In this second adventure from bestselling author Sonny Barger, hard–living antihero Patch Kinkade must find a way to bust in to prison if he's going to figure out who is responsible for killing three of his brothers.
Patch Kinkade, the notorious leader of the infamous and feared Infidelz motorcycle club, has faced down a wide array of bad guys in his day. But when three of his fellow club members show up dead in a meat locker––frozen stiff on their bikes, with counterfeit $100 bills stuffed in their mouths – and the funny money leads back to the Russian mob, Patch is ready to add some ex–Pinkos to his hit list.
After shaking down a couple of Russian hooker/con artists, Patch learns that there's a new Russian crime family, the Shalinsky Cartel, trying to establish their turf, and the murdered Infidelz were unfortunate casualties in their ruthless campaign. The Russians' leader is awaiting trial in prison, and it seems that Patch won't be able to get to the bottom of things without going to extreme measures. Soon he's behind bars himself, after cooking up an ingenious scheme to get at the Russian godfather, where he hopes to send a clear message – don't mess with the brotherhood of the Infidelz –with one well–placed shank. Now Patch's well–honed skills, learned inside and outside of prison walls, must serve him well if he's to avenge his compatriots' deaths, and regain dominance for the Infidelz once and for all.
6 Chambers, 1 Bullet
A NovelBy Ralph "Sonny" BargerHarperCollins Publishers, Inc.
Copyright © 2006 Ralph "Sonny" Barger
All right reserved.ISBN: 0060745312Chapter One
The bedroom was dark as a tomb, just a beaten-up mattress and some empty bookshelves. Bob Dylan howled "Tombstone Blues" on the box. Loud. Drifting in and out of sleep, Patch Kinkade could barely hear the ring of the telephone above Dylan's nasal litany of the outlaw ghost of Belle Starr, Jez-ebel, Jack the Ripper, and John the Baptist.
Patch stopped the CD blaster at the foot of the mattress by hitting the pause button with his big toe. He fumbled for the receiver nearby on the floor and knocked over a half-full shot glass of amber, which seeped into a stained, creaky wooden floor.
Hung over a metal dinette chair was Patch's patch. Infidelz MC. Motorcycle Club. All Harley. All men (of course). Closing in on a quarter century as a member. The toughest club on the Left Coast -- a challenging distinction the Delz were vigilant about and always defending.
A gruff voice on the other end of the blower was unmistakable. It was Rancid. Not the smell, but a real person named Rancid, a longtime member and current president of the Palm Desert chapter of the Infidelz Motorcycle Club. A handful of old-guard MC members called him Henry. Some Hank. He had a small but serious emergency on his hands.
"Henry. Jesus Christ, it's after three. What the hell?" Patch loathed middle-of-the-night phone calls, a loathing that came with age, relationships, and responsibility. Who was in trouble now? Who'd gotten themselves fucked up with John Law?
Three A.M. didn't used to matter. Back when Patch was an Infidelz MC officer, his phone rang at all hours -- calls to party, calls to put out fires or to spring members from stir. Raising bail was bleeding the Infidelz MC treasury dry. The younger officers handled such tasks now, so early-morning phone calls usually meant dire emergencies. Henry ringing this early (or late) meant urgency. He wasn't one for drama, nor was he prone to panic.
"Patch. I'm afraid we gots us a shitstorm here, Chief."
Patch shook the fog out of his head. He was glad he'd spent the day riding in the sun, washing and wrenching on his bike after a long dusty ride, working out instead of drinking himself shitfaced.
"Where you calling from, Henry?"
" 'Cross town, a few miles away from the Palm Desert clubhouse. Did I wake the missus?"
"There ain't no missus, she's long gone." A heavy breath into the receiver. "It's just me and the boy."
Hollister Timmons was the surviving son of the late Oakland Infidelz rider Angelo Timmons, whom Patch brought with him when he'd transferred from California to Arizona.
Palm Desert. About a five-hour ride.
"Clue me in, Hank. What's shakin' on your end?" Three A.M. was no time for social chitchat.
By now Hollister was wide-awake, the boy standing in the doorway of Patch's bedroom.
"What's wrong? Everyone okay?" Hollister asked.
Jeez, the kid's such a pessimist. Patch covered the phone with his palm. "Everything's cool. Something's up out in Palm Desert. I'll handle it. You go back to sleep. You got school."
Hollister shrugged and staggered "walking Spanish" toward his bedroom. Patch was amazed at how the weedy boy had grown and filled out. He was buff and tall -- just like his father had been -- and judging from the intermittent nightly phone calls from giggling adolescents, it was something the girls had already noticed.
"Patch? You there, brother?" asked the raspy voice on the phone.
"Yeah, yeah, I'm here. What's shakin'?"
"It's Wrangler again." The kickboxer champ, the NoCal Infidelz member, one of Patch's loyal colleagues back when he rode with the club in Oakland.
"What's he doing in the desert? He hates the dry heat."
"He's got that girlie on the side down here, so he splits his time between north and south. In fact, she's the one who called us out."
"Yeah, I know her. Lacy. Sweet, sweet thing."
"Wrangler's been a tad off the rails lately. Don't know how she puts up with it."
"Who, Wrangler? What else is new? You call me at three A.M. to tell me Wrangler's tweakin' again? Well, stop the fuckin' presses."
"Seriously, last week he got done in for possession of crank and ephedrine with intent to cook."
Bummer. In earlier days, Wrangler had been a walking, talking human laboratory experiment on the prolonged use of controlled substances. Acid. Weed. Dust. Over the last ten years, he'd cleaned up. Or more precisely, it was either clean up or die. Lately, though, just when it seemed like he was home free, Wrangler renewed his romance with home-cooked speed.
"What Wrangler does on his own dime on his own time is no crime. And none of my concern. Although I wish to hell he'd lay off that cookin' crystal shit."
"Well, it ain't that, exactly. He's free on bail."
"I'm failing to see the problem here, Henry. How much was bail set for?"
"Eleven thousand five hundred, NoCal handled that. That's not the crisis."
"Then what the fuck is the problem?" Henry had trouble getting to the point.
"Well, he's tweaked out of his tree right now is what, and he's got the pretty little missus holed up with him. I suspect we got us a classic combo domestic-dispute-slash-hostage situation. So far we've managed to keep it low-key. Don't ask me how."
Patch stood up from his mattress and felt another twinge of pain in his lower back. One day I'm actually going to buy a decent bed.
"So why me?"
"According to Lacy, he's been asking for you. In fact, he's demanding your presence. Like I said, he's spinning out of his gourd, and he's got Lacy inside, God knows -- "
"Shit."
"In a nutshell. What we got is Wrangler and Lacy and a virtual arsenal and a huge cache of drugs, holed up in this here house."
"I mean shit, Henry. Why call me? Do you think the neighbors might have called the cops?"
Continues...Excerpted from 6 Chambers, 1 Bulletby Ralph "Sonny" Barger Copyright © 2006 by Ralph "Sonny" Barger. Excerpted by permission.
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