Fifty years to the day after Nguyen Van Minh shot and killed Anthony Venezia in the village of Ben Suc, the former Viet Cong soldier knocked on the front door of the house where Venezia grew up.

Anthony Venezia’s sister Angela answered.

“Yes,” she said.

“These are for you,” he said.

Overcome with soft emotion, Nguyen Van Minh’s eyes welled as he stood at attention the way he did when he joined the fight as a boy. He extended the manila envelope he bought that morning at a strip mall discount store.

Angela looked from his wet black eyes to the envelope and back to his face. Lifting the copper-colored clasp, she opened the flap. The wallet-sized black and white photo showed her brother Tony riding a new wooden hobby horse on Christmas morning when they were four-year-old twins living in Scranton in the same green aluminum-sided house where Angela still lived.

“Where did you get this?”

“Look more,” said Nguyen Van Minh

The next photo showed her mother, Gina, and father, Tony Sr., at the party she and her brother threw for them on their parents’ 17th wedding anniversary. Gina told Angela over chocolate cake with peanut butter icing how she found rice in her hair for days after the wedding. Tony admitted to his son he was so nervous he almost fainted at the altar.

Angel stepped back from the door.

“Who are you?”

“And these,” Nguyen Van Minh said, handing her Tony’s dog tags.

Angela screamed.

“So sorry for your war,” Nguyen Van Minh said.

Police caught up to him at the convenience store four blocks away. Four squad cars rushed to the scene in response to Angela’s frantic 911 call. Five armed officers circled the small man with the stringy beard he sometimes told people made him look like legendary Communist leader Ho Chi Minh. The supervising sergeant did all the talking.

“You have ID?”

 Nguyen Van Minh handed over his American passport.

“You’re a citizen,” the sergeant said.

“I vote every election,” Nguyen Van Minh said.

“Where did you get the photographs of Tony Venezia?”

“From his wallet.”

“Tony died in Vietnam in 1972.”

“I shot him in an ambush.”

“You killed Tony Venezia in Vietnam.”

“Yes.”

“Then you stole his stuff?”

“I wanted souvenirs. Now I return them.”

“Fifty years later?”

“I was wrong to take from the dead.”

The sergeant wasn’t sure what to do.

“I’d like to go home now,” Nguyen Van Minh said.

“You’re under arrest,” the sergeant said.

In his mind Nguyen Van Minh saw himself blending with the jungle that day, a bold 17-year-old freedom fighter waiting to pounce as he tensed and watched the American squad move closer. The 19-year-old walking point, laughing, smoking a cigarette and not wearing a helmet made the most noise. Squeezing one shot from his rifle, Nguyen Van Minh saw the enemy’s head snap back. With the firefight erupting all around, he settled into the adrenaline rush that always came with combat.

All 12 Americans died.

After picking through their bodies, taking what they could use in their continuing fight to rid their land of invaders, Nguyen Van Minh and his guerrilla compatriots moved on. Nguyen Van Minh took photographs and other papers from the body of the young man he killed. After stuffing the personal belongings into the Chinese-issued rucksack he retrieved earlier that week from a comrade killed in action he returned to the body, ripped the dog tags from his enemy’s neck and took them, too.

“Put your hands behind your back,” the police sergeant said.

Nguyen Van Minh, 67, set his jaw and stared straight ahead, not complying but not resisting.

Americans would never express sorrow for their wars.

Nor would they understand those who did.

Imagine the squeaky sucking sound and explosive pop a champagne cork makes when it blasts from the bottle.

Now envision the noise a human eyeball makes when it’s freed from a tight socket after Wally Wilson inserts and turns the corkscrew, twists the orb and removes the unsightly sphere.

Envision?

Unsightly?

Get it?

Gross, don’t you think?

Exactly.

That’s what writing and reading disturbing fiction is all about.

Original, authentic, creative free expression must be understood for what it is – a sometimes vicious attack upon raw propriety we should face. Racism and violence comprise only two bitter facets of America’s harsh reality that’s getting worse instead of better as society relinquishes its hold on sanity, discipline and the common good. Societal insanity now prevails to one degree or another.

The eye-popping reality of a lovable serial killer on the loose horrifies normal decent people. But what defines normal? COVID deaths? Fatal school shootings? Murder occurs every day, all brutal, but some far more grisly than others.

As a decades-long newspaper columnist I covered murder for a living. Sadly, I’ve forgotten too many names of too many dead. But the lessons of their demise remain. All those deaths are warnings, all designed to help me share the admonitions of their lost lives.

These ghastly signs provide the words of Blood Red Syrah, my first novel presented as a “gruesome California wine country thriller.”

What turned mild-mannered Wally Wilson, who loves his mother, into a mad, bloodthirsty killer? What planted the sweet voice of she-devil Syrah into the depths of Wally’s brain? What makes him exchange bloodlust for enlightenment in the vicious struggle to find peace of mind?

Violent death lives in the far reaches of insanity. But what turns Wally Wilson into a psycho killer? Chemicals run amok in Wally’s haywire brain but never poison his heart.

As for Syrah, she loves Wally deeply but will never carve their initials on the trunk of a mighty redwood. Syrah might carve the letters into your face but never on the bark of a tree. Although Syrah and Wally both love nature, human nature is another matter entirely.

Not long after Avventura Press published Blood Red Syrah in October 2018, my wife, Stephanie and I hit the road to California to promote the novel. We set off on a Central Coastal adventure where the book is set and where we used to live, walking the same path we once walked and where Wally Wilson and Syrah walk in the book.

The story is a psychedelic trip through the chaos of an increasingly ruthless society marred by violence, bigotry and hopelessness. Yet, the search for truth prevails, resulting in enlightenment and peace of mind. The moral of the story is that struggle is always worth the ride.

A sometimes difficult read because I take you inside the heads of difficult people, my book opens doors of perception some readers want to keep closed. To remain shut off from the forces of hatred is foolish. Narrow minds only allow you to flee down narrow hallways. Freedom means openness. Liberation comes from facing demons that inhabit and inhibit us all.

That’s why I’m reintroducing Blood Red Syrah.

Never let sleeping books lie.

Awakening takes place with our eyes open. And the odds are slim some maniac will try to cut one out with a corkscrew. Still, beware.

I said slim, not naught.

From where white boy Jimmy Ray stood at the back of the nightclub dance floor he could see the two-tone couple glistening beneath the blue spotlight, dancing slowly, sweating, hardly moving pressed that tight against each other.

In a dress that matched her pale freckled skin, the white woman confused Jimmy Ray by keeping her eyes closed. He couldn’t figure out if she was just trying to be trouble out on another cheap night on the town or was she scared, not knowing what to do to get away from the Black man’s grip?

Jimmy Ray eased his way through the crowd. Close enough now to watch the Black man’s hands, he felt uncomfortable, embarrassed at the way the man held the girl against him with his large palm pulling at the small of her back.

None of this would be happening if the owner didn’t let Black people in the club. Why make normal white folks uncomfortable by mixing races in the first place? Not everybody wanted to mingle. I bet Black people don’t even want to be with white people most times unless you’re a Black man looking for white women. Then you crave it. You need it. You take it the same as heroin or robbing a liquor store.

Jimmy Ray moved closer.

It’s 1945. The war’s over. We won.

Does that give Blacks the right to dance with our women? Go dance with the Germans or the Japs. We got rules here, even laws that say no crossbreed marriage. That includes slow dancing. I was too young to enlist after Pearl Harbor but I would still love to kill some Japs. Just look at them, not even human with their teeth and thick glasses.

The Germans at least look like us except for the pretty boy Aryan blond hair and blue eyes like Swedish pinup girls. Not like guys I work with at the shoe factory. Nobody I pal around with looked like those spit-shined Nazis.

And nobody I know is Black dancing with white women. Who does this tramp think she is unless she’s dancing with him because he’s holding her hostage? Blacks play on white women’s guilt. What, you won’t go out with me because I’m Black?  Somebody better save white women before it’s too late. These girls don’t know better and don’t sense how dangerous it is to be out alone and vulnerable without somebody like me looking after them.

Jimmy Ray would have tapped the Black man on the shoulder real hard and cut in had he known how to dance. His mother tried to teach him when he was about 14, but he felt silly there in the living room trying to learn how to dance with his own mother, holding her at arm’s length moving two steps to the left and two steps to the right like some country clod. Dropping his hands after a few awkward minutes of feeling like a pervert and ducking his head so his mother wouldn’t see him blush, he ran out back to shoot targets with his deer rifle. Now, that he could do. Jimmy Ray sure knew how to shoot. Blasting bullets through beer cans made him feel better than learning to swing and sway with Sammy Kaye.

When the song ended the Black man and the white woman turned and went in separate directions. Jimmy Ray followed the Black man outside where they stood smoking cigarettes at opposite ends of the parking lot. The Black man walked one way up the street. Jimmy Ray walked the other.

The feelings that made him sick to his stomach and dizzy with anger that night stayed with him.

All those years later, for whatever the reason, Jimmy Ray thought about the white girl as he loaded his rifle.

He thought of the Black man as he pulled the trigger.

Fate didn’t care which Black face came to mind, the dancer or the preacher.

As far as Jimmy Ray was concerned, they all looked alike.

News of the ceramic baby Jesus stolen from the church manger scene broke like five-dollar dinner plates in a drunken wedding anniversary argument. In the chilly aftermath, Big Mike’s words went viral, shooting off from his big Pittsburgh mouth like fireworks or foam from a shaken can of Iron City popped the day bosses at the last steel mill within driving distance laid him off.

All over Pittsburgh, especially in his Southside neighborhood, Big Mike’s bold edict lives each year at Christmas when countless celebrants repeat his words as they raise a glass and toast the Nativity. That day in history Big Mike made three little words famous.

“Take me, jagoff,” he said.

Big Mike locked and loaded his favorite word as soon as he read the Sunday paper reporting the theft, registering raw contempt in his limited manner of expression. But that’s all he needed. Pittsburghers got the point.

“Jagoff,” he said.

Looking at his wife Alice he lowered his voice to a cross between a rattlesnake hiss and a psycho whisper the way he always did when he was ready to snap even when he didn’t have too much to drink.

“Do you believe this shit?”

“Excuse me,” Alice said.

“Some jagoff stole the baby Jesus right out of the manger scene at St. Pat’s.”

Alice stiffened.

“Where was Little Mike when it happened?”

Hunched over an overflowing bowl of Lucky Charms, 14-year-old Little Mike picked his nose and took immediate offense.

“Mom, I’m on juvenile probation, OK? I’m on my best behavior. I pee in a bottle every day.”

“Don’t blame the kid,” Big Mike said. “The cops profiled him because he’s Irish and looks like me.”

With all the work involved in baking gingerbread men Little Mike left headless and strewn all over the kitchen, shopping and everything else Alice had to do that her family didn’t appreciate this time of year, she couldn’t be bothered with a swiped statue normally stored in a musty Catholic Church closet.

“So some jagoff stole Mary’s little lamb. What do you want me to do about it?”

“Show some respect,” Big Mike said.

“OK, what are you going to do about it?”

“Don’t push, Alice.”

“I’m not the one daring Mr. Jagoff to take me.”

By dusk Big Mike was stretched out on his postage stamp-sized front lawn, lying in the manger he built from two-by-fours he stole from a construction site and planned to sell. He stuffed the manger with pink and green colored straw left over from the Easter beer can roll the guys at the Irish Club did for the poor kids each year. A handmade sign Big Mike made with Little Mike’s graffiti spray paint and stuck in the grass beside him said, “TAKE ME JAGOFF!”

Reclining in what Alice derisively called his “waddling clothes,” he drank a six pack before anybody in the neighborhood stopped to ask him what he was doing.

“Using myself as bait for the jagoffs,” Big Mike said.

Wrapping himself in an itchy tan Army blanket he bought when the marriage counselor suggested they try camping in the state park a couple of years ago, he tied a white clothesline around his belly so the front wouldn’t open and expose his privates. That’s all he needed, to expose his privates in the manger while portraying the Christ child at Christmas.

“You’ll freeze to death,” Alice said.

Big Mike pointed to the five lumps in the Army blanket.

“Hot water bottles,” he said. “I duct taped them to myself like a suicide bomber.”

By Christmas Eve, thanks to cable TV and social media, the whole world knew Big Mike’s name. The Steelers didn’t matter. Neither did the Pirates or the shuttered steel mills for that matter. National television newscasters debated on the air whether Federal Communications Commission rules allowed them to quote Big Mike. A local historian explained how The Oxford English Dictionary acknowledges the Three Rivers slang as a legitimate word meaning an utterly “stupid, irritating or contemptable person.”

Big Mike didn’t need a dictionary to explain the difference between right and wrong and the breakdown of 21^st Century society. He could smell a jagoff coming a mile away. Standing on the steps of his red brick row house in his bare feet in mid-December, he used what academic linguists called fighting words every time a newscaster shoved a microphone under his nose and he repeated his challenge.

“Take me, jagoff,” he said.

As you might expect, the reviews were mixed. You were either for him or against him. Men mostly rooted for Big Mike. Handmade signs went up all over town, in bar and office windows and even on a couple of billboards. Women saw him as just another big goof like their husbands or boyfriends, overreacting, loaded and making an ass out of himself for the holidays.

Big Mike saw himself otherwise, of course, and explained his pure intentions to Alice.

“I’m like them Christmas mice ornaments we put out each year my mother gave us, the ones I thought were real stuffed rats when I was a kid,” he said.

Alice looked at Big Mike like he lost his mind, found it then sold it on EBay at a discount.

 “How are you like the Christmas mice, Mike?”

“Weird but lovable,” he said.

Within two days news crews started showing up from all over the world.

“I’m a Christmas miracle,” Big Mike told the BBC.

And so he was the reason for the season, confident enough to drink two six packs of Iron City a night and let people take pictures and selfies for free. Not an argument or fist fight broke out at Big Mike’s Christmas crèche while he sprawled in the manger. Senior citizens sometimes blessed themselves when Big Mike belched.

“If that doesn’t signal world peace, nothing does,” Big Mike told CNN.

“You know what you’re doing is sacrilegious,” Alice said one night when the crowds went home and Big Mike came back inside.

Incredulous, he highlighted his success.

“You been counting the cash in the donation basket at the end of my shift?”

“Three grand so far,” she said.

“It’s a godsend,” Big Mike said.

Alice saw the opening and tried to lay hands on her own Christmas miracle.

“Can I buy a new vacuum cleaner?”

“And a crock pot for the kielbasa,” Big Mike said.

That was their best Christmas ever.

Little Mike even got sprung from juvenile probation.

And nobody stole Big Mike from his gala Yuletide display.

Not even a jagoff would want him.

Laughing aloud at the far end of the state prison cell block, two veteran prison guards on duty in the hospital unit for the criminally insane snuck Marlboros under the stairs and gawked toward the cell in the middle of the isolation unit.

“Go on,” Christopher Rawlings said. “Go on down and see this crazy bastard for yourself.”

Corrections Officer Matthew Ford dropped his cigarette on the cement floor, squashed the butt with his spit-shined tactical boot and strolled to the middle of the cell block where he stopped to eavesdrop through the metal door slot.

The inmate inside screeched like a rabid hoot owl.

“There’s COVID in the giblet gravy,” he said.

Looking through the small cell window as he passed, Ford saw the naked prisoner with the homemade face tattoos of a spider and a fly holding his hand to his ear with his elbow bent the way you would if you were cradling a telephone. Ford couldn’t make out another faded green tattoo at the base of the inmate’s skull and another above his nose between his reddish-blond eyebrows.

“There’s COVID in the white meat, too,” the inmate said. “I don’t eat dark meat but Chinese spies put it in there, too.

Stolen cell phones, no pun intended, occasionally showed up in deranged inmates’ hands. But this nut wasn’t holding a phone. He was barely holding on to his sanity and probably lost what was left of his mind a long time ago.  The inmate was talking in two different voices, a man’s voice and a woman’s voice, talking for two different people, talking for himself and for a female who wasn’t even there.

Now the maniac began to laugh, a long, high pitched howl that sent a chill up Ford’s back. This kid scared him and Ford was a black belt, a combat veteran and all around shit-kicking bad ass. Yeah, this kid scared him.

“I’m gonna ask for seconds,” the inmate said into his imaginary telephone. “I want all the COVID I can eat. Gobble gobble.”

 Ford went back to the control room where he read a gun magazine and tried to put insanity out of his mind. Still, the guard wondered who this madman thought he was talking to. Thank God this sicko was locked up so nobody else would die.

Lunatic number 865-H-87 listened to his girlfriend’s voice pulse like an open head wound.

“I’m sorry we won’t be having Thanksgiving dinner together, baby,” she said. “I’d love to dig into those giblets with you. We’re a team. Nothing can hurt us. Nothing can stop us. Nothing can keep us apart.”

The skinny inmate with the twisted mind and scarred wrists teared up.

“I’m so happy you came into my life,” he said. “You’re a lifesaver.”

“A life ender, too,” she said.

Shrieking like a loon, the frazzled inmate imitated the hysterical high pitched howl of a woman, then a man, then tried to put their holiday screeches together.

“You’re so funny,” he said.

The inmate listened to her every word, tasting her breath on his brain stem with love pounding in his heart as she whispered marshmallow soft words deep into his dark soul.

“And you’re my little sweet potato,” she said.

The unhinged inmate began to hyperventilate.

“Mashed sweet potatoes,” he said. “Like the leftover mashed brains I’ll chew from bloody cracked heads of people who put me here.”

“We’ll get you out,” she said.

“When?”

“Before Christmas.”

“How?

“Just leave that to me,” she said.

“Can we kill somebody for Christmas?”

“Ho ho ho,” she said.

Again they howled.

“I miss you,” the fried inmate said.

“I miss you, too, my little pumpkin, but I have to go,” she said. “We’ll talk tomorrow.”

“I love you, Syrah,” he said.

“I love you, too, Pug.”

“The Edge… There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.”

Hunter S. Thompson, Hell’s Angels

Imagine the primal power of an outlaw motorcycle army thundering through otherwise civilized streets on the road to a cemetery. Think about the force of the mighty Hells Angels intent on a sacred mission of raw revenge. Ponder their tragic loss as they step closer to the edge of their dead brother’s grave. Take a moment to reflect on just what they plan to do about Christian Harvey Tate’s murder.

Now ask yourself if justice will be served.

Nineteen years later, thick grass blankets Christian Tate’s tomb. A gentle breeze feels like baby’s breath as it blows past emerald leaves on the shade tree that marks his final resting place. Morning is quiet here as his black headstone shines even on a gray day.

The rumble of rolling Harleys that carried about 700 of Tate’s grieving brothers to Santa Maria, Calif., for his 2002 funeral has long ago disappeared. What remains on the Central Coast halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco are whispered prayers for a fallen Angel, threats and blood oaths to avenge his loss matched with promises to live to the fullest his legacy of freedom.

Payback is required no matter how long the mission takes.

The violent death and unsolved murder of this righteous Hells Angel on a barren stretch of road near Ludlow, Calif., remains a mystery. Few can or will say whether his fatal shooting is connected to the shootout that killed three other bikers (two Hells Angels and a rival Mongol) and took place around the same time at a gambling casino in nearby Laughlin, Nev.

What can be said is this: Family, friends and brother bikers swear almost everybody loved the fearless 28-year-old renegade his Hells Angels brothers called Christo.

Now he’s an Angel’s angel, a hallowed symbol of all that’s holy about this unholy brotherhood. But Christian Tate was more than just a brother. Deep personal roots reflect from the gravestone that glistens wet in the damp mist of a cloudy summer day.

The engraving on the front of the stone reads as follows:

Christian Harvey Tate; May 15, 1973; April 27, 2002; Treasured By Family And Loved By All; Lily’s Gentle Father; Samantha’s Forever Love; Two Souls Eternal.

The United States Coast Guard emblem is carved into the left side of the tombstone. A simple cross that resembles the metal cross a loving son once made for his mother is carved on the right side of the marker.

At its base the inscription reads: “When you awaken in the morning’s hush, I am the swift uplifting rush of quiet birds encircling flight, I am the soft star that shines at night.”

One night long ago, in September 2002, after paying my respects at Christian’s grave, I sat with his father, Steve, 50, and grandfather, Harvey, 77, who listened in deep silence as I read aloud the poem from a photograph they showed me.

The dining room table of their neat Santa Maria home overflowed with photos of the funeral, pictures of unforgiving Angels burying their motorcycle martyr using sharp shovels to pile moist earth on a fresh burial ground.

Many of these same untamed men also laid tender homegrown orchids on the coffin to soothe Christian’s last journey in floral colors bright as new chopper headlights that shine through the darkest night.

Grandpa Harvey Tate, who had not long before the funeral lost his wife of 53 years and bought his first motorcycle in 1944, grew those orchids in the garden of the same Santa Maria home where Christian laughed and loved as a joyous presence since he was a baby. When the child grew old enough to understand, he, too, learned at the hands of the master how to raise and care for these delicate, exotic flowers.

Hard men who specialize in orchids are hard to find, but Christian’s dad also spoke of the joy of growing orchids and the bigger joy of raising the growing boy of whom he was so very proud. Big, tough, fair and bright, Christian was a Santa Maria High graduate and Coast Guard veteran who distinguished himself as a member of the sea search and rescue squad.

In another photograph Christian is young, handsome and smiling. Standing beside a Coast Guard helicopter he looks like he’s ready for anything. Such acute awareness further complicates his murder.

“My son was smart,” Steve said.

Still, he died fast and hard, shot several times in the back and torso while heading home on his bike to a family party in San Diego where he lived and faithfully wore the colors of the “Dago” chapter.

Who executed Christian Tate on that dark, bone dry desert highway? Rumors and speculation run wild. The Tate men vowed that first night we talked to never give up their search for the killer.

Another picture they passed around in hands cracked from lifetimes of labor and exhibited at the head of the table drives them deeper into their cause.

Lily, Christian’s infant daughter, smiles with big eyes from the center of the cherished framed photo. The men said when she one day bows her head above her daddy’s grave, she deserves to know what happened to her smiling guardian Angel.

By the summer of 2003 Steve’s tone had turned harsh as he spit a man’s name as if deadly poison filled his mouth.

“Bill,” he said.

Leaning thick arms on the dining room table, Steve Tate’s face twisted into a furious look. A growl of emotion erupted in confusion.

“Who’s Bill?”

According to a federal criminal indictment, “Bill” is the member of the Mongols motorcycle club whom Hells Angels blamed for killing Christian when bullets tore into his Angels colors and blew him off his motorcycle on a desolate stretch of Interstate 40 in San Bernardino County.

“On or about September 17, 2002,” a Hells Angel “was provided with the physical description of a Mongol named “Bill” who it was believed was bragging about killing (San Diego Hells Angel) member Christian Tate,” the indictment said.

Federal prosecutors charged members and associates of Christian Tate’s former “Dago” chapter with crimes ranging from drug dealing to racketeering to extortion to “acquiring firearms, scopes and silencers to be used to murder Mongols,” according to the indictment.

Several “Dago” Angels eventually pleaded guilty to conspiracy and other charges and served time in federal prison. Other mass arrests of Hells Angels in Arizona also gave Tate family and friends hope that police investigating the murder might one day solve the case. Undercover federal agents in that roundup infiltrated the Angels and became trusted confidants.

Since Hells Angels rarely cooperate willingly with police, it’s not surprising that detectives investigating Tate’s assassination long ago said they had not received help from Tate’s former brothers in the club. Yet, indictments and the threat of lengthy prison sentences have a way of uncovering information that might otherwise never surface.

Cops and accused alike sometimes cut deals amid the murky middle ground that exists within the law. Even among a normally stoic brotherhood, Christian Tate’s memory could drive some members to help his still grieving loved ones find consolation.

To be sure, Christian Tate took great pride in living the life of a fully patched Hells Angel. He also felt great pride to be an honorably discharged Coast Guard vet who helped in the grueling search for the bodies of two California Highway Patrol officers who were swept away in 1998 when Highway 166 collapsed after heavy rains.

Angel or no Angel, Christian Tate remains the victim of a ruthless crime. Steve Tate said police never called to tell him about “Bill” or discuss how the indictment for a murder conspiracy might help shake loose more information about his son’s killing. The Tate family first heard that news on television.

Despite being ignored, Steve Tate and his family placed faith in the system because they are cornerstones of the system, hard-working, good citizen taxpayers who have always done their part to help their neighbors.

All Angels aren’t angels, but Steve Tate has no reason to believe his son was anything but a free spirit who rode the open road and valued the camaraderie of rugged men like himself. In the absence of evidence to the contrary, Christian Tate deserves the benefit of the doubt.

On another day, Steve tried to relax while daughter Brandi busied herself cooking for her children and remembering so many good times growing up.

Steve and Harvey had taught Christian to ride motorbikes as a child. Those childhood lessons grew into a passion for building, repairing and riding motorcycles. One day Christian, 12, grabbed a pizza pan from the kitchen and tied it to his bike, instructing 11-year-old Brandi to sit tight and hang on as he pulled her around the yard in a cloud of dust, just two kids laughing and loving the innocence of their lives.

Such revered memories struggle to live amid today’s merciless reality. But remembrances of that soft past help cushion the grim details of death. Yes, even an uncertain future holds hope. But fulfillment will only occur when somebody pays for pulling the trigger.

That “bill” is long overdue.

In May 2004 the exact reason why 300 or so Hells Angels rolled into Santa Maria was anybody’s guess.

The manager of the Preisker Lane campground where the Angels set up headquarters for a Central Coast run said she’d been leaving flyers all over the place announcing that the site is biker friendly.

“This is beautiful country,” said the manager, who asked that her name not be used.

Steve Tate has another theory.

“I’d like to think it was a memorial run for my son,” he said.

But he doesn’t know for sure. Was this gathering of Angels just a coincidence so close to the second anniversary of Christian Tate’s shooting death and subsequent funeral that drew hundreds of Angels to the city cemetery from all over the world? Or, was the get-together a powerful public acknowledgment that members of this notorious tribe will always remember where Tate was born and where he is buried?

On a late Friday afternoon the first wave of Angels crowded the registration desk to check in at the Holiday Inn on North Broadway. Society’s best known barbarians all wore the red and white colors of the club. Fat Boy silver hogs and fire-breathing custom painted road dawgs shined in the sun and lined the parking lot outside the hotel. More glistening Harleys ringed the building. Swaggering Angels bouncing on beat-up boots hung loose and cool everywhere. This gang doesn’t party in Santa Maria often. But they showed this time ostensibly for a Mother’s Day run that included guests, wives and children.

Across the street from the Holiday Inn and just down Preisker Lane, the Angels set up a security post at the gate to the Pines Campground where they reserved space for the weekend and paid in advance. Beneath the cover of a huge rented tent, Angels prepared to cook and serve three meals a day, including a Saturday night barbecue at $30 a ticket.

A group of prospective club members called prospects guarded the entrance and milled around a sign that warned the property was closed to the general public, although the campground manager had given long-term residents red passes that allowed them to come and go.

I stopped by the gate and asked if prospects would tell Ventura chapter president and club national spokesman George Christie I’d like to talk with him. Christie, who has since left the club, denied my request.

Steve Tate and his father stopped by early Saturday night. They invited me inside as their guest, but I respectfully declined. Most Angels who had come from all over California and elsewhere hadn’t known Christian, Steve said, but a few remembered him well.

“I brought photographs of Chris on his bike and handed them all out,” he said.

Only one member of his son’s San Diego chapter was around when the Tates showed up.

“He used to lift weights with Chris,” Steve Tate said.

Steve and his dad walked around the campground and visited for a while before deciding to head home rather than stay for the barbecue. Seeing Angels having fun with family and friends felt good. Enjoying Christian’s brothers’ company felt good.

But the void hammered hurt into their hearts.

For the loving family of a murder victim, pain always looms nearby. For a Tate, no matter how many Angels get together for a run, the most important one will always be missing.

Without renewed interest from police, Tate knows his son’s death will continue to be forgotten.

“I think my son deserves more than that,” Tate said. “I have not had one call from any law enforcement officer saying, ‘Steve we haven’t given up on you.’  I think about it every day. There’s not a day goes by that I don’t think about my son. But there’s no closure.”

Steve Tate meant no disrespect when he said he believed police might have worked a whole lot harder to solve the case had it been a cop’s kid who died on that motorcycle rather than his boy. But he will always hold cops responsible for a thorough, ongoing investigation.

“It’s the responsibility of the police, by God, that was my son, he was a good boy. It’s no closer than it was three years ago.”

“I want justice,” he said.

After almost two decades we should all still want justice.

When I checked last month with the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department, homicide detectives called the Tate murder “an open cold case” and said they could provide no other information. Police wouldn’t even tell me what reports I could see or if they returned Tate’s prized motorcycle to his family.

Police in California and elsewhere need to work harder. If Christian Tate had been a cop’s son like I am, I have no doubt investigators would have taken his death more seriously and treated the family with ongoing respect.

Steve Tate still has not heard from police at any level.

Although President Joe Biden’s Justice Department still works overtime to hunt down outlaw motorcycle club criminals, how much time do agents put into tracking down killers who gun down unarmed outlaw motorcycle club members?  What do federal law enforcement officials at the FBI, the ATF and the DEA know about Christian Tate’s murder? Even decorated retired special agents should want to use all their muscle to right a vicious wrong. 

Did the feds ever locate and interview “Bill?” How hard did America’s supposedly best and brightest gangbusters look for the mystery Mongol that the government’s own indictment says Hells Angels believed had been bragging about killing Christian Harvey Tate?

If cops past and present put half the time into tracking murder suspects that Grandpa Tate put into nurturing and transplanting orchids, America would be far better off because liberty and justice for all then might truly be served.

Not long before he died in 2004, Harvey Tate spent an afternoon with me and my wife, walking us slowly, gently and ever so carefully through the meticulous process of transplanting some of his exquisite plants. With the delicate touch of a surgeon this weathered and seasoned motorcycle master arranged flowers, spliced stalks and patted down dirt in all the right places.

Then he smiled his Wild West cowboy smile and presented us with the newly repotted flowers to take home as earthborn bounty given in love from one living soul to others willing to care for nature’s gifts.

The last time I saw Harvey Tate was in the intensive care unit before he died at 79, after a strong male nurse asked if Grandpa could hear him and to squeeze his hand if he could. When he took Grandpa Tate’s hand he quickly flinched, squinting in pain as this seemingly unconscious yet still powerful old man on his death bed squeezed, held on and refused to let go.

We should all refuse to let go of Christian Harvey Tate’s unsolved murder. We should all hold on and squeeze as hard as we can.

Justice only defines our savage land as long as we do something about injustice.

Only then do we step away from the edge.

Only then do we continue to live free and ride.