Stand (The Brazen Bulls MC Book 7)
Page 1
SUSAN FANETTI
THE FREAK CIRCLE PRESS
Stand © 2017 Susan Fanetti
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.
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
ALSO BY SUSAN FANETTI
The Brazen Bulls MC:
Crash, Book 1
Twist, Book 2
Slam, Book 3
Blaze, Book 4
Honor, Book 5
Fight, Book 6
THE NIGHT HORDE MC SAGA:
The Signal Bend Series:
(The First Series)
Move the Sun, Book 1
Behold the Stars, Book 2
Into the Storm, Book 3
Alone on Earth, Book 4
In Dark Woods, Book 4.5
All the Sky, Book 5
Show the Fire, Book 6
Leave a Trail, Book 7
The Night Horde SoCal:
(The Second Series)
Strength & Courage, Book 1
Shadow & Soul, Book 2
Today & Tomorrow, Book 2.5
Fire & Dark, Book 3
Dream & Dare, Book 3.5
Knife & Flesh, Book 4
Rest & Trust, Book 5
Calm & Storm, Book 6
Nolan: Return to Signal Bend
Love & Friendship
The Pagano Family:
Footsteps, Book 1
Touch, Book 2
Rooted, Book 3
Deep, Book 4
Prayer, Book 5
Miracle, Book 6
The Pagano Family: The Complete Series
The Pagano Brothers:
Simple Faith, Book 1
Sawtooth Mountains Stories:
Somewhere
The Northwomen Sagas:
God’s Eye
Heart’s Ease
Soul’s Fire
Father’s Sun
Historical Standalone:
Nothing on Earth & Nothing in Heaven
As S.E. Fanetti:
Aurora Terminus
For my sons. May they always stand on steady ground.
If you want a place in the sun, you must leave the shade of the family tree.
~ Osage proverb
THE BRAZEN BULLS MOTORCYCLE CLUB
Tulsa, Oklahoma
2001 Roster
Brian Delaney—President
Gary Becker—Vice President
Conrad “Radical” Jessup—Sergeant at Arms
Simon Spellman—Secretary-Treasurer
Neil “Apollo” Armstrong—Technology Officer
Richard “Maverick” Helm—Enforcer
Edgar “Eight Ball” Johnston—Enforcer
Maxwell “Gunner” Wesson—Soldier
Andrew “Slick” Zabek—Soldier
Walter “Wally” Hansen—Soldier
Caleb Mathews—Soldier
Jason “Gargoyle” Rock—Soldier
Roland “Fitz” Fitzgerald—Soldier
Fernando “Ox” Sanchez—Retired
Terry Capewell—Prospect
AUTHOR’S NOTES
A few quick things before we get going (nothing too scary, don’t worry):
First, Caleb and Cecily’s story begins and takes place primarily in 2001. That means that, necessarily, part of their story occurs in September 2001, and I could not—and would not—avoid confronting an event that changed the lives of so many in this country and around the globe, and changed the country itself. So I want to let you know that Cecily and Caleb experience September 11 as so many of us did—at a distance, and yet deep in their hearts.
Next, as has been established since he was first mentioned in Slam, Caleb is a member of the Osage tribe. His heritage obviously plays a significant part in his identity, and thus in his story. It was important to me that my fictional version of Tulsa, a major metropolitan area with a diverse population and a complicated racial history, be authentically diverse—and not just the adversaries—and I’ve taken issues of race up directly in the series narrative. That continues to be the case in Stand. Caleb’s identity is a key aspect of the story I’m telling. I am keenly aware of my position as a white woman writing a character of color, and I feel a deep responsibility to do right by this character and the real people who share his heritage.
I’ve taken pains to tell Caleb’s story and heritage in a way that is true to his character and respectful to the Osage people. It’s not the first time that I’ve written a lead character of color, and I’ve always felt the responsibility to be respectful and true. This, though, is the first time my character’s marginalization has been so central to his story.
I also want to take this moment to boost, in my small way, the voices of two Native writers of romance, Evangeline Parsons Yazzie and V.S. Nelson. I’ve read their work and happily recommend their stories.
In Chapters One and Five, Caleb thinks about the impact of the Osage Murders on his family. That dark event is a historical fact, though of course Caleb’s connection to it is a fiction.
If you’re interested in learning more about Osage life and culture, check out the YouTube channel MYOSAGELIFE. It seems to be inactive now, but in the videos posted you can find how-tos for and explanations of Osage beading, cooking, and language and orthography, among other things.
And finally, the Osage language has been diluted over time and is in danger of being lost. According to the Language Department of Osage Nation, there are only a handful of fluent speakers left. In the very limited instances in which I use Native language in this text, I use Osage words, and transcribe them in English orthography as well as possible.
I hope you enjoy Caleb and Cecily’s story.
Cheers,
Susan
CHAPTER LIST
Title
Copyright
Also by Susan Fanetti
Dedication
Epigraph
The Brazen Bulls 2001
Author’s Notes
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Epilogue
About the Author
Bonus! Chapters 1-2 of Alliance, by Catherine Johnson
(featuring the Volkov Bratva)
CHAPTER ONE
“Can you give me a hand, Chief?”
Closing his eyes against the clench at the base of his skull that word always bro
ught on, Caleb sighed and turned back to the truck. When he didn’t move right away to help, Van, one of the Great Plains Riders, tried to pull the last crate of AKs out on his own.
Caleb had had his top rocker almost a year—long enough that these assholes owed him some respect. Van knew Caleb’s name as well as Caleb knew his.
He was of a mind to let Van try to carry that crate his damn self. Instead, he stalked over and jumped up into the nearly empty compartment. “Call me ‘Chief’ again, and I’ll lift a tomahawk from a museum just so I can scalp you with it, motherfucker.” He shoved at the crate and pushed it around, then jumped down and grabbed hold of the side Van hadn’t been struggling with.
Van gaped at him. “Fuck, man, no offense meant. Didn’t know you were so sensitive.”
He wasn’t, generally. It always pissed him off, but he usually let it go without comment. If he fought every asswipe who threw that word his way, he’d never stop fighting. But there were some times and places he wouldn’t tolerate it. This was one of them. “Now you know. Lift.”
They lifted, and carried the crate into the quiet factory in the middle of Bumfuck, Nebraska, where Colin Murphy, the Riders’ VP, and Becker, the Bulls’ new VP, were heaving the crates through a trap door and into the basement below.
Setting this final crate on the floor, Caleb stood straight and looked around. The factory didn’t run on weekends, so the only people in the place right now were bikers on this job.
It wasn’t much, just a corrugated steel building with a cement floor and a framed-out storage area in the basement. About two dozen sewing machines, some pretty standard-looking and others pretty weird, were set up in neatly organized rows. He imagined that all those machines were run by hunched-over women during working hours, and this place was loud as hell.
Liberty Embroidery, it was called. Murphy’s cousin or something ran the place. They did embroidery for uniforms and patches—including the patches and flash on the Bulls’ and the Riders’ kuttes. And on hats and uniforms for Little League, and regional high schools, and all that. It was a humble family business and a great, low-profile location for short-term storage of black-market Russian weaponry.
It reminded Caleb a little bit of the beading business his grandma Jewel had run. That place was even smaller than this—just his grandma and his mom, his aunts, and a couple other women, and they’d mostly worked by hand, but they’d had a little storefront shop and worked in back, and their tables had been lined up a lot like this place.
The Osage were known for their elaborate traditional beadwork. Some patterns were sacred and only for their people, but the white suburbanites who wanted to hang tribal art above their sofas didn’t know a traditional Osage beading from a wallpaper pattern. As long as it was crafted by Osage women, they were content to pay top dollar. The shop had made a reasonable living for them all.
Most of what he knew of the shop, or his grandma, or his mom, came from old photographs and stories his grandfather told. His memories of them were sketchy and blurred; he’d been only seven when an overtired delivery driver had lost control of his truck, driven through the back of the shop, and killed them all. Every female member of his family gone, all at once. His grandfather had raised him and his brother.
Every time he stood in this place, his hazy memories of his grandma’s shop, and every woman of his family, rose up and perched on his shoulder for a day or two.
A hand slammed onto his shoulder now. “You ready, brother?” Apollo asked.
Caleb looked around—the crates were gone, and the trap door was closed up, with one of the sewing stations moved over it. Four Bulls and three Riders stood idle.
He shook off his ghosts. “Yeah. Let’s ride.” Time to get his ass back home.
~oOo~
Tulsa to just outside Lincoln and back again in one day was a long fucking haul, long enough that they couldn’t do it when Delaney or Eight Ball rode this run—Delaney because he was too old to ride all day, and Eight because his bad leg wouldn’t hold up for ten or twelve hours in the saddle. But this time, one of the few times that they ran all three runs at once, it was Becker, Apollo, Fitz, Slick, and Caleb riding north—nobody too old, everybody spry. With the truck empty of dangerous cargo, they got some speed going, too, and carved off an hour or so from the trip home.
The riders on the northern run would be back in town first; the other runs planned to stop for the night. With Delaney still on the road, and no call to the chapel likely, Caleb peeled off from his brothers near Ponca City and headed east, toward his grandfather’s place in Pawhuska.
This whole portion of Oklahoma, the huge wedge from Tulsa north and northwest to the Kansas state line that was Osage County, was Osage land, but there wasn’t an actual reservation in Oklahoma. Not like other reservations, which worked in part like separate countries, with firm borders. Through a series of political moves on the part of the federal government back in the 1800s and into the 1900s, moves that Caleb, much to his grandfather and brother’s chagrin, hadn’t studied well enough to entirely understand, the state of Oklahoma sort of overlaid Osage Nation, and tribal members coexisted with other Oklahomans. The result was that the Osage were a minority on their own reservation. But the Osage had three towns in Osage County that were substantially populated by tribal members, and they still held communal mineral rights as well. Including oil rights.
Those ‘headrights’ had been bones of contention between the Osage and whites for all the years the tribe had existed in Oklahoma—and they were here only because they’d been forced off their ancestral lands to the north and east. Back in the Twenties, Caleb’s great-grandfather had been murdered by a white rancher and his mob, set on stealing his land and the oil beneath it. Dozens of Osage had been killed in a span of a few years back then, in a plot worthy of a novel.
The tribe wasn’t nearly as rich as it had once been, but the land was still Osage land, and honestly, Caleb thought they were better off than most tribes. Not being fenced in had given them power in negotiation with Washington that others never had. That murderous rancher and his accomplices had been found out and imprisoned. They had good ranchland. They’d had oil. The elders were in talks with the federal government to remediate losses taken from the tribe through fraud and coercion. And now the tribal council was arguing, with the state and with each other, about casinos.
The sun had just about set when he made it to Pawhuska. Twilight turned the little town to shadows, but the last rays of sun behind him still flashed amber on the Main Street shop windows and made his shadow roll out long and thin on the road ahead of him. He rolled through town and hung a right, taking that road all the way to the end, where it gave up any pretense of being a paved road and hooked around near Bird Creek. He pulled his bike up on the broken blacktop of his grandfather’s driveway and parked behind his old Ford pickup.
Before he’d killed the engine, he could hear Ace barking, and by the time he had the stand down, the blue heeler had barreled up from the back. The dog jumped up onto his lap, that strident, ear-splitting bark still tearing from his mouth, even as his tongue turned Caleb’s face into a dripping mess.
Holding the wriggling dog, Caleb dismounted and got down on the ground with him to wrestle for a minute, until his grandfather’s whistle sliced the air, and the dog tore off toward it.
Caleb rose from the scrubby yard and brushed himself off as his grandfather ambled to him. They met under the dusk-to-dawn light humming in the front yard. The eerie glow directly above their heads deepened the creases and divots in the old man’s hawkish, pockmarked face and turned it into a death mask.
And then he smiled, and that fearsome look vanished. “Caleb. Didn’t expect you.”
“Hey, Grampa. Coming back from a ride, and I thought I’d stop in and see how you’re doing.”
Caleb was careful not to call it a ‘run,’ but his grandfather’s smile still wavered a bit at his words. He didn’t like that Caleb was a Bull. “I’m good. You hungry? I was
about to heat up some stew and cornbread.”
“That’s okay. I can’t stay long. I’m going over to Kelly’s.”
The smile came back, this time with a hook of wry understanding. “So you’re here to get a shower before you go on a date.”
Not a date, exactly. More booty call. Kelly didn’t know he was coming over. But she never said no, and she was almost always around. She worked liked ten-hour days at the market, five or six days a week, so when she was home, she was home. But she was always game for some sweaty sex, and he liked a good fuck after a long run. Got the kinks out.
Kelly wasn’t the only sure thing in his life. In Tulsa, there was a clubhouse full of sweetbutts there for the pleasure of the Bulls. But sweetbutts tried so damn hard. They were all big hair and huge jewelry, and tits and ass everywhere. Most of them were heavily inked, too. There was some appeal, sure, but he liked normal girls, too. Kelly wasn’t the kind of girl anybody noticed on the street; even her Osage features were bland. But she was easy to be with, and sometimes that was exactly what he needed.
“I’m here to see you. And to get a shower. If that’s okay.”