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As he followed Dex’s nod, he saw Showdown doing the same.
The Tezcat Kings MC, the whole club by the look, were walking in.
Shit. Maybe the moms and pops had been right to break camp.
The Kings and the Bulls had been allies back in the day, when the Perro Blanco cartel had been nothing more than Irina Volkov’s band of chihuahuas, handpicked by the Russian bratva queen to build up her power south of the border.
Hadn’t that blown up in her face, though. Hers and everybody’s standing with her.
Including the Tezcat Kings. They’d balked hard when the Perros, under Julio Santaveria, surged to prominence and all but usurped the Volkovs’ drug trade. Based in Arizona, the Kings had some of the closest contact with Santaveria’s psychopaths, and they’d taken heavy losses. When they’d stood firm against that onslaught, refusing to be brought to heel, Santaveria had torn a hole through the middle of their clubhouse and their town.
When they’d seen the threat coming, they’d called their friends in to back them up, and the Bulls had been one of their closest friends. Becker and Miguel Hernandez, the Kings’ president at the time, had been actual friends, not just allies.
He’d wanted to stand with the Kings. But the Bulls voted it down. They were in deep with the Perros themselves, with women and children to protect, and most of them weren’t ready to take on that fight.
Eight had voted with Becker, because he’d always voted with Beck and he didn’t have anything at risk anyway. But it wasn’t enough. And in hindsight, the Kings had played their hand too soon.
The truth was, everybody had been fucking terrified of the Perros. Santaveria had proved again and again he was a homicidal maniac, and they’d all taken hard hits by then. Not until they had an ally within the Perros—who was a fucking undercover Fed—had they had a chance to put that dog down.
Now Miguel was dead, tortured to death with eight of his brothers, and the decimated Tezcat Kings were no friends to the Bulls.
Eight made eye contact with Renato Molina, the current Kings president, and gave him a nod. It was not returned.
“We got trouble?” Showdown asked. They’d been allies with the Kings, too, but were only incidental friends. They hadn’t betrayed a friendship and left a club to be massacred. The Bulls had done that.
Shifting his attention slightly, he found Fitz. “We paid for safe passage, right? Are we still on their turf?” Flagstaff was the Kings’ home base; they’d ridden through there a couple hours earlier.
Fitz, their road captain, nodded his shaggy head. “They claim Arizona all the way to the border, but this isn’t turf they patrol. And yeah, we paid for the ride. We shouldn’t have trouble here.”
Renato was walking up to their long, cobbled-together table, with four Kings right behind him. Was that their whole club these days? Shit.
Eight stood, making sure not to wince as his leg sent up a spear of pain in protest. Showdown stood as well. And then Mav, and Dex, and Badger Ness, Show’s VP, and Tommy, his SAA.
Then the whole damn table stood, and Eight thought they’d have trouble from the sheer poison of all that barely-contained aggression. Everybody looked ready to rumble, right here in the dining room of the Flying J.
It was on him, he realized, to calm this shit down.
“Hey, Renato,” Eight said and stepped around the table. He held out his hand.
Renato gave it a long look before he gripped it with his own. “Eight Ball. Thought you’d be through Arizona by now.”
They were on the fucking border. Literally minutes from California.
“We’re just about outta your hair. Had to fuel up. That okay?” It chapped his ass to ask permission to stay and eat a truck-stop lunch when they’d paid thousands of dollars to ride through the state without trouble.
Non-president Eight would have said something sarcastic and probably caused a problem for somebody else to fix. Becker had been especially good at clearing out room for Eight to be an asshole. But now there was nobody to fix what he broke. Now, he had to try not to break shit. So he asked permission.
He almost offered to buy their meal as well, but if he put that offer out now, before they’d sat down, they’d pile up the tab as high as they could. Eight wasn’t looking to get ass-fucked. He’d leave some cash at the register to cover what should be a normal meal for five men. Plus tip.
Renato had yet to answer Eight’s question. He was busy scanning the table of Bulls and Horde, giving them each an estimating look.
Together, they outnumbered the Kings by a factor of four, so if trouble got started, Renato and his boys would lose handily. The problem here wasn’t whether the Kings could take the Bulls and the Horde. They couldn’t. They problem was the mess they’d make if they fought it out in a truck stop.
Another problem, Eight understood, was how a fight like that would destroy any chance the clubs had of a détente, and he didn’t want to blow the bridge up completely. Someday, they might need each other again.
Focusing on Showdown, Renato said, “You got a new charter, I hear.”
Show nodded. “Yep. In Madrone, California. Launch party tomorrow.”
