Rest & Trust (17 page)

“Don’t know what to tell you, bro. Maybe you should start hanging out with Fargo and Keanu. They’re still chasing tail. And shit, since Diaz is back in the game, I’m surprised his dick hasn’t fallen off.” Diaz had been dumped by his supermodel wife a while back. Something like a year later, he was still stalking around the clubhouse like a feral dog scenting out bitches in heat. He’d never been precisely faithful; Ingrid travelled a lot for her work, and Diaz was a firm believer in the run rule, but Sherlock thought he was doing a whole lot of spite fucking.

Lakota gave him a hint of a strange look, just enough to make Sherlock’s brow crease, and then it was gone, and Connor had come up behind them and draped his arms over their shoulders.

“My brothers. Deme and me are heading to the Chip. Let’s do it.” He stood back and cracked his knuckles and his neck, just in case they’d missed the point. Sherlock looked at Lakota, and they both grinned. They had not missed Connor’s point.

~oOo~

The Buffalo Chip campground hosted bare-knuckle fights throughout Bike Week. The Chip had gotten huge and chaotic, hosting a shit ton of wild events, so the Horde weren’t staying at the campground. Both charters had rented space in some rancher’s pasture, about fifteen miles from Sturgis. They had their own mini-campground, far enough from the revelry to be fairly quiet at night, even though they were hardly the only ones renting space there.

Some of the guys—the older ones, especially—were playing it cool this week. Hoosier had ridden up on his trike, defiantly confounding everybody’s assumptions about what the septuagenarian was capable of. Missouri’s Showdown Ryan, maybe ten years younger but with a body that had taken a crazy amount of abuse, had also ridden up on his old Softail. Both oldsters seemed to be making the pasture a comfortable place to stay.

No old ladies had joined them. Not one. Sherlock thought that strange, but he guessed most of them had kids. Still, it was odd to see so many of his brothers at this rally, hanging around together, no women among them, just sitting around drinking and shooting the shit.

Including him.

The club really was changing.

Tonight, though, they all rode up to the Chip, because Connor could not turn down the chance to bash heads, and bare-knuckle fighting was his forte. That Demon was getting in on it, too—well, that was not to be missed. Demon had been a lot calmer since he’d gotten his son and settled down with Faith, but when the dude got mad, he’d make the Hulk take a step back.

Both charters of the Horde were gathered loosely along one side of the ring, cheering Connor on as he brought down his third competitor. Sherlock could see him flagging, but he just roared at the guy on the mat like some kind of gladiator and then held out his hand to help him up. Trick, serving as his corner man, shouted for him to come the fuck over.

At Sherlock’s side, Demon barked a laugh. “Looks like I got next. That dude’s gonna flatten Con.”

A massive, long-haired ape of a dude had climbed into the ring. He had several inches—height and width both—on Connor, who was not a small man. But Connor was graceful for his size. As the block of granite shrugged out of a Priests kutte, Sherlock said, “You think?”

“Fourth fight? And that Freak rang his bell twice. Con’s out of gas. He just won’t admit it. Unless he goes in dirty, I say that guy’s got him down for the count within two minutes.”

“You’re saying KO? You want to put some coin on that?”

Demon grinned at him. “Fifty bucks.”

“You’re betting fifty
against
your brother?” That was Bart, butting into the conversation.

Demon blushed a little, but he didn’t lose the grin. “Just between us Horde, yeah. Nobody outside. Then I’ll go up there and get retribution for Con. Make amends, you know.”

Bart laughed. “I’ll put down on that. Con’s gonna kick your ass when he finds out.”

“If he falls, I’ll split my take with him.” Demon gave Bart a smug look, and by the time Connor and the Priest faced off, the entire Horde club was betting one way or the other. Even Hoosier got in on it, betting on his son. Sherlock threw in with Demon; there was just something about the look in Demon’s eyes that said he was right.

About a minute-forty in, Con made heavy contact with the Priest’s abdomen, forcing him to double over.

And then he dropped his hands.

The Priest stood up and threw a jab like it came out of a cannon and landed it right on Connor’s chin. Their brother went down like a board. They could almost see the stars and birdies flapping over his head.

“Fuck.” Even though he’d bet that way, Sherlock had still been rooting for Connor to win. Everybody paid up or collected, depending on their bet.

Trick flew through the ropes and dropped to his knees at Connor’s side. The Priest didn’t celebrate. He stood off quietly to the side and watched. Just as Sherlock and his brothers started to get restless with concern, Connor sat up, and the whole crowd cheered. Then Trick and the Priest got him to his feet and helped him off the mat.

Demon slapped him on the back on his way to the ring. Now to see if he could take that mountain down and atone for betting against his brother.

A few minutes into that fight, however, they were distracted by three men without colors coming up on them. They looked familiar, but Sherlock was tense. He wasn’t sure whether their familiarity meant they were friends or enemies.

They went straight for Hoosier, and Sherlock saw that all of his brothers felt the same acute wariness verging on alarm. Even Connor, who still looked rung, made himself as big and broad as he could—which was lot—and got in their way. But Hoosier turned, grinned, and hugged the oldest of the three.

“K.T.? Well, Christ on a…crutch, you old fool!”

Ah. K.T. had been President of the Billings charter of their old club. He’d walked away from club life in the Perro Blanco aftermath.

With K.T. identified, Sherlock knew one of the other men as Zed, former Nomad President of that club. The last guy, Sherlock couldn’t place. They were all grizzled old men, in their sixties at least.

As all the Horde gathered around and made their greetings—the other guy was a former Billings soldier they called Rancid—ignoring for a moment the fight going on behind them, Zed asked, “Muse and Demon around?”

Muse and Demon had both been Nomads back in the day. Hoosier shook his head. “Muse has himself an old lady and a new baby. He’s holding the fort down at home. And Demon’s”—he turned to the ring, just as the Priest mountain fell to his knees and then flopped to his side, making the whole ring shake. Demon stood there, panting, his face dark crimson—“Demon. There something on your mind, or is this a…social call?”

K.T. turned to Badger, the Missouri Horde President, and then to Show, and finally back to Hoosier. “Glad to see you, yeah. Heard you was comin’ up. Glad leadership for both charters is here. We got somethin’ to run by you.”

Without any prodding, Lakota whistled loudly, slicing through the noise of the crowd, and got Trick and Demon’s attention, and the two men made their way out of the ring.

~oOo~

After they talked with K.T., Zed, and Rancid, all the Horde called it a night and rode back to their camp. They had some things to discuss, and the camp was the closest thing to really private they’d have here in Sturgis.

On Badger and Hoosier’s shared order, they all met at the campfire and sat down around it. Bart, Sherlock, and Dom had scanned the area for surveillance, and Sherlock ran a couple of different jammers, in case there was somebody around with a Doppler device. They were out in the middle of a fucking field, but it still felt wrong to be having a Keep meeting out in the open.

Badger was less than half Hoosier’s age, but he was now the mother charter President, so he had the meeting. He started by saying simply, “You all heard what K.T. said. Here’s where we start to talk about what we think.”

Hoosier added, “No decisions here. We go back to our own tables and talk it out with full…membership.”

Badger nodded. “Then we’ll come together somewhere to vote it.”

From across the fire, J.R. called out, “Vegas, baby. Gotta be Vegas.”

Laughter and general agreement from the men assembled around the fire.

“So,” Badger called their attention back. “What do we think?”

A restored Connor spoke first, “After that ambush in Idaho, maybe we need a presence farther north. If they got eight men ready, that’s enough to start a charter. Now that La Zorra is expanding that direction, either we’re running our guys all over kingdom come, or we’re trusting subcontractors with our shit. Be nice to be able to turn the work over to a Flaming Mane.”

“Missouri doesn’t do that work anymore, Con,” Nolan spoke up, SAA to SAA.

J.R. responded before Connor could. “Mother takes her cut, though. Don’t see you turning that back.”

“My
point
, asshole, is maybe they don’t want to go that way.” Nolan and J.R. glared at each other.

“It’s Zed and K.T.,” Demon cut in. “They’re outlaws from way back. Probably still outlaw, just without colors for protection.”

“I don’t have much of a rig here,” Sherlock offered, “but I could do a simple check on ‘em, see what they’ve been up to.”

Trick shook his head. “After what happened last fall, do we want to extend trust that far away? Especially if they want in on La Zorra? Isn’t the timing strange? We get ambushed, and they’re here a few weeks later, asking to start a new charter?” He kicked his legs out in front of him and leaned back against a log, crossing his arms over his chest. “I don’t like it.”

He was talking about what had happened to him: Jesse flipping on the club and getting Trick caught up and locked away in some black site prison, for almost two months. Jesse was dead, he’d died a rat’s death, and his name would never be uttered again in club business.

“You heard ‘em. They heard about the…ambush. It’s what got them focused on the ask. It’s K.T., Trick.” Hoosier leaned in and met Trick’s eyes around the fire. “He was wearing colors while you were still…drawing with Crayolas. Same with Zed.”

“The rat had a patch a long time, too.”

Show spoke up. “We don’t need to call it now. Something to think about. I’d say it’s worth bringing it to our tables, at any rate.” He turned to Badger. “What do you think, boss?”

It was hard to tell in the orange glow of the fire, but Sherlock thought Badger blushed. He definitely dipped his head a little. But he answered like a President. “I think it’s an idea that needs a hard look, yeah.”

Hoosier nodded. “Agreed. If there’s no…objection, I’ll tell K.T. it’s under consideration.”

There was no objection.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Sherlock had been gone for four days. Having recently discovered a wide and wild jealous streak in her heart, Sadie was now learning that making a conscious decision
not
to be jealous took a lot of fucking effort. Sherlock kept saying to trust him, and she did. Honestly, she did. But jealousy seemed to come from a different place. A crazy place.

It was weird. Like, she trusted him, but not the world. Which made no sense. Or it did. She didn’t know.

All she knew was that something in her head wanted to think about all the things that could make him stray, even if he didn’t want to. Wanted to think about that all the time.

Things like getting drunk enough to black out. As he had.

It would be a whole lot easier if he didn’t drink—or anything else—either. Or if she didn’t know what it was like to be fucked up and do things you would never do straight.

They’d only been together a month. Sure, they’d both now said the word ‘love,’ but they were still new. She realized that trying to sink her claws too deeply into him would probably mean that they would end while they were still new. She didn’t want that. Loving somebody was hard and painful and scary, but it was also awesome and exciting and…
fulfilling
was the closest word Sadie could think of. The good feelings were worth the bad, even if the bad still poked around in her head and made her fizz.

There was a thing newly recovering addicts were told. Sadie had heard it in rehab, and in NA meetings, over and over again. Recovering addicts should not engage in new romantic relationships for at least the first year of their recovery. Too much of the world was new and scary, too much of the addict’s sense of self was changing, and the powerful and erratic emotions that infused love were treacherous terrain for somebody just taking their first steps into recovery.

Sadie had met Sherlock three hundred and ninety-three days into her recovery. More than a year. Barely.

But Sadie had never been in love before. Not even close.

Gordon had pointed out to her, the night he’d picked her up from the Horde clubhouse, that she’d called him more during the month she’d known Sherlock than ever before. He hadn’t had to tell her; she’d been well aware. Loving Sherlock made her feel like she wasn’t in control of anything in her head or her heart, and it had always been lack of control that made her fizzy, that made her need.

But she didn’t want to lose the feeling of being in love. She didn’t want to lose Sherlock. She simply had to work out better ways to cope and find stability. She’d said as much to Gordon, and his solution had apparently been to storm into a den of bikers.

Which had been an admirably effective strategy.

But now, here she was, alone in California while Sherlock was gone at the world’s biggest biker party. He called every day and texted her several times a day, and that helped. On one call, although he’d been drunk, he’d gone on for a while about how boring the club was getting. A bunch of the men had what he called ‘old ladies,’ so half the club was hanging out at their camp at night, just dudes getting drunk together, no chicks in sight.

Sadie had smiled wide at that image in her head. Now, when her brain wanted to call up images of women clad only in body paint, she pulled up the one she’d made in her mind of a bunch of bearded dudes calling their wives before passing out alone next to their bikes.

That image helped a lot.

She was grinning at it while she sorted out a caller’s slow hard drive when a private chat window popped on her screen. Her boss, Ray:
Got a minute?

She typed back:
on a help call

Hand it over. Andy’s free.

In the way that happens when your boss wants to talk to you
right now
, Sadie’s heart picked up. Ray had already gotten snippy with her about a ‘new habit’ she’d developed of logging on late, and asked if she was ‘having trouble again,’ so she prepared herself for another uncomfortable conversation.

She typed,
K 1 sec
, then connected with Andy, made sure he was ready, and told the customer that she was sending her to a more experienced advisor—which wasn’t true; the issue was garden variety, and she was a better technician than Andy in any case, but customers liked to be told that they had a worthy problem that was being handled by experts. Nobody wanted to hear that their computer was running slow because they were dumb and had made a hash of their hard drive.

When she was free, she typed in Ray’s chat,
here
.

Just a heads up. Remember that kiddie porn call you got a while back?

How could I forget?
The creepy Mr. Penney and his collection of BDSM kiddie porn. She shuddered at the memory.

It’s bigger than we thought. Feds involved. They want a statement from you.

I gave my statement that day.

They want an interview. In person. Somebody’s going to call you to set it up.

Stunned, Sadie stared at her screen for a long time. Long enough that Ray wrote:
Sadie?

I’m here. Just freaked.

I know. But it’s no sweat, promise. Sending you the call transcript and your write-up now. They just need an interview.
An alert chimed, informing her that she had a new email.

When?

Soon. Not sure, but maybe even today. Seemed like they weren’t screwing around.

Okay. Thanks.

You need the rest of the day?

Without knowing when this terrifying call would come in, the last thing Sadie needed was an idle mind.
No. I might have to bail fast, though, if they call while I’m logged on.

Understood. It’s no sweat, Sadie. Just an interview.

Sure, she knew that. She hadn’t done anything wrong. But it was still an interview with government agents, and that wasn’t exactly a day at a spa.

~oOo~

They called within an hour of her chat with Ray, and Sadie spent the evening—until late—at the Riverside office of the FBI. She’d been there for hours, and most of that time had been spent waiting. The actual interview had been about two hours long and held in a room that looked very like a typical conference room, not the kind of interrogation room she’d been expecting, conjured from television and movies. Of course, she hadn’t been interrogated; she wasn’t a suspect, just a witness.

Kind of hard to keep that top of mind when you were sitting across from two FBI agents, both of whom were earnest and humorless. Not much humor to be found in a case like this. They were kind to her, though. Solicitous, even.

Most of the interview had been corroborating the statement she’d already made, but they’d also wanted her to create a minutely detailed context for how she’d encountered the images—in what order; where, exactly, they’d been on Penney’s computer; what his demeanor had been; and so on.

Two months after the fact, she would have expected not to be able to offer those details, but once she’d started describing the call, Sadie had discovered that it was indelibly etched into her head.

The agents—named White and Black, for real—hadn’t been especially forthcoming with answers to the questions she had, but Sadie was smart, and they’d told her a little, and she’d managed to work out that Mr. Norbert Penney of Santa Fe, New Mexico, had been a very bad man for a very long time. He was nearly ninety and going senile, which was why he’d made such a colossal mistake as giving a tech support advisor access to his computer.

Thereby, from what Sadie had put together, exposing a decades-old kiddie porn ring. One they’d been chasing down without luck for years. All because an old man hadn’t been able to get online.

And because Sadie had reported it.

Penney hadn’t understood what he was doing, and his lawyer was trying to quash the recording of him giving her permission for remote access. Without that permission, the call, Agent White explained, became the poisoned tree from which the entire case was killed. So they needed as much detail as possible from her to fight the motion to quash.

Agents White and Black seemed encouraged at what Sadie had had to offer. They told her that she could expect, should the case come to trial, that she might be called as a witness. Then they shook her hand and sent her on her way.

~oOo~

Stressed out from her adventure in crime fighting, Sadie called it an early night and was asleep before ten o’clock. When Sherlock called at nearly midnight, she flailed around for the phone in the dark and answered before she’d completely woken—she hadn’t even checked to be sure it was him, not that anybody else would call her in the middle of the night.

He chuckled in her ear. “Hey, little outlaw. I woke you up. You sound all sexy and sleepy.”

“Yeah. I’m glad, though. Miss you.”

“Miss you, too, sweetheart. You have a good day?” As her brain began to engage, Sadie realized that he was sober—and that was a first for late-night calls since he’d been gone. She was getting quite familiar with drunk Sherlock these days, but she considered it an excellent sign that he was calling her and not out doing other things.

“I had an interesting day. And you’re sober. How’d that happen?”

He chuckled again. “Yeah. I’ve been working all night.”

“Working? I thought this rally thingy was about fun.”

“It’s work, too. More than I thought.” He breathed heavily, like he was stretching. “Tell me about your day. What was so interesting?”

Fully awake now, Sadie sat up and pushed the pillows around so she could lean back on them. “I spent the afternoon at the FBI office, getting interviewed by two agents.” She laughed. “Their names were Black and White. I shit you not.”

There was a strange second of silence in the phone, so sharp and instant that it almost seemed loud. Then Sherlock, in a completely different tone of voice, said, “What? Sadie,
what
?”

Until she heard the strident suspicion, even anger, in his voice, it had not occurred to her that there might be any reason Sherlock would be worried about her going to the FBI. “Oh! Oh, no. Sherlock, it was about something that happened at my work. It doesn’t have anything to do with—”

“Sadie, shut up.”

She did, right away, even though the rest of the sentence she’d been saying was simply the word ‘you.’ It wasn’t like she’d been preparing to say ‘it doesn’t have anything to do with your criminal organization in which you do the killing and the drug trafficking or whatever nefarious things you do.’ But she shut up. He always called her on his registered, personal cell, but she knew he kept a burner for club calls—and she knew exactly why, even though he’d never said.

When he spoke again, his voice sounded tight. “What happened at your work?”

Feeling nervous now, she swallowed hard and said, “This was a couple of months ago. Before we met. I answered a help desk call, and the guy gave me remote access to his unit. There was a ton of really sick porn on it. With kids. I reported it, and it’s turned into a big deal. Some kind of huge ring, with kids being sold into it, something like that. They needed me to come in and give a fuller statement, because the guy’s lawyer is throwing some technicality bullshit on the case. I don’t know. But anyway, that’s it.”

“You went to the FBI office?”

“Yeah. It wasn’t like they hauled me in. They called and asked me to come, and I drove over. They interviewed me there. They were nice, though. I’m not, like, a suspect or anything.” She smiled and tried to make her voice sound light and teasing so that he would lighten up; he was freaking her out a little. “I’m like their star witness. I cracked the case.”