Nicole did understand. If she were being truthful with herself, her interactions with the Bandidos were some of the most gratifying she had ever felt, and pushed aside earlier notions about what success should look like. It was like entering a door to a side of herself she always suspected was there. Some of the Bandidos resented Nicole having her own bike — Old Ladies were supposed to ride on the back of their man’s bike. She was proud of her red low-rider, and fought to use it, adding provocation by wearing her patched vest while riding. Whenever Shane caught her doing that, a black eye followed. When the fighting was at its worst, Shane would demand the patch back. No fucking way you’re going to get my patch back, Nicole would say — despite all the madness, or because of it, the patch at least felt like something that was hers.

The more Old Ladies she met, the more stories she heard that made her hair stand on end. After hearing the litany of abuse they suffered, Nicole’s black eyes didn’t seem so bad by comparison. Most of the other women were missing teeth and had permanent burns on their arms.

Shane began doing cocaine. Nicole had never tried hard drugs, but soon she was using as well. Nicole and Shane hosted a visiting couple from New Mexico, Bandido Boner and his Old Lady, Shirley. Squirrelly Shirley, as she was known, had been gorgeous in her time. Her father had been a Hells Angel. Bandidos raped her when she was 17 years old. While they were staying with Shane and Nicole, Boner had to leave town for a funeral with Shane, and Shirley stayed behind. One night, exchanging stories about their lives, she breezily mentioned, “I was buried in a box for a month.”

Nicole’s jaw dropped.

Shirley had been “bad,” stealing some meth from two of the Brothers, so they buried her in a box. They exhumed her every few days and shot her up with a batch of newly cooked meth to check if it was poison.

When Shane got back from the funeral he confided to Nicole that Boner had stolen from the New Mexico chapter and there was a contract out on him. That afternoon, the Bandidos came to pick up Boner and Shirley. No one ever saw them again. Nicole heard the MC owned a ranch in South Dakota where the brothers were said to feed human bodies to the pigs.

By chance, Nicole’s law office was in the same building as the Colorado Bureau of Investigations. They were on the second floor and she was on the fourth floor. Nicole, always outgoing and approachable, became friends with most of the agents. Agent Brian DeMarco was a favorite; he was cheery and chubby and always made time to chat. The agents didn’t know anything about her husband, and didn’t know about her secret life with the Bandidos. DeMarco even admired Nicole’s red motorcycle, which she sometimes rode to work, rolling it into the parking lot and climbing down in her dark blue Ralph Lauren pantsuit.

Riding the elevators and chatting in the halls, the agents would tell Nicole about some of their investigations. In the parking lot, she’d tell DeMarco about a weekend trip over the Rocky Mountains and he would tell her about stakeouts. “We’re following a motorcycle gang,” he said. “The Bandidos.” DeMarco would ask to see photos of her trips, which she would conveniently forget to bring.

One weekend, she went with the Bandidos to a swap meet in Pueblo in southern Colorado. She was walking through a street filled with vendors when she spotted a few faces she remembered seeing in the elevator of her building going to the CBI. She noticed them walking behind the Bandidos. She ducked into alleys, behind booths, desperate that none of them catch sight of her. At a rally, Nicole spotted the undercover agents and told the Brothers. She was brought to the international president of the Bandidos — Old Ladies never got an audience with the international president — and she told him what she knew. “I remember feeling that I was doing a good job,” Nicole recalls.

Nicole’s life as a law-abiding lawyer was crashing headlong into a cocaine-fueled world of risk and bottomless loyalty. She began to act the spy at work, taking note of anyone getting off on the second floor. In one exchange at the office, Agent DeMarco mentioned to her the CBI was going undercover at another swap meet, this time in Denver, and they were hoping to “catch some action.” Hundreds of Bandidos were coming from out of state. Nicole warned Shane to take precautions, and the MC went on high alert.

Shane often left town for business with the Bandidos. He prided himself on taking care of Nicole by leaving an eight ball of cocaine. Before long it wasn’t enough, and she’d run out of cocaine before he returned. She started breaking into his stash, cutting what was left with aspirin so he wouldn’t notice. When he figured out what was happening he beat her senseless. Then he got a small safe. Nicole figured out how to break into it. She sometimes ended up with two black eyes, and had to find ways to hide her injuries from the law enforcement agents at her office building trained to be suspicious.

Nicole’s ability to feed the MC information about the cops, combined with Shane’s brutality, made the pair the power couple within the club. Where Shane had seemed rootless before, he had ambition and drive now.

One night, Nicole and Shane went for dinner with Bandido Expo and his new girlfriend. She wasn’t “property,” and Nicole was told to instruct the girl how to act properly. Nicole realized she was becoming like the other Old Ladies. After dinner the guys decided the four of them should have a few drinks at the What the Hell Saloon. They were laughing as they walked in the door, but Shane stopped in his tracks and his face went white when he looked up. Sitting at the bar and spread throughout the rest of the place were twenty-five Hells Angels. They were from California and had come to town to discuss bringing a chapter back to Colorado. The Bandidos had worked hard to keep the Angels at bay, and this was not a welcome development. Shane told the girls to go sit at the far end of the bar. The Angels noticed them and everyone in the place stopped talking and stared at Expo and Shane. Shane, stepping out of sight, got on his phone and within minutes another twenty Bandidos showed up at the bar.

Expo’s girlfriend, mad that he was ignoring her, started to cause a scene. Nicole grabbed her and dragged her outside, where they got a cab back to Nicole’s house. Later they heard sirens wailing. It sounded like the entire police force was racing toward the What The Hell.

Shane, Expo and the other Bandidos appeared at the house shortly after and tossed the girls their guns. There had been a shootout, and one of the Hells Angels might have been hit. As quickly as they appeared, they left. Surrounded by the guns — literally dozens of them piled on the floor — part of Nicole wanted to run away. She had always thought she’d be able to leave if she had to, but looking around her at this arsenal, she realized with clarity she couldn’t. She was in the middle of a war. If she ever tried to get out, they would come after her, she realized, and they would catch her. Then she’d end up locked in a box, or food for the pigs. She felt sick to her stomach.

The Bandidos returned two days later to collect their guns. Striker told Nicole she was a good Old Lady.

Just like that, everything seemed to crumble. “It’s like I always knew that my two worlds couldn’t live in harmony together, and that at some point they would collide and something awful would happen,” Nicole remembers.

Nicole felt trapped. She was addicted to cocaine. Like that little cave she escaped to on Golden Mountain as a child, it became her refuge. Her drug use began to affect her work. She would fume with anger when Shane came home after days being away, without explanation. She knew when he hadn’t been sleeping; he was jittery, with bloodshot eyes. She and Shane would get into shouting matches before the roar of the departing motorcycles of fellow Bandidos had even faded. On February 28, 2003, he began to rip pictures off the wall, stomping on them. Then he moved to her mother’s antiques, sweeping them onto the ground one after another, where they shattered.

He looked up at her and smirked. “How do you like me now?”

A fury took hold of Nicole and she punched him right in the mouth. His lips exploded and the blood splattered over his face and hers. His trademark smirk was now a bloody snarl. This was the first time she’d fought back. She turned and tried to run for the stairs, but she wasn’t fast enough. Shane jumped on her and rode her to the floor. She was on her back and his hands were around her throat, choking her. She couldn’t breathe and her vision became dim at the edges. She was dying.

Just then there was a knock at the door. “Police.”

Shane rushed upstairs into the bedroom and Nicole picked herself up and opened the door. Blood covered her face. The officer explained a neighbor had called 911. Nicole’s gaze swept over the house. There was glass everywhere, pictures on the floor, chairs tipped over. Shane had left a large bag of marijuana on the coffee table, and drugs were scattered up and down the house. She told the officer that everything was fine and slammed the door. Then she grabbed the bag of pot and ran upstairs to Shane.

Police flooded in. They separated Nicole and Shane. Agent DeMarco was right behind the police, looking at her — she was caught. She felt she had betrayed him. Her worlds hadn’t just collided, they had exploded into each other.

Nicole was exactly the leverage the Bureau of Investigations needed. They’d been unable to make a case against the Bandidos but they could now go through her to get to them.

In spite of everything, Nicole begged the police not to arrest Shane. She screamed for them to get out of their house. She could hear police questioning Shane and she shouted until she was hoarse that they had no right to. Before she knew it, an officer handcuffed her and took her outside into a police car. Shane, cuffed behind his back, was herded into a different police car.

Law enforcement went back into the house with cameras and lugged out bags of evidence. She watched officers confer with each other, wondering what they were saying about her. What was DeMarco thinking about the woman he had considered a colleague in the halls of their office? She remembered all those times he’d asked for her photos from her weekend trips. Had he suspected her the whole time?

They were taken to the police station, fingerprinted, and held in separate cells. Nicole became hysterical, too overwhelmed to digest the chaos. Striker, a bail bondsman, bailed them out the next morning.

Prosecutors charged Nicole for the drugs in the house, which was in her name. After their investigation, they added more charges and made a federal RICO case — activating punitive racketeering laws geared toward organized crime. They alleged that Nicole and Shane used her law firm and the convenience store to launder money for the Bandidos and characterized their operation as a full-blown drug ring. Nicole was staring down the barrel of twenty years in a federal penitentiary.

With charges of domestic abuse pending against him, a restraining order barred Shane from staying at the house. Nicole remained there by herself. The day she came home after being arrested her answering machine was full. Half the messages were from Old Ladies asking her to call them. The other half were Bandido Brothers demanding that she make contact with them. They were afraid Nicole was going to turn on them to cut a deal. She was terrified what they were going to do to her, and now she was on her own, unprotected. She didn’t return any of the calls.

Adding insult to injury, her cable TV was out. She called for repair. The cable guy examined the usual bundle of wires. Climbing down the ladder, there was fear visible in his eyes.

“You got bugs, lots of them,” he said, and hurried away.

Law enforcement had tapped her house with electronic surveillance devices, video and audio. Dreams of running for mayor of Waterton had been replaced with a desperate fight to save her life. Nicole began to shake like a leaf. Under the microscope from both the police and the Bandidos, she would sit in her shower, weeping. After a while, she started walking and dancing around the house naked for the cameras. She would have conversations with the bugging devices, asking them if they liked what they saw. But when she had to cry, she’d go back in the shower so they couldn’t see.

The Waterton police harassed her. They would knock on her door like clockwork at 6 AM, complaining about violations of city ordinances — overgrown weeds or equipment in her alley. She didn’t store equipment there, but every night engines and metal contraptions would appear there. Nicole theorized the police planted them, or nudged someone else to plant them. She’d have them removed and they’d reappear by the next morning. The local police also began following her. At one point, ten police vehicles drove near her and forced her to turn at every corner until she was in Denver County, at which point a Denver County Sheriff’s car pulled her over. “What the hell did you do to piss them off?” asked the county officer. Waterton had her truck impounded.

Nicole hired her own attorney and explained that the police arrested her after an illegal search. But her attorney chafed. If they challenged the search, they would never be given a plea deal. Nicole knew the law. Her legal skills, in fact, were the last asset she had. She convinced her attorney she could prove the police overstepped the law.

Armed with Nicole’s arguments, they took the matter to court and won, and won again at the Appellate Court. A final hearing was held in the Colorado Supreme Court, which confirmed that authorities had violated the Fourth Amendment and conducted an illegal search and seizure. On March 22, 2004, the case against Nicole was dismissed. She had always believed that one day she would argue in front of the highest courts. In an ironic twist, she had done just that, only as a defendant. The case created new legal precedent in her district, a simultaneous monument to her bad choices and her legal finesse.

But it didn’t change reality: everything she had worked to achieve had vanished. She had lost her license to practice law.

Their dream house was lost to a foreclosure, the same kind she used to oversee at her previous law firm. She was forced out of her own firm. The couple also lost the convenience store. She even lost her real family, who were so disappointed and disoriented they removed themselves from her life.

With nowhere else to go, Nicole reluctantly moved back in with Shane despite the restraining order. She was more afraid than ever to break up with Shane, and by staying with him she also signaled the MC she had not turned her back on them. Shane blamed her for everything. Her self-worth, wispy by now, vanished. She felt responsible for the mess they were in, and there seemed to be only darkness ahead. Nicole began returning to her childhood safe space, the cave on the west side of Golden Mountain, in search of inner strength and guidance. She would also go almost every weekend to the animal shelter, weeping as she pet all the animals through their bars.