Chapter 14
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— Handful —
Dutch’s office was a big corner room, two desks, huge windows. He shared it with Indira, her side spread with binders and color-coded tabs, his side clear. He did most of the club’s quiet business in there. He’d told me Tuesday My office. Thursday, nine AM so here I was.
There was a folder on the desk. Unopened. He rested his hand on it and looked at me until I sat down.
“Tuesday, I thought I was going to do this over the camera,” he said. “Then I sat with it, and the camera’s not what I’m angry about. Two patch chasers did that. You didn’t.” He sat back. “So let’s talk about your fuck up.”
I waited.
“After I pulled you in here a few months back, you stepped up. I noticed, and that’s why I’m disappointed now.
You took the Tilden prep. You ran the Louisville details clean.
You did the work, and you did it the whole time you had that girl on the back of your bike, which told me something — told me you could carry both, told me the man I’ve been waiting on was finally showing up.
” He let that sit a second. “I was gearing up to name you SAA officially.”
That was worse than being yelled at. I’d known I was doing better. I hadn’t known he’d seen it.
“And then Saturday.” Dutch’s voice didn’t change.
“You were the old you — looking at every woman in the room, hands everywhere, working the crowd like it was a job. I looked at you and thought, there he is. The one I hadn’t seen in six months.
” He let that sit. “So Sunday morning I sent you out on the run. You want to know why I did that?”
I hadn’t known he’d done it on purpose. I’d thought it was just a job that needed running and I’d had the bad luck to get it.
“That was me buying you time to come to your senses. You’re welcome.” He looked at me flatly. “Not that it did you any good, apparently. You fucking clown.”
I said nothing.
“Monday night, we’ll skip.” His voice dropped a degree. “Tuesday morning I told you to be in this office today at nine. And then I waited to see what you’d do with the two days in between.” He looked at me. “What did you do?”
Oh fuck.
“Nothing,” Dutch said. “You went upstairs and you sat in your room - your new room - and you did nothing. I told you not to make me wait six months ago. I told you I was asking you to be someone you hadn’t been yet.
You showed me you could do it.” His jaw tightened.
“And then your girl walked away from you at a party and you folded. The Tilden people called Tuesday afternoon to lock the field date — your meeting, your contract, the one I was about to put your name on to make this official — and you didn’t come down.
Holden took the call. They’ve gone cold and they’re talking to a firm in Cincinnati.
” He sat back. “Two days, Handful. That’s all it took for you to put down everything you’d built. ”
“Dutch—”
“Grow up.” Still quiet. He never raised his voice and it was always worse.
“Stop thinking with your dick. Get your head back in the game. You proved to me you can do this — that’s the part that’s killing me, you already proved it — and the first time something hurts you fold up and hide like a kid.
” He held my eyes. “Sort yourself out, or I’ll have your patch. ”
“You’d bump me back to prospect over a few bad days?”
“No, I’d take your cut and you’re out. Gone.” That landed harder than anything else he’d said. “I’d rather lose you clean than spend another year watching you waste the brother I know is in there. That’s how far past patience I am.”
I’d known I might lose the girl. But the cut — no fucking way. The club was the only thing in my life that had never gone anywhere. Even when I was fucking up, even when I was the punchline, the cut was still mine.
“You’re disappointed. I hear it.” I made myself hold his eyes while I said the rest. “But whatever you think of me right now, it’s nothing compared to what I think of myself.
I had her. I had the Tilden thing, the patch coming, all of it — and I knew I had it, and I stood in that room Saturday and fucked it all up.
Nobody did that to me. Nobody encouraged me. I did it.”
Dutch sat back. The stare lost its edge.
“Is the patch still on the table,” I said. “The SAA. Or is it gone?”
“I told you one chance. Should’ve meant it.
” He looked at me straight. “You want to know why you’re still in that chair?
It’s you. That’s the whole of it.” He tapped the desk twice.
“I’ve sat where you’re sitting. Damn near lost Indira being the man you were Saturday — worse than that, if you want the truth of it.
So I know what this feels like. You’ve hit the fucking bottom.
Nothing under you but dirt you dug yourself.
” He let that settle. “As your brother, I want you to make it. Be the man you’ve got in you.
Get your girl back, get wifed up, have some kids, be happy like the rest of us.
I want that for you.” A pause. “As your president — you’re running out of lives, so hear me when I say this is the last time I do this.
Earn it. Except now you’re climbing out of a hole you dug yourself, in the dark, with me watching.
” He nodded at the door. “Church. Come on.”
We walked up the back hall together. Indira was in the common room with Maya on her hip. She clocked Dutch heading for church, handed the baby to Lilac without being asked and fell in on his other side like she’d been waiting for the cue.
She looked at me once. Didn’t say a word.
Church filled the way it always did — Colt, Holden, Glitch with his laptop and his stack of pages, Target, Baxter, Fewin, Smoke. I took my chair, two down from Dutch’s right. Indira sat at the foot of the table in Dutch’s usual spot.
Smoke looked at her, looked at Dutch, and got half a word out. “Is—”
“She’s First Lady,” Dutch said, not even turning his head. “That’s the whole of the discussion about whether she’s in the room, and it’s finished. Let’s go.”
Smoke put his hands up an inch and sat back. Nobody else said anything.
Glitch stood and started his usual slow circuit of the room. Gun running was clean another full quarter; he said it flat and the table tapped it through. Louisville clean. Portland online. Then he slid a stack of pages down the table.
“The Dollhouse. Route 9.” He let it land. “Handful floated buying this place a few months back as a joke. Turned out to be the least stupid thing he’s ever said in this room. Indira and I have been quietly looking at it ever since.”
“Looking at it,” Colt said. “That what we’re calling it now.”
“Bet Glitch’s been looking at it three nights a week,” Baxter said. “Real hands-on research.”
“Does Wren know you’ve been doing fieldwork?” Colt added, grinning. “Bringing notes home?”
Glitch let them run it out, unbothered, and when they’d finished he said, mild as anything, “Wren knows more about strip clubs than anyone at this table.”
The room stopped.
“The hell’s that mean,” Colt said.
“My woman paid her way through college on a pole. Graduated with a degree and no debt, which is more than the rest of you can say about your twenties.”
It took the table a second.
“Wren? Little blonde, jumps if you say boo Wren?”
“She apologized to me last week because I walked into her —”
“I watched her spend ten minutes working up to asking Lilac if she could use the last of the coffee creamer —”
“Taking her clothes off.” Colt looked shocked. “On a stage. In front of men.”
“Took her clothes off for money.” Baxter said it slowly, like he was translating from a foreign language. “That Wren.”
Glitch let it run out.
“It’s work,” he said. “Plenty of women do it. Men too. Nothing to be ashamed of. She needed money, she had the nerve for it, she did it.” He looked around the table.
“The woman you know — that’s my Wren.” He paused.
“The one who got on a stage in front of strangers wearing a mask and took her clothes off — that’s also her.
Same woman. You just never got to meet that one, and you never will. She retired. My eyes only.”
“Moving on,” Indira said from the foot of the table, in the voice that closes subjects — and the table moved on, though Colt sat there shaking his head for a good while after.
Glitch turned to the next page like none of it had happened.
“As Handful told us, the owner’s retiring.
Wants out clean and quick, priced it to move.
Liquor license current, adult-entertainment license current, no liens, six years with no violations on file.
It’s a cash business in a cash-light corner of the books, and with Tilden gone cold we’ve got a gap it fills on its own.
” He looked at Dutch. “On the numbers, I’d buy it tomorrow. ”
“The numbers aren’t the problem,” Indira said.
That was her cue. She didn’t make a speech of it.
“Dutch has spent years making this club something the town stops crossing the street to avoid. Venom buys a strip club, some of that’s in play again.
That’s a real cost and it’s not on Glitch’s spreadsheet.
” She closed the laptop. “But the money’s good.
So here’s the whole of my position. It gets run right, or it gets sold. ”
She didn’t say what right meant. She let it sit there, undefined, like a dare.
“Vote,” Dutch said.
It went around the table. Tap. Tap. Tap. Unanimous. Dutch hit the gavel.
“Then we own a strip club,” he said.
“We own a problem I’m going to watch like a hawk,” Indira said. She held up two fingers, pointed them at her own eyes, then slowly turned and pointed them at every man at the table in turn. One by one. Nobody was skipped. Scary as fuck.
“It needs a new name,” Baxter said. “The Dollhouse — that’s bad optics.”
I’d had names since the day I floated this place in church six months ago. Riders’ Rally House. Handful’s Honeys. Denim Dolls. Bunnies in Stilettos. I’d come up with those in about thirty seconds and Indira had shut me down before I finished the sentence.
“Venom Virtues,” Glitch offered, not bothering to look up from his laptop.
The table went quiet for a second.
Indira looked up from her laptop. Looked at Glitch. Looked at the ceiling. She pressed her mouth together. “That’s actually good branding,” she said, like it cost her something.
Colt snorted. Holden almost smiled. Dutch looked at Glitch, looked at Indira, and nodded once.
Church ran another twenty minutes — Portland staffing, the property-line thing, formation training Saturday. Dutch banged the gavel and the room started to clear.
I stayed in my chair as the rest of my brothers filed out. The door swung shut and it was the three of us — Dutch, Indira, and me still in my seat.
“You staying for a reason?”
I stood and walked to where they were.
“I owe you both an apology.” Indira went still.
“Dutch — you’ve been carrying me and I let you, and I’m sorry.
That stops.” Then I made myself turn to Indira, because hers was the harder one.
“Indira. I’ve been disrespecting the women around this club since before you were ever First Lady.
I did it in front of you, in this room, months ago, with that joke.
” I cleared my throat. “You didn’t come in here and try to make us into something we weren’t.
You just tried to improve us.” I looked at her straight.
“I’m sorry. For all of it. I don’t expect it to land yet.
I just needed you to hear it before I asked you for something. ”
“Ask,” Indira said.
“Let me run it.”
She snorted. “You.” She looked at Dutch, then back. “You’ve been a customer in places like that your whole adult life, Handful. You don’t have the first idea how to run a strip club.”
“No,” I agreed. “I don’t.”
That stopped her, because it wasn’t the move she’d braced for. She’d expected me to bluster the right words back at her. I’ve always been able to find the right words, that was never my problem.
“Here’s what I do know. I’ve been on the wrong side of a room like that for years, and that might be the one thing about me that’s worth a damn here, because I know exactly how every man who walks in is going to think — I was him.
And I know the fastest way to wreck it is to come in on day one like I’ve got it solved and start moving things around to look busy.
So I’m not going to. First week, I don’t touch a thing.
I go in, I watch, I listen, I find out what the place actually is and what those women actually need from whoever’s running it.
Then I decide. I’d rather come back to you in a week with my thoughts. ”
Nobody said anything for a moment.
Indira recovered first. She picked up her laptop and held it against her chest and studied me, and let only a little of whatever she was thinking out.
“That’s the smartest thing you’ve ever said,” she said.
“And I still don’t believe you. Intentions are cheap, and a week of behaving yourself is the easiest thing in the world. ” She didn’t soften it.
“I’ve watched you apologize before, Handful. Different words, same face. Then I watched you do it again. So no. I don’t believe you. You’ll have to show me, every week, for a long time. And the first week you don’t—”
“I get it.”
“You’ll have to live being doubted while you earn it back. There’s no shortcut through it.”
“I get that too.”
She looked at me a second longer, then at Dutch.
He gave me one nod.
“It’s yours,” he said. “On a leash. You go find out what right looks like and then you go be it, you keep me from ever having to think about it, and you start showing me my SAA instead of telling me about him.” Then the leash drew tight, exactly as far as he’d warned me an hour back.
“This is the job that decides whether you keep your cut. One mistake. Not a step down. Out.”
“One mistake,” I said. “Out. Understood.”
“Good.” He set his hand at the small of Indira’s back and walked her to the door. He stopped with his hand on it, not turning around. “It’s a good apology, and a better answer, Handful.” A pause. “Don’t make me remember them as the last two decent things you said before you blew it.”
“Yes, Prez.” I touched two fingers to my temple at his back.