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“Sorry, Prez,” Monty mumbled.
Simon walked up to Eight’s other side just then. “I’ll take a Jack, too, Monty.”
“You got somethin’ to say?” Eight asked Simon.
Sam’s father shook his head. “’Course not. He’ll deal just like we all had to. Or he won’t, and he’ll wash out. Gotta stand on his own.”
Jay looked at Monty, whose back was to them as he poured drinks. His back shook with a quiet chuckle, and he shook his head subtly.
Jay wondered if anyone else noticed that.
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~oOo~
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“Idon’t know, Pop.It’s complicated.”
“Just lay it out best you can,” his father said.
They were sitting in the family room the next evening. October had decided overnight to bail on autumn and jump straight to winter. They’d woken up that morning to a hard frost, and the temperature hadn’t made it to forty degrees all day. Cloudy, windy, and cold. Pop had a big fire going in the stone fireplace, and Marv and Rose were squeezed together in a dog bed before the hearth. There was another dog bed of similar size right next to it, but those goofs would rather be uncomfortable together than comfortable apart.
Jay and Petra had spent most of the day at Gertrude’s. With the help of her friends, and Jay and a few Bulls, she’d gotten her father’s house sorted out as much as she could. She’d hired an estate-sale company to handle the rest of the contents, and was interviewing realtors to deal with the house.
That huge, painful task handled, Petra turned to her work. She wanted to have the bar open again before Halloween—which was a big deal there. Apparently, Gertrude’s was famous in the local LGBTQ+ community for its Halloween party.
There wasn’t that much to do to get the bar ready, except that it had been shut up for more than a month, so there was a sad layer of dust over everything. They’d tidied up, and Petra had called her employees to let them know they’d reopen the following weekend, and then Jay had built a few new Billy bookcases to hold the books of her father’s that Petra wanted to display by the bar. He’d also hung several paintings she’d claimed from her father’s house.
After that, they’d been expected at his folks’ house for dinner. It was her first time seeing his family home. Jay had felt a little insecure, ready to be defensive, for Petra to see the house.
She’d been raised in a big, fancy brick house in an upscale area of a historic neighborhood. The gardens were perfect, the lawns were perfect, everything in that house and its neighborhood looked like a magazine picture.
He loved this house, and he thought it was beautiful, but it was a meandering, well-used, well-loved thing. The original house was a pretty basic two-story farmhouse, standing for more than a hundred years. But in the twenty-something years his parents had owned it, they’d built on a few different times, and added several sheds and other outbuildings. Then there were his mother’s weird gardens, which had started out orderly years ago but now were huge misshapen islands in every direction. And those were just the intentional things. There were also the permanent tracks he and Zach had made through the property with their dirt bikes, all the way up to and around the house. And the scarred boards on the side of the house, which Pop had patched as well as he could, from when Jay had crashed his dirt bike into the side of the house and broken the house as well as his arm. And the tire swing Jay had managed to get completely wrapped around its branch like ten years ago. And the huge holes the dogs made everywhere. And the abandoned skateboard ramps going rotten down near the woods. And ...
Well-used and well-loved. His whole childhood was laid out here—and he’d kind of made a mess. He’d been worried about the comparison between her past and his.
But Petra had seemed to love the house—and the dogs. She’d never had a dog; her parents hadn’t been pet people. She’d been a little nervous when two giant pit bulls came charging up to them, but she’d relaxed as soon as she’d seen Jay dive into their love scrum. Marv and Rose liked anybody their people liked, so after a few sniffs and a check-in with Jay, they’d given her their patented slobber baptism.
Now the dogs were crapped out in front of the fire, Petra and Mom were in the kitchen cooking and talking, and Jay was here in the family room, being grilled by his old man about the club’s plans to expand to a third charter.
Pop did not like being out of the loop. Technically, anything discussed in the chapel was under seal, unless Eight said otherwise, but Jay figured telling his father or brother didn’t count. They were Bulls.
Problem was, Jay wasn’t sure he totally understood the California shit. But Pop had asked him to lay it out as well as he could so ...
“It’s got to do with the Mexican shit. The cartel the Volkovs are working with.”
“The one led by a woman.”
“Right. They call her La Zorra, and apparently she calls herself that, too, even though it’s slang for whore.”
Pop grinned. “Smart.”
“Anyway, we’re running Volkov shipments to her, and I guess the plan is eventually she’ll be running her shit up to Niko—and we’ll be running that, too.”
“Back into drugs, then.”
“It’s a drug cartel, so yeah.”
