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Mav whipped around and stared at him. “What? We’ve got to. This goes wrong and everybody out there”—he flung his arm toward the door to the party room—“is a target. Fuck, if it goesright, we’ll probably still be a target. We need to vote this.”
“No,” Eight insisted. “We don’t have another choice. It’s this or we end. I don’t like acting away from the table, but this can only go one way.”
“Then frame it like that, Eight,” Mav pushed back. “Don’t pull D’s old bullshit and start getting choosy about what the patches get a say in.” He paused, then added, “You know Beck would’ve put it on the table.”
Eight’s reaction was both powerful and subtle. He didn’t lash out, but his posture changed; his considerable shoulders spread out and his thick neck pulled in. Dex, with a great deal of experience in reading people, saw a man enraged and doing everything in his power not to show it.
When he spoke, his voice was flat and dangerously calm. “You’re right. Beck put everything on the table. He would’ve put this on the table, no question. But Beck died. He was killed by the last fucking Mexican drug cartel we tangled with. We’re still coming back from that. The man is two years buried, with two other brothers we lost that same day, and two more we lost in Perro troublebeforethat day. There’s no appetite in this roomright nowfor what we’ve got to do. Do you seriously fuckin’ think, if we sit down in a full chapel and say we need to vote on whether to shove our hands in a hornet’s nest we can’t evenseeyet, that vote will pass?”
Maverick leaned across the corner of the table and got close to Eight. “If we lay it out right, then yeah. Our brothers will see what we see. What we show them. More than that, Prez, if it goes wrong, it’s got to be on all of us. If there’s blame to come down, it’s got to come down on all of us. Or itwillbe the end of the Bulls.”
While Mav and Eight had their moment, Dex put together some pieces Apollo had laid out. When the picture emerged in his mind, he said, “There’s a window here. If we’re right that the Grenell and his wannabes are keeping their mouth shut about what they lost, we’ve got some room to work. Set aside what we found in that house for now. Let’s imagine we never saw it. It’s not our product, they didn’t steal from us. They stole from theHounds. So when it’s known that they lost so much, it won’t be our names their bosses think of first. We’re at least a couple degrees of separation from that. But still, set it aside for a second, and what do we have left?”
Apollo was the first to answer. “A new MC trespassing on our territory.”
“Exactly. How would anybody who knows anything about MCs, or outlaws, or us, expect us to respond?”
Eight’s grin was more like a snarl. “Fuck ‘em up.”
“So we fuck ‘em up, and we do it fast, so it doesn’t look like we had a reason to hesitate. I interrogate them hard and finish them when they’re drained of intel. A cleaved head no longer plots.” That was a favorite saying of Dex’s CO. He liked it, too; it was elegantly direct. “That’s a closed intel loop,” he continued. “We’re just an MC protecting what’s ours. We go hard and leave a message, but the message is just an MC answering an insult and warning other wannabes off.”
Mav nodded. “We’ll still be shaking up somebody big down south, but it won’t be a direct attack on them. Just us doing what we have to do.”
“Which is what I said we have to be careful about,” Apollo said. “That this is all set up with us as a target. That we’re being played.”
“Okay, enough,” Eight said. “Doesn’t matter if somebody’s trying to put us in play. We gotta do it. We’ll just have to be ready for the blowback. We’ll guard against the worst we can imagine, and weknowhow bad shit can get. But we’re startin’ to talk in circles again here, and I fuckin’ hate it, so enough.”
“We’ll put it to a vote, right?” Maverick pushed again.
“Yeah, yeah. We’ll put it to a fuckin’ vote.” Eight leaned in and stabbed the table with his finger. “Whatever the vote is, we gotta end those assholes. If that’s gotta be on my shoulders alone, so be it. But there will not be two MCs in Oklahoma.”
~oOo~
The clubhouse was full and the party ramping up when they finally left the chapel. As soon as Eight cleared the doorway, Marcella turned toward the bar and signaled, and the sound system immediately started blaring Stevie Ray Vaughn. Then she went to her man, who grabbed hold of her like she was the last life vest on the Titanic.
Though Dex had observed the changes in Eight as they’d happened, it still knocked him back that the man was now married and had a kid. The Eight he’d met when Gil, a friend from the VA and one of the patches killed by the Perro Blanco cartel, had first brought him to the clubhouse would not recognize the Eight macking on his old lady tonight.
Marcella fronted a local blues band, and though the Lowdowners didn’t play at club parties—the other members of her band had only beenguestsat club parties a couple times—she always had her guitar with her, and at some point, people would start agitating to get her to sing.
Dex enjoyed her music and usually hung out at least long enough to hear her sing a song, but was not in the mood to party. At all. He rarely really whooped it up, and when it happened, it was because he’d gotten way too wasted. Tonight his head was full of that meeting, what it meant for the club, and what it meant for him, and it would be a very bad idea for him to get drunk and lose what little control over his shadows he had.
Eight meant to call a meeting over the weekend, and as soon as the plan had the club’s backing, Dex would have to move. So he couldn’t spend tomorrow recovering from an epic hangover. He needed to plan to capture, interrogate, and kill three men, probably by Monday.
He couldn’t do all that on his own, of course, but he needed to understand his own plan by the time the club sat down, so he could answer questions—and assign tasks to those he needed as backup. For this job, Gargoyle and Gunner, he thought.
Right now, there was too much commotion around him to form a linear thought. He was too distracted by the work to enjoy the party, and too distracted by the party to focus on the work. Fuck. He wanted to go home and hang with his pack.
No. No, he needed Kelsey. He had her now, and he needed her.
As he made his way to the bar to get a beer, he scanned the crowd. She would be here; she should have been here already, helping her mom and the other club women get things started. But he didn’t see her.
He saw Athena and James, both club kids, talking with their hands because Athena was hard of hearing. Like almost everyone in the club, Dex had learned American Sign Language, and he read their conversation just enough to determine that they were deep in a lively argument about that silly ‘Animal’ something video game, and they probably didn’t know where Kelsey was. At a party like this, open to the neighborhood and other friends and destined to get wild, the club kids tended to cluster together in small groups, as they had been taught: the better to identify them, especially the girls, as not to be fucked with. The younger kids were at a sleepover together somewhere.
He saw Quentin and Sam, Fitz’s boy and Simon’s, talking with Jay and Duncan—and that was about all the adult-age club kids, except for Kelsey. Hadn’t she showed?
Checking his texts, he saw the last one he’d read from her, still the last in the thread:I’ll see you soon. I’ve never had someone to share a New Year’s kiss with before.??
He started to type out a text asking where she was, when he realized he was being stupid. The party room was only one part of the clubhouse where people might be during a party. The women had the throne room outside, and there were always people milling about out in the yard, too, no matter the temperature.
