was ATF. The other was a local boy who had recently joined the sheriff’s department.
     
    The town might have forgiven the federal agent. He was, after all, an outsider. But Billy Spears was a local football hero. They had even given him a parade after he had thrown a game-winning touchdown at the Sugar Bowl for his college team. His death was very personal to every resident of the town. And his death marked the beginning of the end for the Tiger Snakes in Melbourne.
     
    Ron was arrested without incident at his apartment. To the officers’ surprise, the only weapons there were two legal hunting rifles and a registered and licensed Glock automatic. To their even greater surprise, the only drug in the apartment was alcohol. Unless they used the RICO act, there was nothing with which they could charge him.  The tedious groundwork had not been laid for such a charge because no one had considered that they might have to resort to the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act in order to get convictions in such an obviously outside-the-law motorcycle club.
     
    Two days later, Ron was released. Those members who had not yet been rounded up, or were out on bail, made the obvious but incorrect assumption that Ron had been the informer. They cornered him at the clubhouse and were going to kill him, but in the greatest sales pitch of his life, he convinced them that he had not been the rat. His primary selling point was that even the feds were not so stupid as to not charge their own informant. He explained that he was out of jail only because he had lucked out and they had nothing to charge him with.
     
    That argument saved his life, but not his membership in the club. Carlos Rodriguez, a second Vice-President, sneered at him, “So basically, the reason you ain’t in jail is that you were never really one of us! They ain’t got nothin’ to charge you with ‘cause you never did nothin’! You weren’t at the clubhouse ‘cause you never were a true Snake.”
     
    Ron couldn’t answer that accusation because it was true. They told him to leave town and never return. Had more of the club been present, the patches would have been cut from the back of his jacket and he would have been beaten within an inch of his life. But the more violent members of the club were dead and the stronger members were still in jail. Although he was outnumbered over twenty to one, Ron’s physical presence and his intense glare kept the others from acting as he pushed through the crowd to his Harley. As he roared out of town that afternoon, he swore to himself that he would never,