Max
I tried not to stare after Lucy left, but I still ended up watching until her taillights disappeared around the corner, heading down the mountain. It made me more nervous each time I watched those lights, because I was worried now something might change—or might have already changed—and she wouldn’t be there when I got home. Not just her being at her mother’s house or helping out a late-night shift for the club, but gone.
Forcing myself to look away, I told myself she wasn’t going to leave me. Everything was fine and she loved me too much to just up and go.
I only half believed that anymore.
Digging into the back pocket of my dark jeans, I found my cell phone and yanked it out. I had a number scratched out on a small piece of paper with jagged edges, torn out of some address book that was now stuck to my phone. I separated the two and stared at the paper pinched between my thumb and forefinger.
I frowned. Everything inside me told me this was a bad idea. Worse, it was a dangerous idea, and if I fucked this up a lot of people were going to be in a bad way. My people.
Unfortunately, it still had to be done. We didn’t have a lot of options these days.
Smoothing out the paper until I could read the numbers, I made the call. The phone on the other end rang only a few times before someone picked up. A man’s deep, rough voice came through the other end.
“What?”
Taking a deep, calming breath, I tried to sound like this didn’t scare the shit out of me as I spoke. “Blade?”
“Who wants to know?” the man said. I could hear spitting come through the receiver.
“Max Riley,” I answered smoothly, taking on the air of authority I needed to deal with not only another motorcycle club, but the leader of said club. “I thought we should talk business.”
There was a pause and what sounded like someone covering the phone, then some muffled yelling. I tried not to hold my breath, and kept my head held high. That wasn’t for the benefit of Blade, leader of our rival gang and what might be our only hope for surviving the Slayers. Blade obviously couldn’t see me through the phone, but, despite initiation being over, there were still several members of the club hanging around.
Maybe they weren’t really watching me or paying attention, but if they could see how nervous I really was, they would start watching me. It was important to not show weakness to these guys. Most of them wouldn’t do anything drastic over it, except for a few loose cannons, but I didn’t want to have a reason to test that. And besides, if a leader was weak, the club was weak, too. I didn’t want my guys to be weak.
After what felt like an hour of waiting, Blade finally got back to me. “All right. Let’s talk business.”
“We need to discuss the expansion…”
The Slayers were technically our rivals. They had started as a relatively small group, completely non-threatening, at least to us, and in the time of the Preacher, they weren’t big enough to be a concern. “Let them be,” the Preacher used to say, and we did, because no one expected any trouble for them.
Maybe that’s where we fucked up; we should have been watching them. More than that, we should have been flexing our authority over the whole thing. How were we supposed to hang on to our territory and strength if we just let a bunch of fledgling hooligans creep up on our turf?
But it was too late to worry about that. Fact of the matter was, the Slayers had gained a following and they were growing quickly in size. Worse, we’d lost a lot of members in the last few months. Many left because they couldn’t deal with the Preacher’s death. Though these were the toughest of guys, many of the older ones had softer centers. The Preacher was important to them and when he died—when he offed himself—a lot of the older members gave up.
The lifestyle wasn’t for them anymore if the Preacher wasn’t leading them.
I tried not to take it personally. It was no secret that I was next in line for the position of club leader. Sure, a lot of the guys whispered it was because I’d been sleeping with his daughter since high school, but that wasn’t it. The Preacher was important to me before I’d ever even met Lucy and I knew and he knew before I’d ever even joined that this life was going to be for me.
I didn’t really care what people thought of me and how I got the position. All I cared about was whether they listened to me when I had to bark an order at one of them. For the most part, they did, but there had been a few who couldn’t handle the change. Not for any particular love of the Preacher, but because they didn’t think some young punk should be in charge and giving them orders.
That was the other reason we were losing a lot of members. Our size had gone down by at least a forth, maybe even closer to a third, and it was starting to cost us.
Money was short, tempers were shorter, and pulling us up by our bootstraps was getting awfully hard these days. In the end, I made the call I had to: work with the Slayers.
“Yeah, we agreed already, didn’t we?” Blade asked in irritation, the coarse sound filling his voice and making it come out nasally. “You’re just gonna have to trust us, Max boy.”
I gritted my teeth. I didn’t like the nickname and I didn’t like Blade. And more to the point, I didn’t fucking trust him. Not with anything and certainly not with my boys’ lives. Unfortunately, he was right. I was going to have to trust him if I wanted this to work. I sighed. “Yeah, sure, sorry, Blade. We’re finishing up here, so gimme an hour or so. We’ll meet at the warehouse.”
“All right. Fine.”
We hung up and I tried to quell the anxiety that shot through me at the thought of meeting with the Slayers. Strictly speaking, the Sin Reapers were a pretty straight group. We owned a legitimate body shop in town and our business stayed clean most of the time. Of course, we did some drug running on the side, but it was usually just a little MJ, maybe some steroids or speed, but we tried not to do anything too big or too noticeable. I was aware of the police and so long as we kept under a certain line of business, no one was going to care much one way or the other. It was when we got too big or sold to a bunch of dumb kids or got ourselves dealing with the real black hats, like the drug cartels, that we would start getting picked up. I didn’t want us looked at and I didn’t want that kind of shit on my conscience.
But the problem was, the Slayers cared a little less. It wasn’t that we didn’t do our fair share of illegal things, but we had rules and requirements and limits. They didn’t.
Blade had made it pretty clear that, in the end, he didn’t care what kind of shit got run through the club so long as it made him a buck or two. The only part he got pissed about was when he dealt in arms deals. Selling guns got tricky, and with so much backlash and gun control commotion these days, he didn’t want it coming back on him. Besides, you never knew when you picked up the wrong kind of gun. A cop killing kind of gun.
It was nice to know he at least had common sense, even if he didn’t have much in the way of morality.
As I slipped the phone back into the pocket, I noticed Bills standing nearby. He had his arms folded across his chest and was watching me like a hawk, which was not unusual, to be perfectly honest. I headed over to him.
“What’s the word?” Bills asked as I got closer.
I shrugged my shoulders, feigning casualness and calmness. I didn’t want him, especially, to see how much this whole thing rattled me. Splitting territory with the Slayers was a bad idea, and I knew it, but I was running out of members and options pretty damn fast.
“We’re set for tonight. The warehouse in the industrial district. Meeting’s set for an hour and a half.”
Bills nodded. He was a little unhinged, I thought at times, but he’d always been loyal to the Sin Reapers. The Preacher had considered him a lieutenant, much like I did now, and there was no question that whatever else Bills might be into, he was definitely the guy you wanted on your side during a fight. He was going to come with me tonight as my body guard and backup, just in case things took a wrong turn somewhere along the way.
“Blade gonna be there himself this time?” Bills asked me as we watched several more of the boys start filtering out, their bikes revving in the distance and their girls laughing.
Last time we’d set up a meeting with the Slayers, it hadn’t exactly gone as planned. Blade had been set to be there, but he hadn’t shown, letting one of his boys go instead. Granted, I probably liked the old boy better than I would like Blade, but it was a bit of an insult to us that Blade wouldn’t go himself.
It set our plans and negotiations back quite a bit. It had nearly started a goddamned war between our clubs and I was silently grateful it hadn’t come to that. We didn’t make a habit of killing people, but it happened. Not usually on my watch, but I’d thought it before and I’d think it again: the Slayers didn’t have much in the way of morals.
“Yeah, he’ll be there,” I said confidently, though that was hardly what I was feeling. I wasn’t sure what I’d do if Blade didn’t show in person this time, but I was pretty sure it was going to get us all into a lot of trouble. There was no way we’d be able to salvage this joint venture if he ditched on us twice. I’d have to cut the whole thing loose and the territory would be in real danger.
This way we’d just split some of the territory in the area between our two clubs, work out percentages and good faith payments for selling or working in each other’s areas. There was a chance things could go south anyway, that we’d end up losing our asses, but there was also the chance things could go our way. If the Slayers continued to do their deals—illegal or otherwise—we’d get a piece of any of that that happened in our designated territory. Likewise, if we did deals on their turf, we paid a small fee to them. Since we were far less likely to be dealing in the more illegal—and admittedly profitable—side of the law, we stood to earn a lot more money from it, but they got territory out of the deal. We’d have to give up some of ours so there’d be a fifty-fifty split, but I wasn’t worried about territory. What was the point if there wasn’t a club left to do a damn thing with it?
There wasn’t any kind of guarantee this would work and, in my gut, I couldn’t make myself trust the Slayers, but what choice did I have? I had to do something and I was all out of ideas these days.
“He’d better,” Bills muttered as we headed towards our bikes. We’d be the last two to leave and we wouldn’t be going home.
I thought of Lucy waiting for me. I thought of the things I’d rather be doing with her and to her, but business had to come first tonight. Still, I hoped she’d call. That she’d tell me she was okay and we were okay and everything was okay.
I pulled my phone out of my pocket and checked it again, but there were no missed calls. I couldn’t help my frown, but resisted the sigh I wanted to send along with it. Resolving to at least let her know what was going on, even if she wasn’t in the mood to return the courtesy, I sent her a quick text.
Business tonight. Be home late. Don’t wait up.
I put my phone back into my pocket and when Bills handed me the pistol, I took it easily, tucking it safely away in the back of my jeans. I hoped we wouldn’t need it, but I wasn’t going in there unprepared.
Slinging my leg over the side of the bike, I nodded towards Bills. He’d follow me down the hill and back into town, then we’d head over to the industrial district. No one would be around this time of night and that place especially didn’t have a lot of traffic.
I revved up my bike and we headed out of there. I tried not to think of the cold metal pressed against the skin of my back and I tried not to think about how Lucy had left that night. Instead, I did my best to focus on the dark road and the cool night and the rumbling sound of my bike filling my ears.
This would all be over soon.