AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Mav nodded. “They’re not middlemen. They’re minions.”
“Please tell me you fucking know who’s holding their leash,” Eight said to Apollo.
Apollo shook his head. “I don’t. Not yet. The trail gets real spotty at the border. The power vacuum in the south has everything in chaos down there. What’s left of the Perros, and several other players, fighting it out trying to establish dominance. It looks quiet on this side, but down there, it’s a bloody fucking mess. Alliances are shifting by the hour. I dug deep. I called in favors. The people positioned to know won’t talk. The people who usually know these things don’t.”
“How about the other end?” Eight asked. “The buyer—or buyers? Can you get that and work back?”
“I haven’t pushed too far that way yet. If we ruffle the buyers before we know the sellers, we could end up getting fucked from behind.”
Eight dropped his head into his hands and rubbed his scalp like he could reach his brain that way. “These assholes are obviously working for somebody. That means somebody is connecting with them. How fucking hard can it be to connect two goddamn dots?”
Now Apollo was starting to get pissed. “When a dot is buried in a field of dots, it’s fucking hard, Eight. If I lean harder or stretch farther, I’m gonna put a big red fuckin’ dot on the clubhouse. You want that?”
Eight slammed both fists down on the table, and the gavel bounced. “Fuck. Even when we’re just sitting here minding our business, we get ass-fucked by fucking Mexicans.” He sat there, staring at his fists on the table, for a moment, then asked, “How about blowback from what Dex took out of their house? Anything useful there? There have got to be buyers and sellers wanting to know where the fuck their product is.”
“You’d think,” Apollo answered, “but it’s been quiet. There was a scramble at the house when they first saw what happened, but no moves since. My guess is, with the holidays, they’ve got some time before their bills come due, so they’re playing it lowkey until they can figure out a move that saves their asses.” He swiped on his tablet and put up a new image: a commercial real estate listing for a ratty-ass pawn shop in West Tulsa, with the words ‘PAWN SHOP’ sloppily hand-painted directly onto the whitewashed brick facade. It showed an asking price of less than thirty grand and a sale pending. “It’s not a total blank. I found this, and I think we can find a way to make something of it: Marvin Grenell put a cash offer on this property. It’s set to close in about a week. I’d bet my next take he means that to be his clubhouse.”
Dex knew that property, and he figured everybody else in the room knew it, too. Dickie Carruthers, who’d died of old age and orneriness a few months back, had been a well-known fence in Tulsa. Just petty shit, a place tweakers and crackheads went with the crap they’d lifted in smash-and-grabs or snatched purses. The Bulls had never worked with him, but his shop was on their turf, so he’d paid his fee for working dark on their side of town.
That Grenell was buying the place was yet another handful of shit he was flinging at the Bulls. Not only were he and his buddies sporting Oklahoma rockers, but they meant to locate a clubhouse on the Bulls’ home ground as well. “It’s like they’retryingto get something started with us,” Dex said aloud.
“Exactly,” Apollo agreed. “We need to think hard and be smart about how we take them on. They are half our size, a tenth our experience, but they are doing everything to provoke us short of literally taking a shit on this table. If they weren’t moving the kind of product they’re moving, I’d say they were fucking morons. But they’re stealing from big players, they’re moving people, they’re moving big quantities of hot goods.” He paused, sagged back in his chair, took a breath—like what he meant to say next hurt almost too much to put out there.
Dex thought he knew what Apollo would say, and he agreed that it sucked.
Apollo proved him right. “I think whoever they’re working for hasusin their crosshairs. Fighting these guys might be just what they want us to do. I think they’re bait.”
They all sat and considered that for a while. Apollo flipped slowly through the real estate posting, showing the photos of the property: the shop, with typical pawn shop security measures; a large back area, with an office, several rows of shelving, and a large empty space; and a back lot with a small loading dock. Right in the middle of the Bulls’ home turf.
Eight leaned back and crossed his arms. “Look. I see the risk. And fuck, I do not want to relive the Perro shit with whoever fills their hole. But we cannotlet these fuckers ride around our turf with that goddamn rocker. I don’t care who’s on the other end of their scheme. Might as well bulldoze this clubhouse if we’re not gonna take care of that.”
Dex agreed, and he was sure everybody else at the table did, too. It was fundamental to who they were. They were the Brazen Bulls MC. They’d claimed Tulsa as their home and Oklahoma as their territory since 1975. If they didn’t put down these interlopers, the Bulls were finished. As outlaws and as an MC.
The officers sat and thought. Dex got the same feeling in his gut he’d gotten sitting at mission briefings in the Marines. Sometimes being a Bull was a lot like being a jarhead; it was why the kutte fit him. But that didn’t mean he loved the work, however good he was at it.
“Dex,” Mav said while Eight stewed. “It’s on you.”
He’d seen it coming, but it still hit him hard. “Yeah, I know.”
“Yeah,” Eight sighed. “That’s our only way in, ain’t it?”
“Yeah,” Apollo agreed. “We need these guys to pay, we need a message, and we need intel. I only see one way in on that. We do it right, and we stave off trouble. We do it wrong, and maybe we get wiped off the map.”
Dex shifted and sat up straight. “I know we’re all talking about the same thing, but let’s say it out loud and be clear. We’re talking about taking Grenell, and maybe the others with a tie to us, and leaning on them for the intel we need. And then making an example of what’s left of them. That fills in our blanks in the intel, wipes their club out, and puts a reminder out that we are the only MC in our state. Full stop.”
It also put them in focus with Grenell’s bosses, and Apollo was right: this smelled like Grenell and his ‘army’ were nothing more than bait, designed to provoke the Bulls. The problem was, the Bulls had no choice but to be provoked. Whoever was pulling Grenell’s strings, they’d struck on exactly the thing that the club couldn’t look past under any circumstances.
Everyone nodded at Dex’s summation.
“Yep, that’s it,” Apollo said.
“We need to make a big example,” Mav said. “If we’re not going to try to avoid antagonizing their bosses, then we need to go hard.”
Again, everybody nodded.
So Dex would be up to his shoulders in blood again. And then for weeks he’d have to hear, in his brothers’ admiring tones, how ‘fucking psycho’ he was.
“I don’t want to take this to the whole table,” Eight said after a minute.
