Free Dead Men Motorcycle Club by Angelica Siren

they saw us, a few raised their glasses and gave out a loud cheer. I blushed instantly, knowing that their cheer was for more than just Cash's survival. We walked to the bar together with the smiles and grins of the assembled crew all upon us.
    He stepped behind the bar to get us some drinks and I sat on a stool next to Karen who was sipping at a vodka sunrise. She smiled at me and shook her head in bemusement.
    "You're not great at following advice are you, Emma?" she said with a sly grin.
    I grinned back at her and shrugged. "Some better advice came along," I told her with a wink.
    She put her arm around me and gave me a quick squeeze.
    "Welcome to the family," she said, and the smile that appeared on my face didn't fade for hours.
     

Epilogue
     
     
    I carefully closed the hood of the BMW. It wasn't often that I got to work on a car of this quality. Even back home, my dad's shop was rarely graced by luxury cars. Sometimes we'd see something second hand that reeked of cigarettes and spilled beer, but luxury was a word that was never quite within the grasp of our regular customers. Out here in San Viero, things were much the same. Even though the town had all the perks of modern convenience, some things were still very traditional here. The sheriff was a tall, hard man with a bad attitude that wouldn't have been out of place in a spaghetti western. The waitresses were so uniformly sassy that you might think they'd been selected by one of the casting agencies down in Hollywood. And, of course, the richest man in the town of San Viero was the mayor. In big cities, the richest people often stay out of politics - at least directly. In a small town it's just the opposite. When you own half the town on paper, you might as well have another piece of paper saying that you have the hearts and minds of the other half behind you. And yet, here in this place, even the mayor drives a truck.
    The BMW belonged to a man named Reginald Donnovan . It was the kind of name that reeked of old money. He'd driven up from whatever seaside villa he owned to speak with Cash. At first I was confused as to why someone with that kind of money and influence would want to talk to the leader of a small town bike gang. Cash had pretended not to have a theory on that himself , but I could tell he was holding back. He told me that the guy probably just wanted to have a weekend adventure on a motorcycle, and that he didn't really know what the Dead Men were all about. At first that seemed like a reasonable explanation, but after seeing him for only a few seconds I began to doubt it completely.
    Donnovan was somewhere in the clubhouse talking to Cash as I finished up with the car. They'd been inside for more than half an hour, now. Cash had offered to have his mechanics look over Donnovan's car while they talked, and the job fell to me. Of course, there was nothing wrong with the car at all. It was in pristine condition. It had more than fifty thousand miles on it, but might have driven off the showroom floor ten minutes before he got here. I was sure that wherever he'd come from, this rich man had his own personal mechanic to keep his vehicles in perfect working order. He'd accepted Cash's offer because it would have been an insult to say that his mechanics weren't good enough to look at his car.
    It was a slow morning and, aside from the BMW, there wasn't much to do around Peasant Motors. I wiped the small amount of grime I'd accumulated in my inspection off on a rag and walked over to Karen's office. She was sitting at her desk, crunching numbers on a calculator.
    "So what does that guy want with Cash, anyway?" I asked her.
    She looked up, just then noticing that I'd entered the room. She had a pencil gripped between her teeth, which she set down on the desk while considering me carefully.
    "And don't say he's looking for a joyride. I didn't believe it from Cash and I won't believe it from you," I added.
    She nodded, as if I'd just proven that I was enough