Leave a Trail (34 page)

“Ko-d
ee
-ak,” Isaac corrected her. “Yeah, I see that. Good eye, squirt.”

“Ko-d
ee
-ak. Kodiak. Do we get a puppy?” Gia closed the book and turned to her father, her eyes wide and serious. Badger thought he would hate to ever have to say no to that face. Especially since Gia was an absolutely
epic
tantrum-thrower.

“We do. We’re taking the one you think looks like a Kodiak home with us.”

Without warning, Gia sailed from her knees right into Isaac’s arms. He caught her with barely a flinch. “Yay, Daddy! Yay!” She grabbed his beard and kissed his cheek. “His name is Kodiak. You can call him Kodi for short.”

“Maybe we should ask your mamma and Bo if they have ideas for a name.”

“No. His name is Kodi.” She squirmed. “Okay. Put me down.”

Isaac did as he was told, and Gia ran over to the puppies. He watched her for a minute, then turned back to his brothers. “Jesus Christ. She’s just starting kindergarten, and already she’s smarter than me. I’m gonna have to lock her up when she hits her teens. There’ll be no managing her.”

Suddenly, Lilli was behind him. “Maybe if you tried, you’d have some success. I hear we have a puppy?”

Isaac turned and pulled her close. “Uh, yeah.” He grinned. “I love you, baby.”

“Uh huh. You housebreaking him? Training him?”

Isaac just kept grinning, his eyebrows up innocently.

“Right.” She gave his braid a tug. “You owe me, love. I’ll be collecting soon. You’ll need protein and carbs today, I think.” Then she turned and went back to the family cluster over by the couches, leaving the men to themselves.

“Speaking of unmanageable women…”

At Tommy’s muttered crack, Isaac fired a furiously dark look his way. “Watch yourself. The line’s behind you, asshole.”

“Sorry, boss.”

Isaac stared long enough to make Tommy squirm, then said, “I have news. We’re all here, so let’s go.”

~oOo~

From beyond the walls and closed doors of the Keep, the Horde could hear the laughter and happy cries of their children, answered by the yips of their new pups. The lighthearted mood that had suffused the Hall came with them as they took their places at the table. Isaac was still smiling as he picked up the gavel—a new one since that meeting in March, when, arguing with Badger, he’d thrown the club’s original gavel into the wall and broken it beyond repair.

When he struck the gavel, though, his face realigned into solemnity. “To order, brothers. We got things to talk about. Nothing we have to leap up to deal with right now, but all of it deadly serious. First—Santaveria contacted me. He’s calling in his pet bitch for a special job. And I think the window we’ve been waiting for is open—or we gotta bust through that fucker, because we’re not doing the job.”

Badger remembered nothing about being shackled to a wall, Havoc dead at his side, while Santaveria ‘met’ with Isaac. But he knew that the Perro boss thought he’d brought Isaac and the Horde to their knees. In the past year, though, he had not called on them to do anything but the weed run—and, of course, to stop planning against him. They had not done the latter, though they had been more careful and circumspect—and thus much slower—in trying to plan. In fact, working only with the Scorpions LA, and under heavy cover, they hadn’t managed to make a workable plan yet.

Len asked, “What’s the job? We should vote?”

Show answered—not surprisingly, Isaac and Show had already discussed it. “He wants us to take out the Brazen Bulls at the next weed pickup.”

“What do you mean, ‘take them out’?”

Isaac turned and faced Badger as he answered his question with a question. “What do you think it means?”

“He wants us to take out a whole fucking MC?” Len’s jaw had literally dropped. “Why the fuck?”

“He’s not exactly forthcoming with the details. We’ll vote—of course we’ll vote. But my vote is a loud fuckin’ ‘nay.’ Becker is a friend. We’ve been skimpy with our trust lately, but he’s still a friend, trapped in the cartel snare, same as we are. And the Bulls are a little single-charter club like us. I do
not
want to take them out in the service of that piece of filth. So if we buck Santaveria, that’s our hand played, one way or the other. Next weed run, we fight. Whether we can win or not. Ride or die.”

“Put the vote up, boss.” Show’s voice was low.

“All in favor of taking out the Brazen Bulls on Perro Blanco orders? Nay.”

They went around the table. Nobody even paused. Unanimous.

Isaac smiled a different kind of smile from the one he’d worn so comfortably in the Hall, watching his kids play with puppies. This smile was a grim rictus, an expression of weary resignation. “Okay. We have a couple of weeks before the next run. That’s the time we have to plan. Dom, I need to be able to talk to Hoosier in depth off the grid. Can you and Bart do your code thing today and get a message out?”

“Yeah, boss. No sweat. And I have other stuff to bring up.”

“I know. Let’s clear this first. I want to bring Becker in. Whatever we got goin’ is goin’ down on his turf—or at least it’s starting there. Any discussion about that, extending our trust that far?”

Badger shook his head, and saw his brothers doing the same.

“Okay. Show, Len, Badge—when we get it set up, we’ll meet with the Bulls.”

“I don’t like that, boss.” Len leaned forward, his arms crossed on the table. “You know it’s not good to put all the leadership on the same run, not with shit so hot.”

“Gotta be us. We show him respect and trust when we put the whole top of the table in front of him. We’re telling him heavy news. It’s us.”

“But why me, then?” Badger wasn’t club leadership; he didn’t understand his role on the run.

“Because I want you there, Badge.”

At Isaac’s simple statement, Len turned to Badger with a knowing smile. Was this more ‘future of the Horde’ stuff? Badger didn’t know and didn’t wish to confront the idea while sitting at the table. So he nodded and let it drop.

Isaac leaned back. “Once again, Dom, the weight’s on you. And you’ve got news for the table, right?”

“Yeah, boss.” Dom looked around the table. “It’s Seaver. A lot of news. We had a breakthrough with the code—not all of it; names are coded differently. But some detail. Something else first. I think it was Seaver who did the fire at the B&B, and I think I might know why.”

The rest of the table reacted, but Isaac only nodded. Of course, Dom would have brought this news to Isaac first, but the boss was giving the floor to Dom. Badger was glad to see it. Dom had struggled to fill Bart’s shoes; his learning curve had been steep. But it looked like he was topping it. “It’s not proof. With everything else going down, I don’t know if I can find proof. But I found a connection to Signal Bend. A reason that Seaver might have such a hard-on for us. And I was thinking about what Badger said, about Seaver trying to turn the town against us and maybe bein’ mad when they had our back at the Spring Fest. I was tryin’ to think why he was after us so hard, so fast.”

“Get to it, Dom.” The impatience in Isaac’s voice was clear.

Dom cleared his throat. “Mac Evans and Leon Seaver are cousins.”

Show sat up. “What? Wait—we know his kin. He came up here in town.”

“Not this kin. Mother’s side.”

It felt to Badger like the whole table was working that through in unison. When Show nodded, signaling that he’d processed the new information, he did so for the group and then asked the next obvious question. “Okay, go on…why blow the B&B and hurt people?”

“Evans has known our fist more than once, Show,” Isaac answered. “We about crippled him the last time. He’s a smarmy little puke and deserved what he got, but if they’re close, it might be cause to take extreme measures to get us gone.”

“They’re close. Summers together when they were kids. Holidays together still. He was probably coming from Seaver’s house the night he hit Nolan.”

“Still doesn’t add, does it?” Len asked. “Would our law-and-order Sheriff get his hands this dirty? Arson—and murder? Attempted murder? That’s heavy shit.”

“He tried to clear the place. We know he wasn’t anywhere near the fire, because he slowed you guys down when you were on your way. Think about that:
He slowed you down
. I think he put out a contract and the guy he hired muffed it. Or just didn’t care if somebody got killed. I don’t think Seaver wanted anybody hurt, though. Except us. I think his plan just went balls up.”

“If that’s true—if he has an innocent death on his conscience, that could be a way in with him.” Show swiped his hand over his beard, pulling it thoughtfully.

“If he has an innocent death on his conscience, I don’t want a way in with him, Show. I want to end him—life or career or both.” Isaac sat back.

The table was quiet, taking all that in. Badger’s head was whirring frantically, making new connections. A whole lot was beginning to come clear. It was beginning to feel like all the disparate tensions that had been pulling the Horde in too many directions to manage, trying to pull them apart, might not be so disparate after all.

And then Dom said something that filled in the final piece. “I got more. The code. Seaver is definitely talking to a Fed. He was talking to two of them for a while—the one in St. Louis put him with another guy. Now he interfaces with the other guy on a regular basis. He’s DHS. And he’s
inside
the Perros. Lilli’s sure of it.”

“Wait. Again. Seaver is connected to the
Perros
?” Len’s brow wrinkled deeply under his eye patch.

“By a few degrees of separation. Don’t think he knows. I don’t think he realizes exactly who he’s talking to. Lilli picked up a couple of things in their emails, and had me trace the IP bounce. I ended up in Caborca, Mexico. That’s Perro Central. Can’t be a coincidence.”

“You think the Feds are using Seaver.” The picture was nearly complete in Badger’s head.

Isaac answered. “Why not? Small-time county Sheriff with a bug up his ass about an MC, MC in bed with a major drug player—use Seaver to wear us down, make him think he’s getting help on a big bust, then ride us in to take the cartel down—or at least disrupt them. Feds’ wet dream—Perros down, us locked up, the little Sheriff left standin’ alone in the cold with his dick in his hand.”

“Jesus Christ.” Len laughed darkly. “I feel like a dosed chick at a frat party. Everybody wants their turn fuckin’ us.”

“And the B&B fits in how?” Show was the only one at the table who looked completely calm.

Dom checked with Isaac, and when the boss nodded his permission, Dom picked up his story. “Side project. It doesn’t, just shit going to hell at once. The LA bombing happening so close to the B&B fire is really just a coincidence. I guess they happen sometimes. Seaver’s link to the cartel is the only connection, and it doesn’t make them related. It’s correlation, not causation—he doesn’t know he has any link to the cartel. He’s just after us, any way he can get us. Maybe he’s starting to feel like the Feds aren’t giving him the help he thought they were.”

Isaac sat forward again. “There are gaps. They’re using a code in a code, and it shifts. Pretty sophisticated. Lilli’s a little rusty and she hasn’t been able to crack it. Names, dates, those details—still unknown.”

“Can she get help? Maybe Bart?” Badger was sure Bart would help.

“Too risky.”

“We don’t trust him?”

“Not what I mean—it’s too risky for
him
. You know he’s got a flashing light on his head right now. The Perros are watching him, the Scorpions mother charter is watching him. We can’t ask him to take this on. It’ll get him killed for sure. It’s Lilli and Dom. If they can’t get it done in time, we go in a little blind.”

Len laughed again. “Okay. Checking for understanding. This is our theory: Seaver hired out to blow the B&B, as some kind of payback for what we’ve done to Evans over the years—and to try to turn the town against us for good and all. There’s a DHS agent undercover in the Perros, and he’s using Seaver to use us to implode the cartel. That cartel wants us to kill an entire MC, friends of ours. And we have no way of fighting back against any of it, but we’re fighting anyway. Am I right?”

Isaac nodded. “You are, brother. But now’s the time to find the way. One way or another, this shit will all come to an end very soon.”

“Fuck. Days like this, I wish I just sold hardware.” Len crossed his arms on the table and dropped his head.

~oOo~

After the Keep, the Horde all were still dazed and uncharacteristically quiet. Badger figured everybody was doing what he was doing—fitting their world into this new picture. He was of two minds about the news. In some ways, it was a relief to know that everything they’d been going through, all the demons they’d been fighting, were all connected in some way, and it was strangely satisfying that somebody like Seaver had managed to land unwittingly on the pivot point of the whole unstable balance. Like theirs weren’t the only plans that could go tits-up at a moment’s notice.

Then again, if everything was connected, even through the weak link of Leon Seaver, that was a hell of a huge storm cloud over their heads. If it let loose before they could find shelter, they’d drown.

None of the old ladies were in the Hall, but Nolan was sitting on the floor, his back against one of the worn, leather couches. He was playing with Loki and Bo and the puppies. Gia sat on the couch, her legs straight out before her and her feet resting on Nolan’s shoulder. She was reading loudly from a picture book.

The other Horde went to the bar, where Thumper had started pouring drinks, but Badger went over and sat next to Gia and Nolan.

“Where are the women?”

“In the kitchen. Don’t know why. Lilli called them all in there.”

“Badger, I’m
reading
.” Gia scowled at him.

“Sorry, Gia. Go ahead.”

He didn’t know if she was actually reading or had just memorized the book, but if she was reading, then he was impressed. School had only started a few days ago, and she was only in kindergarten.

When she was finished, she closed the book and gave him a benevolent smile. “Okay. You can talk now. I’m going to find Mamma.” She scooted off the couch, her book tucked under her arm. Before she left, she turned and wagged a finger at Nolan and Badger both. “Keep an eye on the boys, now.”