“Fourth fight? And that Freak rang his bell twice. Con’s out of gas. He just won’t admit it. Unless he goes in dirty, I say that guy’s got him down for the count within two minutes.”
“You’re saying KO? You want to put some coin on that?”
Demon grinned at him. “Fifty bucks.”
“You’re betting fifty against your brother?” That was Bart, butting into the conversation.
Demon blushed a little, but he didn’t lose the grin. “Just between us Horde, yeah. Nobody outside. Then I’ll go up there and get retribution for Con. Make amends, you know.”
Bart laughed. “I’ll put down on that. Con’s gonna kick your ass when he finds out.”
“If he falls, I’ll split my take with him.” Demon gave Bart a smug look, and by the time Connor and the Priest faced off, the entire Horde club was betting one way or the other. Even Hoosier got in on it, betting on his son. Sherlock threw in with Demon; there was just something about the look in Demon’s eyes that said he was right.
About a minute-forty in, Con made heavy contact with the Priest’s abdomen, forcing him to double over.
And then he dropped his hands.
The Priest stood up and threw a jab like it came out of a cannon and landed it right on Connor’s chin. Their brother went down like a board. They could almost see the stars and birdies flapping over his head.
“Fuck.” Even though he’d bet that way, Sherlock had still been rooting for Connor to win. Everybody paid up or collected, depending on their bet.
Trick flew through the ropes and dropped to his knees at Connor’s side. The Priest didn’t celebrate. He stood off quietly to the side and watched. Just as Sherlock and his brothers started to get restless with concern, Connor sat up, and the whole crowd cheered. Then Trick and the Priest got him to his feet and helped him off the mat.
Demon slapped him on the back on his way to the ring. Now to see if he could take that mountain down and atone for betting against his brother.
A few minutes into that fight, however, they were distracted by three men without colors coming up on them. They looked familiar, but Sherlock was tense. He wasn’t sure whether their familiarity meant they were friends or enemies.
They went straight for Hoosier, and Sherlock saw that all of his brothers felt the same acute wariness verging on alarm. Even Connor, who still looked rung, made himself as big and broad as he could—which was lot—and got in their way. But Hoosier turned, grinned, and hugged the oldest of the three.
“K.T.? Well, Christ on a…crutch, you old fool!”
Ah. K.T. had been President of the Billings charter of their old club. He’d walked away from club life in the Perro Blanco aftermath.
With K.T. identified, Sherlock knew one of the other men as Zed, former Nomad President of that club. The last guy, Sherlock couldn’t place. They were all grizzled old men, in their sixties at least.
As all the Horde gathered around and made their greetings—the other guy was a former Billings soldier they called Rancid—ignoring for a moment the fight going on behind them, Zed asked, “Muse and Demon around?”
Muse and Demon had both been Nomads back in the day. Hoosier shook his head. “Muse has himself an old lady and a new baby. He’s holding the fort down at home. And Demon’s”—he turned to the ring, just as the Priest mountain fell to his knees and then flopped to his side, making the whole ring shake. Demon stood there, panting, his face dark crimson—“Demon. There something on your mind, or is this a…social call?”
K.T. turned to Badger, the Missouri Horde President, and then to Show, and finally back to Hoosier. “Glad to see you, yeah. Heard you was comin’ up. Glad leadership for both charters is here. We got somethin’ to run by you.”
Without any prodding, Lakota whistled loudly, slicing through the noise of the crowd, and got Trick and Demon’s attention, and the two men made their way out of the ring.
~oOo~
After they talked with K.T., Zed, and Rancid, all the Horde called it a night and rode back to their camp. They had some things to discuss, and the camp was the closest thing to really private they’d have here in Sturgis.
On Badger and Hoosier’s shared order, they all met at the campfire and sat down around it. Bart, Sherlock, and Dom had scanned the area for surveillance, and Sherlock ran a couple of different jammers, in case there was somebody around with a Doppler device. They were out in the middle of a fucking field, but it still felt wrong to be having a Keep meeting out in the open.
Badger was less than half Hoosier’s age, but he was now the mother charter President, so he had the meeting. He started by saying simply, “You all heard what K.T. said. Here’s where we start to talk about what we think.”
Hoosier added, “No decisions here. We go back to our own tables and talk it out with full…membership.”
Badger nodded. “Then we’ll come together somewhere to vote it.”
From across the fire, J.R. called out, “Vegas, baby. Gotta be Vegas.”
Laughter and general agreement from the men assembled around the fire.
“So,” Badger called their attention back. “What do we think?”
A restored Connor spoke first, “After that ambush in Idaho, maybe we need a presence farther north. If they got eight men ready, that’s enough to start a charter. Now that La Zorra is expanding that direction, either we’re running our guys all over kingdom come, or we’re trusting subcontractors with our shit. Be nice to be able to turn the work over to a Flaming Mane.”
“Missouri doesn’t do that work anymore, Con,” Nolan spoke up, SAA to SAA.
J.R. responded before Connor could. “Mother takes her cut, though. Don’t see you turning that back.”
“My point, asshole, is maybe they don’t want to go that way.” Nolan and J.R. glared at each other.
“It’s Zed and K.T.,” Demon cut in. “They’re outlaws from way back. Probably still outlaw, just without colors for protection.”
“I don’t have much of a rig here,” Sherlock offered, “but I could do a simple check on ‘em, see what they’ve been up to.”
Trick shook his head. “After what happened last fall, do we want to extend trust that far away? Especially if they want in on La Zorra? Isn’t the timing strange? We get ambushed, and they’re here a few weeks later, asking to start a new charter?” He kicked his legs out in front of him and leaned back against a log, crossing his arms over his chest. “I don’t like it.”
He was talking about what had happened to him: Jesse flipping on the club and getting Trick caught up and locked away in some black site prison, for almost two months. Jesse was dead, he’d died a rat’s death, and his name would never be uttered again in club business.
“You heard ‘em. They heard about the…ambush. It’s what got them focused on the ask. It’s K.T., Trick.” Hoosier leaned in and met Trick’s eyes around the fire. “He was wearing colors while you were still…drawing with Crayolas. Same with Zed.”
“The rat had a patch a long time, too.”
Show spoke up. “We don’t need to call it now. Something to think about. I’d say it’s worth bringing it to our tables, at any rate.” He turned to Badger. “What do you think, boss?”
It was hard to tell in the orange glow of the fire, but Sherlock thought Badger blushed. He definitely dipped his head a little. But he answered like a President. “I think it’s an idea that needs a hard look, yeah.”
Hoosier nodded. “Agreed. If there’s no…objection, I’ll tell K.T. it’s under consideration.”
There was no objection.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Sherlock had been gone for four days. Having recently discovered a wide and wild jealous streak in her heart, Sadie was now learning that making a conscious decision not to be jealous took a lot of fucking effort. Sherlock kept saying to trust him, and she did. Honestly, she did. But jealousy seemed to come from a different place. A crazy place.
It was weird. Like, she trusted him, but not the world.
Which made no sense. Or it did. She didn’t know.
All she knew was that something in her head wanted to think about all the things that could make him stray, even if he didn’t want to. Wanted to think about that all the time.
Things like getting drunk enough to black out. As he had.
It would be a whole lot easier if he didn’t drink—or anything else—either. Or if she didn’t know what it was like to be fucked up and do things you would never do straight.
They’d only been together a month. Sure, they’d both now said the word ‘love,’ but they were still new. She realized that trying to sink her claws too deeply into him would probably mean that they would end while they were still new. She didn’t want that. Loving somebody was hard and painful and scary, but it was also awesome and exciting and…fulfilling was the closest word Sadie could think of. The good feelings were worth the bad, even if the bad still poked around in her head and made her fizz.
There was a thing newly recovering addicts were told. Sadie had heard it in rehab, and in NA meetings, over and over again. Recovering addicts should not engage in new romantic relationships for at least the first year of their recovery. Too much of the world was new and scary, too much of the addict’s sense of self was changing, and the powerful and erratic emotions that infused love were treacherous terrain for somebody just taking their first steps into recovery.
Sadie had met Sherlock three hundred and ninety-three days into her recovery. More than a year. Barely.
But Sadie had never been in love before. Not even close.
Gordon had pointed out to her, the night he’d picked her up from the Horde clubhouse, that she’d called him more during the month she’d known Sherlock than ever before. He hadn’t had to tell her; she’d been well aware. Loving Sherlock made her feel like she wasn’t in control of anything in her head or her heart, and it had always been lack of control that made her fizzy, that made her need.
But she didn’t want to lose the feeling of being in love. She didn’t want to lose Sherlock. She simply had to work out better ways to cope and find stability. She’d said as much to Gordon, and his solution had apparently been to storm into a den of bikers.
Which had been an admirably effective strategy.
But now, here she was, alone in California while Sherlock was gone at the world’s biggest biker party. He called every day and texted her several times a day, and that helped. On one call, although he’d been drunk, he’d gone on for a while about how boring the club was getting. A bunch of the men had what he called ‘old ladies,’ so half the club was hanging out at their camp at night, just dudes getting drunk together, no chicks in sight.
Sadie had smiled wide at that image in her head. Now, when her brain wanted to call up images of women clad only in body paint, she pulled up the one she’d made in her mind of a bunch of bearded dudes calling their wives before passing out alone next to their bikes.
That image helped a lot.
She was grinning at it while she sorted out a caller’s slow hard drive when a private chat window popped on her screen. Her boss, Ray: Got a minute?
She typed back: on a help call
Hand it over. Andy’s free.
In the way that happens when your boss wants to talk to you right now, Sadie’s heart picked up. Ray had already gotten snippy with her about a ‘new habit’ she’d developed of logging on late, and asked if she was ‘having trouble again,’ so she prepared herself for another uncomfortable conversation.
She typed, K 1 sec, then connected with Andy, made sure he was ready, and told the customer that she was sending her to a more experienced advisor—which wasn’t true; the issue was garden variety, and she was a better technician than Andy in any case, but customers liked to be told that they had a worthy problem that was being handled by experts. Nobody wanted to hear that their computer was running slow because they were dumb and had made a hash of their hard drive.
When she was free, she typed in Ray’s chat, here.
Just a heads up. Remember that kiddie porn call you got a while back?
How could I forget? The creepy Mr. Penney and his collection of BDSM kiddie porn. She shuddered at the memory.
It’s bigger than we thought. Feds involved. They want a statement from you.
I gave my statement that day.
They want an interview. In person. Somebody’s going to call you to set it up.
Stunned, Sadie stared at her screen for a long time. Long enough that Ray wrote: Sadie?
I’m here. Just freaked.
I know. But it’s no sweat, promise. Sending you the call transcript and your write-up now. They just need an interview. An alert chimed, informing her that she had a new email.
When?
Soon. Not sure, but maybe even today. Seemed like they weren’t screwing around.
Okay. Thanks.
You need the rest of the day?
Without knowing when this terrifying call would come in, the last thing Sadie needed was an idle mind. No. I might have to bail fast, though, if they call while I’m logged on.
Understood. It’s no sweat, Sadie. Just an interview.
Sure, she knew that. She hadn’t done anything wrong. But it was still an interview with government agents, and that wasn’t exactly a day at a spa.
~oOo~
They called within an hour of her chat with Ray, and Sadie spent the evening—until late—at the Riverside office of the FBI. She’d been there for hours, and most of that time had been spent waiting. The actual interview had been about two hours long and held in a room that looked very like a typical conference room, not the kind of interrogation room she’d been expecting, conjured from television and movies. Of course, she hadn’t been interrogated; she wasn’t a suspect, just a witness.
Kind of hard to keep that top of mind when you were sitting across from two FBI agents, both of whom were earnest and humorless. Not much humor to be found in a case like this. They were kind to her, though. Solicitous, even.
Most of the interview had been corroborating the statement she’d already made, but they’d also wanted her to create a minutely detailed context for how she’d encountered the images—in what order; where, exactly, they’d been on Penney’s computer; what his demeanor had been; and so on.
Two months after the fact, she would have expected not to be able to offer those details, but once she’d started describing the call, Sadie had discovered that it was indelibly etched into her head.
The agents—named White and Black, for real—hadn’t been especially forthcoming with answers to the questions she had, but Sadie was smart, and they’d told her a little, and she’d managed to work out that Mr. Norbert Penney of Santa Fe, New Mexico, had been a very bad man for a very long time. He was nearly ninety and going senile, which was why he’d made such a colossal mistake as giving a tech support advisor access to his computer.
Thereby, from what Sadie had put together, exposing a decades-old kiddie porn ring. One they’d been chasing down without luck for years. All because an old man hadn’t been able to get online.
And because Sadie had reported it.
Penney hadn’t understood what he was doing, and his lawyer was trying to quash the recording of him giving her permission for remote access. Without that permission, the call, Agent White explained, became the poisoned tree from which the entire case was killed. So they needed as much detail as possible from her to fight the motion to quash.
Agents White and Black seemed encouraged at what Sadie had had to offer. They told her that she could expect, should the case come to trial, that she might be called as a witness. Then they shook her hand and sent her on her way.
~oOo~
Stressed out from her adventure in crime fighting, Sadie called it an early night and was asleep before ten o’clock. When Sherlock called at nearly midnight, she flailed around for the phone in the dark and answered before she’d completely woken—she hadn’t even checked to be sure it was him, not that anybody else
would call her in the middle of the night.
He chuckled in her ear. “Hey, little outlaw. I woke you up. You sound all sexy and sleepy.”
“Yeah. I’m glad, though. Miss you.”
“Miss you, too, sweetheart. You have a good day?” As her brain began to engage, Sadie realized that he was sober—and that was a first for late-night calls since he’d been gone. She was getting quite familiar with drunk Sherlock these days, but she considered it an excellent sign that he was calling her and not out doing other things.
“I had an interesting day. And you’re sober. How’d that happen?”
Rest & Trust Page 18