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  “We’ll figure out details once we vote,” I said, seeing that Sensei was about to propose a fair but unnecessary follow-up question for the moment. “All in favor of retaliation tonight?”

  I looked to BK first. I had little doubt which way he would swing, given that he had first come across the prospect’s body. That, and as my sergeant in arms, I had little doubt that he was always chomping at the bit for some good action.

  “Yea.”

  I turned my eyes next to Sensei. If I expected anyone in the group to question my decision, it was him. But—

  “Yea.”

  He spoke so quickly, I almost found myself asking him if I had missed something. But the thought quickly vanished and instead, I felt much more confident that the action I was proposing and suggesting was the right one.

  “Yea,” Sword, our treasurer, added.

  “Yea,” Mafia said with little surprise.

  I turned to the quietest member of the club, the most junior officer of all, Mack “Krispy” Pope. We gave him that nickname for the amount of donuts he loved to eat… and the amount of shit that he liked to cause. If BK ever went down in battle, it was either going to be Mafia or Krispy that got the role, and likely Krispy, given his youth and bloodthirst.

  “Yea,” Krispy said.

  I turned my eyes last to Splitter.

  “Yea,” he said with as much determination as he could muster.

  “It’s unanimous,” I said. “Good. Now we need to figure out details. Where do we want to strike them? Ideas?”

  “Take ‘em out at their warehouse,” BK said. “Hit them where it hurts.”

  “That’ll be the most heavily guarded area of all,” Sensei cautioned.

  “Bullshit,” BK spat. “I ain’t gonna sit back and let the goddamn maggots get more guns while we shoot a couple of their minor characters in the skull. They ain’t give two shits about their members, just in making sure we suffer. We need to hit their rifles supply.”

  “You go right on ahead and get your ass killed then,” Sensei said. “We’ll let one of them take your role. Might as well name a successor now while you have the chance, BK.”

  “Who the fuck put you in charge, Secretary?” BK growled.

  “Enough!” I shouted. “Goddammit, don’t you get it? This is why we need to strike, but we need to do so smartly. The goddamn DMs are tearing us apart. I’m as responsible as anyone as president, but we all share the burden of taking this out.”

  I sighed, realizing I needed to take a side.

  “BK, yes, let’s plan to strike their warehouse. But not tonight. I promise we’ll do it within a month. But not tonight. Good enough?”

  “Fine,” he growled.

  It was the best I could hope for at that moment to prevent a brawl inside the hall.

  “Sensei,” I said with a sigh. “We agree not to attack the warehouse. But we need to figure out what we’re going to do, then. Retaliation can’t just be an eye for an eye. We need to send a message that this isn’t just about prospect’s death, but about everything that’s been going on the last ten years.”

  “Well, short term, I dunno,” he said. “But you want to really hit them where it hurts? Get their buyers to go to us. Make them lose guns without ever having to steal them.”

  “How? We don’t have the funds. Splitter and I were just talking this morning about that. Money’s tight. Sword?”

  Sword cleared his throat, seemingly forever raspy from years of smoking and drinking and doing God knows what else.

  “We’ve been in the red for three months now,” he said. “It’s a slow bleed, so we’re not in danger of going bust any time soon, but for us to try and buy out the DMs suppliers would cost us the club. The only way it would ever make sense would be if, with those new guns, we completely wiped out the DMs, took their entire inventory and client base, and made it our own. And even then, we’d have to be fending off a whole lot of people who are pissed off at us all the time.”

  “And the last thing we need is to make more enemies,” I groused. “I like the idea, though. Hit them without them realizing it until after the fact. However, tonight, I think we need a more pointed retaliation. Mafia, you know Los Angeles well. Do you have any ideas?”

  He hummed for a second, going into the metaphorical tank, before speaking with his thick Italian accent.

  “It’s gonna be a difficult, but word on the street is that a DMs have a Chinese restaurant they can a run their cocaine hideouts, ya see? We could take ‘em out.”

  “Could be, yeah,” I said. “How far is this Chinese restaurant? And what’s the name of it?”

  “Chau Feng, or somethin’ like that,” he said. “Bout 30 miles south of here.”

  Right into the heart of DM territory.

  Well, no one said it would be easy.

  “It’s their newest investment, and therefore something they probably think has a ton of potential,” I said. “Even if we don’t take over the place and seize all their coke, we can draw the attention of the authorities, who can then make their arrests and procurements accordingly. Cops won’t show up there without having some serious ‘backup’ but if we take care of business, business might take care of itself. All in favor?”

  “How many DMs we gonna kill?” BK said.

  “Enough,” Sensei said, drawing a glare from BK.

  But the words seemed good enough.

  “Yea,” BK said.

  I looked at Sensei.

  “You better not forget my idea, Trace,” he said. “The best battles are won without the shot of a gun. Tonight, yes, let them show we won’t be bowled over. But we won’t win this war with guns blazing. We’ll win this war when all is quiet and they’re high on drugs, thinking they have us beat. Yea.”

  “Sword?”

  “So the decision to buy out their supplier is off the table?”

  “For now.”

  “Yea,” he said instantly.

  “Yea,” Mafia volunteered before I could even look to him.

  “Fuck yes, yea,” Mafia reiterating what he said, drawing a smile from me.

  “Yea,” Splitter said.

  “Then it’s settled,” I said, grabbing the gavel. “Meet out front of the shop at about ten.”

  With that, I slammed the gavel. Everyone started to leave, but I asked Sensei to stay behind. He stood by the door, shut it as soon as Splitter left, and sat near me.

  “You really think such a move will work?” I said. “Do you think it’s something that Paul would have approved of?”

  Sensei grimaced.

  “I’d be lying to you if I said I think it’ll work fine,” he said. “Too many variables at play, and there’s a good chance that going to the suppliers—we don’t even know their identity right now—might get us ratted out and exposed to more attacks. But in principle? Paul would’ve loved the idea. Remember, he always wanted things to be peaceful, at least so much as people could do whatever the hell they wanted. You take out the DMs without pulling a trigger? That’s paradise.”

  “You know I don’t believe in God, right,” I said with a snort. “Paradise doesn’t exist for me.”

  “No, and not on Earth, not in Green Hills, it won’t,” Sensei said. “I’m no fool. I know triggers will get pulled. But let’s look into it, if for nothing else than brainstorming.”

  “Got it,” I said.

  I stood up to leave when Sensei motioned for me to sit back down. I did so slowly, unsure of what this was leading to.

  “I’m sure you’ve heard by now Jane’s back in town.”

  “All too much,” I said with an eye roll. “I saw her this afternoon when I went in on the prospect. You got good ideas for the club. You got any idea why she’s back?”

  The one time I wanted Sensei to have a definitive answer was the one time he had nothing.

  “It’s not so she can pay respects to her father, that’s for sure. He’s the one who told her to get out with his dying breath. My guess would be it has something to d
o with someone in the club.”

  His head tilted toward me, and his eyes went wide when he said, “someone in the club.” It wasn’t even an implication—more like an overt statement wrapped around our typical speech of not outright saying what the truth was. It was something I was trying to beat out of the club, but old habits died hard.

  “You mean the money we paid her to go to school?”

  “You know how much the club hated continuing that,” Sensei said. “We only did it because Paul did it, and no one ever questioned Paul. But you know that people had to be saying things behind her back that reached her. Maybe she feels guilty about it.”

  “So what, she wants to pay her time by being here?” I said. “That’s dumb. She saw her father die in her arms. I don’t know what more she’d want to give back to us. She’s gone through enough.”

  “So what of it, then?”

  I shrugged.

  “She’s a grown woman who’s made her own decision. We treat her with respect as we do all the old ladies and the women in town, and if we cross paths with her, we treat her as a friend of the club.”

  “Easy enough.”

  If only that were actually the case.

  If only that were all there really was to it.

  But for now, that really would be all there was to it.

  * * *

  I sat outside of the shop on my bike, the engine not yet revving, waiting for the rest of the crew to head out. We’d have a group of four of us—myself, BK, Mafia, and Krispy. There was thought of adding more, but we decided that a small task force would minimize any potential blowback from the mission going awry and avoid drawing unnecessary attention.

  BK and Krispy walked out first, and they looked as bloodthirsty as I had ever seen a pair. If they weren’t on my side, I suspected that, upon seeing someone without the black and gold colors, they would have beaten them to a pulp just to get some of the rage out. I made extra sure that I had my jacket on, fully displaying our logo with the image of blood dripping off of what looked like a pope’s hat.

  They got on their bikes without a word, waiting for the signal. I asked them to wait just a beat longer for Mafia to show up. The Italian liked to take his sweet time, but he more than earned it with the precision of his network and connections that could help us figure out just about anything we needed.

  Then Mafia showed up, eating the remains of a sub, the crumbs dripping all over him.

  “Didn’t your mother ever teach you manners?” I shouted. “I thought Italian moms were supposed to be hard asses on their boys.”

  “Ahh, dear mother, yes, she was very strict and mean with me!” Mafia said, laughing and speaking as his mouth was still full. “This is my rebellion stage, you see?”

  “Whatever,” Krispy said. “Can we go burn down some motherfuckers now?”

  I started my engine and kicked the stand down.

  “That answer that question for you?”

  Seconds later, the four Harleys roared out of the shop and clubhouse, making their way down the highway and blazing toward Chau Feng, a restaurant just on the north side of Los Angeles.

  Though we were about to enter the mouth of hell, the path there always seemed to provide a certain amount of immense satisfaction and joy that I never found anywhere else. There was something about the power of a bike between my legs, going nearly a hundred miles per hour, on the freeway, with a shotgun on my back, that just screamed “I am in control.” Who else got to do this? Who else had the freedom to go wherever they pleased, at any moment, with protection, transportation, and the means to get whatever else he needed?

  On the other side of the coin, there was something very settling and very grounding about how my life, as free as it was, was free because it depended on something very fickle and very unstable beneath my legs. This was not a Honda Civic, nor was this an eighteen wheeler. This was a motorcycle, and one asshole driver, one bad turn, one shitty day of rain could ruin it all. Sometimes, I wondered if the greatest threat to my long-term health wasn’t Diablo or the Devil’s Mercenaries, but the very chopper beneath my ass that made all of this possible.

  But it was a trade that I would make any day of the week because the alternative of giving up riding was completely implausible. Even if, by some miraculous chance, I found a woman to love—I found plenty of women to make love to, but almost no one whom I could love—I would never give up the bike. I’d rather be buried with my bike between my legs than leave it for a woman at the altar.

  Some matters, simply put, were non-negotiable.

  But fortunately, I never foresaw that happening. Any woman who somehow broke through to my heart would have to realize that the bike was as much a part of me as the toes and fingers on my body, so there would be no question if marriage ever happened that I would be staying with my current lifestyle.

  If nothing else, the bike had given me my true brothers, the men I could count on to be with me at any moment of the day or night—even if we had our disagreements at times.

  We pulled off of the highway about twenty seven miles later, and we pulled into the parking lot adjacent to the Chinese restaurant.

  “This is it?” I said, nodding to it.

  “Mafia is never wrong,” he said with a chuckle.

  “All right, Krisp, BK, you heard the man,” I said. “Masks on. Guns ready. Let’s go.”

  We dismounted, pulled out our guns from behind us, tugged our masks down, and headed for the shop—mercifully, having already closed, meaning we wouldn’t have to worry about dragging civilians into the fray. That was the one agreement we had with law enforcement in our home town—they’d let us get away with just about anything, but if a civilian got drawn into the mess, we’d get the book thrown at us. Here we did not have the same agreement.

  We reached the staff door. I pressed my ear against the door, listening for anyone inside. When I didn’t hear anything, I ordered BK to kick the door down. He chambered his foot and slammed it forward, quickly going in.

  “Oh, shit, Saints!”

  BK ended whoever had had the misfortune of being inside with a quick pump of the shotgun.

  “Clear,” he growled.

  We headed inside. A younger guy, probably also a prospect for the DMs, lay on the ground, multiple shotgun shell wounds causing blood to pour out of him as if falling toward a river.

  “Really laid a number on him, huh,” Krispy said.

  “Let’s talk later,” I said. “Odds are good others will be converging here. Search everywhere.”

  The four of us split up—although, given the size of the kitchen, we didn’t split up so much as we looked in different directions—and examined every drawer, every floor tile, every ceiling tile, just about everywhere we could look.

  It didn’t take us long to find it, mixed in with the different baking powders that the restaurant actually used for business.

  “Just imagine if they mixed the wrong powders together,” Krispy said with a snort.

  “Not much more different than current LA,” BK sarcastically remarked. “Burn this place down?”

  I shook my head.

  “We would if it were a lab. This is just a store. And besides, someone might actually be needing it to make a living. Let’s get out of here.”

  “You’re the—”

  BK went silent as we heard more motorcycles pull up.

  “Shit!” Krispy said.

  “Everyone, hide,” I said. “I’m calling for backup.”

  We quickly took positions behind the different ovens, frying tops, and other places where the DMs would not have a quick shot. I dialed Splitter’s number and thank heavens that the guy answered on the first ring.

  “Get over here, now,” I said, hanging up before he could say anything else.

  I knew they’d be here soon. The question was, would we even need them in twenty minutes—hopefully because we wiped the floor with the blood of the Devil’s Mercs.

  The first Merc stepped inside, gun held out. I saw hi
m in the reflection of the mirror behind me and waited until he turned his eye toward something else.

  But, as it turned out, Krispy had the same idea, obliterating the guy with a shotgun blast.

  “No point in staying low too long, am I right?” he said, laughing giddily as the DMs outside shouted and moved.

  This plan would have worked out quite well if the staff entrance was the only one available in the building, creating something of a bottleneck. But it was a restaurant, not a prison cell, and so if we didn’t act fast, we’d all be held from behind and executed ruthlessly.

  “Hey, BK!” I yelled.

  I pointed toward where the patrons would normally sit. Getting the idea, he joined me as Krispy and Mafia handled the entrance. Really, one man could have done the trick, but it was nice to have backup.

  We hurried to the counter and took cover. I looked up just in time to see two DMs enter, and both BK and I took them out with a single shot each. But then more fired through the windows, and they did not just have pistols—they had machine guns.

  “The fuck!” BK yelled. “They get those from their supplier?”

  “Don’t think its Pete’s Pistols,” I yelled.

  “No shit!”

  We waited for a break in the action before turning over and quickly unloading into the area where they had come from. More gunfire came back, and we ducked and returned the favor.

  “Whoever is giving them those guns has some serious firepower,” BK said. “Maybe we should go talking.”

  “Talking’s one way to persuade them,” I said, drawing a knowing smirk from BK.

  We again turned over and prepared to fire, but then I dropped down when I felt a sharp pain in my elbow. I’d been hit.

  “Shit!” I yelled.

  But I didn’t have time to be out of the battle or BK would get mowed down in seconds. I sucked up the pain, put the gun in my other arm, and fired when I got the chance. The machine gunner dropped dead instantly.

  “Not bad for a president,” BK said.

  “Shut up, Sarge,” I said back as I reloaded my shotgun.

  The battle continued, adrenaline keeping me from feeling the pain of the bullets in my elbow. I didn’t give a rat’s ass about anything other than seeing the DMs obliterated—I wanted whoever came by to see their bodies littered across the ground like a kid throwing vegetables in disgust. They needed a message one way or another about how we were treating the DMs; namely, without kid gloves anymore.