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“Okay ... that’s ... I guess I want to say that’s unexpected, but it’s not. I fuckin’ hope Eight’s careful. There was shit to be learned in the Perro mess.” He sucked on his beer for a second and then leaned in and gave Jay a keen look. “What do you think about it?”
“It’s a ways off, but I don’t know. I guess I don’t much care what’s in the trucks.”
“No?”
Jay had had ample chances to think about this. Not only had he been old enough to understand what the fuck was going on during the Perro years, and been prospecting for the last part of that, but every patch who’d been through it brought it up on the regular. There was a lot of angst—and probably actual PTSD—in the club about that time in their history. Jay had heard a lot and had never been asked what he thought about it before, so he’d been left undisturbed with his thoughts.
“I mean, I don’t want to be moving, like, people—like those Hade’s idiots were doing. But I don’t see much difference between running rocket launchers and running what, probably coke? H?”
“Both, probably. Patchin’ over a club in Northern Cali, I’d’ve said Volkov wants weed again, too, but the money in that’s not worth it anymore. Too much legalization.”
Jay shrugged again. “Coke or H, it doesn’t matter. It’s all part of the same shit, with the same players, moving on the same road, just in opposite directions.”
His father surprised him by smiling—warmly. “That’s a good way of lookin’ at it, son.” He leaned back and stretched his arm across the back of the sofa, behind Jay’s head. “So what’s this club?”
“The Nameless. They were big players in Eureka weed, I guess, but, like you said: legalization. They fell on hard times, the leadership’s all in a mess. There’s some bad dudes on that club’s roster, but I guess most of ‘em are dead or inside.”
“They’d have to be bad dudes to be major players in weed out there. The shit goin’ down in those mountains during the heyday, some of that shit would keep me up at night if I was too close to it.”
“That’s what everybody says. What kind of shit?” He had trouble imagining his father being worried sleepless over any kind of violence.
But Pop waved him off. “Just think of our shit, but by that clown-lookin’ guy in those movies.”
Jay laughed—mainly because he thought he knew the movies Pop meant. “Jigsaw? TheSawmovies?”
“Sure. What else about this club?”
“I don’t know. A lot of the active patches are on the young side, I guess. Older than me, but Eight keeps callin’ ‘em young. The old farts are mostly dead, retired, or inside, like I said. The club’s been on its last legs for a while, sounds like. Anyway, seems like it’s pretty much a done deal. Officers went out there, the Nameless are interested in bein’ Bulls, and we voted to patch ‘em over, so I guess that’s what we’re doin’.”
Pop scowled at the fireplace.
“What’re you thinking?” Jay asked.
With a shake of his head, Pop dodged the question. “I’m not in the room anymore, so what I think don’t matter.”
“It matters to me.”
That made Pop swing his head in Jay’s direction. For a moment, they stared at each other. There was something in his father’s eyes that seemed important, but he couldn’t quite read it.
And then he could. It was pride. His father was looking at him withpridein his eyes.
Something weird happened in Jay’s chest.
Pop said, “I trust you to handle yourself right. But if I had any advice, it’d be to look every direction. Always know what’s comin’ up on you. By all accounts, Eight’s good at the head of the table, so trust him. Just don’t go into nothin’ blind, son.”
It sounded like Pop was telling him to be wary of Eight as much as he was saying to trust him, and that didn’t make sense. Also, it freaked Jay out a little—was something going on to make his old man second-guess Eight Ball? Was it just the idea that the club was probably getting back into running drugs, or was there something else going on?
Unwilling to let that thought linger in his head, unsure how to respond to the idea that his father was finallyproudof him, and feeling a little dizzy and breathless from it all, Jay pushed it aside and simply said, “I’ll be careful, Pop.”
“I know you will be.”
The unspoken shit happening in this conversation was too intense. Jay needed to get some space from it. So he planted a smirk on his face and added, “And fuck, shit’s been boring lately. This’ll at least be interesting.”
Pop’s grin was a little grim. “Boy, if you think runnin’ guns between Russians and Mexicans is boring, I’m worried about what you do for fun.”
These days, he mainly stayed home and watched Netflix in bed with Petra—which was about the best time he could think of. “Don’t worry, Pop. I’m gettin’ domesticated. Just like you.”
That made his father honestly laugh. Jay felt it like a gold star.
