Biker’s Property: Property of Steel (Rebel Barbarians MC #5)

Chapter 3 – JOSLIN

Chapter Three

JOSLIN

I sit next to my husband and eat slowly, continuing my charade. Seth doesn’t like when women eat too quickly, anyway. He doesn’t notice that it’s not because of obedience, but because I’m scared that drugging him will somehow come back to bite me in the ass.

The good thing about growing up in a strict ass church like mine and having a mind of your own is that you learn how to hide the truth. It’s hard to hide from your husband but… not impossible.

I have the Bible next to my seat at the table – the one next to Seth’s right hand. I have never had such a long breakfast with this man. I’m sweating bullets, so scared that my methods won’t work that I don’t even enjoy the quiet. It’s a nice change of pace from him constantly berating me. The only time I can expect calm is just after one of his more brutal beatings.

Some of my sprains haven’t even healed properly and I get trigger finger in the mornings when I have to make his stupid cup of coffee. Those little injuries — both external and internal — all added up to turn me into the stone cold bitch who would kill her own husband. I — obviously — haven’t even told my mother my plan. I’ll have to just… disappear.

I’m hoping they’ll think the cartel kidnapped me and killed him. It’s a lot better than what will happen to me if I stay, ironically.

It’s me or Seth. That’s all I know. I would rather have a life in prison than no life at all. Watching him makes me feel guilty, but I knew I would feel guilty. I’ll just have to deal with that when it’s my turn to face St. Peter.

His slow dip into unconsciousness doesn’t happen like in the movies. It’s more like watching a man go through all the stages of drunkenness at once. His speech slurs. The food falls off his fork. Then into his blond beard, which drips with sauce. With each word, his tongue hangs out of his mouth longer and his syntax switches up.

His slurring gets more difficult to understand and I know the job is done when he intentionally rests his head in the mashed potatoes to get some sleep. He has the same weird ass food for all three meals everyday, with only the vegetables cooked differently for variety. Steak and mashed potatoes. All the damn time.

Everything about him scares me, but in this state, I get a lot closer to feeling good about the future. It’s the first time in years that I’ve felt a weight rising off my shoulders. Could this be the end of all my problems? The sauce continues to drip from my husband’s beard. I watch him sleeping there, his chest moving so slowly that he barely looks alive. Good.

His blond hair soaks up the gravy. I death grip the edges of the table as I watch his eyes flutter into a half-closed state. His chest heaves and… I think he’s still alive, even if he won’t be for long. I’m not a monster.

The herbal remedies I researched are going to kill him painlessly in his sleep. I call his name a few times across the table to see if he’s going to wake up.

The words barely want to come out. What if he wakes up? What if he grabs me? What if he adds to the beatings and bruises and I have to spend another night in the hospital? This time, he could kill me. He could attack me again. He could bring other men like he threatened.

What if I have to go back to that terrible, shitty state and call my mom, because she’s the only emergency contact they have, and all she does is remind me what the church did for us and tell me I should be grateful that I have a nice white man looking after me?

Anyone can reach their breaking point. Even weak little Joslin. Because that’s always what I was to the people in my life, in my church – to the man in this house. The smallest of my cousins thanks to my Filipina mother, standing at a 4’11” and never able to keep any weight on so my physique always made me look either boyish or childish. Just because I have small features doesn’t make me less of a woman.

“Seth,” I say to him, making sure I choose my last words to this man with extreme care. “I hope you burn in hell.”

Then I calmly get up from the table and run to the master bedroom like the dead man sitting in gravy is chasing after me. I prepared for this moment for over a year. It’s only a few days away from a full moon, making it the perfect time to enact my crazy ass plan – one that I’m sure will work. If the Mexicans can do it, so can I.

It’s simple. Seth and I live in a one-story ranch house in Dripping Springs, Arizona. If I try to run to Phoenix or Tucson, it will be obvious and I’ll still be in Arizona, the place where I committed the crime. He’ll hunt me down, or someone in the church will and either way, it’s too close to my mother and everyone from my past. It would be too easy for someone to run into me and for word to travel back to Dripping Springs.

The closest, biggest, and most appealing city to our north is Denver, to the northeast. But again, I worry that anyone who knows me from my hometown would have a good chance of guessing where I might end up. Plus, if anyone from the church comes after me, like Seth’s brother or his new friends… I’ll be screwed.

After hours of listening to True Crime , I come up with the crazy plan to cross the desert to get there. Denver is still on the menu, but if they can’t track me on the highway, they’ll assume I died or escaped somewhere Southwest, probably even to Mexico. Abusive men are selfish, and it helps if you’re ever trying to escape one to remember that you know them better than they know you. Don’t let them fool you.

I saved my own money that Seth couldn’t track from getting cash back at the grocery store for the past eighteen months and bought the only four-wheel drive I could afford with what I had. I bought it from a discreet black woman named Nadira, who used to go to my church but left when Pastor Woolstenhume broke away from the main church. She still lives in town and she’s still a Christian, which she reminded me of when she sold me the four-wheel drive.

I have tanks of gas in the back and parked the Jeep at an abandoned parking lot a half mile across town that nobody goes to because there aren’t even enough folks out here to rebel and infest the place with needles and trash.

Hiding my getaway bag from Seth was harder than hiding the Jeep. I didn’t do much to hide the old black duffel bag from a mission trip we took together when I was twenty-one, but I kept having dreams he would open it and ask about the money, my identification, or my clothes. Of course, he never asked. The good thing about men like Seth, the only good thing is that a lot of the time they’re so wrapped up in themselves that as long as you’re good at pretending when they’re around, you can get away with planning an escape.

I take my duffel bag and leave the house in the heat. I don’t worry about anyone seeing me because again, our town is so small and our ranch house so isolated, that I can stay off the main road and just by virtue of the time of day and where I walk, no one will be out here.

This country can feel so damn empty sometimes that it’s hard to believe what people say about Denver. Or the pictures I see. Raised out in Arizona, it’s all I know aside from a few mission trips to Albuquerque, Benson, Arizona and then Sanford.

And it’s not like mission trips give you a sense of the place since it’s mostly manual labor, prayer, and occasionally getting to do something fun like telling kids Bible stories. Pastor Woolstenhume loves organizing mission trips but I can’t figure out why we go to places that are so damn close to our church. I think he doesn’t like people getting too far.

When I see the Jeep in the distance, I almost can’t believe it’s still there. I keep expecting something to go horribly wrong. That’s how you train your mind to work when you’re in an abusive situation. It’s called hypervigilance. But so far… everything has worked and my heightened state of fear seems pointless.

Still, that adrenaline surge is unconscious. I can’t help myself. I run to the Jeep as fast as possible, my backpack smacking into my back and reminding me of being the smallest kid in kindergarten, racing to keep up with the much larger white kids. I’m lucky I learned to drive in high school before I got married, because I doubt Seth would have allowed me to learn. My dad taught me before he died. He used to promise that he would take me out on his Harley too, but that was how he died, so there’s no way in hell my mom was ever letting my ass get near a motorcycle after that.

Ever since his funeral, it was pretty much just church and home.

Throwing my stuff in the back of the Jeep, I briefly check on my supplies and then I start the engine and the old-school GPS before peeling out of the parking lot heading North towards Denver across the route I hand-traced across the desert. I tried to be smart about it, and I think I have enough supplies to survive, but crossing the desert alone in a Jeep is a goddamn risk.

Once I get out of the parking lot, my adrenaline kicks into high gear. The dusty ass road looks like a rich shade of ochre. And I swear, the Southwestern sky never looked so good. I wish I could say that I felt completely good about the adrenaline coursing through my veins but right on the back of that pure joy is terror. What if it didn’t work?

I swore his heart stopped before I left but… what if I was wrong?

I push the worry out of my head.

He’s dead. I dosed him with enough to kill a man twice his size.

Freedom should feel good, not like I’m on the run from a monster hot on my heels. It’s freedom, right? This is what America is all about. I’ll contact my mom when I get confirmation that Seth is six-feet under and I’m not a suspect in his death. Which I will be.

I push the Jeep up to 55 and then 60. I have to find the entryway to the desert most folks take to go off-roading for fun. From there, I just have to keep going off the marked out trails and into the heat — the path I marked on my map. I can tell from the terrain map that the four-wheel drive can handle all the elevation out there, but it’s not like I’ve had any practice.

I thought having the top down on the Jeep would make it easier to save on gas, but the heat already threatens to make this journey harder than I expected. No air conditioning will be a pain in the ass, but I have to be smart. I have enough gas in the old cartons to fill up twice, which should get me to Utah where I can fill up at a real gas station before heading to Denver. There’s quite a jump between Dripping Springs and Moab or wherever I’ll end up. No one will think to look for me there.

The GPS works fine as I continue for a few more miles and my nerves gradually calm down as I reach the road leading to the desert. Once I get ten miles away from our town and turn off into the wild unknown with four wheel drive turned on, I feel like I really am free.

Free to reinvent myself. Free to be something other than a white man’s victim.

I might start going by something completely different. Like Joss. I don’t know. That sounds more like a skater and there is nothing about me that’s like a skater at all. The more I drive, the more it feels like the sun exists solely to cook me alive. I have enough water to make it to Utah, but I can’t go guzzling it back like a preschool teacher with a Stanley cup.

Two hours and there’s nothing. If it weren’t for the GPS reassuring me that I’m going the right way, I would be completely paranoid about getting lost. There’s nothing, not even a damn cactus in any direction. It’s so damn hot…

Before I get to the part of the desert where I’ll truly be out on my ass, I have to pass near Pinal Peak and then drive through Globe, Arizona, a small mining town with an access pass to the desert I have to cross to get to Utah. There’s no traffic out near Pinal Peak and the whole road seems empty, so I keep moving at a steady clip on the way to Globe, Arizona.

I pass through the mining town without incident. It’s the last place I’ll have to drive through that will potentially have any civilization before I get to Utah, so I don’t feel particularly afraid. By now, no one will have found Seth and my mother hasn’t called my cell phone, which is a good sign. I plan on ditching that thing somewhere in the desert where there’s no service. I can survive with my GPS and start fresh with a burner phone in Denver.

There are no incidents in Globe, but there’s a literal Nazi flag hanging outside one of the bars, which I find a little weird. A few confederate flags — not too unusual around here — hang outside some of the homes. But I don’t think anything of it. Racists are going to do what they’re going to do and I never saw the point of getting too bothered about it.

I just keep driving to the desert access pass, but when I get there, I can’t enter. Two motorcycles are just lying across the middle of the road, blocking the entrance. And there are two large boulders so I can’t go around. Fuck.

My heart immediately goes into overdrive. There’s that bad shit I was expecting. I keep my hand steady on the steering wheel as I consider my options. Take the Jeep over the bikes and not give a single fuck about what happens — I have to go where I have to go — or back out and head to the highway to find a different entrance.

I want to stick to my plan. My stomach churns. I have a terrible feeling about the bikes across this road. Then, I hear more bikes coming from behind me. Shit.

I don’t even know why, but my instinct is just to hide. I pull the car around the other side of this abandoned building that sits near the desert access pass covered in vines and all this other shit. My Jeep is barely out of sight, but I’m counting on these men being too distracted by what they’re doing in the desert to notice me. I turn the Jeep off as the bikes get closer.

The best thing to do is shut the fuck up. But it doesn’t feel easy. My lungs are bursting for space in my chest, the adrenaline coursing through me simultaneously begging me to scream and run. I regret not taking Seth’s pistol with me, but I thought a gun would be more trouble than it was worth and I didn’t want anything connecting me to that old life once I got to Denver.

Three bikes pull up at the access pass. They don’t look in my direction. I’m safe… for now. I thought outlaw biker gangs were something made up for movies — you know how there aren’t exactly bands of bank robbers pulling off Ocean’s 11 out there? I thought it was like that for bikers. But now…

They don’t bother hiding what they’re saying, so clearly they don’t expect anyone around here. I suddenly wish I’d found somewhere further away to hide, but I didn’t know where they were coming from and it seemed far more important to hide than to take the chance and run into them.

Most of these men are blond. The three that ride up all have black bikes. I make a mental note because the True Crime part of my brain activates immediately. The three that ride up don’t seem like the leaders. I don’t know for sure, but something about their demeanor doesn’t scream leader. I have good eyesight – we have a long line of pilots with perfect vision on my dad’s side – so I can make out the names on the three patches by some miracle. Shithole, Bullet, and Meth. Cute. Meth has black and gray hair in a horseshoe and pulled into a rattail. He’s thin with sunken cheeks like he really is on meth.

Bullet is close to seven feet tall, blond-haired and blue-eyed with enormous, tattooed arms. Swastikas. A large eagle. The number 88. Holy shit. I think this guy is a Neo-Nazi. They occasionally pop up in True Crime episodes, so I’m not exactly an expert, but I know enough to suspect these men are ex-cons.

I suspect they’re ex-cons but I know for sure it’s dangerous for me to be here. I really wish I had a gun…