Arsen found Quinn in the lab, swiveling slowly in a chair. “Come with me,” he said.
“Where are we going?” she asked as she rose to her feet.
“You and I have a couple of things to discuss.”
She felt her blood run cold. “Have I done something wrong?”
“No. But we need your help.”
He led her back into church and motioned for her to sit at the table. She sat, glancing nervously between Arsen, Zane and Phil.
“First off,” Arsen began, “I want you to know why we excused you. The club took a vote and we’re going to have to deal with the Chrome Horsemen. I would like you to tell us everything you can remember about your time there. The layout of the inside if you know it. Anything like that.”
“Why?”
“Because it’ll help us plan.”
“No. Why are you hitting them? What have they done to the Blades?”
Arsen nodded, expecting the question. “Before I answer that, I want to make you an offer. Zane, Phil and I have talked about it, and we want to offer you a position in the club. You won’t have voting rights, but if you continue to work on marketing B3, we’ll give you two shares.”
“Shares? What’s that?”
“A share is some amount of money. It changes every month because it depends on how much income the club generates. The club takes fifty-percent off the top. The other fifty percent is put into a pool. However many shares there are, that’s how the money is divided up. If there are a hundred shares, and the pool is a hundred bucks, each share would get a dollar. You would get two shares.”
“Okay. But there’s a catch, isn’t there?”
“Only one. As part of the club, you have to protect the club. If you leave, you can’t reveal what goes on here. I suspect it’s much like the Desert Riders in that respect.”
“I understand,” she said, nodding.
“One more thing. Fifty-percent of your shares will be held back for the first year. You’re not really a prospect, but that’s standard for us. If you are accepted, then the balance of your shares will be paid to you. Think of it as a signing bonus,” he said with a grin.
“Okay.”
“Do you accept you’ll be expected to abide by the charter of our club?” Arsen asked.
“I do,” she said solemnly.
Arsen nodded at Phil. “Swear her in.”
Phil stood and placed a leather jacket in the palm of his hand with the Blacktop Blades colors showing. “Left hand on the colors and raise your right hand.” Quinn did as she was told.
He used the standard prospect induction since prospects didn’t have voting rights anyway. If Arsen didn’t take her as his old lady, and they accepted her into the club, they have to come up with some modification of the regular oath. They were treading new ground with her. They were giving her the same rights as an old lady, but she wasn’t, and therefore Arsen wasn’t responsible for her conduct. But because she was a woman, she wasn’t eligible to be a full member either.
When she was sworn in she smiled as the three men congratulated her and shook her hand, then she sat down again. “Now that you’ve agreed to abide by the rules of the club. I have something to tell you. You understand, what I’m about to say never leaves this clubhouse?”
She bit her lip, not liking how that sounded at all. “I understand.”
“The answer to your question, about the Horsemen, is they are counterfeiting our product.”
“Soap?” she asked in confusion.
“MDMA. Ecstasy. Molly.”
She paused, considering. “You run molly?”
He shook his head. “We don’t run it, we manufacture it. It’s pharmaceutical grade, very pure, and as safe as a Schedule 1 drug can be.”
“Where?”
“Where do we make it?” He chuckled. “You’ve been in the plant dozens of times.”
“There?” she cried in shock. “So you don’t make soap and bath salts and stuff?”
“No, we do make and sell them as well. We make the MDMA in the same reaction vessels as our legal product. We make an MDMA run once a week, then switch back over and make salts or whatever the other four days.”
She stared at him a moment. “Hiding in plain sight.”
“That’s pretty much it. We have a reputation for high quality, safe drugs. The Horsemen tried to take over the market a couple years ago and failed. Now they’re trying again. But this time they’re trading on our good name. Our product is stamped with a heart on one side and a knife on the other. The street calls them Hearts and Daggers. The Horsemen have started selling their own MDMA with a heart and dagger, but it’s not good quality and it damages our reputation. Hell, people could get sick on that shit. I called the President of the Horsemen to warn him off, but he’s willing to go to war over this, so war it’ll be. That’s where you come in. I want to know everything you know about them.”
She looked at him a moment. She’d heard of ecstasy, but didn’t know much about it. It was a party drug. It wasn’t nearly as dangerous as cocaine, heroin, or meth. She wasn’t sure how she felt now that she knew the Blades were an outlaw club, no different than the Riders were. But then she gave a mental shrug. She didn’t mind being an old lady in the Riders, why would she mind being part of the Blades? At least with the Blades she got a piece of the pie, and she wasn’t working with the drugs if all she was doing was marketing the B3 products.
“I don’t know a lot,” she began. “Except when I was…” She paused and swallowed hard as she gathered herself. “Except for when we were being used, we were kept in a locked bedroom.”
“Any idea of how many members?” Phil asked. “We estimate between seventy-five and a hundred.”
“I don’t know,” she said quietly, “but a lot more than the Blades.”
“What about the layout inside the clubhouse?” Phil asked.
She shrugged. “It’s bigger than here. The front of the clubhouse is open, like this one, but I’m pretty sure the front wall is glass that’s been painted black. You can sort of see light through it.”
“Anybody living there?”
“I don’t know.”
“Anything else you can tell us?”
She shrugged. “They’re heartless bastards who party a lot. Even when they were leaving us alone, we could hear the music thumping, and they always seemed to be either drunk, hung over, or high on something.”
The three men looked at each other. “Pretty thin info,” Phil muttered.
“Yeah,” Arsen agreed.
“I’m sorry I don’t know more. I only saw a few rooms.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Arsen said. “The partying all the time might be useful. Wait outside, please.” Quinn nodded and rose, taking her colors with her. “What do you think?”
“I think we need more intel before we hit their clubhouse.”
“I agree,” Zane added. “What if we hit their lab first and shut that down? That would deny them the revenue and let them know we’re serious. Maybe we can draw them into an ambush.”
“We don’t know where it is,” Arsen pointed out.
“No, but they do,” Phil said, warming to Zane’s idea. “What if we hit them tonight, before they can go to ground? If we go now, we can probably bag one of their guys and squeeze him.”
“I like the idea of hitting them hard and fast, but we don’t want to walk into something ourselves,” Arsen cautioned.
“That’s just it. We’re not hitting them head on. Think of this as a diversionary strike. Let’s try and stretch them a little.”
Arsen thought about it. “How fast to get it set up?”
Phil shrugged. “How fast can you free me up some men?”
Arsen smiled. “Now.”
They spent another fifteen minutes thrashing around ideas and refining the plan. When they stepped out of Church, they had decided that Phil and Zane would leave for Phoenix right away with as many men as they could free up and put eyes on the Horsemen. He would follow as soon as he could shut down the plant, bringing the rest of the brothers with him. If they got a chance they would bag a Horseman and have him ready to interrogate when Arsen got there.
“What’s going on?” Quinn asked, pulling him to a stop.
“We’re not going to hit he Horsemen straight on, not this time. We’re going to take down their lab, if we can find it, to let them know we’re not fucking around.”
She clung to his arm. “Don’t do this! You saw what happened to the Desert Riders when we went up against them!”
He glanced around, then pulled her back into church. “You need to get on board with this.”
“You don’t know them! They’ll kill all of you, us!”
“They may try.” He paused as he looked into her eyes. “It’ll be okay. We’ll be careful. I know you’re afraid of them, and with good reason, but we can handle this.”
“That’s what Bob, the Riders’ President, said too, and you can see what happened.”
“So we’ll learn from his mistake. If you can’t get on board with this, I need you to stay home. I can’t have you questioning me in front of the brothers.”
“I’m not questioning you! I’m worried! I lost everything to the fucking Horsemen once. I don’t want to lose it again!” She looked down.
“Hey,” he said, tipping her head up. “We’ve got this. There may be a time when you need to worry, but this isn’t it.”
She pulled her head away and looked down again. “Yeah. You’ll forgive me if I’m still worried.”
He tipped her head up again. “I need about three hours to idle the plant, then I’m going home to get a few things. You can either stay here or wait at home, your choice.”
“I can’t convince you to not go?”
“No.”
She sighed. “Where are you going after you’re done?”
“Probably home.”
“Then I’ll wait there.”