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Now the naked aerobics could commence.
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~oOo~
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“Lonnie’s good people,” Ben said that afternoon. “He’s loyal as fuck and won’t balk at anything that needs doin’. There’s a couple other guys on the rez who’d be interested, too.”
The Bulls and Bulls-to-be were squeezed in around the glass-top table in the rental house, talking about recruitment for the new charter. After an interesting negotiation with the seller of the derelict ranch—which had consisted of the seller countering Eight’s initial offer with a new price only five grand off asking, and Eight coming back with his own counter-counter ‘offer’ that was literally, like verbatim literally,Google the Brazen Bulls, then sign my offer or fuck off—they had a signed deal and a closing date of only two weeks off. For the next two weeks, the setup crew would be focused on recruitment and hoped to have a full charter to put to work turning that rundown assortment of weird buildings into a Bulls compound.
Recruiting for a new charter was a strange thing, Zach thought. A lot different from establishing a whole club, and the stakes were a lot higher. Grampa D had started the Bulls with his best friends. There hadn’t been a need for recruitment or vetting or any of that shit. They’d been five guys who rode and wanted to be a club. Grampa had bought a business for reasons of his own, then expanded to the clubhouse, and the whole thing had grown organically. Pop and Ox had been their first prospects, and both had started out as employees of the service station. Their transition to Bulls had been equally organic.
But now, the charter was coming before the relationships. They couldn’t do a prospect period for the first patches to sit at the table, and only three Tulsa Bulls were even considering a permanent move to Laughlin. Actually, Zach was fairly sure all three of them—Cooper, Gargoyle, and himself—were decided on staying, but no one had said so out loud yet. At any rate, three men did not a table make.
There were Ben and Reed, too, who had a strong enough tie to Gargoyle to be considered fully vetted—also, Apollo had run checks on them both—but five men did not a table make, either. Not a table doing the kind of work this charter was being established specifically to do.
So recruitment here had seriously high stakes and little time to get it right. They were leaning hard on Ben to lead them in the right direction. So far, every one of his recommendations was a resident of the Fort Mojave reservation and a citizen of the tribe.
Caleb sat back in his chair with a grin. “Gotta say, I like the thought of a crew without any fucking tokens at the table.”
“Hear, hear,” Cooper muttered.
It took just one beat for Zach to get what they meant—Caleb, an Osage Nation citizen, and Cooper, Salvadoran and Muscogee as well as white, were talking about diverse representation at the table.
He thought the Tulsa table was pretty diverse—there were Caleb and Cooper, and Jazz, who was Black, and Christian, also Black and sure to be patched soon. There had been others as well, like Ox, who’d prospected with Pop, and who’d died of cancer when Zach was just little, and Terry Capewell, who’d been killed in the Perro shit. Never in his knowing had a potential prospect or patch’s ethnicity been a factor in the decision.
But he supposed three members of color at a table that currently sat fourteen men wasn’t really diverse, and making it four members at a table of fifteen didn’t improve that much. Plus, Cooper would very likely stay here in Laughlin, so the percentages wouldn’t improve.
Zach also didn’t figure he, as a garden-variety white boy, was somebody who should have much say in what was or wasn’t diverse, so he kept his mouth shut on that point. But he did have one important question no one had brought up yet.
“How many patches do we want at the table? To start, anyway?”
Cooper turned to Caleb and sort of shrugged. Caleb’s face took on a deeply thoughtful shape, and he took some time to answer. When he did, Zach was surprised to hear how close Caleb’s thinking was to his own. “It’s different from how D started Tulsa. We have to hit the ground running, and out here, it’s still a little like the wild west—and no, I’m not talking race now. I mean there are a lot more players and there’s a lot less oversight. Ironically, I think that means more palms to grease, not fewer. And we’re closer to potential trouble, in terms of other crews we don’t have alliances with. We’re closer to the southern border, too, which is a fucking mess.”
“We need a presence, is your point,” Cooper said. “A strong front.”
“Yeah, I think so. You can’t be a few dudes on Harleys. You need to be a force, or you’ll look like low-hanging fruit, and Tulsa’s too far to have your back.” He sucked in a deep breath and let it out. “I don’t want fresh meat overtaking the OG Bulls, but ... I think it’s gotta be about eight at the table to start. And a prospect. Two would be better.”
“Alright,” Cooper said. “Let’s start at the top. I know it’s early, but I think we gotta commit right now, or not, so we know how to go from here. Of the four of us, who’s sinking roots in the desert? Cay, I know you’re not staying. Gargo, how about you?”
Right there, that was Cooper acting like a president for the first time.
“I want SAA. With that, I’m in,” Gargoyle answered.
Cooper circled the little glass table with a glance. “Anybody got a problem with Gargo as SAA?” When all the men shook their heads, Coop turned to Zach. “How ‘bout you, sweetcheeks? Your cute little desert bunny enough to hold you here?”
That was a lot more like the Cooper Zach knew. And shit, Ben, father of the ‘cute little desert bunny,’ was sitting right beside him. “I wanted this for reasons that don’t have anything to do with Lyra. Yeah, I’m in.”
And there it was, the second time he’d said it out loud, and the first time it was official.
“You think you can handle the tech shit full time? Not just be Apollo’s errand boy?” Cooper asked.
“Straight up, I don’t know. Better than all of you, for sure, but it’s more that I know how to do what Apollo or Jazz describe, not how to build it myself.”
“You’re a cable guy, basically,” Reed said with a snarky grin.
Zach laughed. “Yep, basically. I can plug it in and make sure it’s working, like I did here in the house, I can work the scanners and shit, but I can’t go much further.”
