AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Chuffing out a laugh, Ace explained, “Club names are given by your brothers, based on something that stands out. Me? I got my name because no matter how long I play poker, I never draw a damn ace. It’s the weirdest thing. I once played for fourteen straight hours and never got one single ace of any color or suit. It was frustrating as hell.”
“Scab has a big ugly—”
“No, I was joking about his left arm. He got that name because the last job he had before coming here was working as a scab at a local steel mill when the employees were on strike. That man is all about making a dime, and he didn’t give two shits about crossing the picket line to earn it.”
“Ryder?”
“He made off with his old man’s bike when he was about eight-years-old. His feet barely touched the foot pedal, but he made it work. He rode it in a gigantic circle around an entire parking lot. Ven about blew a gasket. The brothers called him Little Ryder for a while. Now it’s just Ryder.”
“Damn, I gotta do something epic to earn a good name.”
“Good luck with that, ‘cause it don’t ever work out the way you think it’s gonna.”
“What are those things you all wear on your shoulders?”
“Two-way radios that Peb made us.”
“You mean that young dude who acts about fifty? He sure got stuck with a crap name.”
“You think so?”
“What does Peb mean?”
“Okay, but is the last one I’m telling you. It’s the first three letters of his club name, which is PEBCAK.”
“I’ve heard that before. It stands for Problem Exists Between Chair and Keyboard, right? Did he get it for fucking up a lot?”
“Nope, he got it because when he rolled into this club, almost all our electronic shit was fucked by the external IT team we were using. The way I hear it, he walked right in and fixed it all in a day. When Darkness asked him how he did it, he said it was mostly user problems because we didn’t know what we were doing and the IT team didn’t understand enough about what we needed to design a functional system.”
“So the gothic kid fixed it all? That’s pretty cool.”
“All I know is it never worked. He got into the security and server room one day, and now we don’t have those problems anymore.”
“I wish I had a cool skill like that.”
“You clearly do. It’s paying attention to details and fitting the pieces of the puzzle together. That’s pretty important shit, right there.”
Jack still didn’t look very pleased. “It ain’t gonna get me a cool club name, I know that much.”
They walked up to the guard post at the gate, and Ace handed the new prospect off to Scabs for the rest of the day. Ace didn’t know for sure if the kid had the right stuff, but they’d sure as hell find out over the next few months.
Heading back to the security room, he began digging through the file Peb had left on the Havier brothers. Neither of the men seemed to be all that important to their gang. No one had reported them missing. Their social media accounts showed images of them wearing gang colors and acting like thugs. They would have been drawing a lot of the wrong kind of attention. Maybe it was like Jack said and the Seven-six were just cleaning house. He shot the info in a group text to his club brothers, ‘cause it was low-grade information and there wasn’t fuck all he could do about it sitting at the clubhouse.
Ace continued monitoring the security cameras until Peb wandered back in halfway through the day. He’d had a shower, looked reasonably alert, and seemed eager to get back to work. He had his laptop under one arm and a huge energy drink under the other.
“You feeling better, Peb?”
“I’m fine. Did anything change while I was down?”
“Jack’s earning his bottom rocker.”
Peb’s eyebrows popped up. “I remember Darkness offering him a spot. I just didn’t think he was smart enough to realize it.”
“I lead the horse to water. Now, we get to see if he can drink without choking himself to death.”
A small smile slipped onto Peb’s face. “Rose took a shine to him.”
“Well she ain’t been showing very good judgment lately.”
