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He’d been a Bull most of his adult life. In Tulsa, the clubhouse was always busy. Even when it was empty, the service station right next door was hopping. Plus, that compound was smack in the middle of southside Tulsa. An urban neighborhood in a good-size city. There was shit going on all the time.
Here ... not so much. He stood outside the quiet clubhouse and saw basically nothing in every direction.
Notpreciselynothing. There was the clubhouse right in front of him. A short ways off was the club garage, which was closed and locked. A little farther off was the former barn, now the home of RockSteady Racing, their new legit business. The barn was remodeled and ready; they just needed the last of the stock shipments to arrive, and they’d be ready to open.
Maybe then the place would come alive.
But as he stood here and saw miles and miles of desert all around him, he wondered. Had they bought a place that was going to turn the Nevada Bulls into some kind of crazy isolationist cult?
No.No. They were already advertising, in a ‘coming soon’ kind of way, and Kai was managing social media accounts for the business, getting the word out and building excitement. He said people were noticing. Word was getting out and spreading around.
For the Bulls’ purposes, the business didn’t need to turn a profit. In some ways it was better if it didn’t get too successful. But shit, Coop thought he’d go crazy if this quiet was the rule rather than the exception.
He checked the time. More than an hour before church. Since they’d finished the remodel and buildout, nobody bothered to get to the clubhouse early, and nobody wanted to stay late, either.
Which was the fucking problem.
He hadn’t seen this problem ahead of time. He’d figured chicks and wannabes would flock to the clubhouse the moment they turned the lights on. He’d figured he’d trawl the casinos and do his ‘brown Paul Newman’ schtick and end up with a line a mile long of hot chicks with a taste for biker dick, ready to bounce and jiggle all over the clubhouse.
He had, in fact, met several likely girls bouncing alluringly up and down the Strip. He had their numbers, and he’d banged a few of them. But they alone would not a party room make. The Brazen Bulls MC needed to make its mark on Laughlin. They needed to be adraw. Otherwise, there would be no hangarounds to become prospects, no prospects to grow the club, and no grunts to do the shit work.
But they’d formed their fucking charter on acoffin. The first and so far only clubhouse party had been Gargoyle’swake—not a good omen for the charter. As far as bad omens went, losing a patch on the first day the charter had acted as a crew was a real doozy.
For most of the time since they’d sent Gargoyle to his rest, they’d been remodeling and preparing, and then the holidays had rolled up, and he was probably getting his nutsack twisted over nothing but bad timing.
Still, fuck. Never in his life had he spent so much time alone, and it was not good for him. His mind was terrible company. Shit in his past that had never bothered him before, or at least had bothered him only briefly and then faded out, was now back and feeling frisky. Shit in his present that should have rolled right off his back ate at him endlessly.
Like his fucking neighbors. That whole fucked-up scene when he’d moved in—those two whole fucked-up scenes—were almost a month old, but still neither Batman nor Robin would even look at him. They could all be standing on their respective driveways, which were less than six feet apart, and they wouldn’t look at him. Cooper could actually speak some kind of neighborly greeting, and he might as well be a ghost.
And why? For the very reason he’d been reluctant to engage with the girl in the first place. Batman had thought he was up to no good with Robin. All he’d done was not be a dick to a kid. And now they both pretended he didn’t exist. Bugged the shit out of him.
People had been assigning nefarious motives to him since childhood. Mainly white people blaming the brown kid for shit their own spawn had done, but it had happened in Muscogee, too. Most of his classmates had been Native, and he could claim the same heritage, but he was more Salvadoran than anything else. Until he’d gotten strong enough to fight back and win decisively, he’d been the class goat, taking everybody’s blame and getting whaled on by kid and teacher alike.
Shit like that! Why was he standing here in the barren desert thinking about getting the ‘Board of Education’ paddle from when he was in fuckinggrade school? He was thirty-fucking-five years old!
No. Fuck that. He unlocked the clubhouse door and went in.
Generally speaking, Cooper did not care about home décor. He wanted a roof that kept the weather off, walls for privacy, a floor to keep his shit out of the dirt. He wanted the toilets to flush and the taps to run, the lights to turn on and off, the AC to cool and the furnace to heat. Not that he’d need that last one here. Otherwise, he barely noticed his surroundings.
Also, he was a slob. He knew it and didn’t get bent when he was called out on it. Neither did he intend to change. He’d hire a service to clean up after him at home, and they’d recruit some bimbos to take care of that shit here. But he lived alone, didn’t want to live any other way, and didn’t see whose business it was if he left his dirty clothes where he dropped them.
However, he liked how the clubhouse remodel had turned out. It was just a boring ranch-style house, absolutely nothing remarkable about it. But they’d knocked out a couple walls to pull a small bedroom/office thing into the main room, they’d built a nice big bar for booze, with two beer taps, and expanded the bar counter in the pass-through between the kitchen and what had been the dining area. They’d laid a cool laminate flooring that looked like black wood, and they’d painted the wall behind the bar orange. On the opposite wall across the room, Zach had stenciled the words BRAZEN BULLS MC NEVADA in the same orange with black edging. On another wall that Zach had stenciled like a lineup wall, black stripes with markings for height, they’d put up a ‘rogues gallery,’ with framed mug shots and photos of them each on their bikes, and group photos taken when Tulsa was here. Plenty of room on that wall for more mugshots or party pics, whatever.
They also had an RIP wall. Gargoyle’s photo hung alone there now, but they all knew that wall would fill up eventually.
The main room—he needed to start thinking of it as the party room—had those cool black leather sofas that were like recliners smooshed together, a couple regular sofas, some armchairs, some smaller table and chair combos. Kai had installed a full-house sound system that could take the roof clear off. A 120-inch TV on the wall, all the best gaming consoles, and the cherry on top: a stripper pole. Right in the middle of the room, going straight up to the top of the loft ceiling.
Geno wanted a mechanical bull. They were talking about putting up some kind of outbuilding that could house a boxing ring and maybe a bull, too. But the costs were adding up, so they’d tabled that idea until they had the take from some big runs in the coffers.
Cooper liked the look of the place. Liked the smell, too. Paint, sawdust, varnish.
That said, it felt weird as fuck for the clubhouse to be so pristine. It looked good, smelled good, but it didn’t look or smellright. Their clubhouse should look and smell like a place people spent time. Where they drank and laughed and fucked. Where they partied.
It should be lived in.
As he went upstairs, he sighed. Upstairs was a loft over the main room, where they’d stuck a couple of couches and tables, a large closet they’d fitted out as a weapons locker, and a room that had been a bedroom but was now Cooper’s office. Because he was the president of the Nevada charter of the Brazen Bulls MC.
He went into his office. So far, before they’d opened RockSteady or had a full Russian run—or done anything except set their shit up—there wasn’t much to his office. Office Depot desk, chair, file cabinets, bulletin board, yadda yadda yadda. Most of it empty. The walls were bare, the floor plain. A big empty space at the back wall, where he meant to put a sleeper sofa but hadn’t gotten around to it.
