ALL
THE
SKY
The Signal Bend Series
Book Five
By
Susan Fanetti
THE FREAK CIRCLE PRESS
All the Sky © Susan Fanetti 2014
All rights reserved
Susan Fanetti has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this book under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales are entirely coincidental.
To Jess, Sarah, and Elena, who never complain when I dump mountains of words on their heads.
And especially to my writing partner, Shannon Flagg, who sees me through every painful stage in the loving labor of my stories.
I never would have even started this crazy obsession if it weren’t for you.
Love you.
love is less always than to win
less never than alive
less bigger than the least begin
less littler than forgive
it is most sane and sunly
and more it cannot die
than all the sky which only
is higher than the sky
from “[love is more thicker than forget],” by e.e. cummings
PROLOGUE
The clubhouse was as packed as if it were Super Bowl Sunday. And there were a bunch of damn kids around, too, so Havoc couldn’t even get himself a lapful of chick. Not just Isaac’s kids, but town kids. Running around like they were at a playground, or Chuck E. Cheese, or some shit. And there were grandmas and shit. Fuck. Marie Bakke and Rose Olsen were sitting next to Showdown and Shannon. Shannon was sitting on Show’s lap—like fucking always. Rose was knitting. Knitting!
He sat at the bar and scowled into his glass. When he heard an eruption of feminine chatter, he turned his scowl to the television. Fucking pissed him off. He didn’t know why the holy fuck either the town or the Horde thought this was a night to fucking celebrate. It was a damn outrage, far as he was concerned.
Draining the last of his tequila, he slammed the empty glass on the gouged surface of the bar. “Keep ‘em comin’, Wrench.”
“You got it, Hav.”
Havoc didn’t think Wrench was going to earn his top rocker. Too soft, too slow, too dim. Even in these quiet times, he didn’t have much to offer. But he was eager to please and amiable enough. After all the shit with the Scorpions, and fucking C.J. putting Isaac out of commission for over a year, they’d needed the help, and he’d stepped up. Havoc wasn’t in any hurry to kick him, as long as things stayed mellow like they’d been since then.
Mikey would probably be ready for his patch soon, on the other hand. He already had a lot of the responsibility of a patch. His minimum had passed awhile back, but they were taking their time. Len had sponsored him, so he’d make the call about when to bring it to the table. It was hard to test the spine of a Prospect when the club was quiet and working legit. These days, the Horde mostly kept order in town—oh, and owned a damn pussy wine bar.
Havoc had sponsored Doogie, who’d bailed after the holidays, moving to Iowa to work his uncle’s farm. Havoc had been incensed. He’d vouched, and the kid had walked away like the Horde had been nothing more than an angle he’d been playing. People bailing. Pissed him off worse than anything.
On that thought, and as the crowd in the Hall got louder than ever, he scowled at the television again. Just in time to see Riley Chase and Bart Elstad walking down the fucking red carpet at the motherfucking Academy Awards.
Because yeah, that made any kind of sense at all.
He fucking hated seeing Bart trussed up like a damn penguin, standing a step behind his woman while people screamed her name and took her picture and stuck microphones in her face. He fucking hated that Bart seemed to be doing okay in the Scorpions, that he was married to a goddamn movie star and living in a goddamn mansion and that he was right this minute smiling down at the little blonde bitch—oh, and now kissing her while the screen practically went white from all the goddamn flashes.
Havoc knew he was being irrational, but he didn’t fucking care. He knew that it had torn Bart up to give up the Horde. He knew that his sacrifice had allowed the Horde to fucking exist at all. If he hadn’t given up his patch and his ink, the Scorpions would have flattened the Horde, one way or another. They’d either be dead now, or they’d be wearing Scorpions patches, too. Instead, because Bart did what he did, the Horde was solid. They were even strong. And their truce with the Scorpions was intact. Guarded, but intact.
Havoc didn’t think they’d ever be really solid with that club again. Too much had gone down between them. And with all this Oscars bullshit, they weren’t in the clear yet. People had gotten interested in the Horde again. But Bart was on it. Only thing was, now he was protecting the Scorpions’ interests first.
Signal Bend, the movie about what went down on Main Street a few years back, had been released in the fall. Havoc hadn’t seen it and didn’t intend to, but apparently it was the shit, because it had been nominated for a bunch of awards, even Best Picture. Riley Chase was up for Best Actress. The guy who’d played Show was up for Best Supporting Actor. And smug asshole Tanner fucking Stafford was up for Best Actor. So half the fucking town was now staring at the Horde’s television, watching people in fancy clothes be fancy.
Havoc sat at the end of the bar, picking some kind of funky, puffy cheese and olive things that he didn’t even like off the tray nearest him, sulking. It didn’t matter that it didn’t make sense. He was pissed. He’d had one best friend in his life. He’d brought him up in the club. Taught him how to build a bike. Sponsored him as Prospect. He’d ridden alongside him for seven fucking years.
It had been a year and a half since then, and everybody was doing okay now. Because of what Bart had given up, the Horde was solid. He should be glad his friend had found his way in the dangerous world of the Scorpions. He should be glad that Bart was happy and had a life he wanted. He tried to be. And he was, most of the time.
But sitting here tonight, watching all the bizarre glitz and glitter that had somehow also become part of Bart’s life as an officer in the Los Angeles charter of a notoriously hardcore outlaw club, all Havoc could feel was abandoned.
“Just gimme the bottle, Wrench.”
Wrench did as he was told. He always did.
Havoc took the bottle and went back to his room. Fuck the fucking Oscars, and fuck fucking Riley Chase and all the fucking shit she’d brought down on the Horde.
Chicks. Fucking chicks ruined every damn thing.
CHAPTER ONE
“What’s the damage?” Isaac glared at Dom across the table.
Dom swallowed and looked at Havoc. Knowing the kid needed a break from the heat, Havoc leaned forward. “Looks like it’s pushing 50K, boss.”
Show whistled and leaned back in his chair. Isaac slammed his fist down, making the gavel bounce on the table before him.
Then Isaac turned his ferocious stare on Havoc. “How the fuck did this go down?”
Dom had the numbers, so Havoc looked over at him and lifted his eyebrows. But Dom was nervous, Havoc could tell. He hadn’t had his patch even two years yet, and most of that time, Show had been running things, while Isaac recovered from being shot in the back. Things had been quiet, steady. No drama. Boring, in Havoc’s opinion. And Show, most of the time, was a level dude. This was Dom’s first time facing any kind of fire at the table.
He was a pretty tough kid. When the shit had gone down with the Scorpions, he’d been a Prospect, and he’d stood strong. Him and Omen
both. Facing Isaac over a fuckup, though—that was another kind of test. More than a year away from the club, most of that bedridden or in a wheelchair, hadn’t mellowed Isaac as much as one might expect. He was a good man, a good President, but he did not suffer fools. In fact, Havoc admired that about him.
Dom had taken over as Intelligence Officer after Bart had patched over to the Scorpions LA. He hadn’t been a hacker—he’d barely known how to write code—but he’d been the only patch with any kind of real tech experience at all. So Bart had given him a crash course in hacking during his last month in town. And, Havoc knew, Dom had leaned on Bart long distance for months thereafter. But now he was handling things on his own and had grown much more confident. Until now.
But the fuckup wasn’t Dom’s. Havoc was in charge of the fucking bar. He was the one who’d hired Larry Bellen to manage it. And Bellen had been stuffing his pockets. From the start. What kind of a fucking moron stole from the Horde?
The club had opened a wine bar in Signal Bend. After months of delays, caused by everything from permit trouble to club trouble to the fact that Havoc had no idea what he was doing and had had to learn as he went, with Show’s old lady’s help, Valhalla Vin had been up and running for about a year and a half or so.
As far as Havoc was concerned, a wine bar was a fucking ridiculous thing for an MC to be running, but it had kind of been his idea. Accidentally. No Place, the town bar, was where he, the Horde, and a lot of guys in and around town went to cause some trouble. A place where a man could swing a fist without getting delicate sensibilities all stirred up. For years, when no one was ever around except townsfolk, everybody knew to expect a fight or two to break out most nights. Full-on brawls, even. Tuck Olsen, the owner and reason everybody called the place Tuck’s rather than its official name, didn’t serve much more than beer and hard liquor, and he didn’t offer much more in the way of food than burgers and pizza. People came for the friendship and the fighting—which were all bound up together. And on Saturdays, there was live music and everybody danced, too—and fought all the harder.
But then things had turned around. Almost four years ago, after all the shit with Ellis, when Signal Bend got famous and had a movie made about it—one that had won some Oscars a few months back. Now, people came to visit Signal Bend. They shopped in the shops, and they stayed at the B&B, and they went looking for a drink of an evening. Some were even moving the fuck in. The town wasn’t what anyone would call prosperous, and it was too far off the interstate ever to be, most likely, but it had climbed some way up out of the pit it had fallen into long years ago.
The outsiders weren’t so keen on Tuck’s lively atmosphere. At first, Tuck and the Horde tried to settle things down, limit the fighting and take what there was outside. But that sucked. It changed everything. Everything everywhere was changing, and it sucked.
All the Horde felt it, but Havoc knew he’d been the most vocal about it. They’d decided to open a place where the Volvo set could have a drink and stay away from Tuck’s. C.J. had been given the job of getting it started. But C.J. had turned out to be a traitorous piece of runny shit, and the job had fallen to Havoc. A wine bar. Havoc didn’t know a cabernet from a cabaret—or he hadn’t, anyway, when he’d started. He did now. It sucked.
But Valhalla had been a popular place almost from the first day. It had started to turn a profit after a few months—even more profit than they had known, it turned out.
Dom’s voice shook, but he answered the question Isaac had asked Havoc, and he answered like he knew that he knew his stuff. “From what I could put together, he started small, just pushing some numbers around here and there, padding tabs, probably skimming straight out of the register, shit like that. He started right off, looks like, before we even had a good sense of how the place would run. I’d say he was bumping his income the first several months by a grand or so each month, no more.
Now Havoc leaned forward. “Until about six months ago. Don’t know if he’s got some kind of trouble or if he just got greedy and cocky, but he got motivated. Started fucking with the accounts payable, adjusting invoices and shoving the difference in his pocket. The skim now is 5K plus a month. Last month, with the Spring Fest and all, the books are more than 7K off.”
In early May, spurred by Lilli, Isaac’s old lady, and Shannon, Show’s, the town had reinstated an old tradition that had died about twenty years earlier—the Signal Bend Spring Fest, an old-school country fair that had started out generations ago as a celebration of the sowing season. This “Second Inaugural” Spring Fest, after the Oscars and everything, had been huge. People had come from everywhere.
“And we know it’s Bellen?” As was usually the case, Isaac calmed as the picture filled in. The clearer the picture of a problem, the more his attention turned to solving it.
“Yeah. Not like there’s a lot of people with access. Us, and him.”
Show turned his chair and faced Dom. “His check show anything?”
“No, Show,” Dom actually looked a little pissed at the question. “He came up clean when we hired him. Since then, he’s started some new accounts, though. I found them when Hav and I started thinking something was off. One in his name, one in each of his sons’ names. So far, he’s just saving it, so I’d say it’s not gambling or anything like that. I haven’t done a full check yet into what he needs the money for. Gonna do that next. I’ve just been chasing the money. ”
Havoc laughed. “Maybe he’s saving up a college fund or some shit.”
Apparently, Isaac wasn’t ready to see any humor in the situation, because his brows drew sharply together. With all of his hospital bills, which Havoc guessed were huge, Isaac and Lilli were just climbing out of some big money trouble. He didn’t know the details, and he didn’t care to know, but he did know that he shouldn’t have tried to make light of this. He also knew that Larry was fucked.
But Isaac was calm when he spoke. “You in the business of sending other people’s kids to college, Hav? Cause I’ve got two kids of my own to take care of, and that asshole is stealing from them. We’ll get the why straight out of him. Through one hole or another. I want him in here, and now.”
That was a bad idea, and Havoc shook his head. “No can do, Isaac. Larry’s at Valhalla. It’s Thursday night, so there’s that folkie chick singer, and the Volvo set loves her. Place gets pretty crowded. We don’t want to be yanking him out of there—and we’ll have to yank. Valhalla’s not Tuck’s—we gotta go in cool.”
Isaac raised one eyebrow at that, and Havoc knew exactly what he was thinking. Havoc wasn’t exactly known for a ‘think first, punch later’ approach to problem-solving. Hell, he was proud of it—just as he admired Isaac’s short temper. A man who thought too much never got around to doing anything, far as he was concerned.
That said, Valhalla was his responsibility, and as much as it fucking sucked to run a wine bar, he took pride in its success. He’d had to learn all that wine shit, so might as well make it count. He didn’t want the place to clear out and stay clear because they’d freaked out the Volvo drivers by dragging Larry screaming through the place. As much as he intended to bloody him and but good for sticking his fingers where he shouldn’t, Havoc wanted to do it smart.
Isaac finally nodded. “Okay. Tonight, then. After close. All four of us, and Len.”
“That’s gonna scare him, Isaac.” Show’s voice was low.
“I know. I want him scared. We wait, cover the exits, and get him alone.” Isaac looked again at Havoc. “Get the Room ready. You’ll need your kit.”
Havoc smiled. It had been a damn long time since he’d messed a fucker up. Though he’d always been a club go-to for putting down beatings when they were called for, he’d only been an official enforcer since the Scorpions shit—when he’d taken on the temporary job of SAA, too, while Isaac was out and Show had taken the lead and Len had stepped up to VP. Havoc had taken on the role of enforcer from Vic—and, in fact, Vic had been his first subject in that capacity, when
he’d turned traitor. Since then, things had been quiet, and the need for enforcement had been limited.
He wouldn’t say he enjoyed it, exactly. Sometimes not at all. But there were times when it was very satisfying. When the fucker really deserved it. Like Vic.
And Larry Bellen.
~oOo~
Valhalla closed at one in the morning. About fifteen minutes before that, Havoc left his brothers in the lot next door and went in to keep track of Larry. Len and Dom split up at the same time, headed for the front and rear exits.
As much as it grated on Havoc that the Horde were involved in a business like this, he had to admit that they’d done it up right. Drawing on the Nordic ancestry most of the town natives—including Havoc, on his mother’s side—shared, they’d done it up like a Viking great hall, with heavy beams in the peaked ceiling, heavy oaken planks for tables, with stools to match, and wide, unfinished, rough-hewn floorboards. The bar was the same heavy oak, as were the shelves around the rough walls that held the bottles of wine for sale. For a pussy wine bar, it had some balls.
Back in its early days, the Night Horde MC had run Signal Bend Construction. The business had folded when there was no longer anything to build in town or anywhere around it. But Show had worked it, and the rest of the Horde were handy in one way or another—a man wasn’t a man unless he could make something with his hands. So they’d done the remodel themselves. Isaac had worked construction, too, and he was an artisan woodworker. He’d been off his feet and away from the club during the build, but he’d been around when they were drawing up plans. A lot of the end result had been his vision.
Havoc had enjoyed the fuck out of building the place up, and that had helped him deal with being responsible for it. He had an affection for the space, and a consequent kind of grudging affection for what was housed within it. He remembered that every time he walked in—the mingled aroma of oak and wine smelled right, somehow. Like they’d done good.
All the Sky (Signal Bend Series) Page 1