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“We’re good,” Cooper answered, and the tension of the moment cooled at once.
Still near the door, Patrick cleared his throat. “I think I have something pretty interesting to show you next.”
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~oOo~
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They followed Patrick’sBMW into the desert, leaving all traces of civilization behind but the paved state road they traveled. After about twenty-five minutes, Patrick turned onto a gravel road, and a few low buildings emerged from the haze along the horizon.
As they approached those buildings, Zach thought they looked like a farm, except what kind of farming could one do in the desert? Maybe ranching—but what would any animals eat? It was scrubby brush and dusty dirt in a flat, unbroken expanse all the way to the mountains at the horizon.
Patrick parked at the end of a gravel drive, facing a sun-faded Quonset hut with three rolling overhead doors. To the left was a long, low stucco house with a partial second story. A bit of a way off to the right was another, bigger Quonset hut.
The place was obviously uninhabited and seemed to have been so for a long time. Zach had grown up in the Oklahoma countryside, surrounded by farms and ranches, but he couldn’t begin to guess what this property had ever been.
They all dismounted and met Patrick near his fancy SUV. Zach dragged his hands through his hair to try to rid his head of the lingering weight of his helmet. One negative about Nevada: a helmet law. Though he wore his whenever he was in a state that required it, in that case he knew it was temporary. Once he got back to Oklahoma he was free.
If he stayed in Laughlin, he’d always have to cage his head.
“What is this place?” Cooper asked as he scanned the vista in every direction.
“It used to be a small alfalfa farm, and they had a small herd of alpaca, too,” Patrick answered.
Zach grinned. “Alfalfa and alpacas? Seriously?”
Nobody else seemed to find the juxtaposition of those words funny. Patrick said only, “Yes. But they went under in the Great Recession. The property went into foreclosure, and the bank offloaded it to a bulk buyer. Since then the owner’s put it on the market on and off, renting it out each time they give up selling. With the water table like it is now, there’s no reasonable way to make it a viable farm anymore, so nobody wants it. It hasn’t been on the market or even rented out for about six months.”
“And you brought us here because ...” Cooper said.
“Because it could work for us,” Caleb answered. “Look, Coop—the house for the clubhouse. Garage for the bikes. And that barn”—he turned to Patrick—“is it wired, HVAC?”
Patrick flipped through his tablet and read for a moment. “It is. All buildings are wired, plumbed, and ducted. Barn has a half bath. It’s not on the sewer system or the waterline, but there’s a well and septic behind the house.”
“Do wells go dry out here?” Zach asked.
“They can,” Ben answered. “But they sink ‘em deep. As long as you’re not filling a swimmin’ pool and you pay attention how you use it, it’s fine.”
Caleb turned to Cooper. “We need to take a look, but if it’s solid enough and doesn’t smell like alpaca shit, that barn could house a business.”
“What kind of business?” Cooper griped. He wasn’t seeing the potential, obviously. “We’re out in the middle of nowhere.”
Turning to face south, Caleb pointed. “The Mojave reservation boundary is right across the road. We’re less than half an hour from Casino Road. We’re not in the middle of nowhere.”
Ben crossed his arms and scowled. Before they’d gotten started on this real estate extravaganza today, he and Reed had proposed folding his business into the club, making the club business crime-scene cleanup. It had a kind of elegance; the Bulls often made a mess and had some experience in thorough cleaning of such messes. In addition to a buy-in payment, Ben wanted an officer’s flash in exchange, something the Bulls had already discussed anyway, but Cooper, acting and possibly eventually the official president of the new charter, was decidedly chilly on the idea.
However, they had played it out for half an hour or so, and none of the Bulls was really enthusiastic about it. The bigger issue than a lack of enthusiasm was that Laughlin was a small town with two cleaner operations. Ben didn’t get enough jobs to need such a big crew on the payroll, and the work wasn’t specialized enough to warrant it, either.
Still, as the Bulls struggled to make their interests and experiences jell with the opportunities available, Zach expected him to bring the idea up again. Especially looking as pissed as he did.
Having no burning desire himself to clean up other people’s messes for an official living, Zach threw out an idea that had been kicking around his head all day. “Tire shop?” Everybody turned to look at him. Worried his idea sucked, he added, “Or body work? Something you’d go to the best place for and not just the most convenient?” When still nobody offered a comment, he mixed in some rationale: “I mean, like Cooper said at the last place, we’re mechanics. We’d do best working with cars and bikes, right? That’s what we were all thinking we’d do—same shit we were doing in Tulsa, just here.”
They’d all been more or less expecting to buy a service station, but there wasn’t anything available, not even anything that could be made into a service station, not around the actual town. Cooper was right—this property was far too remote to sustain a business like that.
The real truth was they didn’t need a legit business to make a profit. They just needed it to be viable on the books—and to give them something to do between the work that made their real money.
When somebody finally responded to his idea, it was Caleb. He tilted his head and looked straight at Zach. “You’re talking like you mean to stay.”
