Читать книгу Evil in Paradise - R. B. Conroy - Страница 9

4

Daisy Vanover looked up from a small stack of motorcycle repair invoices and watched her boss as he led a customer out of the garage area and into the front lobby. He stopped and leaned over his cluttered desk, poked at a small calculator for a few seconds and then scribbled down some numbers on an invoice.

“Let’s see, I’ve got three hours on this one, so with parts and labor that will be exactly one hundred fifty-two dollars and thirty-seven cents.”

“You take credit cards?” the elderly gentlemen asked.

“Read the sign, sir, it’s on the wall right behind you.”

The man turned around and read the faded “Cash Only” sign.

Sorry, is a check okay?”

Dirk paused, “I’ll need two forms of ID.”

The man slid a checkbook and a pen from the back pocket on his Bermuda shorts and flipped it open. “Who should I make this out to?”

“The Cycle Shop, it’s right behind you,” Dirk replied curtly.

The man glanced over his shoulder again, “Oh, yes, I see it.”

“May as well throw those signs in the trash, nobody ever looks at ‘em,” Dirk groused.

The gray haired customer did not comment. He finished the check, ripped it from the book and handed it to the irritable garage owner along with his driver’s license and a credit card.

Without commenting, Dirk examined the check and IDs carefully and then wrote the driver’s license number on the front of the check. He carefully ripped a pink copy from the center of the invoice and handed it to the customer. “You’re all square, partner. Your bike’s out front and the keys are in it.”

The man nodded, left the store without saying anything to Dirk and started his cycle. Dirk watched him pull away from his shop and merge into the busy traffic on Highway 27. “Rich old bastard,” Dirk mumbled.

Dirk Harrison was forty-eight years old and a former member of the Viper motorcycle gang in South Chicago. Nicknamed “Assassin” by his fellow gang members, he had a nasty temperament and a hair-trigger temper. Throughout his years in Chicago, Dirk had, for the most part, confined his violent outbursts to beating up rival gang members with his fists. Then one day, as everyone who knew him had expected, the volatile biker got carried away.

On a hot July evening in the year 2000, angered by some recent threats made by the local Hell’s Angels chapter against one of his fellow Vipers, Dirk armed himself with a loaded .45, hopped on his Harley and headed for the Hell’s Angel hangout on the Chicago’s near Southside. When he arrived at the hangout on West Fullerton Avenue, just outside the Loop in Chicago, he observed several of the Angel’s bikes lined up in front of the nondescript two story townhouse. He became furious as he surveyed the many low-rider bikes covered with Angel paraphernalia.

What happened next is legendary among the many biker gangs that inhabit the greater Chi-town area. With his ire still growing, Dirk pulled out his .45 from under his leather vest, pointed it at the townhouse and began firing at random into the front of the building, shattering several windows and blowing scores of holes in the vinyl siding. Screams of terror soon emanated from inside, trailed by loud shouts of profanity. The carnage continued with Dirk reloading several times and continuing to blast away at the building. By now, crazily furious, he had climbed off his bike and calmly shot the tires flat on all of the motorcycles on the street in front of the building. In all, the police counted seventy-five bullet holes in the front of the townhouse and nearly fifty more bullet marks on the riderless bikes.

Unbelievably, there were no casualties as a result of Dirk’s savage assault. A few of the Angels were slightly injured by flying glass, but no one was badly hurt or killed in the shooting.

Two Angels who resided in an adjoining townhouse had watched the frightening scene through slightly opened blinds, later identified Dirk in a police line-up. He was immediately booked and charged with attempted murder, reckless endangerment, assault with a deadly weapon and several other assorted charges. After a brief trial, he was sentenced to five years in the Illinois Department of Corrections in Springfield, Illinois.

Dirk hated his time in jail and proved to be a surly and uncooperative inmate. With no time off for good behavior, he was released from prison in 2006 after completing his entire sentence. Part of his probation agreement, after he left prison, included a pledge that he would disassociate himself completely from the Vipers motorcycle gang. Any contact with the notorious gang would send him back to prison. Out of money and looking for some place to go, he accepted an offer from his aging grandfather to come and live with him in Lady Lake, Florida, a small community adjacent to a large, well-known retirement community.

A short time after Dirk arrived in Lady Lake, his grandfather loaned him the seed money to start a Harley-Davidson dealership. A natural born mechanic, Dirk was excited by the opportunity to start his own business.

“The Cycle Shop” opened in the spring of 2007 to little fanfare. Being the only Harley shop in the area, the business served mainly the bikers in Lady Lake, but due to his close proximity to The Villages, he also did some business with the retired bikers there. He considered the folks in the large retirement community to be “rich snobs” and didn’t like working on their bikes. He hated their tanned faces, fancy golf shirts and Bermuda shorts. “They’re not bikers,” he would grumble to his grandfather, “they’re just old farts tryin’ to be cool.”

With the customer now out of the store, Dirk’s well-tattooed office gal, Daisy, shouted at him from behind the reception’s desk. “He’s not an old bastard, he’s a nice man.”

“I got enough business; I don’t need those uppity old assholes taking up all of my time.”

A disbelieving look spread across Daisy’s face. “I’m sorry to tell you this, Dirk, but you actually don’t have enough business. We owe everybody in town money. This recession has hurt us real bad. About the only folks who can still afford to repair their bikes are the Villagers. You’d better be nice to them.”

“I was nice to him. I didn’t give the old guy a hard time or anything,” Dirk replied.

Daisy just stared at him. Dirk and Daisy’s sometimes contentious relationship went back a long way. Her husband, Reg, was a mechanic at the shop, a part-time dry-waller and one of Dirk’s best friends. She could say almost anything to the thin-skinned ex-con and he wouldn’t object. Very few people enjoyed that kind of relationship with Dirk Harrison.

Dirk flipped the sign hanging on the front door over to closed and turned the dead bolt. He reached into his pocket and lifted a beat-up cigarette holder from his grease covered jeans, pulled out a joint and lit up. The sweet smell of marijuana soon permeated the small office area. “You worry too much, Daisy. I know how to handle those people. Besides, those rich assholes have nowhere else to go. And quit staring at me; it makes me nervous.”

Daisy looked away. “Okay, boss, but most of the folks in The Villages are not rich. The rich people live down in Naples and Sarasota, not around here.”

“Not rich, my ass! He had a huge diamond on that bony hand of his and a big Rolex on his scrawny-ass wrist.” Dirk took a long, deep drag on the weed, it burned into his lungs.

Daisy shook her head and went back to work. She knew of the violent past of her mercurial boss and knew not to push him too far. Dirk had a dark side. She’d seen it once before and she didn’t want to see it again. Dirk was a throw-back to the glory days of the biker thugs when they all smoked dope, “partied hardy”, and kicked the shit out of anybody who disagreed with them. As far as she could tell, his time in prison had not mellowed him. He was lean, tough, highly opinionated, somewhat unstable, and always egging for a fight. She knew that in the right situation her boss could be a very dangerous man.

Dirk hacked up a cough, traces of blue smoke drifting from his nose. “What’s Reg up to on his day off?”

“He’s dry-walling a new house over in Oxford.”

“I don’t know how he does that dry-wall shit. It would drive me nuts.”

Daisy grinned, “I agree. I used to try and help him and I hated it, but he loves it and he makes a good buck doing it.”

Dirk stacked some invoices and dropped them on his small desk next to the entrance to the garage area. “I’ve got a few bikes to finish up. Call Reg and tell him to stop by after work and we’ll do a few joints and then the three of us can go bar hoppin’.

Daisy winced at the orders from Dirk. She didn’t feel like going “bar hoppin”. The last thing she wanted to do was hang around the shop for a couple more hours watching her husband and Dirk smoke dope, shoot the shit about motorcycles and then head for some bar full of biker buddies and watch everybody get high. But, she knew her husband would be in favor of the idea. He looked up to the muscular Dirk and almost never crossed him. Tired of being pushed around by the men in her life, she decided this was as good a time as any to take a stand. She took a deep breath and answered, “Reg said he was stopping by anyway to pick up that decal you ordered for his bike.”

“Oh yeah, the decal.”

“Sorry, Dirk, but I won’t be joining the party. I’m going home. I’ve got a lot to do,” Daisy blurted, never lifting her eyes off the receptionist’s desk.

Dirk paused at the door to the garage and slowly turned around. A look of disbelief covered his narrow face. “If you don’t go, Reg won’t go.”

“Yes, he will.”

“He’d better!” Dirk warned.

“He will.”

A grumbling Dirk pushed the door open to the garage area and disappeared. The door slammed behind him.

A smile of satisfaction spread across Daisy’s face. “I did it!”