AllFreeNovel
Share Us
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Eight sat down with a groan he tried to conceal and shifted his chair so he could stretch his bad leg out.
Mav frowned at him. “Seems like that’s been acting up a lot lately.”
Their president shrugged. “Gettin’ old. It’s fine. Let’s get to it. What d’ya got, Apollo?”
“Hold on. Let me get set up.”
It was New Year’s Eve. Outside the chapel, Marcella, Eight’s wife and the Bulls’ queen, was working with the other old ladies, the sweetbutts, the prospect and a few hangarounds, and the patches without enough sense to make themselves scarce, to get the clubhouse ready for their last party of the year. The sound of all those people working in the same direction was substantial enough that a muffled rumble came through the soundproofed walls.
Here in the chapel, the top-tier officers were meeting to hear and sort through the new information about the trespassing bikers.
As usual, Dex sat quietly and observed his brothers. He wasn’t shy, and he wasn’t reluctant to offer an opinion when he had one. Any tendency to be intimidated by people with more power than he had been stomped out of him in the Marines. But he didn’t see the point in chitchat, and his relationships with his brothers, while strong, wasn’t necessarily close, so he didn’t get into a lot of non-club related sharing. He liked it that way. So he sat and watched until he had something worthwhile to say, or somebody wanted to hear from him.
Because he rarely pulled attention his way, he noticed more, knew more, about his brothers than they probably wanted known or knew they let on.
The way Apollo prepped to share intel, for instance. Whether it was a full table or just the officers, a major load of intel or an update, he always prepared as if he were giving a corporate presentation. Patches weren’t allowed to bring their phones into meetings—phones had gotten to the point where everybody was carrying Big Brother in their pocket, and they couldn’t be made secure enough to enter the chapel—but Apollo had a lot of IT gear, including a tablet that was both Bluetooth enabled and somehow apparently hackproof, and he always had a slideshow ready anytime he was expected to report.
Watching the precise way he checked his gear, always the same steps in the same order, fascinated Dex. To meet Apollo, to talk with him and get to know him, you wouldn’t think he was a control freak. He was pretty laid back, overall. But put any kind of tech in his hands and he became pathologically anal.
Another thing Dex saw was the relationship between Eight and Mav. Dex had worn the Bull for a long time, and he’d watched those two go from open contempt for each other to real friendship. It wasn’t a subtle change; everybody in the clubhouse had mentioned it in some fashion over the past couple years, but Dex wondered if anybody else saw it the way he did.
It was easy to see that Eight had changed; he’d gone from asshole outsider to club president in a handful of years. He got along better with everybody now—and he was, so far, a decent leader. A lot like Becker, in fact.
Two years ago, only a couple days after they’d taken Santaveria down and still reeling from the sacrifice that win had demanded, what had been left of the Bulls had sat at this table and voted in a new president. Dex was pretty sure that most of the Bulls had done as he’d done: voted Eight to take the gavel not because they thought he was the right man to lead them but because he’d been Becker’s right hand, Beck had believed in him, and the loss had been so fresh it felt like disrespect not to believe in Eight as well. It had helped that Eight hadn’t simply claimed the spot, even as a VP should by rights do when there was no president, and that he’d been stunned speechless when the vote had been unanimous.
And then Eight Ball Johnston, club asshole, had almost instantly grown to fit the seat at the head of their table.
But Dex saw that Maverick had changed as well, and that was far more subtle. He was still the club’s moral center, the one who would raise the Big Questions about any club move, the one who could be relied on to force his brothers to think about the consequences before they made a vote; that hadn’t changed. What had changed was that Mav wasn’t always so sure he was in the right anymore. He’d made some mistakes of his own, done the wrong thing himself, been blind to the consequences. Probably, he’d made his own mistakes before, too—the man had done hard time, after all; there tended to be a mistake involved when that happened—but he was seeing them as mistakes now.
Dex thought that Eight Ball and Maverick’s improved relationship was about more than Eight becoming a decent human being, or Eight deciding to seat Mav at his right hand. It was also about Mav understanding Eight,relatingto him, and that was new.
“Okay,” Apollo said, and the light on the projector above their heads turned on. He tapped and swiped on the tablet, and an image filled the square of light on the blank wall: a map detail. Dex quickly saw that it was the location of the house they’d found the women in, and about six blocks around it.
“Yeah, we know where it is,” Eight grumbled.
“I know,” Apollo was unfazed by Eight’s attitude. “But I want to show you something. Look at where it’s situated.”
They all looked. Dex saw it quickly, but as he opened his mouth, Maverick spoke. “It’s a great trafficking location.”
“Exactly. I-44 just south. The Arkansas River just east. Major commercial arteries going in all four cardinal directions within a stone’s throw from that house.”
Eight made an impatient noise. “Yeah … we know how product moves in and out of Tulsa, Apollo. We didn’t need you taking days to tell us what we already knew.”
Apollo shot him a look, but then went back to his presentation without comment. “We’re talking about very specific product, Prez. Stolen goods and people. And those stolen goods are more than just some hot TVs. They’re stealing from black market players, from the Hounds. And they’re moving people, too. That’s a pitch we don’t play on.”
“Again. We knew this.”
“No, Eight,” Dex said, leaning in. “That’s not the point he’s making.” He turned to Apollo. “You mean these cosplaying assholes are nowhere near big enough to be working like that.”
“Yeah. I don’t care who they think they are, or want to be, nobody would deal with these assholes on their own. They got no rep, and anybody who might be interested in the product knows the state is ours. And I meannobodywould deal with them for the repackaged shit. They’re stealing from the Hounds, and ‘Hade’s Army’ isn’t near enough buffer between that kind of trouble and any customers they might scare up. It’s too fucking dangerous. It’s fucking dangerous tothemto steal from the Hounds, especially in the quantity they’re doing it—and to top it all off, they know they’re on the Hounds’ radar already, because of what went down with Jay.”
Zach Jessup had killed the two men who’d jumped and nearly killed his brother. Those tweaking shitstains had been nobodies in the game, but they’d been working for guys who’d called themselves ‘independent contractors’ at the time. Guys who were now wearing a very stupid patch.
When Dex had led the raid on that house, they’d pulled fifteen kilos of heroin, another kilo of crystal meth, and eight actual human beings. A total street value of well over half a million dollars. They’d left behind whole rooms full of stolen commercial goods. In a house with no security, not even a man on watch. It had all the earmarks of a rinky-dink operation run by amateurs, but doing major-player quantities.
“Only one way that makes sense,” Eight said, no longer impatient.
