by Hazel Parker
Uncle raised his eyebrow in curiosity at me, but I ignored it.
“So, what’s going on?”
“Well, we were going to wait for the clock to strike,” Marcel said. “But at this point, I think we can just get right to it.”
He cleared his throat, took a sip of water, and leaned forward on the table.
“I mentioned last time that a couple of the Savage Saints from across the country had sent us an email warning us that we would never be the real Savage Saints, a sort of opening salvo if you will,” he said. “However, given that there has been no follow-up, I suspect that it was nothing more than a ploy to try to get money out of us.”
“Extortion at its finest,” Uncle cracked. “If he wanted to stir up trouble, he should have learned from the pros. Right, Fitz?”
I smiled uneasily, knowing that while people could have argued about the merits of my profession, they could never say I acted unethically. Uncle, though, seemed to have other ideas.
“So, with that said, until I have further proof of them causing trouble, this is just something that I’m not going to worry about. Let’s instead turn our attention to the issue of recruitment. We need—”
The door to the repair shop opened. Marcel rolled his eyes.
“Shop’s closed; we open at nine! If you need to leave your car, there’s a key drop outside!”
The door shut. Footsteps, however, followed. Niner rose from his seat, his hand by his hip to draw at a moment’s notice. I also stood, but I had no gun on me. The footsteps that came from outside were deliberate, slow, and casual. They sounded like the walk of a man who wore...dress shoes?
A couple of seconds later, a taller man with a thick black beard, slick black hair, a black cut, and a lit cigar in his mouth walked in. Niner tried to round the table, but Marcel held him back.
“Hey, did you hear what I said?” Marcel said, standing up. “Shop’s closed. We’ll take care of your shit in the morning, but not right now.”
“I heard what you said,” the man said, taking a puff of his cigar and blowing it in our general direction. “But it seems from your attitude and words that you have not heard what we had to say.”
Marcel scrunched his eyebrows at him. The black-bearded man chuckled and leaned against the entrance to our meeting room.
“You’re really this dense, Marcel?” the man said. “You literally just spoke about me. And now you’re going to pretend you don’t know who I am?”
Marcel kept his arms folded and his mouth shut. Niner again stepped forward, but the man rolled his eyes.
“Tell your sergeant to stand down,” he said. “You shoot me, and all of you will be dead before the end of Friday night. And lest you think I’m full of shit, look closer at my cut.”
As if to hammer home the point, the man turned, showing us the Savage Saints logo on his back, and then turned around and pointed to a patch on the right side of his collarbone that read “President.”
“I’m Richard Peters, something that I apparently have to hammer home into your thick New York skulls.”
“Yeah? I’m Marcel Stone. And what can we do for an airheaded California boy?”
Richard chuckled, taking another puff of his cigar. I had a very bad feeling for how this was going to end, especially considering Richard probably had a whole host of men with him just out of our view.
“If you had done any research after our initial warning to you, Marcel, you would know that I don’t run the Savage Saints in California. I run the chapter in Las Vegas. But I can see that you need everything handed to you, don’t you?”
“Fuck off,” Marcel said.
“I would be happy to, if you just do what I tell you to do.”
Marcel snorted. Niner’s hand kept clenching in and out, just looking for an excuse to open fire.
“What do you want?”
“Ah, now you’re learning,” Richard said. “You took our name. You took our brand. We should drive your sorry asses into the ground. We have the means to do so, especially considering how new you are. But when I talked to my friend in Green Hills, I realized, you know what, there are better ways to do this. After all, we had never even considered expanding out east. And yet, you’ve given us an opportunity.”
“Opportunity for what?” Uncle yapped.
Richard looked at him.
“Who’s he?” he asked. “The club mouse?”
“I’ll show you what this fucking mouse can do, you little shithead!” Uncle roared as he stood up.
Richard rolled his eyes before he raised a gun. Niner raised his gun in kind. No one fired, but a single wrong move could have resulted in multiple dead bodies—to say nothing of who was outside.
“Fucking shoot me,” Uncle said. “I dare you. You think I’m fucking scared of your sorry hippy ass?”
“I don’t, which just makes you all the dumber,” Richard said. “A man without fear of a gun is a man who is bound to die by one.”
“Spare your fucking nonsense,” Uncle said. “If you have any balls, you’ll shoot me right now.”
“If I wanted you all dead, you wouldn’t even know you were in the grave,” Richard warned. “Have your sergeant lower his gun. All of you, sit down. I’ll give my speech, and then you can take it or fight it.”
“Fuck you!”
“Uncle!”
I pounded the table as I shouted. Uncle, Marcel, and even Richard stared at me in surprise.
“We’re not going to get anywhere with threats,” I said. “And even if we could kill him right now, he’s the president of the club. We kill him, and we’ll have a whole horde of them on us. We’ll be massacred.”
Richard raised his arm out, palm facing the ceiling, toward me.
“One of you assholes has some common sense here,” he said. “I suggest you listen to him.”
“Let’s just all sit down. Richard, you too. And then we can hear what we need to.”
Uncle and Marcel exchanged a look. Richard looked utterly relaxed as if he knew no one would have the balls to shoot him. I didn’t doubt that Niner would, but I also didn’t doubt it wouldn’t be an even trade. The president’s death meant all of ours.
“You fucking punk, Fitz,” Uncle said. “You’re the first to die if this backfires on us.”
“No one is going to die if you just sit down,” Richard said. “At least not today.”
I did my best to ignore his last few words and sat down. Uncle spat on the ground just a couple of inches from Richard’s feet before taking a seat. Marcel and Niner, though, remained standing.
“What will it be, Marcel?” Richard said. “You want to make this a bigger problem than it is now? Or are you going to exercise some self-restraint here and take a seat?”
Marcel muttered something I couldn’t hear under his breath, motioned for Niner to take his seat, and then did so himself. Richard chuckled, put out the remains of his cigar on the ground, stomped it, and then pulled up a chair to the table.
“See? I negotiate fairly. Fitz asked us all to sit, and I am happy to do that so that no one leaves here with anything more than a bruised ego. You ought to listen to him more, you know. He seems like he knows a thing or two.”
“The fucking scrawny banker?” Marcel said with a chuckle.
Richard looked at me in surprise.
“Banker?”
I cleared my throat.
“I work on Wall Street.”
Richard looked at me, looked at the rest of the club, and started laughing hysterically. It was certainly theatrical, but I didn’t doubt that the appearance of a banker with a bunch of car repairmen was also genuinely funny.
“I don’t know what weird shit your club is, but it doesn’t much matter. Anyways, let’s get down to it. From a legal perspective, we could sue your asses into oblivion and you would never be out of bankruptcy and debt ever again. You stole our image, you stole our name, you stole pretty much everything associated with us.”
All true, I thought as Marcel showed
no visible reaction.
“However, we’re bikers, right? We’re not a bunch of lawyers and vampires. We believe in solving issues of justice ourselves. Surely, that’s something you all have come to realize. At least, I hope you’ve realized it. If not, you all have some serious fucking issues.”
He chuckled.
“Anyways, like I said, plan was to come here, threaten you with death, maybe shoot one of you, you know, standard operating procedure for a rival club. But like Fitz over here, I’m a businessman. The Las Vegas chapter is the money maker of the Savage Saints name, while the Green Hills chapter is the enforcement. That’s why I’m here, not Trace. So, that is all to say that we’ll let your little club operate as is. You can do whatever the hell you want with the name. We’ll even help you if you need it—eventually.
“But in order to do all that, you’re going to have to give us a percentage of your profits.”
“How much?”
“Fifty.”
Marcel cracked his neck while laughing. Uncle muttered something about how it was bullshit. I was just fixated on the fact that he said “profits” and not “revenue.” That was a hell of a lot more generous offer than revenue—fifty percent of our revenue would have been death by a “fair deal.” Fifty percent of profits hurt, but it wouldn’t destroy us.
“Fifty percent,” Marcel says. “You want us to give you fifty percent of our profits?”
“First of all, you numbfuck, we ain’t making a profit yet,” Uncle said. “Second of all, the fuck you going to enforce this? You going to fly cross-country every month and make sure our books are good?”
“Yeah,” Richard said as if being asked if he’d like a drink.
“No way. You may be the money-making branch, but you ain’t a fucking billionaire.”
“Don’t have to be.”
“Goddamnit,” Uncle said, realizing Richard was being completely serious. “You’re a fucking pain in the ass.”
“I could say the same about a certain chapter that opens up in New York City, steals everything we worked hard to establish, and then doesn’t pay a goddamn cent.”
Uncle rose from his seat. Just before he turned the corner, I stood up and stopped him.
“Let’s talk.”
“Talk,” Uncle said, repeating the word. “Talk. Talk when this guy just walks in here and demands half our profits. And you want to talk?”
“What is fighting going to do?”
“It’s going to tell him he can’t just walk in here and demand half of our money!”
“You really think you can beat him up and not have consequences?”
“He’s right, you know.”
We both turned to see Richard unbuttoning his shirt, showing us a wire.
“Don’t worry. It’s not to law enforcement. But it is to a few of my club members who are right outside the building. The moment I start yelling for back up, all of you will be shot through the skull. We’ll give anyone who has their car here a few hundred bucks to move it to a competitor, and you all will just be SOL.”
“This is bullshit,” Uncle said.
Richard shrugged.
“I could go on talking, but I really don’t see a need to,” he said, rising and stretching his arms out. “Today’s Thursday, right? Just like at our club. See, you even stole our meeting time.”
He chuckled to himself. No one else was laughing, that much was evident.
“I’ll give you all two weeks to decide what you’re going to do. If this sounds like an extraordinarily generous offer, that’s because it is. You shouldn’t need that much time but consider it an olive branch of sorts from Trace and me. A way of saying that we don’t want this to be extortion; we want it to be a partnership.”
He went to the door, paused, and turned around.
“And by the way,” he said. “You do recognize that it’s a two-way street, right? You won’t just pay us and then never talk to us again. You’ll have access to our brain trust. Our manpower. Our knowledge. Our locations. Only Wall Street over there looks like he’s ever seen a good party, but rest assured, Las Vegas knows how to throw a party—and we know how to throw the best kind in Vegas. Think about it.”
With a flash of a smile, he then ducked out of the doorway. A few seconds later, the door swung open. No one said a word until it shut, but as soon as it did, hell broke loose.
“We are not fucking doing a thing with him!” Uncle roared.
“We are not making any decisions right now!” Marcel yelled.
“Kiss my ass, Marcel, this is my investment, and I am not giving you money so you can then turn around and give it to some California hippie.”
“We don’t really have much choice in the matter, now do we?” Marcel yelled. “You heard him. I saw the email. I’ve done my research, Uncle.”
“And you think I haven’t, you shithead?”
Shit, things are unraveling. Bad, bad, bad.
“You think I’d just blindly give you money? You may be family, and I may look out for you, but if I knew you were going to take that money and buy a shitload of heroin, you’d never see a penny from me!”
“As if that’s the same thing as this!”
“Everyone, shut up!”
I couldn’t believe I’d spoken. Uncle glared at me.
“Where did this side of Fitz come from?” Biggie said, trying to crack a joke.
No one even looked at him, let alone laughed at him.
“We have two weeks to decide, right?” I said. “The rule of deadlines is you never make a decision until the last possible moment. Deadlines spur action, but not until the moment of truth. We have two weeks. If something changes in between now and then, then we can hasten our decision. But we act now, we won’t give time for all the info to come out.”
Uncle ran his hands over his head.
“You say the right things, Fitz,” he said. “But you gotta know your fucking place.”
“I put money into this club too—”
“Not as much as me,” Uncle said, but at least he was calming down. He turned to his nephew. “You don’t give a fucking dime to those hippies until we’ve come to a conclusion. If they try to say you need to pay upfront to keep the window open, you punch them in the fucking skull. I don’t care what it takes, but we are not paying their asses unless everyone at this table comes to that conclusion. And it’s going to take an awful lot of drinking to convince me that’s a good idea.”
Marcel took a few deep breaths, closed his eyes, and exhaled slowly.
“I fucking hate that guy,” he said. “But if we have two weeks, we’re going to use them. In the meantime, let’s call it a night. Nothing else is as important as this.”
He got up without another word and went out of the room. He opened the door to the outside, but when nothing happened, we assumed that the Las Vegas Saints had gone their own way. Biggie and Niner rose and followed Marcel, leaving just Uncle and me.
“Biggie did raise a good point,” Uncle said with a slight smirk. “Where the hell did this side of you come from? I had never seen it before.”
I shrugged.
“I don’t know that it’s a new side of me or not,” I said. “I just saw the situation unraveling, and—”
“Fitz, don’t give me that bullshit,” he said. “You may be able to call it a false assumption on a spreadsheet, but you’re not going to challenge Marcel or myself unless something drastic happened. So I’ll ask it again. Where did this side of you come from?”
Fuck it. Things are so raw here, might as well put it all out there.
“I just want to feel like a legit member of this club, you know?” I said. “I don’t want to be seen as some rich dude who got brought along just because of his bank account. I want to be someone who can actually be called upon on runs and in this clubhouse. I am not a token, nor am I an investor. I want to be a member, damnit.”
Uncle pursed his lips, chuckled, and sighed.
“How many of us do you think have killed s
omeone here?”
“Sorry?”
“I know what I said. How many of us do you think have killed someone? Us being the five officers.”
“I...I don’t know, Niner?”
“Exactly,” Uncle said, a wry smile forming on his face. “Niner, as a cop, has almost certainly shot people. You’ll never get him to admit it—good luck getting him to admit anything—but he probably has. The rest of us? We’re just figuring it out as we go. Marcel and Biggie have been in jail, but never for anything violent. You and I haven’t.”
“So—”
“So we’re all trying to learn what it means to be a member,” Uncle said. “All I give a shit about is that you contribute to the club and you do what you need to do. If you do that, then you’re a legit member.”
Contribute to the club and do what you need to do. Do what you need to do. Do what you need to do…
“Do you understand?”
I nodded.
“Yeah, yeah, I do,” I said, and a wry smile formed on my face. “Sorry. I’ll make sure I’m a better member.”
“I know you will,” Uncle said.
Funny thing about that, I thought. I don’t think you quite do, actually.
Chapter 8: Amelia
The trip to Shanghai absolutely sucked ass.
The thing about trips like that was that if you told someone who wasn’t in banking, they would picture you doing business from morning until sunset, having a group business dinner, and then you’d finally have the chance to do your own thing. Maybe you’d even get a day or two to yourself.
That never, ever fucking happened.
In fact, the time-suck was even worse than it was in New York City because you were expected to make as strong an impression as possible on the client. At least in Manhattan, I could easily find an excuse to escape the doldrums of the day by taking a quick coffee break or retreating to a private meeting room.
But in Shanghai, I had no time to recover from jet lag. I didn’t get the time to review all of the slides as I wanted to, which meant a significant portion of my presentation was made on the fly. And the dinner and drinks after the workday ended, while not technically mandatory, were essentially that considering that I still wanted to become an executive director.