“You know the rules. You promised you’d follow them.”
Right. Don’t get away from the people protecting you. Stay with the group. “I thought they were right behind us!”
“I’ll see you in a few hours.” He disconnected without saying goodbye. Fuck, I was in trouble and it wasn’t my damned fault!
“My guys aren’t going to be happy either,” said Bethany. “I thought the guards were close, too.”
“Tyler’s gonna be pissed,” Viv said with an unhappy sigh. “I could’ve sworn Dozer saw us leaving.”
I looked to Cassie, who was being held by Samantha Levi and didn’t seem to be listening to our conversation. If the two of them were so close, I guessed that explained a little of how Cassie is such a bad-ass.
I looked back to Bethany and Viv. “I know Dozer was a few steps behind us just before we went out the door. He creeps me out and I remember wishing he’d back the fuck off.” I sighed. “Looks like he did. Maybe I shouldn’t wish that next time.”
“Our guys will go over the tapes and see what went wrong,” said Gen. “Don’t sweat it. I’m sure it’ll all be worked out by the time we get back.”
“Well,” I told them. “I intend to be so drunk by the time we leave the next place, I won’t care if he’s mad.”
The girls all thought that a great idea, and every time I turned around at The Diamond Club, someone was pushing a shot of tequila towards me. I was beyond sloppy drunk by the time the drag show started, and I laughed my ass off watching Bethany on stage, grinding with the dancers towards the end of the show. Not because it was funny, but because it was hot and we were all laughing and cheering. Bethany can dirty dance better than the pros, and she held nothing back.
By the time the limos carried us back to the clubhouse, we were all happy, drunk, and exhausted — but we weren’t ready to end the party. Angelica set us up with tequila shots, limes, and salt, and we all fell onto the sofas in a heap of legs and arms — those too drunk for shots lying across us, while those of us those still imbibing mostly sat up. I remember asking where Cassie was at some point, and being told Sam Levi’s husband had picked them up early.
Somehow, my shirt stayed in my back pocket the rest of the night. I totally forgot it, and no one reminded me.
Razor
* * *
I waited until Matty was inside before I went out. Dozer had watched the four of them walk outside alone, and had turned around to look for Gen. He hadn’t stopped them, hadn’t followed them, hadn’t made sure someone else followed them. Protocol said he should’ve followed them out and radioed so someone else took over responsibility for Gen and Connie. Bobcat was supposed to be watching Matty, and he’d got caught up by a Choo Choo security guard who thought Bobcat was being a creeper and following people he didn’t know.
But Dozer had watched them walk out alone and done nothing. Matty had looked back and seen Dozer just before they walked out. He was right to think someone was just behind them. I’d been planning on putting my boy on orgasm restriction for a month, but this changed everything.
I calmly walked up to Dozer and coldcocked him with a right hook. Sucker-punched him, and he went straight to the ground.
I heard a dozen people around me yell, “Fuck!” and jump into action. I figured I’d broke his neck, probably his jaw, and from the angle of his head, I was right. I walked away as my brothers encircled him so no one would see him change to wolf. I’d have to pay a fine for it, but I didn’t give a fuck. It was only money, and my boy is everything to me.
Duke stood at the front door to the clubhouse when I neared, his arms crossed. “Go home.”
“My boy’s inside.”
“Drunk off his ass. I’ll personally see to it he makes it into your bed when he crashes, and I’ll lock the door. You can come back in a few hours and go to your room, but stay out of the main room of the clubhouse. You need to cool off.”
“I need to check on Matty.”
“He’s fine, though I have a feeling he’ll be puking his guts up in a few hours. Let him keep having fun with the ol’ladies. They’re doing tequila shots and laying all over each other on the sofas. I’m giving you my word. Bash and I will personally make sure he stays safe.”
I looked to Bash a few feet away, and he nodded. “We’ll vote Sunday, but I’m pretty sure Dozer just lost his job as enforcer. I know he doesn’t like Matty, but you don’t have to like the people you’re protecting, you just have to protect them. You’ll pay a fine for the punch, but you knew that already.”
I nodded. Under the circumstances, I might’ve gotten away with a normal punch, but I hit him with everything I had. Outside. The MC has to be responsible about showing supernatural strength or we’ll be in hot water with Randall, so it wasn’t the brightest move, but I didn’t give a fuck. “I’m calm. Let me see the feed.”
Bash pulled his phone out, called the control room, asked McGyver to send the feed to his phone, and handed it to me. I watched Matty do a salt/tequila/lime shot with Connie and flop across Bethany. They were right. He was fine.
Shirtless, and sexy as fuck, but fine.
“Okay. I’ll be back in an hour. I’ll come in through the garage and go straight to my room so I can be there whenever you bring him down. If he’s ready before then, I’d appreciate a text.”
Matty
* * *
Daddy took me to an old man’s house the next morning when I’d finally stopped puking. A retired doctor who put six stitches in my face so I wouldn’t have a scar. I was okay with the idea of a scar — I thought it’d make me look bad-ass. Daddy said if he had to look at my scarred face for the rest of my life, he’d kill Dozer.
The girls and I texted back and forth most of the day, and a bunch of us met at the RTMC’s restaurant at seven for dinner. I found out Viv’s husband — a human who works for Drake Security — had beat the hell out of Dozer, watched him change, beat him up again when he returned to human, watched him change to wolf, and then called him a pussy when he wouldn’t turn back to human from wolf. Normally, the RTMC would defend him from anyone not in the club, but they all seemed to think he had it coming, and they basically told him if he couldn’t defend himself against a human, that was his problem.
What we didn’t know, though, was that one of Cassie’s boyfriends was going to tear him a new asshole the next day. Isaac didn’t find out what happened right away, and when he did, he hurt Dozer so bad he almost couldn’t change and fix it. It drove a rift between the Pack and Abbott, because Isaac is Abbott’s partner at The Billiard Club. They’d assured Isaac they would see to Cassie’s safety, and Dozer had fucked up.
Bethany’s men handled things differently. While we were eating, Ranger, Mac, and Jonathan came into the restaurant, walked to the edge of the VIP section, and asked to speak with Duke. He invited them in and offered them a seat.
I was close enough, I could hear what was said. I also knew Bethany had come here without telling her guys where she was going, because they’d told her she had to stay away from the RTMC.
“When we started dating her, you told us Bethany was under your protection,” said Ranger. “Did you rescind that protection?”
“I did not,” Duke answered. “She’s Gen’s best friend.”
“And yet, your lead enforcer let her walk into a dangerous situation when it was his job to protect her. What do you intend to do about this?”
“That’s club business. It’ll be handled.”
“You haven’t already handled it?” Jonathan asked. “I understand Razor’s already taken it upon himself to even the score. Why not the club president?”
“Because Dozer will probably lose a whole helluva lot more if Duke hasn’t retaliated when it comes to a vote,” said Bash.
Duke glared at Bash, who told him, “Yeah, it’s club business, but they deserve an answer. They trusted us with their woman and we fuckin’ blew it.”
Duke looked back to Bethany’s three men. “We have to vote on it. Our bylaws are a co
mbination of MC and supernatural law. Bash is right, though he shouldn’t have said anything. You trusted us with Bethany and we blew it. I hope you’ll give us a chance to make things right.”
I looked at Daddy. If Dozer was kicked out of the club and thought it was my fault, there was no telling what he’d do to me.
“He won’t lay a hand on you,” Daddy said, reading my face. “I broke his neck and his jaw with a single punch. I doubt he’ll lower his guard enough so I can sucker-punch him again, but he knows what I’m capable of, and he knows you’re off limits.”
I shook my head. “Dozer scares me. He hates me, and it isn’t rational.”
“The MC will make sure you’re safe,” said Gen. She leaned sideways and put her arm around Bethany. “I’m so glad you were there to help take care of the assholes and keep Bethany safe. Cassie’s a bad-ass, and Viv can usually take care of herself, but you were all pretty drunk.”
“Hey!” said Bethany. “I’m a bad-ass, too.”
Gen chuckled. “You and I are bad-asses when we have our guns. Without them? We can hold our own in some situations, but I’m not sure anyone would call us a bad-ass.”
“Are you kidding?” asked Angelica. “I’ve heard the story about you throat-punching Duke in the clubhouse while ya’ll were dating!”
I nearly choked on my burger, and took a drink to swallow it down. “OMG! What did you do!?”
Gen laughed. “He pissed me off, and he thought he could be a bully and not let me leave. I wanted to leave.”
“No joking guys, last night brought bad shit back for Cassie,” said Bethany.
I must’ve looked confused, because Angelica said, “It was before my time, too. Do you remember when Sam fought the male cage fighter? I don’t remember his name, and it wasn’t a title fight, but it was still sanctioned, and she beat him live on pay-per-view. Anyway, he was pissed off about it, knew Cassie was Sam’s friend, and saw her out alone. He raped her and beat her up pretty badly. Cassie spent a lot of time in the hospital. Later, he came after her again, and Cam shot him. The asshole’s still in prison, but last night brought back bad memories. That’s why Ethan came to get her and Sam early.”
“I think,” said Bethany, “in the long run, she might be better off because she kicked ass last night, but in the short term, it’s fucking with her head. She hasn’t been home yet because she doesn’t want to tell her guys what happened.”
“She’ll be okay once she’s back in their arms,” Gen said, “but she’s kind of freaked right now, and Sam and Ethan are making sure she’s okay.”
Chapter 25
Razor
* * *
I wanted Dozer gone, but he lobbied hard with enough brothers, so the final vote was that he’d leave town for three months. A full suspension meant he couldn’t even go to his own home, since he lived in the MC’s neighborhood. It also meant he wouldn’t have an income for three months, and he’d have to earn his center patch back when he returned, and would require a full vote of the membership, meaning I could keep him from getting it back if I wanted to be petty. However, he’d abstained from cutting me out, so I’d likely do the same at some point if I didn’t think he was a danger to Matty anymore. It just depended on how things went when he returned.
Bash cut Dozer’s Enforcer patch off the front of his vest, and his center patch off the back, and we waited while Bash put him in a holding room. When we finished church, Bash, Bubbles, and whoever we voted in as the new Enforcer would escort him home to pack and then follow him out of town.
Nix nominated me for Dozer’s spot as Enforcer, but I told him it should be someone else. Without too much discussion, they voted for Gonzo, saying Connie had calmed him down enough he could be trusted with the position. Apparently, he’d been pretty mental before he met her.
Duke told the membership about Bash telling Bethany’s men we had to vote on Dozer’s consequences, and ended it with, “Bash has already paid a fifty-dollar fine, and Razor gave me a hundred before I came up with an amount. If anyone wants either to be more, speak now.”
No one said anything, and Duke brought the meeting to a close.
Three weeks later, Dozer tried to move his membership to Atlanta, but Bud told him he wasn’t welcome with his homophobic attitude, and that he needed to return to Chattanooga and fix what he fucked up. He also told him to stop being a pussy, afraid of a little gay boy.
I know Bud’s heart was in the right place, but it made me even more worried for Matty when Dozer finally returned.
However, from my perspective, things sailed along smooth-as-silk while Dozer was gone. I knew we’d had some fallout from Bethany, Cassie, and Viv’s men, but I thought it’d been handled.
Dozer returned on a Sunday and was given his vest back — still without the center patch, and an obvious empty place where his Enforcer patch had been. Duke welcomed him back, made sure McGyver knew to give him his phone back, and told Dozer he was back on the schedule at the bar.
Most of the club was due to leave Wednesday morning on our way to a popular bike rally — a two-day ride there, three days of partying, and then two days to get back home. I made Matty ride bitch behind me simply because I didn’t want him driving home hung over and tired.
Dozer was assigned jobs at home, meaning he couldn’t go with us, which worked for me.
The trip was a howling success and lots of fun, and the mom-and-pop hotel we stopped at on the way there and back rented an entire wing to us, and were fine with us partying outside by the pool long into the night. They put up signs saying the area was reserved for us, and no one bothered the crazy bikers.
On the ride home, we’d ate at an all-you-can-eat place when we pulled into town, and hit the pool with beer and margarita fixings before seven. At seven thirty, Duke and Bash’s phones went off, and the news wasn’t good. LEO had taken the opportunity while we were away to do a sting. They had warrants for the bar, the gun store, the new self-defense center, the biggest laundromat, and our hotel/whorehouse.
They thought they’d knocked out our cameras, but Brain had put some tiny cams in on a different frequency, and they missed those. This meant we all sat and watched the cops going through our places. If we’d been home, doing the jobs assigned to us, they wouldn’t find anything. But with a skeleton crew handling jobs they didn’t do every day, we had no idea what kind of shape things were in. No one said anything with the ol’ladies around, but we were all thinkin’ it.
Everyone breathed easy when they turned the laptop on in the safe at the hotel and it started the delete sequence — LEO would get nothing off it. Whether they found something physical in one of the rooms was another story, but we’d all been worried about that laptop. Brain was good, though. He’d taken care of us.
Dozer wore a mic and cam while he talked to them in the parking lot of the clubhouse, and we were all glad he was there to deal with them. He had our attorney there in no time, but he tactfully dodged loaded questions while they waited for Zeke. They wanted in the clubhouse and tried hard to bully their way in, but their warrant was only for our places of business. Dozer held his ground and they didn’t get in.
There was nothing for them to find at the gun store or the self-defense office. If they knew what to look for, they might find evidence of money laundering at the restaurant, but it would be hard to prove in court.
Thankfully, the girls at the hotel heard the truck horn play Dixie halfway through and stop in the parking lot, and coached their Johns in how to act if LEO came through the door. We’d have to come up with another alarm for next time, but this one had done the job this time.
The warrant allowed for the cops to enter two rooms, and if they found enough evidence of prostitution to make arrests, they could keep going.
We couldn’t see what happened in the rooms but heard the cops talking about it enough out in the parking lot, we got the gist of what they’d found.
In the first room, the girl had a robe on, the man had pants on, and they were sit
ting on the bed playing cards. I had no idea where the cards came from, but I was happy they were there. In the second room, the john had jumped into the shower and the girl was touching up her make-up. It was five-thirty on a Monday at home, so we only had four paying customers. The two rooms they went in on, the girls knew what to say and how to act, and the cops got nothing.
The worst part of all of this, though, was that Matty picked up enough from watching so he could no longer convince himself we didn’t break the law. I’m certain he’d figured it out long before, but he’d had plausible deniability. A few brothers left with their women when the phone screens started showing the various MC properties and what was happening, but I figured Matty would ask so many questions if I took him away, it was better to let him watch, and then answer whatever questions I could, later.
He knew not to ask about it around my brothers or over our helmet microphones, and he kept his mouth shut until we were home, but started in as soon as we were in the front door. “The cops have to know you’re guilty! The laptop deleting the hard drive when they just opened it to look, before they even tried to put a password in! And so much cash in the wallets of the two men? What else could that mean?!”
I took him by the hand, walked him to the garage, and pointed for him to get in the truck. We drove away from the house, and I pulled over and turned on the app Brain provided us all. It was supposed to make a noise to defeat any kind of listening device. I also turned the radio up. They might have gotten warrants to bug our houses, but it wasn’t likely they were allowed to bug our vehicles, too. Or, at least not those of us who rarely drove them.
“Knowing and proving aren’t the same thing. They didn’t find enough to make any arrests,” I told Matty as I eased the truck back onto the country road.
He crossed his arms. “It should’ve been enough. And the fact you’ve just done a shit-ton of stuff to be sure no one can listen to us also screams guilt. They might not be able to prove what you did, but they should be able to prove you’re doing something.”
Razor: Rolling Thunder Motorcycle Club, Book 11 Page 21