Knife & Flesh (The Night Horde SoCal Book 4) (18 page)

“You saying I shouldn’t be worried?”

Striking the keys at wildfire speed, Sherlock shook his head. “Not at all. I’m already seeing that this guy could be trouble. He works at The Cape Group. That’s a monster firm. As an investigator, there’s no resource that he doesn’t have access to. I doubt he’s a hacker, but their IT guys are good, too. If he has one who’ll play loose with the rules—and it’s a law firm; they’re more outlaw than we are—then yeah, he could cause trouble. Our IT guy is better, though.” He grinned cockily. “Knowing they’re coming, I can lock them out. I don’t keep incriminating shit in the Cloud, anyway. It’s all offline.”

“Okay, good. Good. I need the address of that law firm. And his home address, too.”

Sherlock stopped typing and turned back to Trick. “What’s your plan?”

“Persuade him of the folly of threatening Juliana. And I need you to try to find a way to keep him quiet indefinitely—a way that keeps him breathing, preferably.”

“Juliana…that’s the chick you go for all the time at The Deck. Right? The one who does the karaoke that turns your dick into a dowsing rod? I thought she’d kicked your ass to the side.”

Trick grinned. “Fuck you, my brother. Things changed.”

“I guess so.” Sherlock grinned back, then his face made a U-turn, and he frowned. “You know she works at Shepard & Grohl, right?”

“Yeah, I know. So what?” Mel Sharpe, the club’s attorney, was a partner at Shepard & Grohl. “She works in a different division. And what’s it matter, anyway?”

“It’s not that. Just be careful.” He tapped the screen. “Stiles used to work there, too. He’s probably got friends there. He could make things hard for her that way, if he wanted. So tread lightly. And talk to Hooj about all this. The last time one of us hooked up with a girl with family trouble, we ended up beefing with the Aztecs, and Hooj and Bibi both got hurt bad.”

That thought had not escaped him. “I said I’m talking to Hooj next. Just get me the guy’s address.”

“I got it.” He pulled a paper pad close and jotted down a few lines. “Go in cool, and don’t go alone, T. I know you’re chill, but women have a way of making ice cubes boil. So be careful.”

“Advice about women from a man who’s been banging a woman three times a week on and off for like four years and doesn’t think he’s ‘seeing’ her. Yeah, that completes my day.”

As Sherlock flipped him off, he turned his back and headed down the hallway to see if Hoosier was off the phone.

~oOo~

Sherlock was wrong; Trick was not chill. Not about this. Since he’d sat on Juliana’s sofa the night before and heard her story of how Stiles had come up on her, dragged her alone into the elevator, trapped her, threatened her, insulted her—since then, he’d been very much not chill.

He hadn’t stayed long. They’d talked, and then they’d made out for a while. But he’d been too tense to get into it, too tense even to stay and just be quiet with her for a while, as she’d wanted.

Before he’d left, she’d let him go back and peek in on Lucie, sleeping under her canopy of stars, tucked into her star sheets, with her nightlight swirling stars around her walls and ceiling.

Then he’d gone to his apartment and stayed awake most of the night, all the lights on, fending off the war that had followed his anger and bloodlust.

No, he was not chill. His calm was an illusion.

He knocked on Hoosier’s closed office door, and, hearing “Come in!” from within, he opened it. Hoosier and Connor were in there, Hoosier at his desk and Connor on the leather sofa against the far wall. Their expressions were serious. “Hey. Trouble?”

“Not…trouble,” Hoosier answered. “But we could use…you. You got anything…after…after…afternoon?” He slammed his fist on his desk. “
This
afternoon?”

“I’m still sketching, and no commissions in right now. I talked to that producer that Donovan knows this morning. I thought he was looking for a build. Turns out he’s doing a documentary about Harleys and just wanted my talking head on camera.”

“You doin’ it?” Connor asked.

“Nah. Not interested. Anyway, I’m free. What’s up?”

Hoosier nodded at his son. Sometimes he had more trouble speaking than others. When he had to work to hard to find words, he’d hand off the job of explaining to Connor or Bart. So Trick turned back to Connor.

“Dora”—Trick sighed and took a step back—“easy, T. This isn’t about you. She wants the casinos. She’s looking to pull Ferguson in and wants us to make first contact. We’re going up the mountain this afternoon to sit down.”

“She owns all the drug trade for the whole western half of the country. She’s got Russian guns coming to her as fast as she can open her arms—and she’s supposed to be reigning over a historic peace in Mexico, so why the fuck she needs all that metal is a mystery. Now she wants the casinos? Why?”

“Casinos…full of…of…shit.” Hoosier cleared his throat and took a breath. “
Vice
. Full of
vice
. Lot of…money in it. Sorry. Tired.”

“No sweat, Prez. She’s not going to be happy until she rules the world, is she?” In response, the Elliott men chuckled sourly, in perfect stereo. “You’re not taking this to the table?”

“Job’s not ours. We’re just envoys. Dad told her we wouldn’t work with Ferguson again, not after that double-cross a few years back. But we’ll bring her offer to him.”

Trick looked over at Hoosier. He was struggling today, and had just said he was tired. Bart, Diaz, Muse, J.R., and Keanu were on a La Zorra run to NorCal, so the club was at half capacity. The President couldn’t stay back. “Sorry to ask, Hooj, but are you up to that?”

Hoosier’s eyes narrowed with offense and anger, but then that smoothed away. “Connor’ll…talk. I’m there…to be pretty.”

They all laughed. Then Connor said, “We need to go in eyes open. Last time we pulled into the People of the Pines, we got shot at. We’re not meeting at the casino this time, but we still want a presence. Jesse’s still out of range. So we’ll leave Jerry, Stuff, and Titus in the shop, but we want everybody we can get riding up there.”

Again, Trick looked at their President. He looked strong—skinnier than he’d been, and scarred, but strong. But when his speech was weak, the impression to the casual observer was that his mind was weak. It wasn’t—he was nearly as sharp as he’d ever been, except for some minor short-term memory trouble—but Trick wondered at the impression a silent or stuttering Hoosier would leave on Wade Ferguson. It was well known that Hoosier had been grievously hurt and suffered severe brain trauma.

But he said none of that. It wasn’t his call if Hoosier wanted to ride point on his trike.

“Yeah, okay. Can I have a minute before we head out, though? I got something I need to tell you.”

“Trouble?” Hoosier asked.

“I don’t think it’s big trouble.”

“Sit. Talk.” Hoosier gestured toward the empty side of the sofa, and Trick sat and talked.

~oOo~

Hoosier, Connor, Trick, Demon, Lakota, Ronin, and Fargo rode up Big Bear Mountain that afternoon, Connor and Hoosier in the lead. Hoosier grumbled every time he mounted and fired up that trike, but it had gotten him on the road and back to the head of the table, even while he was still recovering.

Riding with his brothers encapsulated all the reasons Trick loved to be Horde: the sense of brotherhood, of freedom, of purpose, the sense that they were together with each other and apart from all the rest. There was no feeling like riding a clear road, getting real speed, but Trick loved to be in traffic, too, splitting lanes, speeding past the complacent, complicit masses, all the people content to be still and be told.

He hadn’t been a rebel until he’d been made a killer of innocents. Sitting that first night in the stockade, his hands still raw and bleeding from the beating he’d laid on his CO, confronting what had felt then like a certainty that he would be in his forties before he again had anything like freedom, Trick had known no remorse for his supposed crime, but he’d been racked with guilt for the consequences of his obedience. And he’d understood that power was always to be mistrusted, that the only laws or rules that mattered were those that came from within, that sat right on one’s own soul.

It was a potent realization, but it had taken him a long time to build a worldview from it. First, he’d come home and discovered that he was out of sync with everyone around him. War had changed him fundamentally, and his memories were like hostile viruses in his head.

He’d gone to Cali Classics Custom Cycles, the old club’s bike shop on La Cienega Boulevard, because one of the men in his group at the VA had talked about how riding his bike cleared his head, had closed his eyes and waxed rhapsodic about the feeling of riding with the wind in his face. Trick had wanted that feeling.

In the showroom, he had been transfixed by the beautiful, gleaming bikes, some looking like nothing on the road. He’d struck up a conversation with Blue Fordham and had spent the whole day there. Blue had invited him to the next party. Trick had started hanging out right then.

He’d never ridden a motorcycle before. When he started asking about prospecting, Connor had taught him, and all the patches at the time had given him no end of shit—the quiet, brainy vet with the piercings and dreads doing circles in the shop lot.

He’d been at UCLA then, struggling to figure out his major. He’d always liked to draw, and he’d thought it would be cool to be an artist, but he liked to draw spaceships and weird, fanciful vehicles. There wasn’t a place for him in the Department of Art, where they’d sneered and called him a doodler. He could do the kind of art they wanted, but it didn’t feed his interest. Or his soul. He didn’t want to do what other people wanted. He’d had his fill of that.

He liked the aesthetics of the manmade; a flower, no matter how beautiful, was less interesting to him than the smooth curve on, say, a fender—the way something could be made, honed, changed to be geometrically perfect. Some of his brothers rode out to the desert to find their peace, others to the mountains or the beach. Trick found his peace in beautiful buildings, like the Powell Library at UCLA. Or the Griffith Observatory.

For a minute, he’d considered engineering or architecture as a major. He was good at math, too. He was good at pretty much everything he directed his interest toward. But engineering didn’t interest him. He’d wanted both, the art and the machine.

So he’d chosen a major that interested him and hadn’t worried about what it might train him to do. That was why he’d wanted college anyway; he’d simply gotten caught up in all the administrative bullshit about choosing a job first and the major that matched it.

It was hanging out at Cali Classics that he’d figured out what kind of job he wanted, how he could merge his talents and his interests into something he could spend his life doing. He’d studied all the mechanics working in the shop, the builders and fixers both, pestering them with questions in the clubhouse while he poured them their drinks—but learning to ride, learning to understand the power between his legs and in his hands, had been the most important lesson he’d ever gotten in how to build a bike.

It had also been the beginning of the most important friendship he’d ever had.

Immersed in the club, he’d found a home, when he’d been cast away by everyone else. So he always loved riding in formation, surrounded by his brothers. It didn’t matter where they were going. They were his family.

~oOo~

They met Wade Ferguson at a cabin on Big Bear Lake. They weren’t on Serrano tribal land—Hoosier had refused, for obvious reasons—but the Horde remained wary. They were a couple of hours from home, and though Ferguson and his goons were less likely to cause a scene away from the protection of their land, the last meeting between these parties had gone badly.

Ferguson was waiting when they pulled up. There were three black SUVs parked in a row in front of the cabin, and Trick counted ten men in addition to Ferguson himself. He’d brought a lot of company, but whether to start an offensive or simply for protection, they didn’t know. They backed their bikes in and parked. If they had to leave quickly, they were ready.

Ferguson came forward, his hand extended toward Hoosier. He looked a lot older than Trick remembered. His dark hair was threaded with grey, and there was a deep crease between his brows.

The past few years had not been kind to him, Trick knew that. Ferguson had played on the losing side in the war between the Águilas and the Castillos, and La Zorra exacted painful penance on her vanquished foes. Closer examination showed that those black SUVs were showing real wear, and the men surrounding Ferguson seemed somehow less impressive than Trick remembered his security being.

At Trick’s side, Ronin grunted quietly and turned, pulling both his blades from their sheaths on his sides. Ronin hated guns and virtually never used one. He preferred his hands and his blades: quiet, personal weapons. When they were in real battle, while the rest of the Horde armed with assault rifles, Ronin almost always carried two swords. He brought blades to gunfights, and somehow had managed to more than hold his own.

Now, Trick saw that they were being flanked, and Ronin had noticed before anyone else. He drew his own sidearm, a Glock, and pointed it at the Serrano asshole coming up on the other side.