He needed to handle this carefully. Dimes was back out of prison and he’d been next in line for the top job before he’d gone down for six years on an attempted murder charge. The man had ambitions. Mad Dog could feel his rival’s eyes on him at all times, assessing, looking for weakness. This situation had to be dealt with right, or else Dimes would be whispering to the others.
The four pledges stood vaguely to attention in front of him, a ragtag collection of black eyes, rising bruises, bleeding noses, and fractured or broken bones. Franco was wobbling, standing as he was on only one good leg. Gunnie held a dirty bandana up to his nose, trying to staunch the blood flowing freely from it. Mad Dog stepped back and looked at the floor beneath them.
“Fair warning, babies. First one of you to bleed on my rug dies.”
“Yeah,” said Mace with a giggle, from the far corner of the room. “It really ties the room together.”
Then, there was the other problem.
“Could we move this along?”
The woman was five foot nothing, stoutly built for a chick, and South-east Asian, although she spoke with the deep husky growl of a longshoreman. She wore a leather jacket, Doc Martens and black cargo pants topped off with a nun’s habit over a bald head. Her scowling face was accentuated by a scar that ran down the left side, from just below the eye socket until it blended into the jawline. The skin there was red and puckered, and she had made no effort to conceal it. She also sported a patch over her left eye. It was quite the look.
Mad Dog didn’t turn around. “I’m getting to you, Sister.”
“It’s taking you long enough.”
When Mad Dog and the others had returned, they’d found the pledges lying in a heap on the ground and the woman sitting where she was now, in the chair in front of his desk, training a shotgun on them. She’d put the gun down on his desk calmly and surrendered. Hell of a thing.
They’d slapped some cuffs on her and Mace had checked her for weapons. He’d got too handsy and received an elbow in the throat for his troubles, having found nothing other than the mini-arsenal she’d already laid out on the table prior to their arrival.
Mad Dog turned around and looked at the woman, who was still sitting calmly, her cuffed hands resting in her lap. “I don’t think you appreciate the trouble you’re in.”
She hocked up some phlegm and spat on the floor. “Honey, let me explain something to you. Two years ago I was given six months to live. You want to put the fear into me, you’re going to have to work a whole lot harder than this.”
Mad Dog placed his hand on the Glock he wore holstered at his hip. “I get it. You tried to break into my clubhouse on some kind of suicide mission, is that it?”
“Tried? I resent the implication that I didn’t succeed in my endeavours.”
“So, you wanted to get caught?”
The woman rolled her eyes. “If I’d known you were going to try to talk me to death, I’d have just walked out into the desert. It would’ve been less tedious.”
“Don’t worry. You are going to end up there, eventually.”
This raised some chuckles from around the room.
She glanced around. “Wow, you boys find that funny, huh? You should check out some Far Side cartoons. They’ll blow your tiny minds.”
“She’s got a hell of a mouth on her,” said Dimes from his position leaning against the pool table.
“Yeah,” said Mad Dog. “You high or something, Sister?”
The woman cracked her knuckles. “Nope. Two years ago, when the Reaper knocked on my door, I gave up everything: drink, drugs, cigarettes, gambling, sex, chocolate, meat, killing and dairy.”
“No shit?”
“Yeah. Know what I miss most?” She looked around the room. “What I wouldn’t give for a Hershey bar. God as my witness.”
“I thought nuns weren’t allowed to have sex?” said Mace.
“Well, yeah. But I’ve only been a nun for two years, so, y’know.”
“Nah,” said Dimes, “that ain’t right. It takes longer than that to become one. My auntie wanted to sign up.” He noticed the room looking at him. “What? She did.”
“Well,” said the woman, “hard as this might be to believe, I’m not what you would call a conventional nun. I’m one of the Sisters of the Saint. We have a much more streamlined enrolment procedure. Technically, the order was ex-communicated, so we’re an independent group. Doing our own thing.”
“How’d you get ex-communicated?”
“How should I know? Happened in the seventeenth century, I think. I’m guessing we pissed off some men. That’s usually the way with these things.”
“You some militant feminist thing?” asked Mad Dog.
She yawned. “Why does every penis-wielding dumbass think any woman doing something is some feminist statement? I got shit to do. I’m not doing it for any other reason than to get shit done.”
TT spoke up. “Chinese women can’t be nuns anyhow.”
The woman raised an eyebrow. “We have a winner.” She looked up at Mad Dog. “I like to amuse myself by trying to guess who the dumbest son of a bitch in the room is. I’ll be honest.” She nodded towards Mace. “I’d assumed it was that monobrowed mouth-breather. Turned out I was wrong.”
Mad Dog was beginning to find this woman extremely irritating. Clearly she was insane, but still, the attitude was annoying.
“How well do you think you’d talk with a gun in your mouth?”
“Not well at all,” she said, “but take it from me, it’s real hard to get answers out of someone in that scenario. Are you guys new at this or something?”
Mad
