Chapter Five
Zeke
Irolled in with the sun not quite up, red rock and scrub shadowed and sharp in my mirrors.
My Harley, all custom bars and chromed hardware, let out a final cough before settling into sullen silence.
I let it tick down, sat astride the machine, and took in the fortress.
The Harlots had claimed an old mining lodge and built it up like they expected the Mongols to return.
The place had floodlights, three lines of chain-link, razor wire that shone like wet bone in the pre-dawn.
Raw lumber weathered to gray, windows inlaid with reinforced mesh.
Heavy steel door painted in club colors, the Harlot emblem dead center, so you couldn’t mistake who ruled here.
Rows of motorcycles filled the lot, each one modified, not for show but for reliability and intimidation.
No two were the same, but every one was branded.
At the near end, I counted three scouts, posted up and watching me with the boredom of apex predators denied a kill.
They wore leather cuts over faded black, faces sharp, expressions sharper.
Their eyes tracked me, then the gate, then each other, hands never straying far from the weapons at their hips.
I dismounted, boots crunching on gravel, and got a real sense of my own size as I squared up to the first line.
Six-four, two-forty, I wasn’t the biggest man in Vegas, but I beat out anyone in the lot by at least four inches.
The guards didn’t care. Spade, tall, olive skin, scars up her forearms like she’d been training razors since birth, stepped in close and started the ritual, including a rough pat-down, arms, armpits, inside the waistband, then a full circle, boot to collar.
I grunted when she found my backup piece.
“Only the one?” she said, her voice flat, hands not leaving my belt. I almost told her to check the weapon between my legs.
I shrugged, which in my case is more like a landslide. “Didn’t want to insult you with a pea shooter. Besides, I’m not here for trouble.”
She made a sound that might have been a laugh or an animal-like threat. “You’re Zeke, right? Jack Smalls’ blood.”
“That’s the rumor,” I said, and let my face harden. There were stories about me, and most of them were true.
Spade held my Glock up to the light, admired the clean lines, and said, “You want it back after?”
“If I walk out,” I replied. “Name your price, I’ll buy it twice.”
She slid it into a wall-mounted safe by the entry and waved me on. I caught the scent of femininity as I stepped past her, the air shifting from dust and sage outside to old smoke and disinfectant inside. It felt familiar and hostile all at once.
Inside, the war room was alive, if you knew how to look.
They’d taken the lodge’s main hall and stripped out everything but the beams and the stone hearth.
The walls were pegged with maps of the Vegas city grid, county routes, and the entire region webbed in colored marker and thumbtacks.
A folding table ran the length of the room, covered with scattered weapons, ammo, open energy drinks, a bowl of hard candy, and at least three unlit cigars.
At the head of the table, the queen herself.
Selene. She had a presence with her dark eyes, curly black hair to her shoulders, and a face that would have been pretty if not for the perpetually set jaw.
She wore black denim and a single starched white bandana and didn’t bother to get up as I entered.
She just looked at me, steady and unblinking, like she was measuring caskets.
To her right, the rest of her top six. Joker, in mirrored sunglasses even indoors, shuffled a deck of cards like her life depended on it.
Glitz had a laptop open and three phones going, a cigarette parked at the edge of her lips.
Aces spun a wheel nut between her fingers, expression lazy but eyes darting to every movement.
Tempest and Nines took up the flanks, both of them resting arms on their Glocks, both with faces that promised no patience for bullshit.
“Morning, Zeke,” Selene said. The way she said my name made it clear she’d already sized me up.
“Selene,” I said.
“You're here because your father is running out of lies to tell the city,” Selene said. “We’ve heard you’re smarter.”
“I wouldn’t have made it past your perimeter if I wasn’t,” I said.
Joker leaned in, pushing her sunglasses up. “Cut the dick-measuring. You come here to parlay or to recon? We’ve got places to be.”
I bit my tongue. The last thing I needed was a bar fight with seven women, so I just smiled and let the tension wind up a notch.
Selene nodded at Spade, who’d come in behind me. “Get him a chair. Make sure he can’t see out the windows.”
Spade kicked a metal folding chair at my knees. I sat, hands open, nothing to hide.
Selene leaned forward, fingers interlaced. “I know your father’s operation. He’s running girls and guns out of three brothels, half a dozen motels, and a farm outside Amargosa. He uses you as the fixer. Is that about right?”
I waited, measured my answer. “You know more than most. He’s old school. Likes to keep family in the loop.”
“Family,” Glitz said, snorting. “Cute.”
Selene went on. “Why’re you here, Zeke?”
“Because you’re running the only house in Clark County my father can’t bully, bribe, or bomb out of existence.”
Selene smiled, slow and cold. “Because you’re about to jump ship.”
Joker whistled, low. “Straight to the chase, huh?”
I looked at the maps on the wall, the network of arrows and notes, and realized that if I played it wrong, I wouldn’t make it out. “Let’s say I am. What’s your pitch?”
“Simple,” Selene said. “We’re taking down your father, and we’re doing it without leaving half the county in a mass grave. You help us, you get a seat at the table. Or, you walk, and you die in the same old stories your dad tells everyone. The choice is yours, but make it fast. We’re on the clock.”
The room went quiet except for Glitz’s keyboards and the soft shuffle of Joker’s cards.
I felt the weight of every eye. I reached into my pocket, real slow, and pulled out a battered, bloodstained USB drive. I set it on the table.
“That’s the backup server location. All my father’s real books, the kind he doesn’t show the IRS or his own muscle. If you want to burn him down, that’s the fuse.”
Nines grabbed the drive and disappeared, already scanning it.
Selene’s face didn’t move. “Why now?”
“He crossed a line,” I said, and it wasn’t even a lie. “He’s hurting people who don’t deserve it. And I’m tired of cleaning up bodies that should still be breathing.” I looked around the room. “And, Simone called me. I appreciate what you did for her.”
She nodded. “You know what happens if you’re playing us?”
I nodded. “You kill me slow.”
She gave a half-smile. “Slower.”
Joker looked at Selene, then at me, and for the first time, I saw curiosity. “How do we know you’re not setting us up for a hit?”
I leaned in, putting my hands on the table so everyone could see the old scars—cigarette burns, healed-over knife wounds, a thumb broken and set wrong. “You don’t. But if you want to take the fight to Jack Smalls, you need someone who knows the back door.”
Selene stood, and the rest stood with her. A wall of leather, steel, and cold resolve.
“All right,” she said. “You’re in. But you so much as sneeze in the wrong direction, and one of us puts a hole between your eyes.” She nodded at the other women, and they all but Selene vacated the room.
She waited until the last bootheel faded, then circled me, never taking her eyes off mine. In the flat Nevada morning, the air smelled like burnt copper and her cigarette breath as she leaned in.
“A favor for a favor,” she said, and I heard the threat in it, and the exhaustion, too. “You tell me what line your father crossed. Not the one you feed the girls. The real one.”
I let out a long breath, the kind that costs you more than a year in prison ever could. “You want the truth?”
She just nodded, and I could see the history stamped in her eyes, layer on layer of old nights and bad men and the bone-deep need to never be weak again.
“My mother was a runner for his crew,” I said. “He never loved her, just liked the idea of a family. She was killed delivering for him, and he made me watch the tape.”
Selene didn’t blink. “And Simone?”
“She was eight,” I said, and could feel the way that memory scraped my insides raw, like rebar.
But I also noticed how it caught her attention.
“He told me it was my job to keep her safe. He’d punish her if I didn’t.
So I did everything he asked, even when it meant breaking bones on kids who’d never see nineteen. ”
Selene tapped a nail on the table, three times, slow, like counting down my story. “What changed?”
I looked at her, really looked, and saw someone who’d lost the same things I had, only she’d set the world on fire instead of letting it burn her. “He started selling girls younger than Simone. Lied about their ages, used them up, then sent them south.”
She flinched, almost imperceptibly, but I saw it. “You helped him,” she said, flat.
I nodded and let the guilt show. “Until I couldn’t.”
She sat. The chair creaked under the force of her, and she ran a hand through her hair, like she needed to find the right words out of a snarl. “I don’t do pity,” she said, “but I do revenge. You want in, you give me a reason to believe you won’t bolt when it gets rough.”
“I won’t,” I said, and meant it. “But you need to know—I’ve done things. Bad things. You want to kill me after, I’ll hand you the gun.”
She snorted. “You’re not special, Zeke. Every person in this place has done things they regret.”
The door opened, and Joker stuck her head in. “The USB is legit. Jack’s moving two million in armament before Friday. Warehouse on Sahara.”
Selene smiled, and it was the first indication she had any warmth left. “Looks like we’re in business.”
Joker left and closed the door.
“You’re father fucked you up the way my mother fucked me up,” Selene said.
I waited for a sneer, or the slow-dawning condescension of a woman who’s decided men are collectively a genetic mistake. But all I got was a tired, sardonic smile, like we’d both been benched by the same coach for the same busted play.
I wanted to crack a joke, lower the stakes. Instead, I just shrugged. “Didn’t know there was another way to get raised in this town.”
Selene’s eyes bored into me, and I felt myself pulled to the surface of her gaze, not drowning but forced to tread water with everything exposed. “You’re not bad at lying,” she said. “But you’re worse at self-pity. That’ll get you killed faster than a fondness for whiskey.”
She reached over, grabbed my wrist. The sudden touch, all business, but hot, too. “Tell me you’re not going to freeze up on us.”
I watched her thumb, the way it pressed into the scar on the back of my hand. “You ever put a .22 to your own temple at thirteen, just to see if you had the guts?”
Her grip tightened; she waited.
“I didn’t. Couldn’t. He made me take it apart, clean it, reassemble it in the dark, then point it at Simone and dry-fire until my hand stopped shaking. Said that’s how you raise a real soldier. I wasn’t a soldier. Just a scared kid.”
“He did worse to you later,” she said, matter-of-fact, as if reading the logline of a movie she’d already seen and hated.
“Yeah,” I said. “But the first time is how you remember it.”
She let go, eyes on the table, then back at me. “We’re going to need you, Zeke. Not the one who’s a cautionary tale. The one who wants to see his old man eat shit on the evening news.”
I nodded. “Then you’ve got him.”
Something softened in her face, almost imperceptible, but it was there. She stood, walked to the window, backlit by the first slice of sunrise, and asked, “You ever love anyone?”
I could have lied. Instead, I said, “Simone. Maybe a girl in high school. She left town before we could fuck things up the way my parents did.”
Selene let out a sound that was half a laugh, half a curse. “You just described every woman I know. Maybe every man, too.”
I joined her at the window. We stood side by side, the Vegas valley stretching out below us, all light and broken promise. “What did your mother do?” I asked.
She didn’t answer at first, just watched the pink dawn burn away the darkness. Finally, she said, “She ran toward the drugs and away from me. She got my father killed.” She looked up at me. “Never let the world see you bleed, Zeke. Cause when you do, your life becomes infected with sharks.”
I let the silence spool between us. Selene’s posture never softened, but I felt the edges on her voice curl in, as if even she was getting tired of the fight.
She turned, pressing a knuckle to the glass and tracing a squiggle that only lasted a heartbeat before the sun washed it away. “Jack won’t just let this go,” she said. “You know that, right?”
I nodded. “He’ll think it’s a play. That I’m trying to get closer, set you up. He’ll burn a dozen people just to prove a point.”
She gave a dry, skeptical hmm. “He ever hit you hard enough to change the way you see him?”
“Every time I let him down.” I made a fist, thinking of the night he’d put Simone’s cat in a sack and run it over with the car, just to show me what happened when you loved anything too much. “He’s not afraid to break what he owns, because he thinks he can always buy another.”
“That’s a dangerous kind of power,” Selene said. “The kind that creates more enemies than it buries.”
And enemies, I thought, were the only family I had left.
“He’s going to hit back hard,” I said. “Taking his girls was like taking his teeth.”
“We should hit back,” Selene said, but I shook my head.
“We need to wait and see.”
Nines open the door, breathing heaving. “Two black SUVs approaching, flanked by four bikes.”