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The irony was, corruption in Richards was mostly the Midnight Riders’ fault. We’d paid off every cop we could for 20 years – and, I’m ashamed to say, I hadn’t said ‘no’ to Lou when he wanted to sweep shit under the rug. Things like the shooting at the Seven Veils… drunken bar fights…
The death of Ali’s cousin.
I’d been telling myself for three years that I was making the club street-legal and legit, that I was changing things for the better. And for the most part, I was… but I’d looked the other way plenty of times.
In a way, maybe all this shit I was going through was the chickens coming home to roost.
But something Dan had said wormed its way past my guilt-ridden thoughts.
“Wait… what do you mean, ‘even if they were involved’? What makes you think they weren’t?”
There was a look on Dan’s face like uh oh, but it was fleeting. Just enough to make me take notice and think, Huh, what’s that all about?
He lapsed right back into the bullshit, smooth as silk. “You ever known a Santa Muerte to just walk into a joint with a bunch of other bikers and start shooting?”
I tried to keep the You idiot tone out of my voice. “Yeah, actually, that’s happened plenty of times.”
“Years ago, sure, back when you and the Riders were going toe-to-toe with ‘em. But since then? Nothin’.”
“There weren’t any shootings because we weren’t at war with them,” I said, slowly and deliberately, like I was explaining it to a child.
“Exactly,” Dan said, stabbing the air with his finger as though I’d made his argument for him.
…what the fuck?
Goddamn idiot.
“Let me get this straight,” I said. “You’re saying that just because the Midnight Riders aren’t currently at war with the Santa Muertes, there’s no possible way they might send in shooters to take us out, and therefore there’s no reason for the police to investigate.”
Dan shifted uneasily in his chair. “Well… it sounds a little simplistic when you put it like that.”
More like fucking stupid.
“But basically, yeah – it makes no sense,” he continued.
“It makes perfect sense. I still have bad blood with Rodrigo Alvarez – you think he’s forgotten that?”
I’d rearranged Rodrigo’s face back in the day, which had put me in Chino for three years – not to mention on Rodrigo’s permanent shitlist. Now he was the Santa Muertes’ Sergeant-at-Arms. Even though the Riders had negotiated a peace treaty with them when I became president, Rodrigo was never going to forgive or forget. He was just biding his time.
“If you guys have such bad blood,” Dan asked, “then why the hell would a couple of Santa Muertes walk into a club with the Riders’ President, VP, and Sergeant-at-Arms all in the same place, and then only shoot some little pissant new guy? ‘Scuse my talkin’ about your friend that way.”
For a second I got angry at him for referring to Benjy as a pissant.
Then I felt a pang of conscience that I’d totally forgotten about Benjy in the chaos of the last few days. I need to go to the hospital and check on him…
Finally, I realized that what Dan had asked was a damn good question.
“Say it was a hit,” Dan continued. “Why would they send in the JV team? If they wanted to take you guys out, they would have used a dozen heavy hitters with machineguns. But they didn’t. They sent in two retards, one who got himself shot right away, and the other – ”
Dan caught himself before he spoke the truth out loud.
Instead, he just chuckled. “Well, I guess the other one got away, so he wasn’t too much of a retard.”
Despite being a loathsome asshole, Dan had a good point: if the Santa Muerte brass had been behind last Friday night, why the fuck had they wasted a prime opportunity to assassinate me, Lou, and Kade? And why had they sent in a couple of jack-offs to do the job?
Dan shook his head. “Mark my words, they were just two guys who got a wild hair up their ass. Probably high on somethin’. That, and just plain stupid enough to stumble into the wrong fuckin’ titty bar.”
Stumble into the wrong fuckin’ titty bar.
