But she did not want Maureen Delaney to say it. Worse yet, she was positively horrified at the thought of what Mo might do if she believed Jenny wasn’t a good enough mother to raise the child of one of ‘her boys.’ Mo was one of those scary women who ran straight through and over any obstacle when she thought her cause was righteous.
Pain, fear, exhaustion, and failure boiled in Jenny’s heart, and in the battle between fight or flight, or just up and faint, fight won. “And what would you know about it? You can’t grow anything in that dried up old cave between your legs, so you have no idea what it takes to be a mother.”
Holy shit—had she just said that? Oh no. Where the hell had that come from? That was the kind of thing her father might have said.
She’d hit her target, though. Mo’s head flew up, and shock and rage surged red blood into her face. They stared at each other. Jenny was afraid to speak again—she couldn’t bring herself to apologize, though it was warranted, and she was afraid anything else would make it worse—and Mo seemed too overcome with fury to move.
Jenny knew that Mo was childless not by choice, and not even because she was infertile, but because she couldn’t carry a baby to term. She’d had several miscarriages and had been heartbroken every time. Jenny hadn’t been around the Bulls when the miscarriages had happened, but it was common knowledge in the club, and Mo herself talked about them occasionally, when she was drunk enough. She was a maudlin drunk.
There was literally nothing meaner or more awful she could have said to this woman. She felt terrible—but also still angry and threatened. An apology was not going to happen. Maybe this bridge needed to be burned so that the Bulls would leave her the fuck alone.
At last, Mo moved. She shook her head like she was coming awake, and she bent to lay Kelsey down in her cradle—on her belly, which the books all said was wrong. She pulled the receiving blanket over her little shoulders, and the baby remained asleep.
Then Mo came straight at Jenny. Jenny held her ground, with effort, and when they were face to face, Mo hauled off and slapped her. Hard.
Mo stood where she was until Jenny had recovered enough from the blow to face her again. Her expression perfectly calm, but her voice trembling, she said, “You want to do this on your own, have at it. I’ll not trouble you again.”
She picked up her handbag and walked out the front door.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Maverick sat at the bar in the clubhouse and watched as the rest of the Bulls, who weren’t benched on Russian business, filed in, followed by five members of the Night Horde MC from Missouri.
So much had changed while he’d been away. Not only were the Bulls deep in with the Volkov bratva from New York, beholden to the Russians for the bulk of their income, but they were instrumental allies of that organization, managing the western half of the country and supervising two other, smaller MCs who filled in or finished out runs to Mexico and Canada. Trafficking guns. In quantity.
The Bulls were big time outlaws now. He was having a hard time getting his head around that. In the abstract, it wasn’t so much the outlaw work he had trouble with—or, at least, not the fact that it was outlaw. He wasn’t nearly as concerned with laws as he was with ethics. The right thing was right because it was right, not because it was legal, and the wrong thing was wrong whether it was legal or not.
But they were playing with bad people now, and that skewed the question of right and wrong, turning black and white into nothing but grey. The Horde had come into Tulsa this afternoon with a box truck full of assault rifles and grenades. There was only one kind of people who bought weapons like that in quantity, and they weren’t recreational game hunters. Working with people like that meant doing the things one had to do to survive in that world.
Like kill in cold blood. To settle somebody else’s score. As he’d had to do inside. Maybe it was just that clouding up his head—being tasked to kill Lincoln Jennings, a guy he’d known in name only, because a woman he’d never met had wanted him to.
That and the price he’d paid, both in time and in retaliation.
While he mused, the Bulls and the Horde bellied up to the bar. Most of the work was done for the day, and everything had apparently gone to plan, so it was time to party. Maddie had seen to it that there were plenty of women around as party favors, and the Horde seemed eager to partake. They were young men, a couple of them huge—as big as or bigger than Ox.
Maverick tried to remember these guys’ names; the Horde had been a friendly club for a long time, but there hadn’t been all that much cooperation with them before. There was distance of about two hundred and fifty miles between them, so getting together had rarely been a casual thing. Before, they’d met up at rallies or on stopovers on other business. Delaney had thrown them a few jobs, but nothing like this partnership.
The two big guys...Maverick wanted to say that the dark-haired one was the president’s kid. Little Ike, then, though there was nothing little about him, except his age. In his early twenties, mid at the most, Maverick guessed. He was wearing a VP patch already. Damn. And Little Ike’s friend, who seemed about Maverick’s own age. He couldn’t remember his name. He was the only Horde not showing much interest in the sweetbutts, which indicated that he had an old lady and didn’t take advantage of the run rule. Maverick respected that.
From his position on the figurative bench, Maverick wasn’t really interested in any of it. The Russian shit made him uncomfortable for all sorts of reasons, so he was probably better off on the bench anyway. He sat on his stool and drank his whiskey. He gave the occasional friendly nod, but he didn’t bother to make nice.
He was looking forward to getting out of the clubhouse and going to Jenny’s.
She was close, he thought, to being ready. They’d spent the past few weeks taking things slowly, learning each other again, understanding what they needed. He was working on talking with her in ways that weren’t so intent on getting her to see things his way, and she was working on not thinking every damn word out of his mouth was meant to argue. He’d forgiven her for cutting him out of Kelsey’s life, and she’d forgiven him, he thought, for going away.
He would never be sorry he’d beaten her father, but he was sorry about all the ways it had hurt her.
Which was where they were stuck now: what to do with her father. The last obstacle, he thought, between him and his family. He could not live under the same roof as that bastard. Even in Earl’s current state, Maverick knew he could not see that face every day and just deal with it.
Earl’s insurance wouldn’t cover a decent nursing home, and Jenny couldn’t afford the balance. The money the club, and now he, had been giving her, she’d been saving for Kelsey’s college. Maverick admired that, even as it frustrated him that his girls had been struggling. But he was damn glad she hadn’t been using his money for Earl’s care.
That was the sticking point: Maverick could afford to cover what the insurance wouldn’t pay for a good private home. He’d asked Mo to do a little research, and she’d found a couple of places that looked decent. Not luxurious, but comfortable, with good care.
Even while he was benched, his cut of the Russian business was solid, and he was doing all the other work he could get his hands on. He was in financially good shape. If Jenny and Kelsey lived with him, and they sold that shithole of a house, and maybe the bar, too, they could make Earl somebody else’s problem without any negative impact on their own security.
But Maverick couldn’t bring himself to pay for Earl’s care. He couldn’t get right with the thought of supporting that son of a bitch in any way. Probably the last block between him and the life he wanted, and he couldn’t fucking do it.
He hadn’t offered, and Jenny hadn’t asked, but it was on his mind constantly.
“Mav!” Delaney’s shout pulled him out of his reverie. “C’mon, brother, we’re in church before we’re all too wasted to think.”
Maverick spun on his stool and considered his president. The meeting
tonight was prep for the runs the next day—gun runs. Not his job.
“Prez?”
Delaney grinned. “You’re off the bench, brother. We need you on Galveston. You good with that?”
Was he? Theoretically, he could say no. There’d be consequences, but nobody wanted a guy on work like that who wasn’t all in.
Galveston. That meant Mexicans picking up the cargo at the port. The northern run was easier—just up to Nebraska, to relay with another club: the Great Plains Riders. It wasn’t clear to him who in Canada wanted Russian steel, but the southern route left no room for pretending they weren’t doing business with the worst kind of people.
Seemed to him that, in this business, the Bulls were sandwiched between the worst kind of people.
“Mav.” Delaney wasn’t asking. “Let’s go.”
“I’m on release, D. Can’t leave the state.”
Delaney simply stared, unmoved.
Facing the club president, Maverick felt the ground shudder under his feet. He wouldn’t have his patch taken from him if he refused, but he teetered on the edge of a cliff nonetheless. If he said no, he made a choice beyond the work. His reasons for refusing would be about the club, and about his years inside, and about his life—the one he had, and the one he wanted. He was either in or he was out. Even if the club allowed him to lurk on the margins, he couldn’t live like that.
Despite Jenny’s discomfort with the Bulls—which seemed lately to be easing—Maverick needed the club. These men and their women were the first thing like a family he’d ever had. They weren’t enough; he needed Jenny and Kelsey, a family that was only his, to have enough. But he needed the Bulls, too. He could only give his woman and child the life they deserved if he had the club. He could be the man he needed to be only if he had the tether of the club. That was simply true.
So he’d have to get right with the Russians and their customers. He’d have to get right with what Irina Volkov had had him do inside, and the price he’d paid.
And he’d have to hope with all he had that he didn’t get caught up beyond state lines. Hope was still a precious commodity to him, hard to come by and painful to lose.
“Maverick.”
Maverick finished his drink and stood up. “Yeah. Coming.”
~oOo~
Galveston was a five-hundred-fifty mile ride from Tulsa. With the cargo they were protecting, they couldn’t go over the speed limit, so it was a long slog. More than eight hours, almost nine with a quick pit stop.
But the weather on this mid-October day was fine—the sun bright and warm, the wind cool enough for the breeze in his face to keep him wakeful and feeling alive. He rode with his brothers around and near the truck, and the roar of big Harley engines filled the air. For the most of the ride, Maverick couldn’t have cared less what was in that truck or how far behind him the Oklahoma state line was. He was doing one of the few things he truly loved—riding an open road, the wind filling his lungs, his bike in his hands and between his legs.
The only time he felt tense was just south of Dallas, when a couple of Texas state troopers came onto I-45 and kept pace with them for a good ten miles. You didn’t want to fuck with those guys, or give them any reason at all to fuck with you. The two cruisers had obviously decided that bikers sporting colors were up to some kind of trouble; they were just waiting for their chance to pull them over. Maverick and the rest of the crew put on their best friendly-neighbor faces, and Wally, driving the truck, pegged his speed at a couple of miles per hour under limit.
Maverick, riding at the back, considered the situation and worked on keeping his heart quiet and steady. Normally, he’d trust everybody on this run to be cool: Rad and Ox were always solid as steel beams. Gunner, too—he could go badly haywire on his own, but when he had his brothers with him, he was chill. Wally, the prospect, Maverick still didn’t know all that well, but he wasn’t easily cowed by the patches, and that was a good sign.
But they had a Horde riding with them, too. Little Ike had asked for his club to get a place on these runs. He wanted to know the end point; he wanted to understand the work completely. For some ungodly reason, Delaney had agreed. So they had a kid riding with them, way too young to be wearing that VP patch. Maverick didn’t know him at all, and he trusted him even less.
While those troopers rode along, Maverick kept his eyes on the back of the Horde VP and waited for that kid to do something stupid.
But he didn’t. He kept his cool like the rest of them. After a while, the cops pulled off onto a ramp. Maverick smirked to himself; those dudes must have been damn disappointed—and little did they know that they’d missed what might have been the collar of their careers.
As they rode under the overpass, Maverick checked his mirror. He couldn’t see the cruisers, but they were in his rearview even so, and he relaxed again.
~oOo~
In Galveston, things got tense again, and for real this time. They brought their truck to a commercial dock, near a row of rusting vessels that Ox identified as ‘shrimpers.’ Maverick wouldn’t know a shrimper from a skiff. He’d didn’t like large bodies of water and had never been on a boat—not even the little johnboat they had up at the Bulls’ cabin. He’d never learned to swim, and the few times he’d been in deep water, he’d felt powerless and panicky. Water was deadly and unpredictable. Even standing on the dock unsettled him. He didn’t like the feeling of something that should have been solid shifting under his feet.
That wasn’t the true source of his tension or his disquiet, however. The men Rad and Ox were talking to—that had him on high alert, keeping his hand on the weapon at the small of his back. All four men who’d come up to the Bulls were heavily tattooed—including their faces. The one in charge had really extensive face art.
In four years in prison, Maverick had earned what might as well have been a university-degree’s worth of knowledge about ink. In the Bulls’ world, ink was significant. Club inked declared more than simply affiliation. It meant a commitment, one so deep it was carved directly into the body. That mark of affiliation was also protection, indicating the power of the people at your back. They marked their women for the same reason—that commitment meant loyalty. Trust. An indelible vow to hold each other’s secrets, and faith, precious.
In prison, it wasn’t much different, but it was even more crucial. Ink often made the difference between life and death.
Maverick had had to fight hard for the right to keep skinhead ink off his body and keep their so-called ‘friendship,’ and even so, his lack of evident affiliation had branded him, to guards and inmates alike, an outsider. Only a man like him, who could fight for his place and win, could survive prison as an outsider.
As the state penitentiary, McAlester had housed the whole pantheon of bad men and their communities. Maverick knew the inking styles of virtually every outlaw group. The men doing business with Rad and Ox, with the rest of the Bulls and their lone Horde companion arced behind them, were very bad men indeed.
The man doing most of the talking had the name Abrego 13 tattooed across his forehead, from his hairline to his eyebrows and from one temple to the other, in a style like graffiti. He had hash marks inked below his left eye, in groups of five: seventeen in all. He was marking his kills. On his fucking face.
These guys were Salvadoran, or affiliated with them. A Salvadoran gang. Abrego 13 had started up in in Los Angeles in the Eighties, populated by young men whose families had fled the civil war in their country, and they had spread south toward home, infecting all points between, when the war was over.
This was no drug cartel, no organized business. Abrego 13 was about violence and mayhem. If they were the Volkovs’ customer, they were using these guns and grenades for terror, not greed.
Jesus Christ.
Ox’s father had been a Mexican immigrant, and he spoke fluent Spanish. He was doing the talking for the Bulls. Maverick spoke no language but English, so he didn’t understand, and he didn’t think anyone else did, eith
er. But, based on body language, the exchange seemed to be going smoothly—a truck full of guns for two big duffels full of money. They’d drop the money off at a dry cleaners in Galveston that was a front for other kinds of laundering, and the Bulls’ part of this nasty business would be over.
Ox and the Abrego in charge nodded. Ox said something to Rad, who turned and motioned to the Bulls and Little Ike that it was time to start unloading the truck.
Yeah, everything was moving smoothly—but for the fact that they were handing war weapons over to a death gang.
Little Ike hefted a crate of AKs and stalked toward the Salvadorans. He met Maverick’s look as they passed each other. The kid was pale, and his eyes were wide, but he seemed steady—just, like Maverick, freaked the fuck out.
~oOo~
“Those guys were some kinda fucked up.” Little Ike nodded at the server who’d set a fresh beer before him and offered her a lopsided grin. “Thanks, darlin’.”
At his side, Rad said, “Don’t matter. Not our job to judge the customer. We just move the merchandise.”
“And you’re good with that? What the fuck are they doin’ with the merchandise?”
“Not our job to know that, either. And that meetin’ was cordial. Straight business, no wrinkles. You’re judgin’ books by their covers, Little Ike.”
“Isaac.”
Rad acknowledged the correction with a tilt of his head. “So they got ink. So do I. Every one of us has our share. How much d’you got, son?”
“Enough,” Little I—Isaac growled. “It’s not the point. The guy you were talking to—those hash marks. That was a kill count. Seventeen. I don’t think he’s countin’ mosquitoes he’s squashed.”
Maverick had been thinking all the same things. “The kid’s right, Sarge. Abrego 13, they had a presence at McAlester. Very bad dudes. If they’re buying Russian—”
“They’re not. They’re middlemen, just like us. And we all need to shut the fuck up and mind where the fuck we are.”
Slam (The Brazen Bulls MC #3) Page 25