“Trouble?”
“Maybe.” He looked around the living room but didn’t see a phone.
“It’s on the kitchen wall.”
He eased out from under her legs and picked up a throw pillow to prop up her knee as he stood. When he went to the kitchen, Ollie followed him, stopping in the doorway. Rad had the impression that he was being kept in sight.
Her phone was an old model, in that rancid gold color that had been big in the Seventies. That surprised him; it clashed with the rest of the kitchen, and Willa’s style was precise. He picked up the handset and dialed the clubhouse.
As he waited for the call to connect, he noticed a small chalkboard on the wall above the phone, in a curlicue metal frame with the white paint rubbed artfully off. His card was tucked in the frame. In blue chalk was the beginning of a grocery list: toothpaste, tampons, butter (x2), rye flour. Rad grinned; she had round, pretty handwriting, with a flourish to her Ps and Ys.
“Yeah,” was Dane’s gruff answer. Rad heard the twang of the jukebox in the background—Randy Travis, singing about a better class of losers.
“Rad callin’ in.”
“What’s your 20?”
“Northside. What’s up?” There shouldn’t be trouble. They were between gun runs, and they hadn’t finished the plans for the scouting run north. For the next week or so, they were just mechanics and Harley riders.
“Gunner.”
“Fuck. Where?” Gunner was the club’s loose cannon, a younger patch with a mountain for a chip on his shoulder and a crazy sense of humor about it. They tried to keep a brother on him, because he had a whole gut full of bloodlust. That could come in handy in a fight, or when they needed to persuade some asshole, but on his own, it meant costly damage to life and property. Often Gunner’s own life and property—he loved nothing better than unwinnable odds. With enough Southern Comfort in him, he’d take on a whole army singlehandedly, knowing full well he’d lose. It was like he was looking to get beaten to death.
“Terry’s. Lita called—he’s got the place fully involved.”
“Fuck me sideways. He alone?” Terry’s was a Northside pool hall, so he was close. But full involvement was more than he could handle himself. And nobody at Terry’s was going to be calling law. That brawl would go until there was nobody standing to fight. “I need Eight and Ox. Simon, too.”
“He’s alone. Already paged Eight. I’ll get Simon next. I’ll have ‘em meet you. Ox is on his way in the flatbed. I don’t think Gun’ll be ready to ride.”
“Alright. Fuck this kid, I’m tellin’ you.”
Dane hung up with a smoky chuckle. Rad was not laughing when he put the handset back.
Ollie was no longer guarding the doorway when Rad went back to the living room. He was standing with Willa, who was on her feet, in the middle of the open space between the living and dining rooms—as if she’d been curious but hadn’t wanted to eavesdrop. Her arms were crossed over her waist.
“There’s trouble?”
“Little bit, yeah. Gotta go help a brother. I’m sorry, baby. I can’t stay after all.”
“Okay.”
He reached out to her, but she moved to the side, eluding him, and limped over to the box on her sideboard. Keys in hand, she crossed to the front door and began opening the locks.
First chance he got, he was replacing her door and putting safe locks on the fucker.
The atmosphere in the house had chilled markedly, in a way that made the back of Rad’s neck prickle. She was putting guards back up. He went to her and laid his hand at the small of her back. “Willa. I’d stay if I could.”
“I know. I get it.” she turned the last lock and opened the door. “Go help your brother.”
It occurred to him to say he’d come back later that night, but he had no idea what was in store for him at Terry’s, and after she’d laid herself open to him, he didn’t want a make a promise he wasn’t sure he could keep.
He caught hold of her hand. “I’ll call you.”
At least she smiled and gave his fingers a squeeze. “Okay. Be safe.”
“Do my best.” He bent to kiss her, meaning to make it good, to let her know that he really did want to stay, but she didn’t open her mouth for him. It was the first time that she didn’t give over to his touch.
He had to go, so he backed off and said, simply, “I’ll call.”
She nodded, and he headed toward his truck as she shut the door and turned the locks.
Fuck. Women were complicated business. He’d be better off in a pool hall brawl.
~oOo~
Terry’s Billards took up just shy of half a block in Tulsa’s Greenwood District, a historic area that had once been an enclave for affluent African Americans. Most of the district had been burned to the ground in a massive race riot in the Twenties. The community rebuilt, but then the district started to fail again in the Fifties and Sixties, as suburbs grew up around the city, and then a chunk of the area was leveled when they put up the expressway in the Seventies.
Revitalization efforts came and went. Someday, one of those efforts might take.
Rad was suspicious of ‘revitalization’ efforts. As far as he could see, that meant rich folks moving in, jacking up rents so the families who’d lived there for generations couldn’t afford their own community anymore, and turning history into nothing more than a colorful story to tell while they gave tours of their ‘edgy’ new loft to their equally opportunistic friends.
He was glad he was from the country. Farm life was hard, but rich folk never thought the deep country was cool. Too far out from the shopping malls.
Terry’s had hung in there, its roots clinging to the soil while the winds of change flattened the world around it, doing more damage than any twister ever had. It was nothing special, except that it had stayed. A third Terry, son of the second and grandson of the first, ran the place now, and all three had stood cross-armed and wide-legged through decades and ridden out the storms.
By virtue of that obstinacy, Terry’s had become a pillar of the district. Though it was a pool hall, where men—and women, too—drank seriously and gambled casually, where too much booze and too many hard losses sometimes made the men mean and scrappy, this was a place where people came together.
Rad admired it. He’d hate to have it gentrified out of existence.
Ox was just climbing down from the station flatbed when Rad pulled up in his GMC. He snagged his Glock out of the glove box and hopped down. Shoving the gun into his jeans at the small of his back, he grabbed his kutte, shrugging it over his shoulders as he met Ox near the door.
People were reeling out the door in various states of roughed-up. Each time the door swung open, the commotion inside blasted out. He checked his watch. Less than ten minutes since he’d hung up with Dane. The brawl was still in full swing.
Rad looked around at all the vehicles parked in Terry’s lot and on the street. It was crowded in there.
Ox was a mountain of a man—six and a half feet tall, broad as a barn, a body like it was cut from solid stone—and Rad was a big guy in his own right, but even so, two of them alone trying to extract the guy who’d probably started this mess was a tall fucking order.
He had no idea whether Eight Ball and Simon were on their way. But Gunner could be getting killed in there.
The door swung open again. Two men dragging a third between them. All three were bloody. The guy in the middle was holding his stomach, and blood poured through his fingers. He’d been knifed.
“Fuck shit fuck,” Rad muttered. Not just a brawl. A battle.
“What’s the call, Sarge?” Ox asked, his voice deceptively soft.
“We can’t wait. Eight and Simon’ll see our rides and know to come in. We get in, get eyes on Gun, and figure out how to pull him. Don’t engage unless you gotta.”
The big man nodded his cinderblock of a head. “I’ll take point.”
Rad shook his head. “Can’t see around you, brother. I’m on point.�
�
Just then Eight Ball and Simon roared up on their bikes, throwing up dust and gravel as they braked. They both dropped their stands and dismounted.
“What’s the sitch, Sarge?” Eight Ball asked as he landed on the sidewalk.
“Full-on melee inside, with weapons. You carrying?” Both men pulled their kuttes back to show holstered sidearms. Rad was carrying, too. He knew Ox wasn’t. The man was a shit shot. He relied on his fists, the ten-inch blade strapped to his thigh, and anything he could turn into a weapon on the fly.
“Don’t fire unless there’s no goddamn choice.” He repeated the instruction he’d already given Ox. “Get eyes on Gun. We get him out. Don’t engage anybody unless you have to. Let’s just get our brother and get out.”
With nods from all three, Rad led them to the door.
Inside was a riot. Sweet holy fuck. Terry’s wasn’t much in the décor department—cracked concrete floor that had last been patched or painted when maybe Eisenhower was president, walls covered in booze-soaked wood paneling gouged and scratched by years of bar fights, twelve standard pool tables chosen for price and basic functionality, plain industrial lighting, a long bar made of plywood and covered with cheap green vinyl, the cheapest possible tables and chairs—but all of that was destroyed. Chairs and barstools had become weapons. The concrete floor was slippery with blood. Posters had been torn from the walls and fluttered over the fracas like paper flags.
The ancient Wurlitzer still played at high volume, John Lee Hooker belting out a warped, skittering rendition of ‘Boom Boom Boom,’ and Rad’s eyes couldn’t resist focusing there. Some poor slob was getting his head bashed in on the side of the juke, and the force of each impact made the old 45 inside jump.
The Bulls stood at the side and sought out their brother. Where the fuck was Gunner?
Sure that Gunner had started this bullshit, Rad looked for signs of an epicenter. He found it at a pool table close to the bar.
“There!” He pointed. A man straddled a body on the table, slamming his fist down again and again. The body on the table fought limply back, and Rad saw a distinctive tattoo, a dragon with the head of a bull, on the arm that came up. Then the arm was forced down, and Rad saw that Gunner was being held to the table.
Seeing a path through the chaos, Rad charged ahead, not bothering to call his brothers to join him. He knew they’d follow.
One thing about a confusion like this: it wasn’t all that difficult to move through it without becoming part of it. Everybody’s attention was elsewhere. He had to deke and duck a few times, but he made it to the table in a matter of seconds, without taking or delivering a blow.
He felt his brothers right behind him, also free and clear.
Gunner was being held, arms and legs down, by four men while the fifth, straddling him, bashed him again and again with a fist full of rings. He struggled against the holds, but he was fucking laughing. Rad could hear the blood in the sound, even over the battle boiling around them.
He was wearing his goddamn kutte. He’d caused this trouble with the Bull on his back.
Stupid, crazy-ass motherfucker.
With a brisk wave of his hands, Rad sent his brothers to flare out around the table. It would be one on one, except that Gunner had already lost his matchup and was about to get himself fucking killed.
They hadn’t been noticed yet. Seeing no other choice, Rad put up his hand, thumb and index finger extended, and Eight Ball and Simon took out their guns at the same time he did. Ox pulled his blade.
With his nod, three Bulls put the muzzles of their weapons to the temples of three men holding their brother down. Ox put his blade to the throat of the fourth.
“Let go,” Rad muttered in his guy’s ear and was immediately obeyed. “Now call him off. Or you all die here.”
“Booker!” his guy yelled. “Man, enough!”
Gunner, still conscious and now freed, managed to land a decent punch on the side of Booker’s face. That got the guy’s attention, and he saw the way the field had changed. In that break of focus, Gunner managed to flip him off the table and sit up. He grabbed at his side and turned a swollen mess of a face at Rad. “Cavalry to the rescue,” he said, grinning. His beard dripped blood.
Rad thought that was what he’d said. It was loud, and his mouth was a mess, but it sounded like that. Or close.
Then Rad felt the prick of sharp steel in his back, at his kidney, and a female voice at his shoulder said, “Back the fuck off, biker boy.”
Rad pulled the muzzle of his gun up, but before the guy he’d had it on, or the chick with the knife, could react, he sent his elbow backward and connected with something solid—her face, he hoped. The knife was gone from his back. He punched the guy before he turned, going for the gut. As that guy grunted and fell back, doubled over, Rad spun.
A woman with brassy red hair and prodigious cleavage had one hand over her gushing nose. The other hand still held the knife. Rad hated to hurt a woman, but he wasn’t going to get ganked by one, either. He hit her again, this time going for her arm. The knife clattered to the floor, and he stomped his boot down on it.
Before he could bend down to take control of it, the guy he’d put his gun on sailed at him from the side, and that was it. With Gunner still sitting on the pool table, bleeding and laughing, the Bulls were fully engaged in this mess.
~oOo~
It was a war won by attrition. When Rad next looked at his watch, nearly thirty minutes had gone by. But the brawl was over, and he was still standing. So were Ox and Eight Ball, and about a dozen other men who’d gone the distance. Gunner had finally passed out, and Simon was sitting against the wall, holding his side. He’d been stabbed, but insisted the blade had missed anything important.
The floor was littered with dazed and unconscious bodies; moans, grunts and coughs filled the air.
Terry, the owner, a big man with dark skin and light eyes, picked his way over the wounded and came up to Rad. He knew the Bulls and knew Rad was the closest thing in the place to an authority. He’d been in the fray, too. His practice was to protect his business and his employees as much as he could when shit like this went down, so he put his waitresses in back and kept himself to the bar with his trusty aluminum softball bat. But his eyebrow was swelling, so he’d taken a hit or two.
“That sumbitch is banned,” he growled at Rad. “This the third time he’s started trouble this year. You know I don’t mind some scrappin’, but look at this bullshit.” He indicated the room with an angry fling of his arm. The place was all but destroyed. Delaney was going to lose his shit. The whole club would be up Gunner’s ass, because they’d be on the hook for most of this damage.
Rad considered the heap that was Gunner. “What the hell happened?” Gunner could start a brawl on a whim, but this mess had been so much bigger than a brawl.
Terry pointed at an unconscious body on the floor near their feet: Booker.
Rad shrugged. He didn’t know him, except for his first name. “Booker somebody.”
“Booker Howard. Runs the Street Hounds crew in Chicago. Tight ties to New York and LA.”
“Chicago? What’s he doin’ in Tulsa?”
“Recruitin’. Your boy just gave him a chance to do tryouts in my fuckin’ livelihood.”
Ox came over and picked up Gunner. “Got their bikes on the flatbed, Sarge. Eight’s helpin’ Simon to the truck. I’ll get ‘em both back to the clubhouse. Eight’s on your six.”
“Thanks, brother.” He turned back to Terry. “I don’t fuckin’ understand half the shit that went down here or what you’re tellin’ me. How’d this start?”
“Way it always starts with Gun. Hustled Booker, then laughed at him. The fuckin’ mouth on that moron. Booker called him a cracker, circled his men up around him, and it went to shit from there.” Terry watched Ox carry the moron in question out, cradling him like a baby. He shook his head. “You know I’m a friend to the Bulls, man. But this shit has got to stop. We ain’t had a gang war ‘ro
und here yet. All our troubles, we ain’t had that one. The Dyson crew got their foibles, but they keep it quiet at home. I don’t got race problems in my place neither. Now some ass with a death wish is stirrin’ shit up and givin’ some outsider like Booker Howard somethin’ to say? Goddamn.”
“Sorry, man. Call Delaney in the morning. We’ll make it right.”
“It’s more than fixin’ the room this time, Rad. Storm’s brewin’.”
Rad sighed. They didn’t have trouble in Tulsa. None of the crews shat where they ate. Leave it to some citified son of a bitch to come in and change that up.
“I use your phone? Gotta call for medical.”
Terry scowled, but nodded. “You know where’s at.”
Crash (The Brazen Bulls MC Book 1) Page 9