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~oOo~
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They were headed tothe Haddons’ because Ben had the keys to the house the club had rented for crew while they were in town. Getting to the Haddons’ from the reservation meant a ride along Laughlin’s strip. Normally, that was pretty cool, coming up on the swath of color and light dropped in the middle of the desert. Sort of like Vegas, though there was a lot less buildup around Laughlin, and a lot less traffic because of it.
On this night, though, the ride felt eerie. All the casinos were open except the Cadence, all those big neon signs flashing bright colors just like usual, and there were plenty of people in and around the casinos those busy signs lit up, but the Cadence was like a black hole in the middle of it all, sucking energy into its abyss.
Another fucking mass shooting.
People looked on outlaws like the Bulls as the dregs of society. ‘Respectable’ people eyed them sidelong; women pulled their purses and children close, men pushed their women and children behind them. They got some kind of filthy, suspicious look from just about every Karen and Chad they met. Honestly, a lot of the Bulls got off on that a little bit, played it up and really put out a danger vibe, but almost all the ones who did, in Zach’s experience, were doing it defensively. When someone figured you for a threat no matter what you did, might as well make them shake.
But every one-percenter Zach knew, Bull or otherwise, was just trying to live their damn life. Yeah, they carried guns and often used them. Yeah, they broke the law. Yeah, they made a lot of their money on that broken side of the law. They were outlaws, after all.
What one-percenters weren’t doing? Walking through a place full of innocent people and blowing holes in as many as they could reach. When the Bulls killed someone, that death had been earned. When the bullets were flying, they were aimed at other outlaws. It was a fundamental element of their code: they kept their shit away from the regular folk. They did not color outside the lines. They left the normies alone.
Even the clubs who worked with stolen goods weren’t robbing houses. They were robbing insured companies and leaving the drivers whole, unless a driver crossed the line into their world and became a threat—which rarely happened, because over-the-roaders knew the score.
Not every outlaw gang worked that way. Cartels most certainly did not. And, okay, there were some MCs that didn’t subscribe to the code. There were shitheads everywhere, so of course some shitheads wore kuttes. Within their world, though, those MCs were widely reviled, and the messier gangs and cartels were dangerous enemies to clubs like the Bulls, just as they were to the normies. But the Bulls could fuckingdo somethingabout those threats. Their code was much cleaner and more efficient, in Zach’s mind much morehonorable, than the US legal code. Fuck, the Feds had had to enlist the Horde and the Bulls to defeat Santaveria; crippled by bureaucracy and politics, they’d been unable to take him down on their own.
When Zach walked into some nice place, like a hotel, wearing his kutte and boots, he knew he’d field some kind of nasty look from just about everyone he passed. Sales folk, front desk personnel, whoever, would either be curt and officious or terse and wary. If he went into a store wearing colors, suddenly a guard would appear, lurking at the edge of his periphery. And there was literally no chance he’d cause trouble in those situations. He just wanted his fucking room, or meal, or pair of jeans, or what the fuck ever.
Zach was fascinated by snakes and had been all his life. He really wanted a ball python as a pet, but his mom did not want a potentially very large snake in the house, and she’d convinced him it wasn’t cool to keep an animal like that in a glass box. But he still loved pretty much everything about them. He’d been in high school, writing a biology paper—about dangerous snakes—when a metaphor about snakes and the outlaw life occurred to him.
As he rode with Cooper, Caleb, and Gargoyle through the eerily somber, post-shooting Laughlin strip, he thought about that metaphor.
A Black Mamba was one of the most aggressive snakes in the world, and highly venomous to boot. A mamba would fuck you up just for the fun of it. Those fuckers would lie in wait and attack anything that passed by just because they didn’t have anything better to do.
A rattlesnake, on the other hand, warned the fuck out of you before it struck. It did everything in its power to get you to leave it alone first. It had evolved a very literal warning system because it just wanted to be left the fuck alone. If you got bit by a rattler, odds were decent that you had it coming.
MCers like Zach and all the rest of the Bulls, and pretty much every one he knew, were rattlesnakes.
The Cadence shooter—Brady Everdeen, aged twenty-two, from some tiny town in Wyoming—that skinny, pasty, 8chan motherfucker was no rattlesnake. Frankly, even a Black Mamba was better than that smear of runny shit, because the mamba was legitimately tough. A real Big Bad.
Everdeen? What a goddamn pussy, hiding behind a fucking $10,000 arsenal and killing people who’d never done anything to him, people he didn’t even fuckingknow, women and children as well as men, grandmas and grandpas, poor slobs just trying to get their shift in and moms and pops on their vacation, and for what? Probably because some chick wouldn’t suck him off. Fragile pussy fuck. Probably one of those ridiculous cocksuckers who strapped a rocket launcher on their back to order their half-caf mocha with extra whip and sprinkles. Zachdespisedthose anal warts posing as human beings.
That shithead was no outlaw, but people would look extra sideways at the Bulls for a while now. To the normies, a violent shithead was an outlaw and vice versa.
News reports said that Everdeen was dropped, and his rampage ended, with a bullet through the throat. Fucker got off way too easy. The Bulls would have made him pay what he owed.
Not until Lyra had told him last night that she was working the cleanup had Zach really thought deeply about the work she did. They’d talked about it, but in his mind, he’d sort of associated it with the kind of work he’d done as a prospect, work he still did sometimes as one of the younger patches—cleaning up after Dex had put somebody on his table, or after a firefight. He’d been a prospect during the Perro years, so he’d cleaned up some bad scenes.
The stories Lyra had told him, like that fat guy who’d been left so long in the heat he’d melted where he’d died, had been more like ... maybe museum exhibits. Or a slasher flick. A story to hear and goWow, gross!
But the Cadence was nothing like that. The Cadence was scores of innocent people getting their brains and guts blown out.
Zach absolutely fucking hated that Lyra had spent her day cleaning that up.
She was home now; she’d texted to let him know, and Ben had let Gargo know they were ready to welcome them.
It was September. More than two months had gone by since the Bulls had been in Laughlin. Since Zach had met Lyra. A lot had changed between them in those two months.
He meant to spend this night making her forget what a terrible day she’d had.
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~oOo~
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