Brütal • Mötley Crüe •

Twenty-Eight • Run

Warnings: Vulgar Language, Drug & Alcohol Use, Child Abuse, Heavy Gang Violence, Heavy Blood & Gore, MURDER (Seriously, if you don't like descriptions of murder, message me and I'll just give you a summary of the chapter—no judgment!!)

February 15th, 1979
1:46 AM

It always seemed to be in the winter that Halston experienced life-changing events. She wasn't sure why. Maybe it was the counter of her age ticking up by one, a new year's birth, or the moon rising at an earlier time of night. Maybe it was just too damn hot to have an existential crisis in the summer.

It didn't really matter the reason, she supposed. It was what it was. Just like the pistol stuck into the front of her waistband brought death, and just like the switchblade hidden in the back drew blood, the winter beckoned change.

She sat in the back seat of the rusted and decaying Chevy Nova parked on Hackberry Lane with her father in the front, his pale blue eyes shining under the moonlight and his yellow teeth chomping into a half-smoked cigarette. Her grim-faced brother sat in the driver's seat, his fingers gripping the steering wheel so hard that his knuckles had turned white. The scar that ran the length between the first knuckle on his pointer finger to the top of his wrist was pink and raised due to the cold, and Halston couldn't help but smile every time her sight wandered on top of it. It'd been a long time since she put it there, but she found a sick sense of joy in knowing he was doomed to wear the evidence of his inferiority for the rest of his life.

They were two blocks away from their real destination—a two bedroom cottage with peeling siding and tobacco-stained walls on Cedar Lane. The home belonged to a big, rather ugly man legally named Joe Hogan but had been nicknamed Hogjaw due to his underbite and unsavory eating habits.

And they were there because Hogjaw had been sentenced to death by Barry "The Baron" White, Halston's father, for breaking one of the brotherhood's core commandments—keep your fucking mouth shut.

It was a simple rule, really. You don't hear shit, you don't see shit, and you never say shit. A fucked up take on hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil, if you will. And there was a lot of evil in the brotherhood.

In the summer of 1978, Hogjaw and three other brothers had been tasked with the hit of robbing a small, locally-owned bank in Fresno, California. They weren't the smartest of the group by any means, mostly newbies just trying to make their bones, and the hit ended with all four of them in the back of a black and white, only $3,844 dollars between them.

The arresting officer was an old beat cop, having been around the block a few too many times with little to no praise, and he knew that the shamrock inked onto Hogjaw's forearm could be his ticket to the detective promotion he'd been passed over for the last three years.

Hogjaw may have been a big man, standing just over six feet, but his spine was made of the runniest jelly and as soon as Officer Do-Gooder separated the four men into four different tiny, smelly interrogation rooms and fabricated a deal to each of them in exchange for their freedom—something he had no real authority to do—Hogjaw was the only one to sing like a canary.

The Baron didn't have much to do with the robbery besides ordering the hit and giving them the blueprint of the bank, but for some reason unbeknownst to Halston, he was the first name Hogjaw ratted on.

The Baron was a cop's wet dream. Hell, he was the DEA and FBI's wet dream, too. All the acronyms had been after him for over a decade for everything from drug trafficking to racketeering to plain ol' murder, but he was always a little too slick; slipping right through their fingers when what they had just couldn't stick. He'd go away for a year or two on some bullshit possession charge every once in a while, but he'd always be back to run the streets eventually.