Cade and the rest of the guys were led through the common area where bikers sat around talking or stood around shooting pool. Most of them had a drink in their hand and some of them a half-dressed woman. The air was thick with smoke and pockets of it smelled like weed. There was a door open on one side of the room with loud cartoon music blaring. Cade looked inside as they walked by and surmised that must be where the biker’s old ladies and kids were hanging out while they were locked down. The prospect led them to a door marked “Private” and knocked.
“Yeah!” Cade heard his old friend bark out.
The prospect opened the door and said, “Cade Travers is here to see you, Prez.”
“Send them in.”
The prospect stepped aside and Cade entered the room first. A big smile spread across Bunker’s scarred and weathered face when he saw him. He was sitting at the head of a long, hand-carved table. He stood up and spread his arms.
“Well, look at you! You haven’t changed a bit.” Cade went over to shake his hand as the rest of his team filed in behind him. He wasn’t sure that he hadn’t changed at all in five years, but Bunker most assuredly had. His head was shaved, but Cade could see the outline of the stubble where if he had hair, the hairline would be greatly receded already. He had a long scar on one cheek and next to his left eye he had another. An unkempt-looking beard lay reached down to his chest and the once black hair was marbled through with white and gray. Cade found himself thinking that his old friend looked at least twenty years older than his thirty-two-years. People probably looked at his tall, ultra-fit body and marveled at how good he looked for fifty.
“How are you, Bunk?” Cade asked as the two men shook hands.
Bunker sighed as he let go of Cade’s hand. “Kind of screwed at the moment.” He looked at the guys and Cade introduced them. He felt bad for Bunker and he hoped that they would be able to do something for him…just not what he was asking.
“This is my team, Marcus, Nate, Billy, and Grant.” They each shook hands with Bunker and he told them to have a seat.
Once everyone was sitting down, Cade said, “You and I have been friends for a long time, so I’m not going to mince words. I was disappointed, to say the least, to find out what and who you’d gotten involved with since the last time we met.”
Bunker’s scarred face looked like he’d just bitten down on a lemon. “This town, the people here, they’re our people and we do everything we can to protect them. We have the lowest crime rate in the entire state of Nevada per capita, five years running.” Cade’s lips twitched and Bunker said, “We aren’t choir boys, but we don’t do our business here in our own backyard and we don’t invite people in that do.”
“So, then tell me then how you ended up moving product for one of the most powerful drug cartels in Colombia.” Bunker had given Cade a quick overview on the phone, but he wanted his men to hear all the details.
The men all sat silently, listening as Bunker started talking. “We live right along the border of California. If you follow the Interstate out of here for a couple hundred miles, you’ll end up in the Central San Joaquin Valley. If you keep following it, you end up north in places like San Jose, Oakland, Sacramento and San Francisco. In other words, we are the opening for a pipeline, a very important pipeline that the Colombians and Mexicans need to move their product.”
“What product?” Marcus asked. “Are we talking about methamphetamines, heroin…?”
“Cocaine.”
“Coke? I thought with the advent of cheaper ways to get high, like meth, that the cocaine market had slowed down.”
“Not by a long shot—not in California, anyway. In San Francisco, ‘Speedballs,’ a combination of heroin and cocaine, are cheap, easy to get, and popular. In Sacramento, I heard something like 30% of all females arrested tested positive for cocaine. In the mind of a Colombian drug lord looking to make money, that’s good news. Believe it or not, they keep stats just like any other business, so they know where their product will be welcome. They like San Jose too. A lot of Vietnamese immigrants settled there. The Vietnamese generally won’t use meth or smoke crack. Cocaine is their drug of choice; it’s almost a class thing with them.”
“How much does it sell for?” Grant asked.
“The cocaine the cartels send into California via the Mexican border tends to be of lower purity and sells for something like 14 to 16 grand a kilo. The stuff that is coming through us, is about 90% pure and it can go as high as 25 grand a kilo.”
Billy whistled. “That’s a lot of money.”
Bunker nodded. “Yeah, and where there is a lot of money, there is a lot of violence. The street gangs in LA have been killing each other over it for years. There are gangs up north, but most of them stick to the cheaper things like crack and meth and they don’t mess with the pure coke because the clientele is of a higher ‘class,’ so to speak. These are the wealthy, the young professionals, the college set, the kind of people that won’t go out on a dark street corner to find a dealer in a rough part of downtown Oakland. While those guys are busy killing each other over crack, the cartels are busy pushing their pure product through clubs like ours. High-end dealers are more apt to do business with us than they are some kid that grew up on the streets because Mama was a crackhead and Daddy was in prison. Those are the guys leading the gangs on the streets. I don’t wanna toot our horns, but a lot of us guys in the MC come from professional backgrounds or are college educated, or both. We are the lesser of two evils in the eyes of the young professional looking for his Saturday night party fix.”
“So, you sell drugs?” Marcus said in that slow, soft-spoken way of his. To the outsider, Marcus could sometimes sound and even appear dull or slow. Cade knew differently. He knew that Marcus had a mind like a steel trap. He never forgot anything; he analyzed everything and when he made a decision, it was always well-thought-out.
Bunker nodded. “We do.”
“I don’t understand,” Nate said with a small frown. “Why are we here?”
“We tried to get out of the cocaine business years ago. The violence associated with it has tripled in the past five years since I took over as president of this club. Like I said before, we’re no choirboys, but we have been trying like hell to go legit. This little town was a hellhole six years ago. Once I took over as president we started using a lot of our revenue to invest back into the community. It was still dirty money, but we used it for good things. We bought property and started flipping houses and renting them to families for a decent price. We started fixing up the schools and parks, making it a nice place to raise a family and attracting people that would rather live in a rural area and commute across the border to their jobs in the central valley or back the other way to the bright lights of Vegas. Nobody is dealing drugs in this town, at least not after I find out about it. A few years ago, I told the Colombians that we were dealing with that we wanted to sever ties. They threatened us and made life miserable for a while and then things went quiet and I thought they’d given up. I was shocked, to say the least, when I got a call not long after from none other than Don Miguel Dominguez himself.”
“Who is that?” Nate asked.
“He is a Colombian businessman who is rumored to be the head of the biggest cartel in Colombia these days. I say rumored because the Feds haven’t been able to prove it. He has lieutenants and soldiers that handle his drug business so if the empire crumbles, he can be left standing on top of the rubble instead of underneath it. I had heard over the years that when he gets personally involved, it’s all bad. I found out that was true the hard way. He asked I wanted to cut ties, and I told him that our club was trying to clean up our business and stay within the law. Before we ended the call, he asked me if I was sure I wanted to disrespect him and his organization. I told him I meant no disrespect, I was just doing what I thought was best for my brotherhood and our families. He didn’t say much more but even on the phone I could tell that his mood was tense, to say the least. I found out the next morning just how tense he was. There were two heads in boxes left at the front gates the next day. They were my lieutenants. There was a note attached. It was in Spanish and it said, ‘El precio de la falta de respeto.’”
“What does that mean?” Billy asked.
“The price of disrespect,” Cade answered grimly.
“So what did you do?” Grant asked him.
“I had less than fifty men at the time, forty-two to be exact. I didn’t have enough men to wage a war against an entire cartel, so we kept doing what we were doing. Then about a year ago, I was approached by the DEA. They knew I spoke to Dominguez. How? I don’t know. But they offered the club immunity if we would help them set a trap for him. I took it to church and the club voted to take the deal. We did our part, giving them times and dates that product would be moved through our territory. They made some busts over the past ten months or so and the DA convinced two of the men they arrested to testify against Dominguez if they were ever able to bring him in. About three weeks ago, I got a call from the agent we’ve been working with. One of the men died of suspicious circumstances in his cell in county jail. He was in a protective housing area, so the guards and anyone else that comes and goes from the jail are being investigated. A few days later, the second guy was stabbed in the heart with a homemade shank by his cellmate. The cellie is not talking, but it’s obvious that Dominguez has a far reach and he proved just how far about a week ago. My Vice President went missing. He was staunchly loyal to this club and to his family. I knew that he would have never just taken off.”
“Did you report it to the police?” Nate asked. Cade could tell he was struggling hard, being in the presence of an admitted criminal. He doubted that Nate had ever knowingly broken any law; he probably didn’t even jaywalk.
Bunker chuckled softly and said, “No, but that’s not the way we do things. We set out to search for him ourselves. He was found in a shallow grave just on the other side of our fence, burnt to death. That, we reported. So far, there are no suspects, but I’m pretty damned sure I know who is responsible.”
“Damn,” Nate said, slightly under his breath. He looked at Bunker. “Is the DEA looking out for you guys now?”
Bunker laughed out loud. “Hell no. They let us keep the deal, no charges, but they’re not going to waste their time and resources sitting on a bunch of bikers while they’re still having a hell of a time getting anything to stick to Dominguez. It seems like it would be easy to indict the SOB, but there’s a lot more to it than we know, partly because he’s based in Colombia and partly because he just has unlimited resources to work with.”
“And you’re sure Dominguez knows that your club was involved with the DEA?” Grant asked.
“When we found Vince, my VP, I was pretty convinced of it. If it were just my head on the chopping block, I would have never asked for help. But a few days ago, this was left in an envelope at the front gates.”
Bunker handed Cade a photo. He had already told him all of this on the phone, but it really hit home when he looked at the picture. It could have been a photo of one of the barbecues they had at Wanda’s bed and breakfast in their own little town. In the photo, women and children mixed with men in leather vests were eating and laughing and playing games. “There was no note with it, but I’m looking at it as a clear threat to my club and our families.”
After the team looked at the photo, they looked at each other and then at Cade. Billy was the one that finally said, “So, what is it that you want us to do?”
Bunker looked at Cade and Cade gave him a slight nod. “Find and kill Dominguez before he makes good on his threats.”