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I’m on edge, dammit. I know I did the right thing to protect her. I didn’t expect her to be pissed at me. Or maybe not pissed, exactly. She just acts kind of numb. Hell, at this point, I’d almost prefer for her to yell at me. I guess it’s because I couldn’t tell her exactly what actions our club took against the Talon.
I know she thinks it’s her business because Quad’s her brother. What she doesn’t understand is that it’s better for her if she doesn’t know. I need to keep her as uninvolved as possible. If she knows anything about us destroying the Talon’s drug shipment, and Quad finds out about it, she’ll be in danger.
The next day, I text her and ask her how she is. She doesn’t answer. I stick around until the early afternoon, when I see her leave the building in her nurse’s uniform and make her way to her car. She doesn’t look at me, but I can tell she knows I’m there by the stiff way she’s walking.
Well, fuck. I ain’t trying to have a big confrontation with her about this right now. She drives to work, and I follow behind her, doing a bullshit dance that we’re both aware of but don’t acknowledge. When I can see she’s safely inside, I don’t send Black in after her again. We’re gonna go after Quad and Hooch directly, right now. This problem is gonna be taken care of.
I’m in a bad goddamn mood when I get to the clubhouse for a postmortem of yesterday’s run. Plus I’m preoccupied by the image of Kat’s pinched expression as she tried to pretend she didn’t notice me.
When I walk through the door, I almost don’t notice the crazy skull-faced motherfucker until he’s standing right in front of me.
“Jesus H. Christ!” I yell, jumping back so fast I nearly fall on my ass.
Christ on a crutch. This dude is not a ghost, or a demon. He’s real. His entire face is made up in a skeletal mask that makes it look like he’s not even human. His head is shaved, emphasizing the look. He’s like something out of a goddamn horror movie.
The skull-faced demon grins maniacally. “Haha, that ain’t who most people take me for. Most folks assume I’m from down below. Not up above.”
I stare at him, gaping, as my brain tries to reassemble itself. Eventually, as I take in the familiar leather cut and patches he’s wearing, I begin to make some sense out of it all.
“Tonopah,” I say, reading his patched out loud. “Sergeant at Arms. Shit. You’re one of the Tonopah Bastards. You’re a Reaper. You’re Rael, ain’t you?”
The Tonopah, Nevada chapter of the Royal Bastards MC is… well, it’s a fuckin’ strange one. That club is the stuff of legend. They call themselves Reapers. People say that they do some dark, voodoo-ass shit. That they made some sort of deal with the Devil, to take people’s souls and give them to him when they die.
I never took much stock in the stories, but I gotta admit, more than one big-ass motherfucking biker has had fear flashing in the whites of his eyes when he’s told a story of witnessing the Tonopah chapter in action. Their initiation into the club involves something called The Devil’s Ride. I hear it’s some demonic shit, and that witnessing it will scare the goddamn soul right out of you. Like I said, it all seemed liked bullshit whenever anyone told me about it before. But now, looking at this scary-ass motherfucker, I get a little tingle of something at the back of my neck.
Norse approaches us, flanked by Mack. “I see you and Rael have met,” Mack smirks at me. “Rael, this is Fury, your counterpart here.”
“So I see,” Rael affirms, nodding at my own Sergeant at Arms patch. “I’m up here on a job for Grim,” he tells me. “Just got in a bit ago. Gonna be around for the next few days.”
Shit, right now I’m almost glad Kat isn’t here at the clubhouse. This dude would scare the living hell out of her.
“What’s the job?” I ask.
“Ain’t at liberty to say. But since Magnus was kind enough to let me bunk here at the clubhouse while I’m in town, I’m available to help out your club if you need it.”
The four of us grab some beers from Little Big Mama at the bar and head on up to the rooftop deck. We’ve got it all set up there with space for partying, including some fire pits. The sun is just starting to dip in the sky, so the view is pretty good up there right now. We grab some chairs around one of the pits. I set my beer on the ground and light up a smoke, then glance at Norse.
“You fill Rael in on the shit with the Eagle’s Talon?” I ask him.
“Yep. I was just doin’ that. Got as far as tellin’ him about the meth shipment we grabbed off of them yesterday.”
“Where’s the shipment now?” Rael asked. “You sellin’ it?”
Norse shakes his head. “Took it out in the country into a field out in the middle of bumfuck and torched it.” He grimaces. “Fuckin’ stank to high heaven. Goddam, that shit’s poison.”
“Jesus Christ,” Rael says under his breath. “That’s a fuckin’ big waste of money. Coulda made a fortune off it.”
“Not worth the scrutiny of finding someone to unload a haul that big. You can’t keep shit like that a secret.” Norse spits on the ground. “Besides, fuck meth. That shit is evil.”
“Any time now, they should be getting to their hidey-hole,” I observe. “They’ll discover their stash is gone and their guards are nothing but bloody corpses.”
It makes me laugh to think imagining them starting to panic, knowing the cartel will be coming for them because they won’t be able to pay what they owe. The Talon won’t know for sure who did it, but it won’t be too hard for them to guess.
Bring it on, you motherfuckers.
The sun sinks deeper. I think about going back to the hospital in time for the end of Kat’s shift later. I ended up calling in a prospect to go out there, one to hang out in the parking garage by her car. At this point, the Talon’s probably got too much going on for Quad or Hooch to have time to be focused on Kat. But still, I don’t want to leave too much to chance.
As I sit there nursing my beer, my gaze pointed south in the direction of the hospital, I find myself wanting to head back down there to check on her anyway.
