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As they came into hisoffice, Cooper gestured at his new sleeper sofa. Eight crossed to it and sat in the middle. Cooper took his desk chair.
“This is nice,” Eight said. “My office is full of almost fifty years of crap. It’d be like a fuckin’ archeological dig gettin’ down to the flat surfaces.”
“Thanks. Mine’ll probably look pretty shitty after I settle into it.”
Eight laughed. “Yeah, I expect it will. You never were much of a housekeeper.”
“And you are?”
“Well, no. Delaney or Beck, either. That’s why Indiana Jones would take a look and run the other way.” Leaning forward, forearms on his knees, Eight added, “So what’s up? Need a debrief of the meeting?”
Now that they were up here, in private, Cooper quailed a bit. It wasn’t that he was afraid to be straight with Eight, but that he wasn’t sure he had the grounds to challenge him, so he wasn’t sure what he should say.
Not sure. That was his steady state lately. He never felt sure of anything, least of all himself.
And that was what needed to change.
So first thing, he needed to be on the same page with Eight—and he needed Eight to see him as a president. A colleague. An equal. “I guess it’s a debrief, yeah. I heard a couple things that didn’t ring right in my ear, and I want to talk it out with you. President to president.”
Eight cocked his head, almost looking defensive, but the mood was pushed from his face before it could settle. “What didn’t ring right?”
“When you told Ben he could leave his kutte behind and opt out if he said no to the Mexico run.”
“How’s that not right? You got your boxers bunched because I spoke to your man?”
That was part of it, but Cooper shook his head. “It’s bigger than that. I’m wondering what you think this charter is.”
Again, Eight cocked his head. Again, a defensive look moved across his face. This time it stayed. “Iknowwhat this charter is.”
“Which is what?”
He shook his head. “Tell you what. Sounds like you’re settin’ a trap. So you tell me whatyouthink this charter is.”
Cooper decided to meet Eight’s newly tense tone with one of his own. Keeping his gaze steady with the mother charter president’s, he said, “I think it’s a full-fledged charter of the Brazen Bulls MC. Idon’tthink we’re Tulsa’s errand boys. Or your cannon fodder. So I don’t like the implication that if this table votes not to go into Mexico, we lose our patch. There’s nothing in the charter bylaws that says we have to agree with everything coming over from Oklahoma to keep the Bull.”
“You were atmytable when we decided to start this charter. You know damn well why there are Bulls here—why Tulsa paid a fuck ton to establish this.” He punched the arm of Cooper’s new sofa. “This fucking property, all these renovations, this goddamn sofa, all of it—that came out of Tulsa’s chest. Because Tulsa needs Bulls in the west. So what good are you if you’re not what we need?”
As Cooper listened to Eight’s increasingly angry little speech, he understood what had been wrong with him for all these months, why he was getting lost in his head, seeing crises in minor to moderate problems and missing everything that was going right—because he’d been seeing all of this, the whole Laughlin project, as Eight Ball’s project. As a Tulsa project. He hadn’t been acting like the boss here because he hadn’t felt like he was the boss. He’d felt like Eight’s errand boy.
In that realization, he found a calm that had mostly eluded him for months. “I was at the Tulsa table. I know why we’re here. You’re right about that. We need a charter here to service the Volkov run. I agree, and I’ll do what I can to get my table to see that and vote accordingly. And yeah, Tulsa laid out the money to get Laughlin started—but Laughlin will be taking on the lion’s share of the risk, going into Mexico in a truck that might as well have the word BAIT painted on the sides, while Tulsa turns around and rides back home, so I’d say that’s a wash at best.”
Eight grunted, but Cooper didn’t give him the chance to turn that into a rebuttal.
He pushed forward to the real thing he needed Eight to hear. “That’s not the point I care about right now. What I’m saying now is, if a Bulls charter is only as much as what it does for the Russians, then that makes usboth, Tulsa too, nothing more than Niko’s errand boys.”
He’d struck center mass. Eight’s whole head went immediately, completely beet red.
Before Eight could blow up and say shit that would tear everything apart, Cooper put his hand up and kept going. “I know Tulsa is much more than that. I want you to see—to agree—that Laughlin, young as we are, is as much a full Bulls charter as Tulsa. We’re newer, so far we’re smaller, but we are not some straggling orphans you rescued. We’re not some service club. We’re Bulls. We’re your brothers. We’re two halves of a whole. Equals. We have interests we share, and we each have interests of our own. I said earlier that you’re still my president, but that’s wrong. You’re my colleague. That’s what I want you to see.”
As Cooper said it, as he made that case to Eight, he finally believed it himself.
Approximately three tons of stress cracked apart and fell off his back.
Eight stared for a long time, and Cooper let him do it, watching the blood slowly drain away until his complexion was normal again.
Eventually, Eight said, “We need that run to work. We need Laughlin to take the back half.”
