I went back to my office and dicked around on the computer for a couple of hours, paying bills for my house and the body shop. Anything to keep from looking at her.

She watched something on TV in the den. I couldn’t tell what it was.

I figured I should let Kade in on the plan, but I didn’t want to do it over the phone. Call me paranoid, but I wanted to do it in person in case the fucking lines were tapped. I knew that was highly unlikely, but I still wasn’t about to take any chances.

“Did you find her?” Kade asked.

“Yeah. She’s here right now.”

“…huh.”

That ‘huh’ spoke volumes without saying anything at all.

Like, So what does that mean? Are you two good now?

Are you going to fuck her, or what?

None of which I felt like replying to, so I just said, “Can you come over?”

“You two are that bored already?” he said in a deadpan voice, though I knew it was a joke.

“Ha ha,” I said, not laughing. “Just get your ass over here.”

“Be there in fifteen.”

When I heard his motorcycle out in the driveway, I left the office and walked into the den. Fiona was standing there holding her .38, looking nervous as hell.

“It’s Kade,” I said, and opened the door.

“Oh,” she said, embarrassed.

“Keep watching your show,” I said as I opened the front door. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

I walked down the driveway just as Kade was getting off his bike.

“What’s up,” he said.

“I thought I should fill you in on the plan.”

“Okay,” he said, not bothering to comment on my paranoia.

“I hired Fiona’s boss to help out. He’s staying somewhere outside of Richards, so Lou won’t know in case his guys are watching us.”

“He’s good?”

“He seems pretty sharp – although he also seems like he’s a few fries short of a Happy Meal.”

“Sharp how?”

“He thinks those two fake Santa Muertes were hired by Lou.”

Rarely do I ever see any hint of emotion on Kade’s face. This was one of those times. He raised his eyebrows slightly – which for him was the equivalent of shouting What the FUCK?!

All he said, though, was “Really?”

“Yeah, and I gotta agree with him. It makes sense.”

Kade looked off into the distance and frowned. I could tell he was thinking it through. He finally said, “Except for the part about shooting Benjy, and not you and me.”

“Yeah, that’s the only part we can’t figure out. But I think the old man’s probably right.”

“Okay.”

“There’s more.”

“What?”

“Before all that shit went down at the Roadhouse, Fiona was blackmailed into being an informant for the DEA.”

Kade’s eyebrows went up even further. He was really overreacting today.

“Are you sure?” he asked.

“Yep. Remember that night Roach disappeared? The DEA got him.”

“How do you know that?”

“Fiona saw it go down.”

Kade’s eyes flickered towards my house, then back at me. He wasn’t a Sergeant-at-Arms anymore, but he still thought like one.

He’d cleaned up some particularly nasty shit for me when I first became president. He’d never done anything I hadn’t done myself back in the day, back when the Midnight Riders were outlaws and criminals. The difference was, Kade had done it so I could take the club legit. He’d pulled the trigger a couple of times when I wasn’t able to, mostly because of politics and appearances. I couldn’t exactly preach to the club about staying inside the law and then go out and do some of the things Kade had done on my behalf.

I could tell he was thinking along the same lines now, although he and I both knew the reasons I couldn’t pull the trigger were vastly different. This time, it was all about emotional attachment.

Do you need me to take care of this for you? he asked with a glance.

“It’s fine,” I reassured him.

He raised one eyebrow like, You’re sure?

“Fiona and I are… we’re working on it. But there’s something else.”

“Really,” he said in the driest voice imaginable. Sort of like, I’m not sure I can take any more.

“Eddie Deacon’s an undercover DEA agent,” I said.

Kade leaned his head forward and his entire forehead wrinkled, his eyebrows shot up so high.

I wanted to joke, Don’t have an aneurysm, man, but now really wasn’t the time.

“You’re fucking with me,” Kade said.

“Nope.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“Yeah. And we’re meeting him tomorrow morning at ten to see if we can work with him.”

Kade stared at me. Anybody else would have thought he was just caught off guard and looking at me blankly, but I knew that expression was his version of unmitigated horror.

“Are you sure that’s a good idea?” he asked after about ten seconds of silence.

“No. But if I don’t do anything, he’s going to take down the entire club. According to what Fiona said, Eddie hinted that Lou’s doing something we don’t know about – probably some sort of drug operation. And the DEA wants to hang all of us for it.”

“What if we exposed Eddie?”

“No. We do that, and Lou would kill him. And if not Lou, somebody else.”

“Not like he wouldn’t deserve it.”

“Maybe, but I don’t want his blood on our hands. I know I asked you to do a lot of shit three years ago, but we were trying to cut ties and get on the straight and narrow. We’ve been clean for over two years now, and I’m not going back on that just to save our hides. Not to mention the DEA will come after us even harder if anything happens to Eddie.”

Kade nodded the slightest bit. “…yeah, that’s true.”

“The only play I can see is to cut a deal where they go after Lou and a handful of other guys, and leave most of the club alone.”

“…I don’t know, man.”

That was his way of expressing a shit-ton of fear.

“It’s the only way out I can see.”

Kade looked off into the darkness. “I could take Lou out.”

I knew he didn’t want to look in my eyes when he said it.

“I appreciate that, but no. Unless you killed ten other guys at the same time, they’d just come after us anyway. And I’m pretty sure Lou’s got Secret Service-level security around him 24/7, in case we try to come after him. No… he’s more valuable to us alive. If he’s dead, the DEA doesn’t have anybody to scapegoat.”

Kade nodded, then finally looked at me again. “You want me to go with you tomorrow?”

“No. If shit goes wrong and you don’t hear from me within 24 hours, get the fuck out of town. Go to Mexico and wait it out.”

“I wouldn’t do that.”

“It’s not a request, it’s an order.”

Kade didn’t alter his voice much, but I could hear the gallows humor in his tone. “As I recall, you got demoted a while back.”

“Asshole,” I said with a grin, then turned serious again. “Give it some serious thought, at least.”

“We’ll see.”

“Alright… talk to you soon,” I said, and turned back towards the house.

“You hope.”

I looked back at him and nodded grimly. “I hope.”