Overdrive’s Folly (Saint’s Outlaws MC: Phoenix Chapter #2)

Chapter 1

Overdrive

Iwas actually going to be on time for once.

That was the reason I should have known my day was about to go down the shitter.

It should have been a giant red flag waving in my fucking face that on a day where I had to hit a fucking timeline to the damn minute, that something was going to throw a wrench into it all.

It was a beautiful March day in Phoenix, Arizona. Winter was over, not that the winters were harsh here, and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. Everything was going exactly as planned as I stacked and loaded firearms into the cage ride I’d borrowed from my club.

I co-owned an indoor shooting range and gun store with my best friend, and club brother, Kilo.

The weapons I was loading weren’t for our store, Double Tap, though.

These were for club business. We didn’t sell weapons to shit bags on our streets.

Every guy in our club was prior military, one branch or another, and the way we kept ourselves sane now that we were all out was by keeping our city safe.

We’d be considered vigilantes, if you needed to give us some kind of title. The weapons I was loading out of Relay’s house were earmarked for ourselves and our allies. They were all…hard…to trace. And by hard, I meant impossible.

Our friends, The Berserker’s Rage MC, in Sentinel, Wyoming—not to be confused with Centennial, trust me, I’d made that mistake the first time—needed a little extra firepower.

Even though I was the vice president of the Phoenix Chapter of The Saint’s Outlaws, I didn’t actually know what our Wyoming friends were involved in this go round.

Cypher, the president up there, ran a security firm. They got involved in shit that was so far above my paygrade it was laughable. That was the kind of shit I got into while I was in the service, but not anymore. I didn’t need quite that level of excitement any longer.

I was thirty-two years old and while that wasn’t exactly ancient, I felt every fucking year I’d spent running around overseas.

It only took some occasional action and killing to keep me satisfied these days.

Though, it’d been quiet ever since we helped Kilo’s old lady out of a scrape six months ago.

My phone rang and I grumbled as I set a heavy ass box down in Relay’s backyard to dig it out. “What?”

“Why are you still at my place?” Relay asked. “If I knew you were going to take so fucking long, I would’ve left what I was doing to help you.” There was the briefest of pauses while I shook my head at my MC brother’s words. “You’re not fucking going through my place, are you?”

“Why?” I asked, grunting as I hefted the crate back into my arms. I kept the phone pinned between my shoulder and my ear. “What would I find?”

There was a longer silence this time.

I put the crate into the back of the SUV, then narrowed my eyes. “What would I find, Relay?”

“Nothing.” His voice was too flat. The fucker was lying.

“I don’t have time for shit to go wrong today,” I warned him.

We’d been stretched thin for the last few weeks, and would be for at least another couple days until Kilo, Flir, Merc, Bolo, and Drifter got back from the run Ruck had sent them on. They’d headed over to Colorado to help out another group of friends of ours.

“Then get that shit and get out of my house. I don’t like people being there. People don’t belong in my damn house.”

“Fucking nag,” I muttered.

“And don’t touch anything,” he added.

“Sort of have to touch the crates filled with guns to get them out of your house,” I reminded him.

“You know what I mean.”

I chuckled. “What if I need to take a shit?”

“Do it in the yard.”

“I’m not shitting in the yard like a dog, asshole.

” I was just giving him a hard time. Didn’t matter that I was the VP, this wasn’t my place.

I wasn’t going to fuck around with it if Relay was touchy about it.

He rarely let anyone over here. I honestly wondered if he had bodies buried in this back yard.

Not that it would bother me if he did. We all knew what a crazy motherfucker he was.

Seriously. There was something wrong with him. But we still loved the bastard like the brother he was. “I’ll be gone in ten,” I told him, eyeing my watch on my wrist. This phone call was cutting into time I didn’t have.

Cypher and Ruck had agreed to have me and Warrant—the Berserker’s Rage Sergeant at Arms—meet at a private airstrip outside the city in forty-five minutes.

I needed to get out of here in no less than ten minutes if I was going to make it on time.

“I’ll have to wait for a different time to search your place,” I added, just to piss him off, before I hung up on him.

I ignored the ring of the phone. He eventually got the hint as I finished loading up the rest of the crates.

Wiping my arm across my forehead to catch the sweat, I grinned. “I’m fucking good.”

The phone rang again.

Glaring down at it, I swore as all satisfaction fled. Kilo’s old lady, Mercy, was calling. She shouldn’t be calling. Her plan today was to eat chocolate and watch The Notebook. I’d checked with her before I started the day because of this tight ass schedule I was on.

I’d tried to take Kilo’s place on the Colorado run.

He didn’t need to be leaving behind his six-month pregnant old lady, but Ruck had needed me here.

He was over in Pennsylvania handling his own personal shit.

I didn’t know what it was yet, but I’d find out once he got back.

That meant I was in charge of the rest of us who were still here in Phoenix until Ruck and the others got back. I answered the phone.

“OD?”

Jesus. Fuck. Goddamn it.

Mercy’s voice had caught on a sob as she said my name.

She sounded terrified. Kruzman, the man who’d been after her and her family, was dead.

She was safe from him for the rest of her life, but something had her upset.

If it was anyone else, I’d wonder if she was calling me up to cry about that damn movie, but that wasn’t the way she was.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“I…I fell.”

“What?” I asked, trying to ease the intensity of my voice.

She was clearly already petrified. The last thing I needed to do was worry her more.

I didn’t know shit about pregnancy or babies.

Fuck, I barely knew anything about women, other than how to pleasure them in bed.

My life had been a fucking shit storm of constant deployments and death before I’d gotten out of the military.

There hadn’t been time for anything other than some fucking. Nothing long-term, that was for sure.

But even I knew a pregnant woman falling wasn’t good. “Are you okay?” I winced. Of course she wasn’t. That was why she was calling me. “I mean-”

“I’m…cramping.”

Shit. What did that mean? Normal or… The sobs that started up on the other side of the line answered that question fast enough. “Okay. I’ll be there in less than ten minutes,” I told her. “Where are you?”

I moved as I listened. Starting the SUV, I reversed out of Relay’s backyard and didn’t bother to shut the gate behind me. He was going to have to bail on those plans of his today to come lock up his house.

“I’m sitting on the porch,” Mercy said with a sniffle.

“Is your mother home?”

Her family lived right next door to Kilo and I hoped like fuck someone was home. Her mom. Her sister. Someone. Anyone.

“No.”

Fuck.

“I’m going to have to hang up so I can call you an ambulance, Camila.

” I used her real name because that ‘no’ had been full of so much anguish I needed to help calm her down.

Mercy was the nickname Kilo had given her.

Once a brother gave their old ladies a nickname that was often what we went by, but this was a different situation.

Of course, Kilo was the first brother from this chapter to have an old lady.

So we were just figuring things out as we went as far as having women be a permanent part of our lives.

“Okay.”

“I’ll call you right-” I swore and jerked the wheel as some dickhead ran the red light.

He’d been trying to catch the yellow but failed.

By a long shot. That wasn’t uncommon in this city, but I was in such a fucking hurry, I’d already started out into the intersection.

I flipped the fucker off even though he was already long gone.

“I’ll call you right back,” I told her. “Hang on, okay?”

“Okay. Thanks, OD.”

Jesus. She was hurt, alone, and probably scared to death for her baby, and she was thanking me. I had to call the ambulance though. I wasn’t going to be able to do shit to help her.

“Should have made sure Drifter stayed here. No. Instead, he’s states away and I’m fucked.” He’d been a field medic. He’d know what to do in this situation.

The nine-one-one operator answered the phone, and for the next couple of minutes, I simultaneously answered her millions of questions, swore, and tried not to die in a fiery car wreck as I flew across town. I should have been on my motorcycle. Then this would have been so much faster.

Finally, the operator let me get off the phone so I could call Mercy back. When she answered, I let out a relieved breath. “Any better?”

“No,” she whispered. “I’m so stupid. I went out to get the mail. I wasn’t paying attention and my foot kicked the step. I fell up the couple of stairs on the porch.”

I winced. A direct hit to the gut? That couldn’t be good.

“I’m almost there. Three minutes at the most. Ambulance should be getting there right around the same time,” I told her.

“It was an accident. But you’re going to be fine,” I said, trying my hand at being comforting. I was pretty sure I didn’t do it right.

What did I know about comforting a woman in that way? The only time I saw pregnant chicks was in passing and I usually made a beeline in the opposite direction. Couldn’t do that with my best friend’s girl, though. I’d promised Kilo I’d take care of her.

Shit. The guns.

Using my knee under the wheel to keep the cage ride on the road, I texted Relay to let him know he was going to have to come pick these weapons up. And get his house locked down. There seriously was probably some shit inside his home we didn’t want some innocent passerby seeing.

I’d shut the backdoor, but hadn’t locked it and Relay lived in an older neighborhood that had a lot of families in it.

And I left the back gate open. Shit, shit, shit.

Not my finest hour, but in the grand scheme of things, the pregnant lady took priority.

Everyone would agree on that. Still, the last thing we needed was a kid to take the opportunity to break into the biker’s house while everyone was gone.