KING
I left Mahoney behind as I walked out of the interview room. As I passed Sanderson, he sneered at me again. I could see by the look on his face that he wanted to toss me into a cell and throw away the key. Or just shoot me. They had no choice but to let me walk, though. They had nothing on me, no reason to keep me.
“Hey, Sergeant,” I called. “You've got some donut residue on your uniform. You might want to do somethin' about it. Gives the wrong impression and all.”
His face turned an unnatural shade of red as he looked at me. I heard some stifled snickers from around the room and saw some of the cops trying to hide their faces.
“Go fuck yourself, dirtbag,” he snapped.
As soon as I stepped out into the sunshine and got on my bike, I headed over to the clubhouse for an update and to make sure the Incas weren't causing any trouble. It's not like we had any sort of control over what happened. I'd get them their drugs – it was just going to take a little bit longer than we'd agreed upon. Not much I could do about it, though. It's not like I'd called the fuckin' cops.
Our clubhouse wasn't too far from Abbie's apartment complex. It was a little farther away from the city limits and was surrounded by large trees. The gravel parking lot was filled with a host of familiar bikes. And no unfamiliar ones. Most of my boys were there, which I took to be a good sign. And there was no sign of the Incas at our clubhouse. Which was an even better sign.
“Hey, King,” Roy called out to me as I stepped inside the building. “Have a good time with the popo, did ya?”
Roy and the others laughed, but I flipped them off. Grabbing a beer from the fridge in the shop, I sat down on a stool and took a nice, long swig. Some of the guys stepped into the shop and gathered around. I noticed that a few of them were walking around strapped. Which was a bit unusual. Some of them looked a little tense, as if they were on edge. Maybe they were. Maybe they were expecting the Incas to come storming in here with guns blazing.
“Anything going on I need to be aware of?” I asked.
Roy stood up from where he'd been working on his bike, wiping his oil-slicked hands on his jeans. “Not a whole lot really. I heard they dragged El Segador down to the station on a couple of old warrants for parking tickets.”
I laughed. “They're creative,” I said. “I'll give Mahoney and his boys that.”
“El Segador probably isn't in a very good mood today,” Roy said. “Last I heard, they sweated him all fuckin' night.”
Which might have explained the heightened tension in the station when I was there. “Yeah? What happened?”
Roy shrugged. “They had nothin' on him. And you know that son of a bitch ain't gonna crack. He got out within hours.”
“Probably cut a deal with the cops,” Gunner said, still on the ground, replacing the wheel on his bike.
“They had nothin' on him,” I said. “No deal to cut.”
“Whatever,” Gunner said. “I hate that son of a bitch. He's creepy as fuck.
I nodded, agreeing with him. El Segador – Spanish for “the Reaper” – was creepy. There was something that just wasn't right about that guy. Something that even managed to unnerve me a bit.
“Doesn't matter what he's doin',” I said. “Have they been in touch yet?”
“Yeah, they want to meet up tonight. Midnight. They choose the spot this time, somewhere more secure, apparently.”
I nodded and bit my tongue. I hadn't yet told anyone the biggest problem we were going to run into with this whole clusterfuck. And it was the one thing that stressed me the most – we no longer had the drugs the Incas wanted. I needed to get them back from Abbie, which may or may not be easy to do depending on how pissed she was going to be.
She was a little spitfire, that one. But one way or another, I needed those drugs back. All of my hopes and dreams were riding on it. It was my ticket out of this life and into something that was going to be much, much better. I'd be lying, though, if I said there wasn't some part of me that wanted to see that hot little body one more time. Three guesses about what that part of me was. I wanted to see her again, but she wasn't exactly my type. That girl was a little too feisty for my liking. I preferred my women a little more submissive, a little more willing to ride on the back of my bike rather than demand to be the driver. Nobody drove my bike but me. All of that aside, though, I had to admit she was damn fine to look at.
“King?” Roy asked me, waving his hand in front of my face. “You with us, man?”
Turning my attention back to the older man, I said, “What?”
Annoyance creeped into my voice, but that was because I was stressed and had a lot on my mind. This deal was huge and too important to screw up. I needed this. I'd screwed up a lot of things in my life, but this was the one thing I needed to go right. To go smoothly. Or, at least, smoother than the rough start it had gotten off to. I needed to find a way to pull this back and make it right. I had to.
Roy looked at me. “I asked you what happened to the stuff last night? One minute you're holding them, ready to pass them off to El Segador – ”
I stopped him right there with a look that would have frozen water. “Let's stop using his fucking lame nickname like he's some goddamn avenging angle or something, okay? I'm tired of hearing it. He's no fucking Reaper if you ask me. He's a little punk who thinks a gun makes him invincible. He's an arrogant, cocky little bastard.”
Roy and Gunner shot each other a look as the older man scratched his long, scraggly beard. I could see it in their eyes; they were wondering what the fuck was going on with me. I saw it in their eyes, but I couldn't give them the answers they wanted. To be honest, some days I wondered what in the fuck was going on with me. There had been a time when I couldn't have dreamed of a life that didn't involve the club. I loved riding. I'd loved being a part of a club. In a lot of ways, these guys were the family I didn't have.
But something along the way changed. It had started a little while ago, the thought that there was a better life to be had outside of the club. Running drugs and beating people up on our security jobs had just lost their appeal to me. I woke up one day and realized that I wanted more. I wanted a life that didn't include doing illegal shit, possibly getting myself killed by a rival gang – or somebody inside my own club who wanted my seat. I didn't want to spend the rest of my life looking over my shoulder and wondering if today is the day I'm going to catch a bullet to the head. I wanted to live. I wanted to have a life. I wanted to see things. Do things. I wanted more.
I just wanted this deal done. Done and over with. Working with The Incas wasn't my idea and it was something that made me incredibly leery to begin with. If I'd had my way, we would have never climbed into bed with them in the first place. They were bad people. Really bad people. And they were people I wanted nothing to do with. But doing this deal with them was the only way to get enough money to retire comfortably and get out of this life once and for all.
“Fine. Eduardo it is. We'll stop with the nickname if it makes you feel better,” Roy huffed, clenching his jaw. “But you still haven't answered the question. One minute you had the stuff in hand and were ready to hand it off to him, and the next minute, they're gone. I asked everybody here and you didn't give them to nobody. So where in the hell is the stuff? What gives with the disappearing act, man? What in the hell is going on?”
There was a throbbing beginning in my head. Stress headache. I seemed to have started getting them more often ever since I took over the leadership of the club. Small wonder. But I couldn't let them know I didn't have the dope with me. I couldn't let them know what I'd done. They would have been pissed. And rightly so. I'd panicked and had pulled a rookie move. So instead of telling them, I shrugged and blew it off. Being the president of the club came with certain advantages – like not having to explain myself to anybody.
“Don't worry about it. They're safe. All you need to know is to be ready because we're still good to go tonight with The Incas. Reach out to Eduardo and tell him to let us know where to meet him and his boys and the deal will be done tonight.”
I stood up and headed toward my bike, knowing what I had to do. I had to run over to Abbie's apartment, make nice, and somehow get the bag of drugs back from her. Hopefully she hadn't opened her bag yet and didn't even know they were in there. But the way my luck was running, the odds of that happening were about as good as the Incas not killing somebody in the next week. I would just have to deal with Abbie as I hoped and prayed she didn't flush them down the toilet or turn them over to the cops. I really hoped that if she'd found them, she'd simply give me a little talkin’ to while I was over there, too. Which, I was sure, would be a whole lot of fun. But it was the price of doing business. At least, I'd get to stare at that rack while she was busy reading me the riot act. So I at least had that to look forward to.
I just hoped she didn't do anything stupid with them.
“Where ya going now?” Roy asked me.
“I'll be back, don't worry,” I said. “The deal's on. You've got nothin' to worry about.”
Because there was no way I was going to let some feisty brunette ruin this whole deal for us. There was no way I was going to let her ruin this for me. No way in hell I was going to let that happen.