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Harridan looked precisely liked you’d expect a desert sheriff to look: a white man with skin the sun had baked to a permanent terracotta, cracks like bone-dry earth across the back of his neck and the tops of his hands, deep crevices at the outside corners of his watery blue eyes. He had about fifty extra pounds on him, most of it carried over his belt buckle.
Cooper couldn’t help but be tense around any lawman, but one who looked liked he’d come straight out of some Stephen King story made his sphincter clench.
They’d already met and come to terms with Harridan’s California and Arizona counterparts. Those dudes had been good ol’ boys, too, but they hadn’t given Cooper the same jolt. That jolt had been forged in self-preservation, and he always took it seriously.
Ben stepped out in front as they neared Harridan, and, despite his wariness of the sheriff, Cooper pushed down another territorial blast. Ben was the one who knew Harridan, so it was right he move up first.
“Hoss,” Ben said and offered his hand.
“Ben!” Harridan had a politician’s voice—big and loud, full of bluster, bravado and too much friendliness to be authentic. He slapped his hand with Ben’s, clamped down, and pumped hard. “Good to see you, man. Been a while.”
Acknowledging the sentiment with only a nod, Ben turned to Cooper. “I want you to meet the president of the Brazen Bulls Nevada charter, Cooper Calderon.”
“Sheriff.” Cooper offered his hand.
Harridan gave it the same abuse he’d given Ben’s hand. “Senor Calderon. Good to finally meet in person.”
That ‘senor’ tightened the skin across Cooper’s nape. A man who looked like this one, wearing the badge this man wore, who was not speaking Spanish—and very likely could not speak Spanish beyond a few weaponized phrases—calling him ‘senor’ wasn’t just a red flag. It was a fucking flashing red light.
They’d done the legwork. Apollo and Jazz had spent months learning the ins and outs of Nevada politics, legal system, law enforcement, everything. They’d dug deep into the lives of every person with power in and around Laughlin who could either be brought on board or identified as someone to avoid. Cooper therefore knew that Hoss Harridan was on the take already. He could be bought. Moreover, they’d found his weakness as well, so if they needed to control him, they had the leash. His weakness was the typical Nevada weakness: gambling. He was in deep at several casinos, six figures deep altogether, and leaning on his badge to keep credit alive, adding to his debt on the regular. That was a house of knives that could come down on his head with one flick of a finger.
Maybe he was a racist. Maybe he was just a dumb fuck good ol’ boy who didn’t bother to consider if his ways of being ‘friendly’ might be offensive to the person he was talking to. It didn’t matter either way; Harridan could be leashed, and Cooper had the loop in his hand.
“Call me Cooper,” he said, and Harridan smiled.
“And I’m Hoss to my friends. So let’s be friends.”
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~oOo~
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They waited to debriefuntil they’d gotten some distance from Hoss Harridan’s hometown, then they stopped at a diner in an even smaller bump in the road with the uninspired name of ‘Cal-Nev-Ari.’
The diner was decent, and the menu was good. They took a booth at the back, ordered three variations of burger, and got down to business.
Cooper opened. “I don’t like that motherfucker. I didn’t like gettin’ in bed with assholes who thought they were the tops back in Tulsa, and I won’t have it here. He needs to be brought to his knees and bent the fuck over.”
Harridan’s attitude had been a faux-friendly version of ‘get in line, fuckers.’ He was billing every single crew in Clark County, all of whom had much deeper Nevada roots, and some of whom had very powerful forces at their backs. Many crews had competing interests, several had interests that could put them in direct competition with the Bulls, and Harridan’s stance was that his loyalties were already stretched thin, so he didn’t see how he could be friend to the Bulls as well. Unless...
There was always an ‘unless.’ Harridan had straight-up asked them to shut down a crew out of Vegas—a gang running small-scale casino heists.Ocean’s 11 for Dummies, Harridan had called their operation. They were trying to stiff Harridan while at the same time making themselves a nuisance all up and down the Vegas Strip.
Calling out the Bulls’ rep as ‘crew killers’—and Tulsa had, it was true, been involved in wiping out probably five or six different crews over the years—Harridan wanted this crew handled ‘extrajudicially.’
Cooper really hated assholes giving them hit jobs like they were hired assassins. When the Bulls killed, it was because they had to, in protection of their people and their home.
That was how it should be, at least, but the truth was, they’d killed for the Volkovs. They’d killed for fucking Santaveria. Targets who had not wronged, and were not a threat to, the Bulls. There was a way to see that as protecting their people and their home, too, but it wasn’t clean. Being assigned a killing under threat was a whole lot different from killing the threat.
Harridan’s threat was more diffuse. He didn’t want money, at least not now. He had plenty of that, he said. He wanted this ‘service.’ And in return, he’d be a friend to the Bulls for a period of five years, at which time they could renegotiate. Implicit in that ‘offer’ was the threat that he would be no friend to them unless they took care of his Dummies 11 problem.
The Clark County fucking sheriff. If he wasn’t a friend, if instead he starting gunning for them, they were hamstrung. Cooper had thought he had the leash; he was wrong.
“We need to take it to the table, Coop,” Zach said. “We need to vote it.”
Cooper glared at him. “Are you good with this bullshit?”
“No. I hate it, too. I don’t want to be the guys who kill other people’s problems. But Harridan’s not wrong about us. Pop’s told me stories.” He put up his hand and started counting on his fingers. “The Bulls helped the Volkovs take out a Dirty Rats charter back before I was born. We helped bring the whole Scorps organization down along with Santaveria. We helped take down Santaveria and a fucking cartel. The Bone Wolves. Hade’s fucking Army. And now the Silver Dragons. And those are just the ones I can name without thinking. Wearecrew killers.”
