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CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Eight knocked the gavel on the table. “Settle down, boys.”
The Bulls settled. “What’s the what, Prez?” Cooper asked.
“I talked to Niko about the run next week,” Eight said. “And I got some news on the Mexican front.”
Dex had heard this news already. He leaned back to watch his brothers take it in.
Since they’d interrogated and disposed of Grenell and two of his minions, the rest of ‘Hade’s Army MC’ had disappeared. Apollo tried to track them but found nothing that put those men outside Tulsa. Which likely meant somebody had disappeared them—and that had to have been the people they’d failed. So their trespassers had been dealt with. Completely. The storage house had ‘mysteriously’ burned to the ground—no doubt the cartel cleaning house.
Eight had been frustrated by that. He’d wanted to fuck the rest of that two-bit club hard. They’d left the club ink at the storage house as a message, and Eight had wanted the Bulls to make a big, clear statement to any others who might be paying attention that the Bulls owned Oklahoma for bikers.
Dex, on the other hand, thought they’d done enough by ending their president and VP. He also thought leaving the rest of that crew to the Mexicans was best-case, giving the cartel a place to slake their thirst for vengeance that was nowhere near the Bulls.
Apollo and Jazz hadn’t been able to ID the cartel players. Things on this side of the border trade were still fairly quiet, with the border still in the process of loosening up for traffic again and no one yet stepping in decisively to fill the Perro void, and that had the effect of looking, to a naked eye up north, like things were quiet overall, but down south there was a lot of mess and fear going on, too much for Apollo and Jazz to get clear intel. The players shifted constantly, people were dying and disappearing at a rapid-fire pace, and nobody was willing to talk. There came a point when the Bulls’ intel guys had to pull back or get tagged as snoops. But the club had to know if they were targets for some of that mess and fear.
Finally, Eight went to the Russians. Niko Volkov and his bratva were rebuilding their pipelines after the Perros, and they had contacts in the south that Apollo couldn’t reach. Asking a favor from the Volkovs always came with a big price tag, but they’d run out of all the DIY options.
“Niko says he ID’d who it was pulling Grenell’s strings,” Eight said. “He says he can handle it so there’s no beef between us and them for what we liberated from the storage house. But, no surprise, he says he wants something from us in return.”
Most of the men at the table groaned or muttered. Every man at this table would say that the ledger between the Volkovs and the Bulls damn well should favor the Bulls now, and for a while. It was the Volkovs, after all, who’d turbocharged Julio Santaveria and started that whole miserable disaster. And the Volkovs were the only crew who’d hardly lost a drop of blood in it.
That wasn’t the way Niko saw it, of course.
“What’s that cocksucker want?” Gunner grumbled.
Maverick answered. “He doesn’t like the Dragons.” The Silver Dragons were an Idaho-based MC the Bulls had been working with for about a year, running Volkov product to Canada. They were decent guys and had been good with the work, so far as the Bulls knew. But Niko was Niko and wanted things his way. “He says there are too many crews involved and he wants to streamline.”
“Which means?” Zach asked.
“He wants the Bulls to run it all the way,” Dex said and watched his brothers’ reaction.
“All the way to Canada,” Cooper said. “He’s fucking nuts. That’s got to be … what, two thousand miles? Theshortway? It’s one thing to ride that many miles once a year for a fun run. We can’t run that six times a goddamn year, muling life sentences in a fucking Fed prison each time.”
“Agreed,” Eight said. “But if we do streamline, it’s a bigger share of the cut to those who stay in. I don’t want to get blinded by dollar signs again, but Simon had an idea that could make this pretty fuckin’ interesting.”
Eight looked to Simon, who set his elbows on the table and leaned in. “We form a new charter.”
That got their attention. “How? Where? Who?” asked Gargoyle.
Apollo jumped in. “If we do this, we’re thinking ultimately two new charters, at progressive points on the pipeline. It’s way too much to stake two at once, so for the first one, I’m thinking Laughlin. That’s our terminus already, where we hand off. If we stake a new charter there, we just hand off to our own.”
“That’s still a helluva long ride for them, isn’t it?” Duncan asked.
Apollo nodded. “It is. But about half what it would be for us—and it would only be long for them until we stake another charter, which we’d do as soon as Laughlin was established and we had the funds secured for another. A couple years, probably.” He leaned back. “Laughlin’s good for a few reasons, not just because it’s already our handoff. It’s close enough to the southern border to be useful if the pipeline shifts. And Nevada is pretty flexible for people walking on the other side of the law.”
“And Vegas is right there!” Gunner added, clapping his hands.
Eight laughed. “And Vegas is right there. Somebody better get Gambler’s Anonymous on retainer before Gun gets close.”
“How’s it work, starting a charter?” JJ asked. “Who’s gonna run it? Do we know people out there?”
“Some of us would have to go out there and set it up,” Eight answered.
JJ frowned. “Like,moveto Laughlin?”
Mav nodded. “At least temporarily. We’d need a president and VP, at least, preferably SAA too, to make a strong stand. Then they’d recruit. Could be it’s temporary, and new officers come from recruitment. When that new table is settled, our guys come home. Or maybe they like it out there and stay.”
