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Or maybe it wasn’t a foot in each. Maybe she had hold of each one. Maybe she could pull them together—pullhimtogether—and make a whole.
That was way too much pressure to put on one sweet young woman.
“Dex!” Eight called from the barn door. “Get in here, brother. We got a development.”
“What’s up?” He turned and headed back to the barn.
“You were extremely effective. We can’t fucking shut Dormer up.”
~oOo~
It was well past dark when Dex got home. He let the dogs out first thing. While they ran and wrestled and handled their business, he stood on the patio and let the cold sink deep, into his bones. When his pack swarmed him for attention, he sat down on the frigid bricks and loved on them.
Inside again, he took them through their meal ritual and waited until everybody was at the appropriate bowl and minding his (or her) own business. Then he went back, stripped, and got into the hottest shower he could stand.
He’d texted Kelsey from the field, after the work was done and they were about to head out, and told her he needed to be alone tonight but he’d call when he got home. He felt far too dirty now, though, to talk to her. He needed to get clean and right first, so he wouldn’t taint her with the filth of his day.
Long ago, so far back he didn’t remember the how of it, he’d figured out that the shock of going from bone-deep cold to skin-shrinking hot did a pretty fair job of getting his head out of the place it needed to be in to do the work he’d done today.
They’d killed all three men, but only Grenell had gone hard. Dormer had spilled everything, would have given up his own granny if she’d been alive, so he and Miller got bullets in the backs of their heads and then he’d taken their ink. And they’d all planted three more seeds in the Bulls’ field.
What they’d learned: the ‘Hade’s Army MC’ had started off as arrogance, butt-hurt, and stupidity. Grenell and Dormer were still salty about getting iced out of the Bulls. They hadn’t passed through the Bulls’ clubhouse at the same time, but they’d met working security at the Crazy Rose, a country bar that had been a big deal back in the day but was losing badly to the newer, bigger, more Millennial-friendly Dawghouse.
They’d both been nursing wounded egos and wanted the cred a one-percenter kutte offered, so they decided to start their own. Dormer knew Miller from the Bulls’ clubhouse, knew he’d been exiled as well. They pulled in a few riding friends, sketched up a patch and had it made, and called themselves an MC.
Of course they’d known they were trespassing. They’d wanted a war. Knowing they couldn’t fight one with the Bulls and win without some serious muscle at their back, they hung their kuttes in their closets and went looking for muscle.
They’d had to go to El Paso to find it, but an in-law of a friend of Don Allman, the ‘SAA’ of the ‘Hade’s Army MC,’ worked border patrol there, and she had a line on a south-of-the-border player looking for a way to climb on top of the shit mountain the implosion of the Perro Blanco cartel had created in Mexico.
So yes, there was a fucking drug cartel on the other side of this mess. But just now, after the Perros, and the immigration FUBAR, drug cartels were in disarray. They were, comparatively, weak, too busy jockeying for position to flex a strong arm in the States. Mostly what they were doing was killing each other and stealing product back and forth.
The druglord who gave ‘Hade’s Army’ a look had worked through an intermediary. Dormer gave them the name of the contact but insisted that they truly did not know the name of the guy at the top. Considering everything else he spilled, Eight and the rest of the Bulls in that barn believed him.
Not even a weak, disordered cartel would work with a brand-new, unproven MC. Grenell and his little buddies were assigned a series of jobs as proving ground, starting with raising fifty grand. The bullshit job JJ had gotten caught up in a year or so back had been a fundraising effort.
That they’d caught a Bull up in it had been dumb luck. Stealing from the Hounds, and the house full of drugs, hot goods and kidnapped women? Part of the test.
Which the Bulls had made sure they’d failed.
Dormer had told them that nobody knew where Don Allman and his wife were. They had not taken a holiday vacation. They’d simply disappeared.
While they were sowing the field tonight, the Bulls on the job had debriefed. What they knew: One—a new cartel was trying to sink its claws into the States, and now, thanks to Grenell and his little buddies, had Tulsa in its sights. Two—'Hade’s Army’ had been on its last gasp before today. It had been a matter of probably days before that cartel, which they’d failed, got the rest of them, and their families as well. Mexican drug cartels were not known for coloring inside the lines.
They also had confirmation that they’d liberated a substantial quantity of drugs and several human beings, with a combined street value approaching seven figures, from a Mexican cartel, but they’d already known that.
They had the name of the contact at the border, so they had avenues to explore, but what they didn’t know was still too much. They didn’t know who the druglord, or wannabe druglord, was. They didn’t know if said druglord knew the Bulls had raided that house. They didn’t know how deep their current shit lake went.
But long experience had given them one more thing to know: always expect the shit to go as deep as it could go.
Barely more than two years since they’d crawled from under Julio Santaveria’s boot, badly broken, hardly more than a year since they’d regained full health, another cartel loomed.
This time, they meant to strike before any of those crazy fuckers got hold of real power.
~oOo~
Out of the shower, his head fairly straight, Dex pulled on a pair of sweats and a flannel shirt. Leaving the shirt unbuttoned, he headed to the kitchen. They’d broken for lunch, but he hadn’t eaten since, and he had a headache, probably from low blood sugar.
He got as far as the hallway between the living room and the kitchen and then just stopped, as if he’d run out of gas. Standing there without the will to take another step, he thought he was about to lose time and tried to force his mind to focus on the things around him. That worked sometimes.
