Evil in Paradise - R. B. Conroy

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these seats taken?” she asked a darkly tanned man dressed in a purple golf shirt and white Bermuda shorts.

      “Certainly not,” the beaming man replied, temporarily interrupting a conversation with a lady that appeared to be his wife. “Help yourself.”

      The man watched her carefully as she slid onto the tall bar stool next to him. He was acting like a bore, amateurish and awkward. Even Cathy, hardly a beacon of virtue, thought it was rude of him to totally ignore his wife. The man continued to ogle her.

      “New around here?” he asked.

      What a dumb question. Over ninety thousand people lived in The Villages. Seeing someone different at Cody’s certainly didn’t mean that person was “new around here.”

      “No, of course not,” she said curtly, attempting to discourage any more conversation with the lout.

      “Oh, I just thought ya might be new or somethin’.”

      She raised her brow and glanced at him from him corner of her eye, “I’ve lived here for nearly five years; I’m hardly new.”

      “Sounds new to me, we’ve lived here more than twenty years!” The man laughed out loud, even his overlooked wife chuckled along with him.

      “Good for you. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a phone call to make.” Cathy lifted her pink cell phone from her purse and tried desperately to think of someone to call. She flipped it open and pushed the speed dial number of a girlfriend who had just left to go up north. She let the phone ring until the answering machine picked up and then left a brief message about playing bridge when her friend returned. A totally unnecessary message, but at least it got Romeo off her case.

      The young bartender approached. She quickly shut her phone off and set it on the bar. “Vodka tonic,” she ordered.

      “Coming right up. Running a tab?”

      “Yes, I will be, thank you.” She took a quick glance at the parking lot, looking for Eric’s Jeep. She loved it that he drove a Jeep. It made him more masculine and sexy-much different from her reserved and conservative husband, Ed.

      “There ya’ go, ma’am.” The bartender set the vodka and tonic on the bar in front of her.

      Cathy hated the word “ma’am” thinking it was a name younger people used only when speaking with someone they considered old. She hoped the bartender would refrain from using that term when Eric arrived. She worried about the difference in her and Eric’s ages and didn’t want the bartender bringing attention to it. So far she had handled the age difference pretty well with Eric. He seemed interested enough in her and she looked younger than her sixty-seven years. Except for some sagging on the back of her legs and some not so deep wrinkles around her eyes, she could pass for the late fifties.

      “Oh my, look at that guy, he’s cute,” a pretty lady two seats down from Cathy exclaimed.

      “What a hunk!” her wide-eyed friend agreed.

      Cathy spun around to see Eric approaching her from behind. His tanned, muscular body looked great in his white tennis shorts and light blue shirt. The setting sun reflected off his wrap-around shades, adding to his ultra-hot persona. The comments from the other ladies only caused Cathy’s excitement to grow. She was hoping more and more that this might be the night she got her hunk of a tennis partner into bed. She shivered at the very thought of it.

       4

      Daisy Vanover looked up from a small stack of motorcycle repair invoices and watched her boss as he led a customer out of the garage area and into the front lobby. He stopped and leaned over his cluttered desk, poked at a small calculator for a few seconds and then scribbled down some numbers on an invoice.

      “Let’s see, I’ve got three hours on this one, so with parts and labor that will be exactly one hundred fifty-two dollars and thirty-seven cents.”

      “You take credit cards?” the elderly gentlemen asked.

      “Read the sign, sir, it’s on the wall right behind you.”

      The man turned around and read the faded “Cash Only” sign.

      Sorry, is a check okay?”

      Dirk paused, “I’ll need two forms of ID.”

      The man slid a checkbook and a pen from the back pocket on his Bermuda shorts and flipped it open. “Who should I make this out to?”

      “The Cycle Shop, it’s right behind you,” Dirk replied curtly.

      The man glanced over his shoulder again, “Oh, yes, I see it.”

      “May as well throw those signs in the trash, nobody ever looks at ‘em,” Dirk groused.

      The gray haired customer did not comment. He finished the check, ripped it from the book and handed it to the irritable garage owner along with his driver’s license and a credit card.

      Without commenting, Dirk examined the check and IDs carefully and then wrote the driver’s license number on the front of the check. He carefully ripped a pink copy from the center of the invoice and handed it to the customer. “You’re all square, partner. Your bike’s out front and the keys are in it.”

      The man nodded, left the store without saying anything to Dirk and started his cycle. Dirk watched him pull away from his shop and merge into the busy traffic on Highway 27. “Rich old bastard,” Dirk mumbled.

      Dirk Harrison was forty-eight years old and a former member of the Viper motorcycle gang in South Chicago. Nicknamed “Assassin” by his fellow gang members, he had a nasty temperament and a hair-trigger temper. Throughout his years in Chicago, Dirk had, for the most part, confined his violent outbursts to beating up rival gang members with his fists. Then one day, as everyone who knew him had expected, the volatile biker got carried away.

      On a hot July evening in the year 2000, angered by some recent threats made by the local Hell’s Angels chapter against one of his fellow Vipers, Dirk armed himself with a loaded .45, hopped on his Harley and headed for the Hell’s Angel hangout on the Chicago’s near Southside. When he arrived at the hangout on West Fullerton Avenue, just outside the Loop in Chicago, he observed several of the Angel’s bikes lined up in front of the nondescript two story townhouse. He became furious as he surveyed the many low-rider bikes covered with Angel paraphernalia.

      What happened next is legendary among the many biker gangs that inhabit the greater Chi-town area. With his ire still growing, Dirk pulled out his .45 from under his leather vest, pointed it at the townhouse and began firing at random into the front of the building, shattering several windows and blowing scores of holes in the vinyl siding. Screams of terror soon emanated from inside, trailed by loud shouts of profanity. The carnage continued with Dirk reloading several times and continuing to blast away at the building. By now, crazily furious, he had climbed off his bike and calmly shot the tires flat on all of the motorcycles on the street in front of the building. In all, the police counted seventy-five bullet holes in the front of the townhouse and nearly fifty more bullet marks on the riderless bikes.

      Unbelievably, there were no casualties as a result of Dirk’s savage assault. A few of the Angels were slightly injured by flying glass, but no one was badly hurt or killed in the shooting.

      Two Angels who resided in an adjoining townhouse had watched the frightening scene through slightly opened blinds, later identified Dirk in a police line-up. He was immediately booked and charged with attempted murder, reckless endangerment, assault with a deadly weapon and several other assorted charges. After a brief trial, he was sentenced to five years in the Illinois Department of Corrections in Springfield, Illinois.

      Dirk hated his time in jail and proved to be a surly and uncooperative inmate. With no time off for good behavior, he was released from prison in 2006 after completing his entire sentence. Part of his probation agreement, after he left prison, included a pledge that he would disassociate himself completely from the Vipers motorcycle

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