Simon dismounted his Super Glide and followed Rad and Ox into the rear entrance of Signet Models. Though Simon wasn’t an enforcer, Rad called him in often on protection or control situations, usually when the situation in question needed a calming hand—especially when that hand might need to be applied to a brother. Eight Ball and Becker, who were enforcers, were good at intimidation and force. Simon was better at peaceful resolution, and he had a knack for reading people’s moods. Especially his brothers. There was nobody on earth he knew as well as he knew the Bulls.
This time, Simon knew he was here for Ox. Ox’s level head could be relied on in every circumstance but one: a threat to his old lady. As the three Bulls filed into the kitchen of Maddie’s business and made their way through to the front rooms, Simon put himself at Ox’s hulking shoulder and kept his antennae tuned into his brother’s vibe—which was already pulsing with worry and anger. He’d swelled up with it.
Signet Models was, on its face and in truth, a successful, legitimate agency that supplied talent for regional print and television advertising. The girls did copy for store circulars and commercials, served as show models and booth babes at conventions downtown, did portfolio shoots for up-and-coming local photographers—the usual work of regional models.
But the real money was made off the books. Some of the legit models were escorts as well, and some of the ‘models’ took legit jobs, too. Some even worked in-house: Maddie kept a floor of elegant guest rooms, and had a few fetish rooms in the basement.
She herself had been what she called a ‘working girl,’ back in the Seventies and Eighties. She told some hair-raising stories about those days, always ending them with the same, well-honed speech about how she’d vowed that someday, when she could afford to run her own house, she’d do it right and treat the women like members of her team.
By all accounts, and from what Simon knew from his own experience and observations, she’d kept that vow. The models and escorts on Maddie’s books were respected, protected, and well paid, and in control of whom they did business with and when.
To keep the legitimate façade of her business sturdy, Maddie wanted plenty of separation between the Brazen Bulls and Signet Modeling. The Bulls had good relationships with the law in Tulsa, both city and county, but they were well known, and Maddie wanted as much discretion for her business and its clients as she could muster. So she’d hired her own security and protection staff.
Even in light of the club’s trouble with the Street Hounds, she’d refused to allow the Bulls to fold Signet into their protection watch. She’d put extra guards on her staff instead.
Her guys had failed on both security and protection fronts today, however.
When Rad, Ox, and Simon came into the main room, which Maddie called the ‘reception room’ and was set up like a large, luxurious living room, Ox’s worried vibe became rage. Even before Simon had stepped out from behind the big man, he knew what he’d see would be bad.
And it was. The pastel, tastefully sedate space had been turned upside down, inside out, and every which way. ‘Ransacked’ didn’t cover it. Furniture had been destroyed, wood in fragments and upholstery disemboweled. Art had been torn from the walls and smashed on the floor. The carpet had been defiled. Even the wallpaper was shredded in places.
A burly man in a dark suit lay facedown on the cream-colored carpet, a dark stain encircling his head.
Simon wasn’t sure Ox had even noticed the dead security guy. He’d veered toward the office, charging ahead of Rad, and stormed through the open door. Rad was through right after him. Simon took a beat to check the guy’s pulse, just to be sure. Yeah—dead. He followed his brothers into Maddie’s office.
This room hadn’t been torn up. But the women now in it had. Maddie and two of her girls—one of whom was Kendra, a longtime club sweetbutt—sat together on Maddie’s white leather sofa. All three had been roughed up. Maddie sat in the middle of the sofa, leaning forward with her elbows on her knees. She held what had been a cream-colored washcloth to her head. Now it bloomed with red stains.
Upon seeing Maddie and the other girls, an image rose up in Simon’s head—of Deb. What would he do, how would he feel, if she’d been hurt? Since the night she’d shown up at his place, he’d been trying not to think about her. Failing more than succeeding, but trying. Now, he imagined her sitting before him, bleeding, and his stomach soured with anger.
Ox dropped to his knees before his old lady and grabbed her face between the two catcher’s mitts that were his hands. Her own hands fell away and showed a face swelling with darkening bruises, and a long gash across her forehead, still actively bleeding.
“Christ, Mads!” Ox tried to touch her forehead, but Maddie flinched sharply back.
“It’s okay, boo. I’ll be okay.”
“Who did this? How’d they get in?” He picked up the washcloth she’d dropped, and he dabbed it at her forehead. Without bothering to answer her old man’s question, she rested her cheek in his palm and let him tend to her.
Rad stood in the middle of the room, scowling so hard his face seemed about to turn inside out. “What the fuck happened, Maddie?”
Resting in Ox’s hands, Maddie still didn’t answer. Kendra, sitting at her side at the near end of the sofa, holding another washcloth to her mouth, answered. “They just…they…stormed in and started tearing shit up.”
“Who the fuck is they?” Rad snarled.
Kendra began to cry; her puffy eyes indicated that she’d been crying quite a lot already. Simon hated women’s tears and never knew what to do about them, but now, he went to Kendra and crouched before her.
“Hey, sweetheart, hey now. It’s okay. You’re safe now.” Gently, he tugged the washcloth away and saw the damage. She’d taken a powerhouse punch to her face, one augmented by rings or brass knuckles. Her lips were like ground meat, and one of her perfect teeth was out of place. A tear through her silky white blouse made one side fall from her shoulder as she shifted under his examination, and he saw long, angry scratches across her chest, too. Putting the blouse back up, covering the red strap of her bra, he took the washcloth from her and held it to her sore mouth for her, letting her rest her head in his other hand, much like Ox and Maddie.
Rad didn’t seem inclined to offer similar kindness to the remaining girl, whom Simon didn’t know, but she didn’t seem inclined to want kindness from strangers. She’d wound her body up like a knot at the other end of the sofa and simply stared. A blackening bruise swelled the dark skin of her cheek, and her black hair was wildly mussed, but otherwise, she seemed the least battered of these women.
“Maddie, we need fucking details,” Rad growled.
Ox wheeled his head around. “Back the fuck off, Sarge,” he growled right back. Though Simon was crouched on the opposite side and couldn’t see his face, he had a perfect image of Ox’s murderous expression. Those two going head to head would be like King Kong vs. Godzilla. It had never happened before in Simon’s knowing. Then again, Maddie had never been attacked in his knowing, either.
Maddie lifted her head from her man’s hand. She was still bleeding; red had stained her short, bright blonde hair so thoroughly that it almost seemed intentional. “Five men. They shot Brad at the door. I heard another shot in back, too—I think they must’ve got Larry, too.”
“We didn’t see him back there.” Rad’s full attention was on Maddie. “We’ll look again. Tell me about these five men, Mad. Or was it more—in back, too?”
She shook her head. “Five altogether, I think. Three came through the front, and two came up from the back. They killed the guards and then just…it was like they’d come to party. Something out of A Clockwork Orange. If it had been later in the day, when the place is full of people…They just tore the place up. Renee got the worst of it”—she reached out and clutched the quiet girl’s clenched hands. “I was in the basement when it started. When I came up, two guys were on her. Kendra was fighting off another and losing, and two were just tearing the shit out of the reception room, laughing like idiots.
Ox jumped to his feet. “Mads, did they—” His voice shook. His whole body shook.
But Maddie shook her head. “Not me. Renee, and Kendra. One of them knocked me around a little, then bashed me in the head, and I was out. But they didn’t touch me otherwise.”
Simon returned his attention to Kendra, resting in his hands. He saw now that her legs were bare and her knees were bruised and scraped. “Oh, sweetheart. I’m sorry.”
He’d fucked her dozens of times. She wasn’t one of the desperate doormats among the sweetbutts, but a smart woman who hung out at the clubhouse because she liked the place and the guys.
She gave him a shaky smile and brushed her hand over his cheek. “I’ll be okay, Si. Not the first time in my life a guy’s roughed me up. Not even the first time one’s roughed me up this way. I don’t break so easy.”
He leaned close and pressed a careful kiss to her cheek. “I’m still sorry it happened.”
Ox had crouched before his old lady again. “I need to get Maddie to the hospital. This wound is bad.”
“They all need the hospital, Sarge,” Simon added. Two women raped, three beaten, at least one dead guy. Signet Models torn up. There was no way to keep this off the public radar.
Rad nodded, and his scowl deepened even more. Simon wouldn’t have thought it possible. “Yeah, I see that. Fuck! Maddie, is there anything else? Anything about the assholes—something they said, what they looked like, anything.”
When she answered, her voice had lost some of its sharpness; she really did need medical attention. “They didn’t say anything important. Didn’t monologue about why they were tearing us up. But they were black. All five of them. Young and black.”
Simon wasn’t the least bit surprised, and he knew Rad and Ox weren’t, either.
The quiet, under-the-radar skirmishes that had been going on for months, steadily intensifying, were over. The Street Hounds had just fired the first shot in the war for Tulsa. And they’d aimed at women.
“Jesus fuck,” Rad muttered and pulled out his new cellphone.
~oOo~
“How’s Maddie?” Delaney asked as Ox sat at the Bulls table.
“Concussion. Fifteen stitches in her face. They’re keeping her overnight. I want these bastards, D.”
They’d had no choice but to call Jim Novak, the Tulsa police chief. The attack was far too high profile to just clean up and move on. Luckily, Novak was a personal friend of Dane, the Bulls VP, and thus a friend to the club. He’d managed the scene well, and the club could feel confident that they’d have some room to handle the payback.
Not unlimited room. Novak, Delaney, and Dane had stood in Maddie’s office and snarled at each other for a good ten minutes after his team had cleared out. The chief did not want seats on the fifty-yard line of a war in the middle of his city. He wanted shit handled, and quietly, and he’d threatened to come down on them all if it blew up.
It was going to blow up. No question about that anymore.
But for now, Novak was giving them some room to deal with it themselves. Now, the Bulls president nodded at Ox. “I know you want ‘em, brother. And we’ll get ‘em. That’s why we’re sitting here now. Gargoyle with her?”
Gargoyle was one of their new prospects. His given name was Jason, but he’d lost that about his second day in a prospect kutte. He was about five-ten or so and heavyset, at least two-fifty, maybe close to a full three hundred. Not fat, too solid to be fat, but a thick, hard mound of human flesh. Shaved bald and fleshy-faced, with a heavy brow and hooded eyes, he was lucky the name Gunner had slapped on him wasn’t worse. Simon’s first thought had been ‘Jabba.’
‘Gargoyle’ fit him, though. He was a scary bastard. He looked like a guy with a double-digit IQ, but then he’d open his mouth, and weird philosophical shit would come out, in this deep, almost musical mumble. Simon found him just a little bit off-putting. But he made a great guard. Fucker was tough as shit.
The other two new prospects, Caleb and Fitz, were more typical young recruits, still a little intimidated by the club and trying not to fuck up. If Caleb made his patch, he’d be the first Native American in club history. He was full-blooded Osage. Fitz was the only among the three who’d actually hung around the club with any regularity. Gunner had brought Caleb in, and Eight Ball had sponsored Gargoyle, on the strength of their acquaintance elsewhere. That was a risk, but Fitz had been the only of the regular hangarounds with the inclination, potential, and readiness to take the Bull, and they needed warm bodies for this war.
Simon had sponsored Slick, who was now a patched member and a good one. Still young at the table, but confident enough to speak when he felt it important. Simon wasn’t sure he’d have put his name up to prospect if they’d been at war at the time—Slick was slight and young, and didn’t look all that tough—but he had a tempered-steel skeleton inside that skinny body. He’d bled for the club as a prospect and shown his toughness again and again.
He hoped this new batch would be as tough.
Since they’d been brought in, the prospects had done almost constant guard work, following around the old ladies all day. And it still wasn’t enough. They had more women and children than they had prospects. All the Bulls did their turns on guard duty, and when the club had business that brought them all together, they put their most trusted hangarounds on their women.
They were stretched thin, keeping everybody safe, and it had been going on for months. Mo, Delaney’s wife, had actually taken early retirement from her teaching job, in the middle of the school year, because she couldn’t have an armed biker lurking around a grade school. Dane’s wife, Joanna, and Rad’s old lady, Willa, were dealing with bikers at their workplaces. Maverick’s pregnant wife, Jenny, had taken their little girl out of preschool, to avoid another biker lurking around a schoolyard, and to conserve Bulls’ resources. Gunner had finally sent his old lady, Leah, out to Osage County to stay with his father and sister, out of harm’s way.
Maddie having her own security had been a help to the Bulls. But that security had failed, and now she was under their wing as well.
Simon turned to Delaney. “We’re too big, Prez. There’s too many of us. I know you think staying spread out keeps us from making too much of a target, but we’re not just spread out, we’re spread thin. We gotta bring everybody in.”
“You mean lock down,” Dane replied.
Simon nodded. “Don’t see another way. We’re trusting fucking hangarounds with our families. We can’t fight a war while we’re shielding women and children with one arm. We need to bring them in and conserve our resources for the fight.”
Delaney shook his head. “We bring everybody in, all our women, kids, families, the people we love. Then the Hounds have one target. Just one. Look what Irina did to the Rats in Lubbock a couple years back. Cratered their clubhouse, took down the whole club and more in one swoop. That’s what a lockdown in a war does.”
“We could send the women and kids away,” Apollo suggested. “Maybe ask Caleb if his people would take them in. Not even Booker Howard is stupid enough to fuck around with the Osage.”
“You don’t think so?” Maverick countered. “I think he doesn’t give a shit about anybody’s boundaries. Look”—he sat forward—“Jenny is pregnant with my son. I fucked up and left her alone with Kelsey, and I won’t do it again. I made her a promise that I would be with her every step, and there’s no way I’m letting her down again. Ever. I say Simon is right. We need to lock down. Here. They can’t bomb us if we’re ready for them. The Rats—they didn’t know the Russians were coming, did they?”
Maverick had been inside during that trouble. He was still catching up his understanding of life working with the Volkov bratva. Rad answered his question. “No, they didn’t. If they expected anythin’, it was us.”
“Then we lock down and prepare for everything. And then we pay what the Hounds did today back.”
“We’re sure it was the Hounds?” Becker asked.
Apollo nodded. “Yeah. Showed Kendra some pictures. She ID’d a couple of them.”
“How’s she doin’?” Wally asked. The question of the lockdown had obviously been tabled.
Kendra and Renee were both in the clubhouse, resting in a couple of the crash pads upstairs. Feeling guilty for what had happened to them, Simon had checked in on them before he’d come into the chapel. “She’s banged up and hurting, but she’ll be okay. She’s tough. The other one—Renee—she’s not a sweetbutt, and she’s freaked out about being in the clubhouse. We need to keep an eye on her.”
Delaney held his hands up. “We’ll get the girls to take care of Kendra and the other one. We need to move this talk on to our next step. We have to answer this attack. Are we agreed on that, or do we need a vote?”
They didn’t need a vote.
“Okay, good. Apollo, do your thing.” With that, the president yielded the floor.
Apollo pushed a sheaf of papers around the table, sending sheets skidding over the scarred wood toward the members seated around him. Simon reached for those that had stopped near him. He took one and pushed the rest toward the head of the table.
The paper showed a black and white photo of a long, single-story building. The inkjet printout wasn’t good enough quality for him to make out anything remarkable about it, but then he noticed what looked like…no, couldn’t be. A jungle gym?
“Is this a school?” Maverick asked, just as Simon reached the same conclusion. “You want us to hit a fucking school? D!”
“Not just any school,” Delaney countered. “The charter school that Howard’s shell company sponsors. Big deal in Greenwood. Right in the heart of Hounds turf.”
“That’s a grade school, isn’t it?” Maverick asked.
“Pre-K through eighth,” Apollo answered.
“You are a sick fuck if this is your plan, kid. No fucking way we hit a school.” Maverick shoved the paper away and sat back, his arms crossed and his forehead furrowed in disgust. “And it’s in Tulsa. What happened to ‘we don’t shit where we eat’?”
“The Hounds took a giant dump on Maddie, that’s what happened. Hear Apollo out, Mav.” Dane didn’t yell, but his voice was firm. Often, Dane inserted himself between Delaney and a Bull the president was in conflict with. The dynamic had always interested Simon. Dane was generally more volatile than Delaney—except in this particular circumstance. Then he was reliably the valve that eased the pressure.
Maverick was no less angry, but he settled back in his leather seat and glared quietly at Apollo.
Looking a lot less confident than he had, Apollo picked up his thread. “I know it seems fucked up. But we hit it at night, when it’s empty. Nobody gets hurt. We destroy the main thing Howard’s been doing Northside to get the community in hand. That will hurt him bad, and show him we’re not to be fucked with.”
“We can’t hit a school,” Griffin mused. “Mav’s right. That’s fucked up. We destroy that place, and a bunch of kids got no place to learn. A bunch of people lose their jobs. They hit a whorehouse. It’s not comparable.”
Ox slammed his fists on the table, and the whole thing rattled. “They beat Maddie and raped two women.”
“Whores,” Eight Ball interjected. “They raped whores. Not like they haven’t had all kinds of dick in all kinds of places before.”
Simon whipped his head around. “Jesus Christ, Eight. Did you just fucking say that?”
Whether Eight Ball had simply forgotten that Maddie had been a whore herself once upon a time, or whether he really had harbored that kind of contempt for her as well as the others, he didn’t get a chance to clarify. Ox sailed his whole heft across the table, slamming Eight and his chair to the floor.
All the rest of the Bulls stood, but none tried to break them up. They let Ox wale on Eight for quite a while. Even Delaney stood there, watching, while Ox tuned Eight up.
Finally, the president shouted, “Enough! Ox, back off!”
Rad and Simon got hold of Ox and pulled him back. The big man’s arms were slick with sweat, and Eight simply lay on the floor, still partially in his seat. Griffin helped him up. Wally handed him a bandana to handle the blood from his gushing nose and mouth.
When everyone was back around the table, Delaney said, “You can finish it in the ring. We need to focus on the work. Apollo, finish this shit.”
Even more subdued now, Apollo nodded and got back to it. “I know it’s fucked up. But unless you want to go into Northside and start raping their women, we need to do something that gets at their heart. They didn’t come at us head first. They went for an old lady and her livelihood. They went for family. And they hurt her. This is an attack on family, too, but it hurts a different way. No blood. No women or children hurt. And Howard is fucking proud of that school. The Sunday paper did a spread on it a few weeks back. He thinks he’s going to take over Tulsa and be some kind of philanthropist while he’s pushing drugs all over the heartland.”
It made some sense, yeah. Getting used to the idea, Simon asked a next-level question. “Destroy it how?” He was getting a tickle at the back of his head. Excitement and trepidation.
“That’s you, Si,” Dane said.
That tickle intensified. “You want to burn it.”
Delaney, Dane, and Apollo all nodded.
Simon’s people owned a fireworks factory outside of Chicago. He’d started working there before high school, but even before that, he’d been getting tutored on incendiary devices and their use, safe and otherwise. More than just fireworks and explosives—his father and uncles had insisted that he understand fire itself. He’d hated the work as a kid, but when his life had taken a sharp left turn onto the outlaw road, he’d found that knowledge and skill especially useful.
“Burn it or blow it?” he asked now.
“Burn it, we think,” Delaney answered. “We want controlled damage. Unless you think blowing it would be better for control.”
Simon pulled one of the sheets toward him again and studied the photo. It was a shit image, but it looked like the school was in a residential area, or on its edge, at least. “Implosion would be best, but we don’t have that kind of time. Burn it. We need to burn it.”
“I want it totaled,” Ox snarled.
“I know, brother. I can get it done.” It had been a long time since he’d stretched those muscles, but the chance excited him—so much so that he began not to mind so much that the target was a school.
Delaney offered him a grim sneer that was probably meant to be a smile. “Good man. Tell us what you need.”
~oOo~
The thing about burning something big was finding the right place to drop the match. People thought that you just squirted lighter fluid everywhere and threw fire at it, but it didn’t work that way at all. To get something to burn right, you needed to know it, understand its blood and guts, know how it breathed.
If you could understand how power and air moved through a building, you were halfway to knowing how to burn it down. Simon spent the rest of that afternoon studying the blueprints of the school building—several sets of them. The building was old, first erected early in the twentieth century. It had lived a few lives in the past ninety years, and several plans had been filed with the city. Apollo and his hive of worker bees throughout city government had produced quite a stack of table-size papers for Simon to peruse. It hadn’t taken him long to see where the heart and lungs of the building lived. As evening became night, just as the Bulls friends and family had filled up the clubhouse for the lockdown that the club had finally called, Simon and his brothers were ready to gear up and get moving.
If the inside of the school looked like Howard’s plans for it, then the man had spent a mountain of money and time on making the Alice Dunbar Nelson Honor Academy look good. The building and its contents were almost definitely insured, but losing this crown jewel would still be a massive hit.
He’d made it look good, but he’d spent his money on flash. The guts, what people couldn’t see, were old.
Simon checked his Beretta in its holster, then zipped up his black hoodie and pulled the hood over his head and low before his eyes. Gunner, Rad, and Ox did the same, and they each shrugged black packs unto their shoulders. Becker, Maverick, and Slick had lookout positions at the nearest intersections. The rest of the Bulls were at the clubhouse, waiting for word on this job.
Rad turned to the front of the club van. Fitz sat behind the wheel, also in a black hoodie, looking nervous as hell. “You know what to do, kid. Right?”
“Yeah, yeah. I got it, Sarge. I’m on it. I’ll be at the end of the block, just in the alley.”
“Good. Stay chill, Fitz. Breathe deep and stay chill. This is easy shit, if you don’t lose yours.”
“I got it, Sarge. Swear.”
“Good boy.” He turned to Simon. “You’re on point here, Si. You ready?”
He was more than ready. He was able, willing, and eager. “Let’s hit it.” Ox opened the back of the van, and they all jumped out.
The building was a single-story brick structure, typical of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century industrial construction in this part of the world. The parking lot was empty, and the only lights came from four floods on the building—two on the parking lot, and two on the front entrance. Simon led his brothers beyond the range of the floodlights, to a far side entrance, one shielded from view by a late-addition concrete-block wall that hid dumpsters from sight.
Gunner took out his pick kit and opened the standard commercial lock on this door. Inside the building—it did look like the plans, all shiny and new and equipped with high-end technology and other educational resources—Ox and Rad broke off to do the work Simon needed them to do. Gunner followed him to the service room and picked that lock, then went off in another direction. For the whole building to be sure to go down, they needed fresh catch points for the fire he’d start. He’d shown his brothers how and where to set those catch points.
Now alone in the service room, where an old boiler still worked and a new circuit breaker box had been installed next to a nest of fuses still in use—cut corners that were about to bite Booker Howard in the ass—Simon crouched on the floor, opened his pack, and laid out his tools and supplies in the order he’d need them. His gloves were in his way, but he fought off the itch to remove them. If the fire burned right, there wouldn’t be fingerprints or any evidence left behind, but no point in taking the chance.
They would make sure that the Hounds knew who’d destroyed their building, but they meant to leave no trace for law to know.
As he finished disabling the smoke detectors, fire alarms, and sprinklers, his cellphone buzzed against his belly, and he pulled it from his hoodie pocket. “Yeah,” he answered.
“I’m done,” Rad said and was gone.
Two more calls just like it, from Ox and Gunner, then one more, from Rad: “We’re clear. You’re on.”
Simon stood and got to work.
~oOo~
“Did it work?” Ox peered through the back window of the van. They’d had Fitz pull off and park about a block and a half down, just around the corner.
“It worked. Be patient. It’s only been two minutes.” The service room had been fully engaged when Simon had left it, but it would take time for the fire to make it through the vents of the whole building. When it hit the catch points, that would be payday.
Another minute passed, and the windows of the school lit up, almost all at once, full of churning yellow fire—exactly as he’d planned. Taking in the curling blooms of flame and blaze that pressed against the windows all along the building, Simon smiled. Fire was one of the basic elements of the natural world, and he’d mastered it. He wasn’t a firebug, but in moments like this, seeing the work of his hand on something so natural and devastating, he understood how someone might become a firebug.
Gunner barked out a laugh. “Yeah! Yeah, man!” He turned and slapped Simon hard on the back. “You da man! SHIT! It’s gorgeous!”
Yeah, it was.
While they watched, the fire began to burn through the wood-framed windows and lick over the exterior brick, working its way to the roof. That was what they needed for complete destruction: the roof would collapse and take the whole thing down with it.
People who lived nearby began to gather across the street from the school, dressed in robes and pajamas, most of them. It was a few hours before dawn.
By the time they heard the first siren, the building was entirely ablaze, front to back, side to side, top to bottom. Some of the neighbors had started to try to do something about it, pulling their garden hoses forward, but Simon saw that they’d turned their attention to the nearest buildings to the school. The school itself, they’d given up on.
Rad turned from the rear windows. “We gotta go. Place is gonna be crawling with legal beagles any minute. Fitz, hit it—drive like a regular Joe, kid.”
The prospect nodded and put the van in gear.
Simon watched his handiwork as long as he could. He’d hoped to see the roof fall, but no such luck.
Still, he knew it would. Fire was his bitch.
~oOo~
First thing the next morning, the Bulls sat in the chapel, quiet around their table. Simon stared at his hands, his mind still reeling, trying to make sense of what Delaney had just said—and what Griffin had added.
After they’d returned to the clubhouse last night, they’d all shared a celebratory drink and then gone off their own ways. A few had stayed and picked up girls. Simon had gone home and worked on his model until the buzz from the night’s work had worn off, then crashed heavily and slept soundly.
His cellphone had pulled him from deep sleep after a couple of hours—Dane calling him, and all the Bulls, to church for an emergency meeting. He hadn’t said more on the phone. Not until Delaney called the meeting to order and made his announcement did Simon hear what he’d done.
Now, he turned to Delaney. “What was he doing there? It was way past hours.”
Griffin answered, his voice flat and cold. “He’s on the outs with his wife. He’s been sleeping in his office past few nights.”
“Jesus Christ.” Simon swallowed down the swell of bile and black coffee rising up in his throat. “Jesus Christ.”
The assistant principal of the school had been in the building. Simon had killed an innocent. Burned in the fire he’d started. Worse, the victim was Patrice Thompson’s uncle. He’d killed Griffin’s girlfriend’s blood kin.
The club hadn’t even known that Patrice had Northside ties.
“Griffin,” Delaney said, his voice a smoky, early-morning rumble. “We need to know what you know and how long you’ve known it. And you best be straight and wide open right now.”
“I didn’t know any of it. Until a few hours ago, when her mom called, I didn’t know any of it.”
“You should’ve,” Eight Ball said. “We all should’ve. It’s obvious.”
Griffin glared at Eight. “Why? Because she’s black?”
Eight Ball answered with only a shrug.
“Not every black person in Tulsa is related, or from Northside, you racist fuck. Not everybody from Northside is black. Fuck, half our neighbors here are black. And Patrice’s mom is white. I didn’t even fucking know she had any contact with her dad’s side.”
“That’s a problem, where I sit,” Rad said. “You’ve been with her how long? Four years? Why’d she never say so?”
Griffin ran an agitated hand through his shaggy hair. “I don’t know. Never came up. I don’t talk about my shit, and she doesn’t talk about her shit.”
Delaney leaned forward, toward Griffin. “And here’s the critical issue, Griff. What does Patrice know? You be straight, boy. You hold back now and we get hurt because of it, and you will pay hard for that betrayal.”
Before he answered, Griffin scanned the table. Simon wondered what he was looking for, or hoping to see. For his own part, Simon was trapped in the sudden snarl of guilt and shock. He’d killed a bystander. An innocent. Collateral damage. Some poor asshole in the wrong place at the wrong time. Jesus Christ. He had little room left for Griffin’s dilemma.
Finally, Griffin blew out a sigh. “She knows it was us last night. I didn’t tell her, she put it together.”
The table responded to that with a general rumble that amounted to Fuck.
“What else has she put together that you haven’t said outright? Over the past four years?”
“I don’t know. We don’t talk about it. D, I swear. I don’t tell her shit.”
“She’s not stupid, though,” Gunner said.
“No, she is not,” Delaney agreed. “And she doesn’t keep your flame. Always thought that was your business, but now it’s our business. Why’d you never mark her?”
“It’s complicated. And private.” Griffin’s eyes dropped; he knew that answer wouldn’t get him far.
Delaney slammed the side of his fist on the table. “Uncomplicate it. Make it public. Right now.”
It took a few seconds for Griffin to work himself up to it. In those seconds, the table seemed to gear up to hear something really bad, even worse than the bad of this whole meeting.
“A few years back, she caught me fucking around. She got back on me the same way. Fighting that out got…it got physical. She won’t keep my flame because she wants out fast if I do it again.”
That pulled Simon’s attention from his own trouble to his brother’s. Griffin was a mellow guy. If there’d been an ocean nearby, he’d probably have been a surfer dude. He tried to imagine Griff putting angry hands on any woman, much less one he cared about, but he couldn’t even form the picture. From the thudding silence around the table, it seemed that Simon wasn’t the only one who couldn’t get hold of this new information.
Griffin put up a hand. “Before anyone asks why we stayed together, that’s not complicated. I love her. I fucked up, but I guess she loves me anyway. But she took her out over this. We split a couple hours ago.”
More silence. Simon turned to Delaney and tried to read the president’s inscrutable expression. He couldn’t.
When Delaney finally broke the table’s fugue, he spoke with quiet steel. “You understand the problem we have, Griff.”
“No, Prez. There’s no problem. Just because she has family Northside doesn’t make her a Hounds ally.”
“Not our ally now, either.”
“She has good friends in the club. It’s not just me. You know her. She’s angry, but she won’t do anything to get people she cares about hurt.”
With a slow shake of his head, Delaney turned to the whole table. “I’m not prepared to make this call either way on my own. I want a vote.”
“What’s the vote?” Becker asked.
Glancing first at Delaney, Dane answered, “Do we deal with Patrice as a liability, or do we leave her be? Aye says we deal with her.”
Maverick spoke up. “‘Deal with her’ how?”
“Deal with her in a way that neutralizes her threat.”
“You mean kill her. A woman. That we don’t know is a threat.”
Delaney heaved a sigh that wrote an essay of weariness. “If we need to. That’s the vote, Mav.” When Maverick glared, Delaney added, “If leaving Patrice alive means Kelsey gets hurt, what would you do?”
Maverick didn’t take the bait. “We don’t know she’s a threat. This vote is too early.”
“I want to know the will of the table.” Delaney passed the first vote to Rad.
The SAA took a long time to make his call. When he did so, his eyes held fast on Griffin. “I like Patrice. But she’s not club, and that was her choice. She doesn’t keep Griff’s flame. I will protect this club from any threat. I want intel first, and I don’t relish the job, but my vote is Aye. I will put a bullet in her head if it means Willa and Zach, or Leah, or Mo, or any of our women and children stay safe.”
“This is fucking insane,” Griffin protested. But he said no more.
When the vote made its way to Delaney, it was already decided, but far from unanimously. Five Bulls had voted to deal with her: Rad, Ox, Eight Ball, Becker, and Dane. Seven had voted no. Delaney made his vote, strictly rhetorical, with his eyes on Griffin. “I’m sorry, Griff. My vote is Aye.”
Thirteen men sat around the Brazen Bulls table. Six of them had just voted their willingness to kill a woman in cold blood.
Simon sat back in his seat, stunned.