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CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The official Christmas-night snowfall accumulation was three inches; closer to four fell around Kelsey’s apartment, but the roads were clear before noon. After their breakfast and serious talk, Dex and Kelsey went out to do some dog-related errands. They went by his house first and spent some time with his pack, then went to the Helm house, where Kelsey picked up Mr. Darcy and her car.
Dex didn’t go in with Kelsey. He didn’t feel like having a confrontation with her father, or even just an inevitable staredown. There was plenty of opportunity for that later.
His own misgivings about himself and his ability to be a decent partner—a safe partner—hadn’t been assuaged. At all, really. What was different was, first, his trust that Kelsey would call him out if necessary. He was coming to understand her more completely, to see that while, yes, she was fantastically sweet and kind, and yes, there was an optimism about her that was, in his mind, naïve, there was also a thick band of steel wrapped around her spine. She was gentle, but not fragile. She was giving but not a sap. He might hurt her, but he wouldn’t break her.
Second, and maybe more importantly, or at least more persuasively, was pure selfishness. It felt good to be with her. It felt good to know how much she wanted to be with him, how determined she was to shove aside his concerns. It felt good to be wanted. It had been a very long time since he’d allowed any woman to get close enough to really want him. He didn’t want to lose it. Or ruin it.
So they spent a quiet, contented Saturday together, and Dex worked on trusting all those good feelings. He didn’t spend Saturday night, because he had to get back to the pack. And he opened the station on Sunday.
Kelsey had plans with her family Sunday evening and work Monday morning, so right after they’d decided to be together, they had a string of days apart.
That was probably good, though. It gave him a chance to get a choke chain around his emotions. The intense stuff going on in his head regarding Kelsey freaked him out.
The last thing he wanted was to turn out to be like that asshole he’d killed for her.
~oOo~
Late on Monday, a few days after Christmas and a week after Mav and Dex first eyeballed the rundown house that the ‘Hade’s Army MC’ used, Dex was there again, this time with Gunner, Gargoyle, Duncan, and JJ.
All day Sunday, as word got around the club, Dex had withstood gossip, teasing, trolling, and general curiosity about how he’d hooked up with Maverick’s daughter. By Monday, they’d all grown bored of his monosyllabic, or entirely nonverbal, responses and moved on to some other shiny thing. Now, the five Bulls sitting in the club van were completely quiet. Just as Dex preferred it.
In the days since he’d last sat in a truck and watched that rat trap of a house, Apollo had used the intel Dex and Maverick had brought him to determine some interesting details about this new ‘MC.’ For instance: they now had names and addresses for all seven members, and had discovered that three of their seven members had tried to be Bulls. Two had been hangarounds never invited to prospect. The other, the one who wore the president’s flash, had been a prospect about seven years ago. During Dex’s time.
Marvin Grenell. The Bulls preferred to prospect younger men, mainly early twenties, because they were quicker to get with the club program. Guys who’d had a chance to be in the world a while didn’t have a lot of patience for the drudgery that was the prospect period. But there was no rule that older men couldn’t prospect, and occasionally someone in their thirties or so applied.
Marvin Grenell had been pushing forty and had only hung around the club for about six months or so before DC, rest his soul, had agreed to sponsor him. Nobody at the table had resisted the idea. They’d been the major movers on the Volkov drug pipeline, starting to move Perro product in big quantities, and they’d needed more manpower. Grenell was a veteran and had been riding his whole life. He understood—they’d all thought—what the prospect period would be like, and what was expected of a Bull.
A few months later, they’d washed that asshole out for beating up a sweetbutt. Put the poor girl in the hospital for almost a week. For a farewell party, they’d tied him up in the basement and Dex had worked on him for almost an hour. Not to get him to talk, not to get him to act. Nothing but punishment.
That incident was one that sat perfectly quiet on Dex’s soul. Motherfucker had deserved more, but Becker wanted Grenell walking when it was over.
He walked. More or less.
And now he’d made himself his very own club. Of Bulls washouts and wannabes.
Other information Apollo uncovered: this house they were surveilling was neither a clubhouse nor a residence. It was a property owned by the Hade’s Army ‘Sergeant at Arms’—Dex couldn’t help but think of these morons’ titles in scare quotes—previously a rental, now storage for the ‘club’s’ fencing and black market operation.
And then there was the thing that had put ‘Hade’s Army’ on the Bulls’ radar: three of the members who hadn’t washed out with the Bulls had been small-time dealers working in the Tulsa shadows, siphoning off fumes from the Hounds’ tank for years. They’d been the guys JJ had freelanced for a year or so ago—and gotten into so much trouble. Now he was down a kidney and had nearly lost his patch.
Gary Samms had considered them a nuisance not worth his time, but now that they had themselves a club, they were obviously trying to elevate their profile, and they were getting in the Hounds’ way.
Dex understood why Samms had come to Eight to handle this: the degrees of separation between the Bulls and these assholes were few. Six of the seven men had some kind of direct connection or interaction with the Bulls. The seventh was Grenell’s cousin.
Apollo hadn’t yet managed to locate a property they were using as a clubhouse. They hadn’t yet seen all seven members in the same place. Just two or three guys showing up seemingly randomly to this house, where they loaded or offloaded product. With Christmas over the weekend, they’d decided to keep sharp eyes on this address but not start making noise with these guys until after the holiday.
So here they were, ready to make some noise.
Dex was the highest ranking Bull on this job, so he ran point. “Okay, looks like we’re clear. Everybody remember the program?”
They all nodded, but Dex went over it again anyway, and added more precise instructions now that it was go time. “I’ll put the van on the pad next door.” The abandoned house next to their target had a car pad, where a garage had once stood, that would put the van close enough for getaway and loading of any goods they liberated. Dex had shot out the sodium arc lamps back there last week—and, as he’d expected, nobody from the public works department had gotten around to fixing streetlights in this part of town. “The dark’ll cover us, but we need to move fast and quiet, just in case. Gun, Gargo, you take the back. Lock’s a simple Yale.”
Gunner was good with a lockpick. “Right.”
“Dunc, Jay, you’re with me. We go front. Front door has a barricade lock, so we need to break out a sidelight, and then Jay, you put your skinny-ass arm through.”
Duncan nodded at the windshield and the house beyond it. “ADT sign in the yard. That’s not a problem?”
