Strength & Courage (The Night Horde SoCal Book 1) (8 page)

“It’s a bad idea, Hooj.” Bart, the VP, had said his bit and had then cut off Hoosier now three times. The President looked about ready to slit his VP’s throat. Usually, those two got along well and had a good cooperative relationship. Watching Bart fight Hooj so hard
at the table
, Muse knew that the details of Hoosier’s business—which had not yet been shared—were dicey. They must be. Bart continued, ignoring the fire coming from the Prez’s eyes. “All the shit that went down a few years back—that destroyed a whole club and almost took down the Horde, too, that sent Isaac and Len away and got good people killed—all that shit started with a job like this. We play on this field again, especially in SoCal, and we are asking for big trouble from bad men. It’s insane that we’re even talking about it. We shouldn’t be. And Missouri will bust a vein over it.”

Hoosier slammed his ringed fist into the table, leaving yet another gouge in the oak. Bart had told everybody about the table in the Missouri Keep, describing it like it was some fucking magical piece of art, created with the Great Isaac’s own hands. Muse had never met Lunden. He was probably a decent guy. If he was half as good as his reputation, then he was more than a decent guy. And no question that he’d led a hell of a battle to destroy a whole drug cartel. But Muse fought a tendency to roll his eyes whenever Bart had a story about Isaac.

Apparently, that table Lunden had built was so special that they’d all taken care not to mar it. For years. Muse thought that was bullshit—it might be true, but it was wrong. A club table should show the story of the men who sat around it. It should be gouged and burnt and scratched. In the same way that a kutte showed the life of the man who wore it—tattered and rubbed soft and smooth, despite years of loving care.

SoCal’s table was a great slab of blonde oak. Just a table. And after a few years of use, it was showing wear. As it should. Muse rubbed his fingertips over gouges made by his own rings, then returned his eyes to his President. “Let’s hear the details. All we’re hearing so far is how you two feel about it, and we don’t even know what you’re fighting about.”

With a gesture that said he was giving up for now, Bart leaned back. Hoosier sent another venomous look his way, then turned to the whole table. “You know Connor and I were up in Big Bear last night, sitting down with Wade Ferguson.” The club did security for Ferguson’s strip and gambling clubs. “He wants us to expand into other parts of his business. He’s looking for us to ride protection on a San Diego to Oakland transport. We’d do a handover with Smiling Ghouls. Every two weeks. Eight percent cut.”

Lakota, the club Secretary and Treasurer, asked, “Product?”

Hoosier took a beat, and Bart filled in the space. “It’s a border run. You know what it is.”

“Goddammit, Bart. Sit back and shut the fuck up,” Hoosier snarled. “We’ll fight this out
after
the details are
all
on the table.”

“Drugs, guns, or people?” Demon was usually quiet at the table. He preferred to leave the thinking and debating to others and often seemed to be barely paying attention to club discussions. But his attention was sharp today.

“Wouldn’t bring people to the table, Deme. Those days are done. And guns run south, not north. This is a one-way transport. It’s coke and heroin. The take is huge. Ferguson is saying we’re looking at one-fifty, two-hundred every two weeks.”

“This is exactly the shit that nearly got us all killed four years ago. Running fucking drugs for a cartel.” Bart spoke without looking at Hoosier.

Again, Demon spoke. Muse wondered what it was that had him so vocal and keen here. “This is for Ferguson. He’s not cartel, is he? He’s, like, an Indian—like you, right?” Demon addressed the last question to Lakota, sitting across the table from him.

Lakota sighed and answered his question. “Ferguson is Serrano, asshole. I’m Sioux. Lakota Sioux. Get it? We’re not all the same.” Demon shrugged, and Lakota went on. “Coming from the border, the drugs are cartel. No question. Doesn’t matter what face hired us. We take this, we’re working for some cartel. Bart’s right. It’s bad news. I don’t care how much money’s in it.”

Muse, though, was thinking about the money, running totals in his head. He was good with math. One-fifty, the conservative end of Hoosier’s estimate. Take thirty grand off for the charter fund’s twenty-percent take, of which the Missouri charter would get twenty percent. That left one-twenty to be divided among the patches. Officers got a bigger chunk than regular members, but members working the run got a bump. Muse would work that fucker. He’d personally pull in ten to fifteen thousand a month. For this run alone.

He’d never have to worry again about whether the San Gabriel Care and Rehabilitation Center was going to boot Carrie out because he’d missed a payment. Fuck, he could pay ahead.

And he missed the outlaw life. The adrenaline, the freedom. The taking shit from no one, ever.

Hoosier spoke up again. “We’re not voting today. Despite what it looks like with me and Bart today, I’m not sure I disagree with him. What happened with the Perros was bad, bad shit. We all felt it, we all suffered. Some more’n others. We lost good men. We lost Blue to that bullshit. While he was standing at my side. So everything Bart says is true. And let’s not piss ourselves and try to pretend it’s raining. Yeah—this is cartel work. But things south of the border are different since Santaveria’s gone. Calmer. Truces are in place, and people still working those fields say things are stable. Maybe it wouldn’t be a repeat of the past. But we should make a decision thinking about the past. Remembering it. I know none of us want to relive it.”

He leaned back, spinning the gavel on the table. Muse had noticed that he did that when he was truly conflicted. “But this is a table full of outlaws, and I’m not so sure we’re as reformed as we think we are. We’re fighting each other more, and I think that’s because we’re all feeling squeezed by our straight life. Money isn’t coming in like it was in the day”—he looked right at Muse—“and I know some of us feel that hard.” He sighed. “Maybe we don’t take this business. If we don’t, Wade will pull his legitimate work from us, and that’ll be a big hit. Maybe this job is too big, too much, and it’s worth it to walk away from somebody like Ferguson, who thinks he’s got us by the short ones. But if we lose Ferguson as a legit associate, then we’re gonna have to go deep into the grey to stay afloat at all. So maybe what we vote on next week is to broaden our horizons again, Ferguson and his Mexican friends or otherwise.”

Muse’s heart was pounding. He already knew how he was going to vote.

~oOo~

Right after the Keep, Muse sent Keanu back to his house to drop Cliff off. He trusted his brothers not to be shits to his dog, no matter how wasted they got, but Friday night parties got crazy and crowded, full of hangarounds and hangers-on, and Cliff would lose his mind. And who knew what a stranger might do to him.

Muse found himself a seat in the corner. Normally, he kept himself busy on Fridays, taking a few girls in succession, but tonight he wanted to think. So he sat and drank and watched girls try to work the pole. It always surprised him how fascinated most girls seemed to be with that thing, like they all harbored a fantasy of being strippers.

For most, it would only be a fantasy—at least as far as the pole was concerned. But God love, ‘em, they tried.

Ember was on it now, and she was actually good. Despite her age, and her flabby, worn-out body, she was adept and acrobatic, holding his attention with some fairly impressive maneuvers. Maybe she had been a stripper once, when she was younger. Muse didn’t know. He didn’t know anything about her, and he didn’t care. But she was good on the pole, he’d give her that. And she gave great head.

But he wasn’t interested in Ember’s mouth, or in her pole skills, anymore. In fact, he wasn’t interested in the party. He wanted to get clear, give his head some space to think.

Maybe take a ride by Zinnia Lane, see if anybody was home.

CHAPTER SIX

When Sid woke on Saturday morning, she was alone in her father’s condo, but the coffee was made, and he’d neatly set out a mug and a grapefruit for her on the kitchen counter, with a Post-It stuck to the white tile. In his elegant, foreign-looking script, he’d written,
Namaste, nanu! I’m off on my constitutional, but will be back with you soon. Then we will have an outing!

His ‘constitutional’—what normal people called a walk. Rajesh Tuladhar started every morning with a brisk, three-mile walk, taking the exact same route, leaving and returning at the exact same time. He was a man of very specific, iron-bound routines. Born and raised in Kathmandu, Nepal, he came to the States to study at UC Irvine, and he’d never lived anywhere but Orange County since. Her mother’s theory about her father’s rigid lifestyle was that the culture shock from Nepal to Southern California had been so severe he could only manage it by making his life as predictable as possible.

And he had. His weekdays varied not at all—and when they did, there was usually a frantic call to Sid. He allowed for some limited flexibility on Saturdays and Sundays, but not for surprise. It was one thing for her to visit on a weekend because he’d asked her to come help him record a program—or for her to call a few days in advance and ask to visit. If she’d just popped in, though, he would have sent her away, his day being already planned otherwise. Even if that plan had been to read all day.

In the course of her own studies, Sid had come to wonder whether her father might land somewhere on the ‘highly functional’ side of the autism spectrum. He was brilliant, but often out of sync with others. Most people called him ‘quirky.’ People who didn’t have to live with him. People who had to live with him saw the breakdowns and frantic rages when his ordered life broke formation.

But he was the sweetest man in the world, with a huge heart full of love, and he was willing to offer it to anyone. It took a lot for him to stop trusting a person—which had, especially since Sid’s mother had given up on him, caused him a few problems. He was easy to take advantage of, big brain or not. As his only child, it fell to Sid to keep him out of trouble. Fifty miles away was about as far as she could ever imagine living from him—and as close as she ever wanted to.

She poured herself a cup of coffee, skipped the grapefruit, and went out onto his balcony, which overlooked harbor, about half a mile away. The mid-October morning was bright and felt like it might become warm—a typical day on the Southern California coast.

She didn’t have to wonder much about what ‘outing’ her father had in mind. There were only three choices: the Old World Village for shopping, the library for books, or the harbor to watch boats. It didn’t really matter; he wouldn’t offer her a choice, and she didn’t mind. He just wanted to be able to spend some time with her, and he wasn’t good at chatting. Last night, after he’d had his mid-level freakout about her hurt hand, he’d conducted an interview to learn about any news she had. Then she’d set up his History Channel show to record, and they’d sat side by side on his couch and watched television, without saying a word to each other until eleven o’clock, when he’d turned off the set and announced it was time to begin preparing for bed.

Preparing for bed was a ritual for her father, as was rising for the day. He was a Buddhist, born into the Urāy merchant caste of Kathmandu, and he began and ended every day at the little shrine in his bedroom.

Her mother was a French-Canadian Catholic. Sid was…whatever. Some strange hybrid of the two, maybe. Her spiritual upbringing had been much like her cultural and social upbringing, much like her parents’ marriage: schizophrenic. Cluttered and disorganized. Yet framed by rituals and routines of all sorts—an oddly rigid kind of chaos.

Her parents loved her, and she loved them—never had there been a doubt. Her mother had loved her father once. Her father loved her mother still. But Sid had grown up navigating a world pulled in two different directions—by a woman who needed not to be controlled and a man who absolutely had to do things, and have them done, the ‘right’ way, the same way, every time.

How they’d managed to fall in love, Sid had no idea. She knew the story, but she still had no idea. They could not have been less compatible.

But she knew how they’d stayed married for more than twenty years. Sid herself was the reason—neither parent had wanted her to grow up in a ‘broken home.’ They both had the same emphatic idea, in this one way alike, that a child should be raised with both mother and father in the home, an intact nuclear family.

Her father would never have divorced her mother. His idea of marriage was lifelong. Period. But her mother had considered her sentence served when she’d deemed Sid to be grown. They’d separated before she had received a copy of her B.S. degree in psychology to place in the empty folder she’d been given at the commencement ceremony.

Some children were stressed out because they thought they were the cause of their parents’ divorce. Sid had been stressed out because she knew she was the cause of her parents’ long marriage.

In her own life, that experience, among others, had made her slow to get involved with men. She liked to date, and she did it often. She liked to have a boyfriend, of sorts. But mostly what she wanted was a companion. Someone to go to dinner with, someone to see movies with, someone to have sex with. She didn’t think she’d ever want to live with another person, combine her life with his.

In temperament and personality, Sid was more like her mother—she needed control over herself. She differed from her mother in that she had no need to control anyone else—in fact, she had no respect for anyone who allowed himself to be controlled—but she could not abide being controlled.

How could two people live one life unless one person was in charge? She didn’t want to be the person in the lead, but she would never be the person following. So she would be content as a single, more or less serially monogamous, woman.

She finished her coffee, chuckling lightly into her mug. She knew why she was batting these thoughts around her head this morning, ten years after her parents’ divorce. Because the previous morning, she’d woken up with a man in her bed, practically a stranger, and she’d spent an impressive chunk of the hours since he’d dropped her off at Harry and Carole’s house thinking about him.

From what little she knew about him, Muse was nothing like any other man she’d been with. That was certainly true in the sex department. He was confident and accomplished in sex in a way that was new to her. He was rough and gentle, demanding and caring, all at the same time. And he understood a woman’s body. He’d understood
her
body, specifically, very quickly.

But he was different in more ways than that. He was older, maybe by a lot, though she wasn’t sure. His body was young and firm—and glorious—but his handsome face was creased around the eyes, and his dark hair was noticeably grey. And that hearty, youthful body showed a lot of wear, scars and ink that suggested a life lived hard.

Also, he was a biker. Maybe an outlaw biker—she’d done some quick research yesterday on his club, the Night Horde, and she wasn’t clear on whether they were good guys or bad guys. They seemed to be prominent citizens in Madrone, and they had a big bike shop that a bunch of celebrities frequented, but Demon’s rap sheet was miles long, and she wouldn’t exactly be shocked to know that Muse had one like that himself.

The guys she dated tended to be professionals of one kind or another—college graduates, people with careers. Mark, her last ‘relationship,’ was an associate at her mother’s law firm. She had been pleased to see Sid pairing up with someone with such ‘promise,’ and Sid and Mark had gone out with her mother and stepfather on several occasions, all of them awkward to Sid for the very reason that they weren’t awkward to anyone else.

She’d broken up with Mark when she’d learned that he and her mother had been lunching together on a regular basis. That had been just too fucking weird.

Sid wondered what the elegant and accomplished Claudine Bouchard Tuladhar-Townley would do if Sid sat Muse down for dinner in her tasteful dining room. At that image, she laughed outright. That possibility alone might be worth giving the man a call.

But he was pushy. That was fine during sex—great, even, in doses—but she would not allow herself to get entangled with some uneducated, underemployed caveman who called women ‘bitches’ and expected his word to be law. Oh, hell no. So if she did decide to call him—and who was she kidding, she wanted more of him—she’d have to be on her guard.

She heard a noise behind her, and she turned to see that her father had returned from his ‘constitutional.’ Looking through the open sliding door, she glanced at the large clock on the kitchen wall. Nine-fifteen. Right on schedule.

“
Nanu
! Good—you’re awake!” He came into the kitchen and fixed his eyes on the counter. “But you didn’t eat your grapefruit. I left you a grapefruit for breakfast. You always have grapefruit and coffee.”

She’d come through the slider as he spoke, and now she went to him and kissed his cheek. “I know,
Baa
. I wasn’t hungry this morning.” She didn’t, actually, have grapefruit for breakfast every morning, not since high school.
Still staring at the offending fruit, he said, “Well. I’m going to shower. I’m sure you’re hungry now. When you eat that, get cleaned and dressed. We’re going to see the boats! There are four for sale—we can tour them!” With that, he patted her hand, then turned and headed toward his bedroom, his white cotton socks padding over the gleaming white tile floors.

Sid watched him go, then set her empty mug down, picked up the grapefruit, walked back onto the balcony, and heaved that fucker into the green space below.

There was no way in hell she would ever be with a man who tried to make her live her life his way. Not ever.

~oOo~

She left her father in the late afternoon, after a day spent at the harbor and a lunch at the Blessed Garden Vegetarian Café. He pouted a little, but he understood. If her mother got word that she had been in Orange County and had not given her equal time with her father, then Sid would have to deal with her mother’s particular kind of quirks, the kind that came with masterfully applied guilt. She wasn’t passive aggressive—in Sid’s mind, passive-aggressive behavior exposed a weakness of spirit and character with which her mother was certainly not afflicted. It was more apt to say that her mother was quietly aggressive, able to convey a very clear and pointed threat with nothing more than a smile.

Her father knew this—more than that, he believed devoutly in a child’s responsibility to honor and love her parents, and he would have considered it beneath Sid to disregard the woman who’d borne her. So, while he was loath to let her go, he sent her off with a light pat of her shoulder and a blessing.

Her mother wouldn’t mind if she just dropped by, but Sid didn’t like to do that, not there. They were always off doing something, or planning some big hootenanny, and she would have hated to fall into the middle of some event. So, while she and her father were eating lunch, she called. They were at Sid’s stepsister’s soccer game but would be home by the time she got there.

For her marital reboot, her mother had married a man not much older than Sid. Davis Townley would be forty later this year. Claude—everybody but Sid and her father called her Claude; mother and daughter had both ended up with mannish nicknames—was fifty-nine.

Sid would be thirty-three in November. Her stepsiblings were young enough to be her own children, if she’d gotten a fairly early start. Helena was twelve and Harrison was ten. Though they had a relationship with their mom, they lived full-time with Davis and her mother. Sid didn’t know the details of Davis’s custody arrangements with his ex, and she didn’t much care. The truth was that her mother was raising more children, and those children were living a much more ‘normal,’ predictable life than she herself had. If such a posh life could be considered normal, that was.

Sid’s mother was a partner in a big L.A. law firm, the head of litigation. Davis Townley was a venture capitalist—which, Sid thought, meant that his job was basically to be rich and arrogant. But he was a pretty good guy, overall.

Her father a dentist and her mother a lawyer, Sid had grown up in an affluent home, even by Southern California standards. But her childhood seemed positively starved by comparison to her mother’s new family.

Not that she was jealous. The opulence made her feel a little queasy, frankly. Their whole huge house echoed. Every room but the smaller bedrooms. When she walked through the front door, she half expected to find a concierge desk.