Jerry Langton Three-Book Biker Bundle

Biker
isn't a typical novel. While it is a work of fiction, I didn't make very much of it up. There's very little in
Biker
that didn't actually happen at one time or another.

Much of it comes from the research I did for my first book,
Fallen Angel
. While collecting the material necessary for that book, I had some great stories that just didn't fit because they didn't fit with the primary theme of Walter Stadnick's rise to power, couldn't be substantiated in time, or put me at risk of libel.

And since
Fallen Angel
was published, I have met dozens of other people—including bikers, their friends, their girlfriends, cops, lawyers, and others—who have told me more and more about their world. So
Biker
is as much a collaborative effort as any non-fiction book I could write. And I'd like to thank all of my collaborators here.

My thanks has to start with John Wiley & Sons' Robert Harris, who believed in this crazy hybrid idea right from the start and is ultimately responsible for its existence. And, of course, the great Don Loney, the only editor any author would ever want, deserves just as much thanks. The rest of the team at Wiley—from Robin Dutta-Roy and Erika Zupko, who will make you want to buy the book, to Adrian So for his awesome cover and Tegan Wallace for her great interior design, to Lindsay Humphreys for her production prowess—were outstanding as always. Thanks also go to my agent B.G. Dilworth. I must also mention Leta Potter here.

And I am grateful to the people who talked with me. Most of them would prefer not to be mentioned by name, but there's no way I can leave out the incredibly informative Sergeant John Harris of Hamilton Police Services.

And I have to thank my wife and children, whose patience and creativity made writing
Biker
not only possible but enjoyable.

Even though his girlfriend was gyrating on stage completely nude, Steve Schultz wasn't paying any attention. The former Miss Nude Springfield—who went by the name of Lexus onstage and Connie Horvath away from it—was doing her best to be seductive, but Steve was busy with something he considered far more pressing. He was in the middle of a meeting with his two most trusted confidantes—Warren “Lizard” Lessard and Daniel “Bamm Bamm” Johansson—and one of his most promising young newcomers, Ned Aiken.

The subject was a phone card scam. Steve had fake long-distance phone cards printed in Thailand and he marketed them through convenience stores in Toronto, across the border. The immigrants who bought them were desperate for a bargain, and too scared of the authorities to raise a fuss when they discovered that Steve's cards didn't actually connect to anything.

Unlike Steve, the rest of the patrons of Foxes Gentlemen's Club (known throughout town as “the Strip”) were eating up Connie's act. Connie was exactly what they had come for. She was tall and blonde. But under the harsh light at Foxes, her natural blonde hair darkened and appeared light brown, so she dyed it nearly white. Away from the stage, it looked harsh and unnatural, but that's not where she made her money. She was painfully thin. You could easily count her ribs from behind. The view from the front was a different story. A former boyfriend, intent on advancing her career, had sprung for radical breast augmentation surgery. Distinct lines ran down from her sternum and they ended a few inches below her ribcage. The implants in no way resembled actual breasts—and the crowd adored them.

Calling the collected patrons at Foxes a crowd might be too ambitious. There was seventy-one-year-old Hank, who sat silently in the back of the bar, three shy Chinese teenagers who popped up the collars of their golf shirts and sipped long-necked Buds, and Buddy, a morbidly obese kid with a learning disability who cleaned the place and worked the dishwasher in exchange for not having to pay a cover charge or order drinks.

Steve didn't own Foxes. The actual owner was a wealthy man named Myron Fishman whose luck was in decline. Myron had made his considerable fortune manufacturing cardboard boxes. He had retired to Florida not long after Steve made his first appearance at Foxes in the company of Lessard and Johansson, who were decked out in full Death Dealer colours—complete with club patches that featured a skull in a top hat with four aces and a joker tucked into the brim. Now Steve had the run of the place.

A full-patch member of America's largest bike gang, the Sons of Satan, Schultz had been hand picked by the gang's national president, Ivan Mehelnechuk, to bring the ragtag assembly of Springfield's bikers under the Sons' control. The larger goal was to wrest the city's drug and prostitution rackets out of the hands of their biggest rival, the Lawbreakers, who had adopted the Satan's Own, a proudly independent local club, as their Springfield chapter.

Many of the disenfranchised and disillusioned local bikers approached the Death Dealers when word spread that they were now headed by a bona fide Son of Satan. Steve had earned his nickname “Hollywood.” He was handsome, he was larger than life, and he never, ever stopped talking about himself. Steve wasn't from Springfield and he never let the other guys forget it. He had moved there when he was fifteen, then left to enjoy a successful career with the Sons of Satan in Mehelnechuk's power base of Martinsville. While Martinsville was a fairly large city by Midwestern standards, it was hardly cosmopolitan. Steve's brash worldiness stood out.

Steve was actually from Bay Ridge, a quiet, residential neighborhood full of tree-lined streets in the south side of Brooklyn. It has more in common with the New Jersey suburbs than the mean streets people associate with Brooklyn, but that didn't matter to the guys in Springfield. In their minds, Steve was a New Yorker with all the rights and privileges that held. And he knew how to play it up. He'd go from spouting a ridiculous parody of Brooklynese (“dese,” “dose,” and “dem”) to speaking in overly complicated English—sometimes in the same sentence—whenever he thought it would give him a psychological advantage.

He hadn't wanted to go back to Springfield. He considered it being sent to the minors—going to the boondocks to babysit a bunch of idiot yokels. But Mehelnechuk painted an entirely different picture of the Springfield assignment. Steve wouldn't be a babysitter, the boss assured him; he would be a general, heroically carrying the Sons of Satan banner into a war he was sure to win. Ivan also, subtly, indicated that once the city was secured, it would be his to plunder. Schultz readily accepted and, in a short time, he had achieved impressive results.

By the night on which he spoke with Lessard, Johansson and young Ned Aiken, Steve had turned the Death Dealers into the Sons “puppet” club and made them a force to be reckoned with in Springfield.

As they discussed the nuts and bolts of the phone-card scam, Connie's show was coming to a close. “Let's have a big hand for Lexus. Lexus, everyone,” the DJ intoned as Connie crawled around the stage on all fours picking up the crumpled bills that had been thrown at her. There were a few minutes of awkward silence as the DJ waited until she was finished before starting his spiel to introduce the next dancer.

There was a smattering of applause. Most of it came from two guys who stumbled in halfway through Connie's act, when she was already nude. Jason Sugarman and Tyler Heath barely knew each other. They were junior employees at a local television station who had stumbled into Foxes toward the end of six-hour binge following a work function earlier that day.

Tyler, who was drunker, got right into it. Connie, or “Lexus” as he knew her, was exactly what he imagined “his type” to be and he fell for her act. Once he had gathered enough nerve, he abandoned Jason and took a seat up close to the stage. He lured Connie over to his area with five and ten dollar bills and very nearly touched her a few times. When she left the stage, he applauded loudly and even hooted a few times before returning to his seat beside Jason, whose anxiety was obvious.

The DJ threw on a song with heavy synthesized bass. As it got louder and louder, he growled into the microphone: “Gentlemen . . . please put your hands together for Destiny . . . Destiny joining us for her first time at Foxes, gentlemen, it's Dessssssssssssstiny.”

Lessard nudged Ned, and said, “You may want to watch this.” And pointed at the stage.

Destiny was none other than Ned's girlfriend Kelli. She was dressed in what appeared to be a hard plastic corset and matching miniskirt, and was prancing nervously around the stage. She studiously avoided eye contact with any of the men. Ned was shocked to see her there, but did his best not to let the other bikers notice.

The crowd gave her the benefit of the doubt through the first song, but began to get restless during the second. Tyler voiced their disappointment with her unwillingness to take her clothes off. “Take it off, you fuckin' bitch!” he shouted. “I didn't come here to see your fuckin' face!”