"Oh, come on, man! Not now," I muttered as I heard my cellphone ringing. I had just finished getting ready for bed when the text came in, and once I saw that it was from Countess, I just knew that I wouldn't get to sleep early like I had originally planned to do tonight. Countess wanted me to get some food for her and Chains and then bring it over to Chains' place where the two of them were. I sighed and shook my head, and then I took off my pajama sweats and put on some jeans and my Vampires kutte over my tank top. I then got on my bike, rode out to buy some burgers, and then I went over to Chains' apartment to bring them their food.

As I parked in front of Chains' house, I happened to notice three other bikes alongside Chains and Countess's Harleys, and those three motorcycles were dirt bikes and not Harleys as you or I would expect. The dirt bikes were painted garishly and in bright neon colors, and I wondered why a trio of dirt bikers would be visiting Chains alongside Countess this late at night.

I got my answer when I knocked on the door. A big burly guy with a thick but trimmed beard answered the door and I held out the paper bag holding the girls' food to show him that I meant him no harm. "Let her in," Countess called out from inside the house. "She's our new prospect."

I walked into the threshold of the house, still holding out the bag in front of me, when I saw a red laser dot hovering right over my chest. "Bang!" Chains said as she pointed an M16-lookalike rifle with some kind of laser targeting device on the side of the barrel grip at me. "If this bad boy was loaded, you'd be dead by now, prospect," she added.

"Come on, man! That's not funny," I retorted. I tossed the burgers to Countess, who dug into the bag and took out a sandwich wrapped in foil. "Only basic cheeseburgers, prospect?" she asked me. "Not even a BLT or a TLC?"

"It's the middle of the night, man," I replied. "It's the only thing they had without cooking up some more." Countess seemed to think about my answer before she shrugged it off.

"As I was saying before the prospect here barged in with our food," Chains said to the fifty-something man who was seated across the living room from both Countess and Chains, "the HK416 is one of the newest guns out there based on the M16 platform. There are only two gun platforms that ever really became popular, and that's the AK and the M16. Heckler and Koch made the HK416, and you know the Germans: ruthlessly efficient at everything. This guy is also supposed to be the successor of the M16 to the Canadian Army, which should tell you something about how highly this gun is rated over here."

Countess took this as her cue to lean forward from her seat in the living room and move closer towards the fifty-something, who appeared to be the leader of the dirt bikers. "So how many do you want, Elijah?" she asked him.

"I'll take twenty-five," Elijah replied. "Fifteen hundred bucks a pop."

"You're joking," Chains said. "One of these HKs can get us over thirty-five hundred to the right buyer. The only reason we're talking is because you asked for us specifically, and also because you're a valued customer. Make it three thousand a gun and you've got a deal."

"Come on, Danny, that's ridiculous money and you know it," Elijah retorted. "I don't have cash flowing out of my pockets like water. Fine, I'll bump it up to two thousand dollars each."

"Hey, we had to work hard to get those guns too, you know," Countess added. "Do you actually believe that these guns actually fell out of the truck when they got reported as 'damaged or lost in transit'? It takes time and money to get the guns and sell them on to whoever wants them. We deserve to be compensated for the work we're doing for the community, if you know what I mean."

"You've always driven a hard bargain, Carmilla," Elijah said with a shake of his head. "All right. Twenty-five hundred bucks a rifle. For twenty-five rifles, that's what? Sixty-two and a half thousand right away. Surely that would be enough compensation for your efforts to help the community, as you called it."

Carmilla (Countess) and Danny (Chains) exchanged looks with each other. Chains shrugged her shoulders and Countess replied with a nod. "All right, Elijah," Countess said to the older man. "Twenty-five hundred a pop it is. You got yourself a deal. Let's shake on it." Countess held out her hand, her pearly white hand with long and slim fingers and nails in black polish and cut and filed to wicked points. Elijah extended his hand, which looked humongous and hairy compared to Countess' small and smooth hand, and they shook hands.

Something that I believe you should know about the Vampires: unlike a lot of other outlaw biker gangs out there, the Vampires don't have a lot of fingers in the pie that was the Canadian underworld. About the only real large-scale illegal activities that the club were committing were money laundering and gun-running and gun smuggling. I don't know how they ever got started on stealing and selling guns, but by the time I prospected for them, gun-running was by far and large the biggest money earner for the Vampires.

But despite qualifying for the definition of being an outlaw biker gang (and practically living the lifestyle of one as well), the one thing that the Vampires will not tolerate among its members is the use of illegal drugs and narcotics, and by that I mean the really strong stuff like crack cocaine and Ecstasy. Abusing prescription drugs (the ones you can get from a doctor or the drugstore) is also highly frowned upon among the Vampires. That's what the beer and the marijuana are for, they say (marijuana being the only "drug" that was not prohibited among the Vampires). If anyone affiliated with the Vampires, whether they were just a friend of the club, a hang-around, a prospect or even a full-patch member, was caught using drugs or carrying drugs on their person then that was grounds for immediate dismissal from the club. It doesn't matter if you've been with the club for one day or since its foundation; if the Vampires find drugs on you, you're out of the club, baby. The Vampires will disown you and kick you out of their clubhouses and tell you that if you wanted to be a junkie then you shouldn't have joined the Vampires because we simply do not use drugs. But selling guns and even high-powered rifles to the less lawfully inclined sector of society? Hop right in!

Both Countess and Elijah the dirt biker stood up with their hands still together, a sign that this deal was real, and that there were to be no renegotiations afterwards, I would learn later. Outlaw biker gangs may be criminals but they've got their own morals and code of conduct, twisted it may seem to be. "Chains will even give you this piece as a token of the Vampires' appreciation for choosing us as your armament supplier once again," Countess told Elijah as they finally broke off their long handshake. Chains tossed the Heckler & Koch HK416 assault rifle to Elijah, who caught the rifle in mid-air and examined it closely. "I'll have a hell of a time trying to hide this on my bike," he muttered mostly to himself. "The usual, right?"

"Half the guns this weekend and the other half on the next," Countess recited from memory. "And the same goes for the money, yeah?"

"Sure, sure, of course," Elijah replied. And then he leaned in close to Countess and whispered, "And let's not forget about that special order that I made last Friday."

"I'm working on it," Countess replied in an equally furtive whisper. "Don't worry about it."

I waited until the dirt bikers had walked out of the house and rode off with their bikes roaring loudly in the night before I finally opened my mouth to speak. "Was that Elijah Cruz you just sold guns to?" I asked. "The Elijah Cruz?"

"So what if he is? What's it to you, prospect?" Chains asked in reply. "You ask an awful lot of questions for a prospect, prospect. You're always trying to make us think that you're a cop, Hollis. If this was just once or twice, I'd really think that you're a cop, probate. But no cop would ever ask so many questions like that because surely they can't be that stupid, right? Or are you double-bluffing us by pretending to be stupider than you look?"

"Hey, hey, Danny, now is not the time and place for this bullshit," Countess said, killing off a potential confrontation between me and Chains before it got out of hand. "As for you, Laura, I think it's time for you to forget that all this happened."

"I was just asking, man," I said before I stepped out of Chains' house and drove off on my bike. To be perfectly honest, I didn't really know who Elijah Cruz was; I just knew him from the news because there was an article or two about him being the oldest active Motocrosser in history, and because there was some kind of separated at birth meme circulating comparing Cruz to some actor named Ray Stevenson, a guy whom I think I may have heard of but not really seen (but according to his Wikipedia article, I've actually seen some movies of his). For me, there was some kind of resemblance between the two; Cruz had the eyes, the hair, and the beard, but other than that I just couldn't see how Elijah Cruz and Ray Stevenson could have been mistaken for twins. Not that that I could speak for myself. To this day I still have some difficulty telling apart Matt Damon from Mark Wahlberg.

As Countess said though, I promptly forgot about the meeting with Elijah Cruz and his gang of dirt bikers (which I would later learn was called the Yahoos) as soon as I got back to my apartment and fell asleep without even changing out of my clothes. A few days passed after Countess and Chains' deal with the Yahoos for a number of high-end and high-powered assault rifles before the topic was brought up again, this time during one of the Vampires' regular runs to Toronto. I was serving drinks to the full patches just like any prospect would in this situation when Countess called me and Chains over to her table. "Have a seat, prospect," she told me, and I complied immediately.

Once Chains had sat down beside Countess, the latter leaned closer to me and said, "Remember that night when I asked you to pick up some food for me and Chains? The one where you met the Yahoos?"

"I don't know. Should I remember?" I replied. Countess was the one who had told me to forget all about that night, and I had the feeling that this might be yet another test that the Vampires were doing to me.

"Genius was right when they said you were a wise-ass," Countess muttered, but there was a smile on her lips as she said that. "All right, Laura, I'll cut to the chase. That night, I didn't call you over to Chains' place just because we were hungry. We called you over there because I thought that it's time for you to get acquainted with the other side of the Vampires."

It took a few moments for Countess' words to sink in before I finally understood what she was trying to say. "You want me to help you sell guns to the Yahoos?" I asked.

"Of course not, you idiot," Countess immediately retorted. "Not yet, at least. But I do want you to understand how we do things here in the club." Countess then proceeded to explain how gun running was the Vampires' primary source of income and how they have used it to become a force to be reckoned with in terms of the Greater Toronto Area outlaw biker scene. "Right now, it doesn't matter to you how we get the guns that we're going to sell to those who want to buy," Countess added. "Think of it as you cutting your teeth into the family business, this being a sisterhood and all. All that matters to you, prospect, is that you now know what you're actually getting into."

"I don't suppose it's too late to back out now, is it?" I asked. I had intended it as a joke but apparently neither Countess nor Chains were in the joking mood right now.

"Now I want you to listen to me carefully, prospect," Countess said to me. "Later tonight, I'm giving you an opportunity to get up close and personal with the Vampires' business. I promised Elijah that I was going to give him a bunch of new handguns fresh from our supplier, but because Mother and I have got some more important business to attend to with the rest of the Original Six, I've entrusted the deal to Chains. She knows what to do; she's the one who's going to deal with the old man, and the Yahoos have been one of our biggest clients lately, and I do not intend to screw up that particular business relationship. But I want you there to get a sense of what we're doing to keep this club up and running, Laura. There might come a time when you'll have to do it yourself."

"No bikes, prospect," Chains added. "Bring that shitty Mazda of yours tonight. I saw cops running a regular beat on Cruz's street when I scoped out the place yesterday. If the cops see two bikers hanging around Cruz's place, that's the deal busted before it even began."

"Bring the Mazda. Okay," I nodded my head.

"Right, that's about it. Go and bring us a couple of beers then, prospect," Countess said, and it was back to the shithouse of a probationary member of the Vampires Motorcycle Club for me.

The prospect (pun not intended) of taking part in a gun deal between the Vampires and the Yahoos, while it didn't particularly appeal to me, happened to take up the majority of the free space inside my brain as the day turned to night. Sure, it may be part of me proving myself to the other Vampires but it was also getting me up close and personal with the dark side of this particular outlaw biker gang, and I wasn't about to let that opportunity slip. Finally, at seven PM, I drove my rental Mazda out to Chains' house and picked her up. "All right, prospect," she said to me. "Time to go to Old Man's place."

Chains gave me the directions to Elijah Cruz's house, and we arrived at the place an hour later, although granted that was through the early night rush hour in Toronto. That being said, I really could have waited until eight or maybe even nine PM to pick up Chains and drive to Cruz's place, but here we are.

"Hey, prospect," Chains said to me. "Yeah?" I asked.

"What's your deal, prospect? Why did you want to join the Vampires again?"

Oh, God, not this again. "I already told you before, man," I replied. "I wanted to make something more out of my life, find meaning and purpose in it again. Maybe even pay it forward by helping out another girl in need."

Chains shook her head. "I don't think I have to tell you this one more time, prospect, but I don't trust you," she told me. "I'm only tolerating you here because Countess is the chapter vice president and her word is as good as gold, and until you do something that really proves to me that you're on the up and up, I'm always going to be suspicious of you. That being said, if you don't want anyone else to get real suspicious with you, just keep your mouth shut and don't ask any questions unless we tell you to ask. I shouldn't have to tell you that already since you should know."

I honestly didn't know how to react to what Chains had just said to me. She like went from basically saying that she didn't trust me to giving me a tip on how to help the others trust me a little more. It was like, what was her deal? For a brief moment I wondered whether Chains was either an undercover agent or another confidential informant like me, but in my own honest opinion Chains was too much of a cop-hater to even think about working with the police to bring down the Vampires. Unless she was a very excellent actress in which case I can only applaud her acting skills, because she is really selling her cop hate and suspicions of me very well. And that got me thinking: would two undercover cops trying to infiltrate the same gang know that the other guy is a UC? Or will they both treat the other like any other legit gangster? It was something to ponder about, at the very least.

I killed the engine of my Mazda to save fuel and not contribute any more to global warming than I already have, and Chains and I lowered the windows to let in the cool night air. We listened to the rustling leaves and the crunching of gravel under tyres as cars passed by us but, one hour later, the lights to Cruz's house were still not on. "Where the heck is that old geezer?" Chains asked, more to herself than anyone else. "God, I can't take this silence anymore. If I don't hear any music in the next few minutes, I'm going to go crazy." She then reached out, turned on the radio, and tuned in to a soft rock radio station.

"Dude, my battery's already shot," I said. "You could short out the battery."

"Just one song, prospect," Chains replied. "Just let me listen to one song or else I'm going to go batshit insane."

I would have said something about Chains always being on batshit insane but it might just trigger the very same situation that I was trying to avoid so I held my tongue. Having said that, Chains didn't turn off the radio after the first song, and she didn't turn it off after the second, third, and even fourth songs. But by that point I wasn't really bothered anymore. Who was I, a mere prospect, to complain about the actions of a full patch member anyway?

It was probably about 9:30 in the evening when I felt my cellphone vibrating in my pocket. I took it out and saw that it was a text message from Carly asking me where I was and why I wasn't answering my phone. "Oh, crap," I muttered. I was supposed to call in with Carly tonight but Countess telling me that she wanted me to cut my teeth into the Vampires' gun running business had driven my scheduled appointment with Carly right out of my head.

"Who's Carly, prospect?" Chains asked. She had glanced over to look at who had texted me. She was probably hoping that she would catch me making contact with the authorities which, technically, she did, but as she didn't know who Carly was (I hoped), I believed that I could talk myself out of this.

"It's nobody," I replied. "Just a friend of mine. An acquaintance." I then texted back a quick reply to Carly telling her that I was busy and can't talk, and then I turned off my phone and put it back in my pocket. I didn't need to deal with both Chains and Carly at the same time.

Thirty more minutes passed while we waited for Elijah Cruz to arrive home. I had finally gathered the courage to turn off the radio myself, and when Chains protested, I told her that if we had to make a run for it and my battery failed, I was going to pin it all on her. We had both sat in silence yet again, both stewing in our own mental juices as we both pondered how this deal was going to unfold. In the back of my mind I was pretty sure that both Carly and Vordenburg were now throwing hissy fits because I had turned off my phone and was refusing to respond to both of them but I didn't care. I was just doing what they had told me to do, and that was to get in deep and close with the Vampires. And I couldn't do that if they were constantly hounding me tonight.

"Where the fuck is that old bastard!?" Chains muttered to herself with more than just a hint of anger and bitchiness. "God, I gotta do something or else I'll go crazy!" Once again I wondered whether I should say anything about Chains already being crazy but I value my life too much. And then Chains took out a semi-auto handgun and began disassembling it. "What the heck are you doing?" I asked. "Where the fuck did you get that?"

"Hey, what did I tell you about asking questions, prospect?" Chains replied.

"You might wanna put the gun away," I said. "Someone might see it!"

"So what if they see it? It's not like I can use it on anyone, at least not looking like this!"

Of course, it was right at that moment that a police car chose to appear and make a slow rolling patrol down the street, flashing its blue and red lights and sounding out its siren. "Put the gun away!" I hissed at Chains, and she quickly shoved the disassembled parts of the gun under her kutte and arms. The black and white passed us by and I held my hand up to my face so that the cops wouldn't get a good look at me even with their spotlight. "Nothing to see here, officer, just move on," I said under my breath.

The police car drove on, and as soon as it was out of sight Chains reassembled her gun and then returned it to where she had hidden it in the small of her back. Finally though, we both heard the familiar sound of dirt bikes revving and roaring down the street, and we could see three headlights that looked like the right size for road-legal dirt bikes. We waited until we could make out the riders on the bikes before we made our move. "Go flash your lights at them," Chains told me, and I complied. I flashed the lights of my Mazda twice to get the attention of the Yahoos, and we both heard their bikes slowing down.

The biker in the middle then began talking with the others, and then the two bikers to the side peeled off and continued down the road while the middle biker drove up to the driveway of the house beside which we had been waiting for over two and a half hours. Elijah Cruz got off his bike and went into his house, and then Chains and I waited for a few minutes before we got out of the car to follow him inside. "Stay quiet and follow my lead no matter what," Chains told me. I nodded my head, and then she knocked on the door and then Cruz let us in.

The inside of Elijah Cruz's house was similar in layout to Chains' place, but the decorations and furnishings were different. The majority of the walls were covered with motorcycling and dirt biking posters but there were also a few flags up and around. The flags of Canada and Ontario were pinned prominently on the walls behind the couch where Cruz had sat down, but I also noticed a flag underneath those flags that looked very much like the flag of Nazi Germany except the swastika was replaced by a strange three-pronged cross that looked like a bunch of number 7s joined together at their bottoms. I think it was the flag of a group of radical fascist White South Africans who were vehement supporters of apartheid.

I sat down across the table from Elijah Cruz while Chains took up a standing position beside me. "All right, let's have it," Cruz said to me.

"Hold up, mate, eyes on me," Chains said. "You're dealing with me tonight. The prospect is here for some on-the-job training, if you know what I mean."

Cruz furrowed his eyebrows at that, and then he shrugged as if nothing had changed. "So, you got what I asked for, Danny?" he asked Chains.

Chains reached into her kutte and pulled out a package tightly wrapped in black plastic. She unfurled the plastic wrapping as best as she could and then she pulled out a metallic gray pistol with black molded grips. "Smith and Wesson 5946," Chains said, handing the gun over to Cruz. "It's the official service pistol of the Mounties. Fresh from the factory and serial numbers gone, just like you asked."

Cruz inspected the pistol closely, making sure that any potential identifying marks had indeed been erased from the pistol. He then aimed down the sights with first one eye and then both eyes, and then he put the gun on safe even though it wasn't loaded with any bullets and he asked, "Where's the rest of it?"

"Go get it, prospect," Chains told me. "It's in your boot," she whispered to me. I went out, opened the boot of my car, and retrieved a small cardboard box that was nevertheless big enough to fit in nine more guns as well as a few boxes of ammunition. I went back to the house and laid the box on the table in front of Cruz. Cruz opened the box and inspected the contents, and when he was satisfied that he had everything he had asked for, he asked, "How much?"

"Ten thousand," Chains replied.

"Cash or drugs?"

"Come on, Elijah. You know how we do business. We're all about the cash. You should know that by now."

"All right. Just wait there while I get the cash." Cruz stood up and vanished into a side room, and when he went out he was carrying a thin brown envelope. "Ten thousand dollars," he said as he handed the envelope to Chains. "Like Carmilla and I agreed."

Chains tossed the envelope to me. "Pleasure doing business with you, Elijah," she said, and then she stood up to leave.

"Whoa, whoa, wait a minute," I said. "Countess told me to count the cash. I gotta count the cash first."

"Are you serious, prospect?" Chains asked me in a tone which made it very clear that she thought that I was very much kidding.

"No, dude, I'm serious," I replied. "Ask Countess if you want. She told me to count the cash right before we all went home after the run."

"All right, fine," Chains muttered. I opened the envelope and laid out the cash in front of me and began counting. The bills were in small denominations like twenty- and fifty-dollar bills, meaning that the counting process took me some more time than I would usually take if the cash was in hundred-dollar bills. Eventually I finished counting, and I put the money back in the envelope. "Yup, it's ten thousand dollars," I said.

"All right, now can we go?" Chains asked me. "Or is there anything else Countess told you to do?"

"No, no, we're good," I said, shaking my head.

"Good." Chains then nodded her head at Cruz, who nodded back, and then she and I went out of the house and back to my car, but not before I had given the envelope with the cash back to Chains.