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“Good.”
“I really like it, Daddy.”
He felt a hum in his chest. Fuck. He could get used to that.
“Is Om Baby safe?” Esme asked.
Rainer checked his pocket. Thankfully, the blissed-out little stuffie was safely stowed away in there.
“You know, I—” Rainer was interrupted by a hard slap on the back, followed by a firm squeeze on his shoulder.
“Glad you listened to our advice.” It was Baron, looking almost as happy as Esme.
“I didn’t,” Rainer replied. “I just listened to my heart.”
“Hi, Baron,” Esme said.
“You here for the meeting, too?”
“Uh-huh.”
The grizzled blacksmith raised an eyebrow. “Not sure how well that’s gonna go down with Dog’s contingent.”
“Yeah, well they’re just gonna have to f…” he glanced at Esme, “froggingdeal with it.”
“Frogging good save,” Esme said.
“Hey, no cussing,” Rainer joked.
“What?!”
“He’s right,” Baron joined in. “To a toad, that’s about as bad of a word as you can say.”
“Tradition.” The word rang out across The Den like a gunshot. “It’s what Marcus stood for. And it’s what I’ll bring back to The Drifters.”
Dog was in the middle of what was basically a speech pitching himself as the President of the club. In a way, it didn’t matter what he said, because he was still the only person standing to be Prez. He could have said that they’d be focusing exclusively on petting cats, and he’d still have been elected.
He was wearing his cut — the item of clothing that he’d publicly removed about a year ago as he’d left the club. It was adorned with a brand-new patch, but it clearly still hadn’t been cleaned. That was one of the unbreakable rules of the club — you don’t clean your cut, no matter what.
“In the past few years, we’ve gone soft.” Dog walked back and forth at the front of the bar, his thick boots striking the ground hard with each step. “I get it. We’ve got big hearts. We ain’t criminals like some of the other bastard clubs that run in this state.” He snorted, then spat down onto the ground.
“Trouble is,” Dog continued, “If we don’t fight fire with fire, then we’re gonna be in serious trouble. Other clubs are gonna take advantage of our good nature, and we’ll be wiped out. We’re a motorcycle club, not a fuckin’ scout troupe. And that’s the way I’m gonna run things. Here are my priorities. First, we get armed. I know we’ve got a stash of weapons for when shit gets bad, but we need more. A shit-ton more. Not just pistols. We need assault rifles. We need ’nades. We need fucking RPGs. We need respect.”
“How we gonna get all that?” That was Crank, at the front of the room. His arms were crossed, and his body language was doubtful. Still, Crank seemed to be seriously considering Dog’s ideas.
Rainer suspected that Dog’s idea to arm themselves would go down well with the rest of the bikers. They still intercepted shipments of arms from the other gangs in the city from time to time, and it was important that the club stayed armed. Heck, they had quite a stash — RPGs, automatics, even a bunch of frigging night-vision equipment that had at one point been army tech. Having said that, he questioned why it was exactly that Dog thought that procuring a bunch of firearms was the top priority for the club.
He had the feeling that it wouldn’t stop at just buying the guns. No doubt, Dog would sell a few of them, too. And that spelled trouble. Rainer thought a much better policy would be to watch for gun deals between other, more criminal organizations, and stop them being completed. That’s what the club had done in the past.
“We’ll get the damn guns any way we can,” Dog said to cheers. “Buy, borrow, or steal. Way I see it, they’re better off in our hands than in the hands of someone else. Like I said, we’re an outlaw motorcycle club, not a bunch of girl guides selling cookies.”
A bunch of people said, “Right,” and “Fuckin’ A.”
“When we’re armed, we take control of the drugs in this city.”
This got Rainer even more worried. He glanced at Esme, and his mind went immediately to the other Littles affiliated with the club. The thought of them even being in the vicinity of narcotics made his skin crawl.
“Out of the question,” Baron said, shaking his head.
