“Shit. Shit, shit, shit, fuck.”
Simon cracked open his eyes and saw a blurry silhouette before his bedroom window. He blinked the night’s sleep away, and the blur became a body. A female body. A nude female body, trying to quickly and quietly not be, and failing on both counts.
“Shit!” she barked in a whisper. She snatched her jeans from behind the chair and shimmied into them. With a pang, he watched her tiny red thong disappear into faded denim.
He’d been banging Debra for more than a year—not steadily or seriously, but predictably and pleasantly—and she’d never spent the night. After their first time, in her bed, they’d always fucked here, in his bed, or a few times in his truck or her car, and once, memorably, on his bike. Never at the clubhouse, and never again at her place.
Flirt, fuck, recover, and off she’d go, in her fake-wood-sided station wagon, back to the family farm, like the Oklahoma edition of Cinderella.
The muttered R-rated tantrum she was throwing was, he assumed, explained by the morning sun streaming through his bedroom window. She’d spent the night and was not happy about it.
He cleared his throat, but he didn’t move from his cozy position, where the empty spot right against his belly was still warm. “Hey, you okay?”
“I fell asleep. I gotta git.” She yanked her sweater on, pulling her fantastic mop of thick, long, wavy black hair out of the neck with a sweep of her arm. “Do you see my other boot?”
“Uh-uh,” he grunted, without moving.
Her hands slammed down on her hips, and her flurry of movement stopped for a second. “You didn’t even look. Asshole.”
“I’m comfortable.” He put a grin on his face, but it took some effort. He was getting pissed off. No idea why.
Clearly in no mood for banter, she flipped him the bird and stomped to the other side of the bed, where he lay. She was no longer trying to be quiet, and not really making that much more noise.
Simon finally shifted a little, turning his head to follow her path. She disappeared from his sight, blocked from view by his shoulder, and then came up with the missing boot in her hand. Standing on one foot, she pulled it on.
“Gotta go. I’ll see ya.” With that sad excuse for a fare-thee-well, she turned and hurried out of his bedroom. After a few seconds which he figured were occupied with pulling on her jacket and grabbing her keys, he heard the door to his house open and close with a firm slam.
Simon rolled to his back and stared up at the ceiling. Yeah, he was pissed. Why? They’d simply crashed out after a few especially athletic rounds of erotic wrestling. He hadn’t planned on her spending the night, he hadn’t been hoping for it, he wouldn’t have said he’d even wanted her to. Moreover, it was no surprise, after all this time, that she wanted to fuck and fly. She had to be home in the early morning to help her dad out with the farm, and she was looking for exactly zero commitment to anything but a reliable orgasm or two. Or, last night, five. Fuck, even he’d come three times.
No commitments, no expectations, no jealousies or demands. Just Hey, you free? Wanna hook up? And some damn fine trim. That was the whole appeal—and better for his personal well-being and the continuing connection of his body to all of its parts. Deb’s little brother could get totally fucking crazy when he was angry. Violently crazy. Simon had no intention of having a relationship with Gunner’s big sister.
Or any woman, for that matter. He wasn’t opposed philosophically, but practically. The Brazen Bulls were in deep dark woods these days, and things were far too dangerous to be thinking about bringing civilians in. Which was another reason that Gunner would want to dissect him if he knew they were even fucking, much less anything more. As his sister, Deb was a satellite to the club. A romantic involvement would pull her into the center. And that could be dangerous.
So why was he so pissed? As he lay there, irritation heated to a simmer, and then to a boil. He was seething. He snatched the pillow she’d lain on and hurled it across the room, where it hit the wall and knocked his print of the HMS Victory askew.
Swinging his legs over the side of the bed, Simon sat and raked his hands through his hair. He was sore. His legs, his back, his shoulders—they’d really gone to town last night. No wonder they’d crashed for hours afterward. Deb was a fucking wildcat in the sack, but last night had been intense even by their usual standards. His cock felt bent.
He took a few deep breaths, filling his lungs with oxygen, waking his body up, getting past the sore and the seethe. What the hell was up in his head?
It was the shame. The way Deb had run around, cussing and chasing down her clothes, like she’d gotten caught out doing something naughty. She was a thirty…something-year-old woman. She was single. Why was he sitting here feeling like the other man?
Or maybe it was worse than that. He wasn’t the other man; he was just the guy with the dick on call. At least she hadn’t left a stack of bills on the dresser on her way out.
Wait, what?
He was pissed because she only wanted him for sex? When in the holy hell had he turned into a chick?
No fucking way. No, no, no, no, no.
“Fuck this shit,” he grumbled aloud and stalked off to his bathroom, straightening the Victory and tossing the pillow back to his bed on the way.
~oOo~
Apollo dropped a hunk of black plastic on the table before him and continued around the table, dropping identical hunks of black plastic before all of the Bulls.
Ox picked up his hunk and scrutinized it, one eyebrow cocked high. “What the hell?”
“It’s a cellphone,” Apollo answered, continuing his trip around the table. “Climb up out from under your rock, man.”
“I know what it is, shithead,” the big man growled back. “I don’t want one.”
“Everybody gets one, Ox,” Delaney, the club president, said. “Apollo will explain.”
His sack of goodies empty, Apollo sat. He was a youngish patch, just heading toward thirty, and far savvier about technology than anyone else at the table. For the most part, the rest of the club just nodded and voted ‘yes’ when he said they needed something—a beefed up security system in the clubhouse, pagers for all the patches, whatever.
He had some good contacts in law enforcement as well—the whole club had good relationships with the Tulsa County Sheriff and the Tulsa Police Chief, but Apollo had a network of low-level employees, data-entry folk and dispatchers, the kind of employees who had access to great information the club could touch without starting a wave at the top.
They were all, as far as Simon knew, young, starry-eyed women. Apollo was slick as fuck and built like a marble statue. He’d gotten his road name because his parents had named him Neil Armstrong—his father was a space buff—but he might as well have been named for the Roman god.
At any rate, in addition to being their technology guy for shit like security and communications, his ability to get both computers and breathless young women to give up their secrets had put him in charge of a certain kind of information-gathering for the club. Generally, intel was the SAA’s job, but Rad’s brand of information-gathering often required a cleanup crew afterward, and sometimes a six-foot hole.
Apollo was the feather; Rad was the cudgel.
Simon picked up the phone before him. It was heavy for its size, which was about three times bigger than the pager he’d worn clipped to his belt for the past few years. The pagers had been Apollo’s idea, too—the first one he’d brought to the table as a patch. It hadn’t gone over well, either, at first, but the club had come to rely hard on those little gizmos.
Delaney had already given him the floor, so Apollo took it and spoke with authority. “These are prepaid phones. Untraceable. But I’m still going to collect them every week and wipe them. These are for club business only. Don’t give the number out to some chick, or even your old lady. If this rings, you know it’s club business and important.”
“Just what we need—to be in the middle of some kind of trouble and have a goddamn phone start ringing in somebody’s pocket,” Becker complained.
“I don’t want this brick in my pocket.” That was Rad. He’d been in the officer meeting, as Simon had, when they’d decided to let Apollo run with this idea, so it wasn’t a surprise to him, but he didn’t look like the extra time had made him like the idea better.
Apollo sighed with all the evident patience of a father trying to explain to his kids why they had to eat their vegetables. “Jeans pocket, kutte pocket, whatever. If you don’t like that, I’ve got holsters for them that’ll clip to your belt.” He turned to Becker. “The phones have a vibrate feature. You can turn off the ringer, and it’ll go off just like the pagers do. In fact, before we leave the chapel, I’ll set everybody’s phone to stun, okay?”
“What do you mean, ‘stun’?” Ox asked, eyeing the phone suspiciously.
“Christ, Ox. Are you ninety? Vibrate. I mean vibrate. Like the goddamn pagers.”
Ox’s eyes narrowed to dangerous slits, but he said no more.
Delaney and Dane, their VP, just sat there, letting Apollo take the grumbling heat. He was doing a decent job of it, too, but Simon had been in a mood all week, and he was sick of the bellyaching. “Look. With these”—he waved his hand at the phones on the table—“when the club needs you, instead of having to find a phone and call in, you’ll just get a call right then. And if you need the club, we don’t have to send out calls to a dozen fucking pagers and wait for a dozen calls back to get things moving to help. We can just call and move. We’re switching to phones. Suck it up.”
Apollo offered him a nod for the solidarity. “Thanks, man.” He turned his attention out to the whole table. “Now, I said these are untraceable, and they are, to the extent of normal scrutiny. TPD or the sheriff wouldn’t be able to get anything off them. But if you use them enough, hold onto them enough, there’s higher-level shit that the Feds could touch if they look our way.”
“Feds don’t look at us.” Maverick had been quietly examining his phone. Now he looked up and square at Delaney. “Do they?”
Maverick had done four years in the Oklahoma State Penitentiary and had been out less than a year. Though he was back in the thick of it with the rest of them, it was pretty clear that he didn’t feel fully caught up yet.
The club president leaned forward. “Not straight on, they don’t. But the Volkovs are on their radar, so the Feds see us. And with this shit we’ve got brewing on our home front…when that blows, we could be smack in the middle of a lot of crosshairs.”
They’d been sitting on a powder keg for months, preparing for war with the Street Hounds, a national gang that last year had overtaken a Northside crew that had been influential in Tulsa since the 1940s. Booker Howard, the regional head of the Hounds, had declared his intent to control all of Tulsa, and all of the Great Plains, which meant flattening the Brazen Bulls.
The Bulls, of course, had no intention of letting that happen. So far, the war was brewing and not full-blown, both sides gathering intel and causing inconvenience. But it wouldn’t stay that way forever. There would be blood eventually. They were all tense: when war hit home, everything that mattered was in the line of fire.
Apollo picked his talk back up. “My point is, don’t get lazy. You get lazy, you could bring us all down. I’ll collect the phones before every regular meeting and give you freshly wiped ones.”
“Pick ‘em up, get used to ‘em, figure out where you’re gonna keep ‘em,” Delaney barked. “If you need a holster, see Apollo. If you need a lesson on how to use a fuckin’ phone, see your kindergarten teacher. Let’s move on. We got other things to talk about.”
~oOo~
“Dude, it’s the button that says Talk.”
“Like a walkie?” Ox was supposed to be spotting Simon while he did chest presses, but he stood there staring at his new cellphone.
Simon muscled the barbell onto the stand on his own. “No, not like a walkie. Jesus, Ox. It’s not that different from the cordless we got sitting on the bar.”
Ox’s scowl of irritated concentration slid from the phone in his hands to Simon’s face below him. “I hate that fucker. It never turns on when I want it to. Or turns off if I can get it on. I’m gettin’ too old to learn all these new tricks.”
He was in his mid-forties or something. Not exactly geriatric. Delaney was well older than that and doing fine with the tech upgrades. Ox looked, at first glance, like he’d be tipping heavily toward muscle on the brawn-brain scale, but he was, in fact, quietly smart. But he despised change. He was old-school in just about everything. He liked his movies black and white, his hair short, his whiskey neat, and his women blonde and busty.
Woman. In the singular. He’d had an old lady for well over a decade and, as far as Simon knew, he’d never strayed. Not even on a run. They weren’t married, but that wasn’t Ox’s call. Maddie Donne was definitely blonde and moderately busty, but she was not remotely old-fashioned.
She’d taken his ink, though. She’d conceded that much and kept his flame.
For his part, Ox had a big pinup tattoo on his chest, right over his heart. A busty blonde in a sheer negligee, with bobbed hair and huge grey eyes. The name Maddie was scrawled in script below her little high-heeled slippers, with a tiny heart atop the i.
With his own two eyes, Simon had seen Ox Sanchez pick up a large human male and break his back over his knee, but for his woman, he was pure fluff.
“You’ll figure it out. It’ll be good, being able to get in touch faster.” Simon came up off the bench. “It’ll be safer. Your set.”
As Ox and Simon changed the weight on the bar—Ox was a goddamn mountain and could bench eighty pounds more than Simon and not break a sweat—Gunner and Griffin came into the club’s basement weight room. Griffin sat down on the Bowflex, and Gunner picked up a couple of fifty-pound dummies and started to curl.
Griffin settled into his contraption. He and Slick were the only ones who ever used the Bowflex. “Gun and I’re gonna head out with Slick and Wally to the Crazy Rose later. You guys want in?”
It was Friday night. Generally, they had some kind of party going on weekend nights, at least members, neighbors, hangarounds, and sweetbutts hanging out to drink and fuck, but they’d cooled it lately. Twice since Christmas, they’d had to bring all their loved ones into the clubhouse and lock it down, so they’d been pulling their trust in a little. Keeping the clubhouse doors locked, not throwing parties. It was hard to be vigilant when everybody was getting plastered, and right now, they had to be careful who got close.
Conventional wisdom was that partying at home was safer. Right now, on the brink of a war, Delaney believed that partying out in the wild was the better call, so they couldn’t all get hit at once. Lockdowns were different, because everyone was on high alert and ready to fight. When they weren’t locked down, it was important to be a smaller target.
But still. Gunner.
Simon cocked an eyebrow at his wild brother. The Crazy Rose was one of those massive country bars with sawdust-covered concrete floors, and three different areas, for dancing, pool, and hard drinking. They held line-dancing classes before sunset. The drinks were pricey and the music was live, so the clientele tended to be likewise. Friday night was Ladies’ Night, and you could find some excellent pussy getting very well lubricated on two-dollar cocktails while the men nursed eight-dollar Buds.
You could also find some real asshole dudes who styled themselves alpha males and puffed up their chests when guys like the Bulls came in. Exactly the kind of place Gunner was supposed to stay clear of.
He hadn’t blown in a long time—shit, it had been more than a year. Since he’d hooked up with Leah. But Simon didn’t believe that the love of a woman was a permanent cure-all for whatever mental misfires Gun had going on up there.
“You sure, bro?” he asked, rubbing at the ugly scar on his side. A war wound he’d gotten pulling Gunner out of trouble. With all the shit they had going on lately, one of his signature crackups could bring the whole club to its knees.
Gunner stopped in the middle of a right-arm curl and glared at Simon. “I’m cool, Si. That’s not me anymore.”
Again, Simon did not believe that love, no matter how deep and true and real, was actually curative. Come to think of it, though, Gunner didn’t go out that often these days. He partied at the clubhouse when he partied at all. Mostly, he went home to nest with his little chick.
“You’re not heading home?”
He shrugged and resumed his set. “Leah’s in Oklahoma City for the weekend on a thing for one of her classes. I don’t like being home on my own.”
He’d said that without an ounce of embarrassment. Simon chuckled. Damn, the guy was way past gone.
The laugh got his hackles up, though. “Fuck off, man. You don’t know.”
“No offense meant, brother.”
Ox had completed his set. Simon, a more conscientious spotter today, guided the bar back to its resting place, and the big guy sat up. “You gotta watch yourself, Gun.”
“For fuck’s sake.” He racked the dummies. “I’m chill. You seen me lose my shit lately?” When nobody answered, he did it himself. “No, you have not. I’m telling you, I got it figured out. I’m cool.”
Simon let it drop. “Why the Rose?” Shit, they could go to The Wayside and be supporting a brother—Maverick’s old lady owned that bar.
Griffin answered that one. “Patrice got a job there. Waitress, starts tonight. I want to keep an eye out.”
Well, that settled it. Griffin’s girlfriend—they’d been together years, but, for reasons far above Simon’s need-to-know, he’d never marked her—was gorgeous. She was also black, and the Rose drew the kind of guys that would see her as prime pussy they had leave to get particularly fresh with. Entitled assholes who’d shove a twenty in her cleavage when she handed them their beer and call that payment for whatever they meant to do. He couldn’t fathom why she’d want to work there.
But he could fathom why Griffin wanted them to go. He wanted backup.
Even Gunner was surprised. “Why didn’t you just ask straight out, man?”
Obviously abashed, Griffin dropped his head, and his hair fell forward, blocking his face. “She doesn’t want me there. She’ll be pissed. I figured if we were all there, just hanging, she couldn’t throw down with me.”
Simon laughed. “Pussy. Jesus, this whole club is coming down with fucking PMS. Yeah, I’m in. Ox?”
Ox sighed noisily. He was not a partier. But he was a protector. “Yeah, I’m in. Gotta call Mads, let her know.”
Simon grabbed his t-shirt and yanked it back on, then snatched up his kutte. “Y’all are a lost cause,” he muttered as he stalked from the weight room and headed upstairs.