Chapter Eighteen
Salt Lake City, Utah
Bones sat in the corner of the café, back to the wall, one eye on the window facing onto the bustling street. He hadn’t been home since Sheila’s warning the day before, hadn’t been on his motorcycle or in his truck –he’d been fattening up Uber’s bank balance, and paying cash at some crap motel downtown, just to be sure that he wouldn’t be in a situation where his ‘brakes failed’, or some ‘home invasion’ went way wrong.
He pulled out two phones now, one a burner just for making calls, one with WiFi capabilities, registered under one of his fake ID’s. Three years before, when Crusher had started to lose the fucking plot and tip over into mayhem just for its own sake, just to alleviate his boredom, Bones had purchased these two phones. He knew that there would be an occasion when he’d use them… he hadn’t seen this situation coming, but then again, Bones had been in the life long enough to know that you never fucking know.
You just don’t know when fucking cancer will make you rethink every single one of your loyalties and life choices.
He searched online for Satan’s Bar in Denver, took a screenshot of the landline number. He stared at it for a while, simply unable to believe that he was actually going to reach out to the Road Devils for help. He knew damn good and well that they’d tell him to fuck himself – if he didn’t have the ace in his pocket that he did.
Wolf Connor and those babies… they’re my ‘get out of jail free’ card, and also my ‘gimme shelter’ card. Time to play my hand.
**
“So that’s everything that we know for sure,” Scars finished. “I wish that I had some news about Wolf, but I don’t.”
The Road Devils all stared at their President, visibly stunned at the bombshells that he’d just lobbed into the middle of the conference room. Now they knew everything about Denton, and Bale, and the (supposed) CI, and the plan concocted by Wolf and Scars that had been intended to keep Wolf safe – a plan that was as useful as an fire poker made of ice, now that Bale had been exposed as the treacherous piece of shit that he was.
“King?” Scars turned to the other man. “Anything that I forgot?”
“You covered it,” King said. “I think we’re all up to speed.”
“So what now?” Cowboy asked. “I mean, I get why storming into Utah and trying to take the Hellions clubhouse is a terrible idea all over the place, but do we have any moves? Anything at all?”
“Well, we can always get hands on this Bale fucker,” Kansas snarled. “Maybe he’d come up with a few helpful ideas if Ice got some time alone in a room with him?”
Every eye turned to Ice now, standing silently in the back of the room as usual, arms crossed. He shrugged.
“I have no objections to some one-on-one time with that motherfucker,” Ice said calmly. “I don’t know how we’d be able to trust anything that he told me, though. Someone this deep into double- and triple-lives would have backup plans for his backup plans.”
The men digested that with disquiet. Ice was right, and they knew it.
“So – what?” Saint burst out. “We got nothing ? We leave Wolf on his own, we just give up on Dux and Drake’s kids?”
“Did I say that?” Scars said, his blue eyes shining with that dangerous glint that every man in the room knew meant danger. “Huh?”
“Sorry,” Saint muttered. “I was out of line.”
“I have an idea for a way to get close to The Hellions, like through a trapdoor that they won’t see –”
Scars was interrupted by a tentative knock at the door, and Ice shot his President a look before opening it. Every member of the MC was present, and it was an iron-clad rule that when the club was assembled in this room with the door closed, it was like they’d entered another dimension: none of them existed to the outside world. The fact that someone was actually interrupting either meant that they had a death wish – and Ice had his gun out now, in case he got to grant that wish – or some other horrible tragedy had taken place, and the news couldn’t wait.
To a man, they hoped that Ice was going to have to shoot whoever was standing there, because they weren’t sure that they could handle any more bad news.
Ice opened the door, glared down at Elle standing there, wringing her hands.
“Elle!” Viking crossed the room immediately. “What’s wrong?”
“I’m sorry to interrupt, I know I shouldn’t,” she said. “I just thought – I don’t think this can wait.”
“What can’t?” Scars demanded.
“A call came in on the bar landline,” Elle said. “I think you need to take it, Scars. He’s calling back in two minutes, he said.”
“Who is?”
“I don’t know. He didn’t give a name.”
“So why do you think I need to talk to him?”
“Because,” Elle said, her voice shaking. “He said that he can help you get Wolf and the babies back, but he doesn’t have much time.”
“Why not?” King demanded.
“I don’t know. He didn’t say any more than that.”
“Shit.” Scars hurried across the room, nodded at Ice, King and Cain. “You three come with me, watch the bar doors while I’m on the phone. The rest of you, get your asses into the parking lot and over to Blue Dragon and the garage. This feels like a fucking set-up and I don’t like it.”
The men rushed down the hallway, out of the bar, to their various assigned areas. They shot suspicious looks around them as they walked, not trusting anything or anyone that they saw, and thanked Christ that to a man, they were armed.
Scars told Elle to put the call through to the bar manager’s office, then sat at his desk and waited for the phone to ring. As he did, all he could think about was Zoe and Keira, how much he fucking missed them. He’d sent them to one of King’s safe houses – which one and where, he had no idea, for their own safety – and they were now being guarded by two of King’s Men. Scars hated every single fucking thing about having to do it, but for as long as he lived, he’d never forget the sight of Keira screaming and crying in Saint’s arms, and Vixen lying broken and bloody on the ground, and the look of terror on Zoe’s beautiful face as she ran to her daughter.
In those few seconds, all Scars saw was hurt and horror; devastation and danger. As soon as Zoe had gotten Vixen’s place ready for her to come back home from the hospital, Scars had sent her and Keira with King. It was all he could do as a man, and husband, and father… so it was what he did.
The phone rang, and he took a deep breath before he grabbed it up. Whatever was going to come down the line at him, he wasn’t going to be in any way prepared for it, he knew that. But he had to at least sound competent and in control – even if that was the last way that he felt right now.
He picked up the phone, but didn’t say anything. There was a pause, then a voice in his ear:
“Scars Innis?”
It wasn’t a voice that he recognized, but that didn’t mean anything. There were plenty of men floating around in the MC orbit that he’d never heard speak, even if he knew them through word of mouth, maybe even glimpsing them himself from a distance.
Or across a scene of battle. Is this a friend or a foe? Or is he in the middle of switching from one side to the other?
“Yeah,” Scars said.
“You’re looking for a few people,” the man said. “Two of them are pretty small.”
Scars held his breath, then exhaled slowly. “Yeah.”
“I know where they are. Them and Wolf Connor.”
Scars had a hundred questions that he wanted to ask, everything from Who the fuck are you?, to How the fuck do you know any of this?, to What the fuck do you want in exchange for your help?
But if there was one thing that he’d learned from watching Wolf in negotiations and in situations where he had close to zero information, but had to look like he was in control, it was to say very little. Make the other person do all the talking, let them blab and monologue and lead you out of the dark, let things slip. Things that Wolf stored away and then used against them at the right time, when he decided to go for the jugular with the ferocity of the wild animal that he was named after.
So Scars said nothing more. He was in a very bad position here, and he knew it… but he would lay money that the man on the other end of the line was too. Probably worse, in some ways, because he was the one reaching out. He might be framing this as some kind of favor to Scars, like he was all great and powerful with his knowledge, but he needed something too. Something from Scars, something that if Scars refused it to him, he might end up hurt badly. Maybe even dead.
Scars waited some more. He heard the man breathing, noticed that it was getting tighter and faster. Scars gripped the phone, gritted his teeth, stayed quiet. Held on, willed his heartbeat to stay slow and steady, prayed to a God that he didn’t believe in that this man might be offering him the chance to get everyone back safe and whole.
“Look,” the man said abruptly. “You know that it was Viper who took those babies. You know that he’s got Wolf. You also have to know that making any moves into Utah will just spook Viper, and put everyone at risk. You can’t take that chance.”
Scars made a sound of assent in his throat, a sort of Mmmmhmmmm .
“They’re alive, all three of ‘em. But I can’t say for how much longer.” The man seemed to hesitate. “Viper is – he’s fucking pissed about what happened in Denver.”
“What didn’t happen, you mean.”
Another pause. “Yeah. Yeah. The boys fucked it all up, and as it turns out, Viper’s not good with failure. He’s – well. He’s fucking spinning out, Innis.”
“Uh-huh.” Scars got the sense that they were reaching the point where the man’s reason for picking up the phone was fast approaching, so he decided to push. Just a bit. “And?”
“And he’s now killing his own people,” the man said quietly. “Anyone who makes a mistake, or who questions what he’s doing, they’re gone. Old-timers, men who have been loyal to the club for decades and to four Presidents… just disappeared.”
Scars realized that this meant that the men who’d tried to kill Vixen and Keira were dead now, at the hands of their own brothers, and he felt a pang. He’d have taken great pleasure in making them suffer, but then again, there was a kind of perverse justice in them being taken out by the people that they’d trusted the most, their own brothers, their own family. If Wolf ordered for Scars to be killed by Arrow, or Holt, or Jinx, Scars thought that he’d die from the betrayal before they could get on with it. It would be the absolute worst way for him to go, and so a part of him was fiercely glad that the assholes in the van had been shown that level of contempt and disrespect by and from their own.
But he also realized the reason that this man was on the phone with him now: he thought that he was going to be the next to disappear, and he was quite probably right, and he was scared enough to reach out to the enemy. Which meant that Scars might not have a lot of time to get what he needed to know from him, to find out what he wanted in return for his help. For all Scars knew, the guy was in a scope-sight right that minute, seconds away from having his fucking Hellion head blown off.
“And?” Scars said again. “You next?”
“Yeah.” The man sighed, and for the first time, Scars got the sense that the guy was quite a bit older than he’d originally thought. He was almost certainly one of the ‘old timers’ that he’d mentioned. “I know it.”
“So what do you want?”
“I don’t believe in kidnapping kids,” the man said suddenly. “And I sure as fuck don’t support running them down in parking lots. I’ve done plenty of bad shit, don’t get me wrong, but there’s always, always been a line that you don’t cross, and fuck knows that kids are on the safe side of that line. Viper – Viper doesn’t have a line, Scars, but I didn’t understand that until Preacher showed up with those babies in a fucking cardboard box. That was when I knew that my club – my family – had changed into something that I don’t recognize and I don’t want anymore.”
“So you want out?”
“I do.”
“You can’t come here,” Scars said flatly. “If we took you in, we’d just be painting the bullseyes on our backs, and our families’ too. Fuck knows we’ve got enough trouble as it is, and that’s without even trying to cause any.”
“I get that. That’s not what I want.”
“So?”
“I have money saved,” the man said. “And I have three fake identities that nobody knows about, and I have property paid-for in full under one of those names. Bought it twenty years ago, told nobody about it, not one soul. All I need is someone to get me there, to my little place in the woods. Then I disappear – but I do it my way. Not Viper’s.”
“You want us to get you there?”
“Yeah. I get Wolf and those babies out and safe, meet you somewhere and hand ‘em over. Then a few of your boys get me safe – and we never see each other again. That’s the trade-off.”
“Not quite.”
“Why not?”
“Because if Wolf and those babies go missing from under his nose, Viper’s going to come after us, guns blazing. We’re not crossing into Utah because we can’t figure out how to get over there without risking them getting hurt or dead, but their lives and ours are forfeit anyway if Viper crosses into Colorado, furious about his hostages getting away.”
“Yeah.”
“So,” Scars said slowly. “You need to make sure that Viper and Preacher don’t get it into their fucked-up heads to follow us back here. You need to take care of them, and you need to make it clear to everyone that it was you , not us. I need to see proof that it’s done before I even think about coming to meet you in person. Then we have a deal.”
Now the silence fell on the other man’s side. Scars could hear his thoughts whirring, as he came to understand what Scars was saying.
“You want me to kill my President and Vice,” the man said. “And since the Hellions that they’ve brought in who are loyal to them will rain down hell on me and you, I’d also have to kill them.”
“That’s your call,” Scars said coolly. “But it sounds to me like your MC might benefit from someone going through and cleaning house. When the dust settles, whoever’s left starts again – clean slate and all that, and believe me, I know a thing or two about a club having to do that – and nobody will have any reason to be pissed at us because –”
“They’ll all be pissed at me.”
“Maybe. Or maybe most of your brothers feel the same way that you do about killing and kidnapping kids, and they’ll be grateful for Viper and his lunatic religious zealot to be gone, along with all the idiot hangers-on. Hell, they might even beg you to stay on as Prez.”
“Ha!” The man huffed out a laugh that had an edge to it that Scars couldn’t quite place. “Not a chance. I’m leaving Utah and never coming back.”
“Doesn’t matter to me,” Scars said. “All I care about is getting my people back, but not in a way that makes things worse for us.”
“I got you.”
“Good.” Scars’ chest loosened slightly. “So, time line?”
“You and your people can be here tomorrow at midnight for the pick-up.”
That startled Scars, and he fought to keep the surprise out of his voice. “Yeah?”
“Yeah. I’ll clear the decks tomorrow night, go out to Wolf and those babies as the chaos runs riot, bring ‘em to you at a safe meet-up spot.”
“Are Wolf and the kids in the same place?”
“Yeah. I can get them out with no major problems.”
“You make it sound so easy,” Scars said, a bit interested despite himself. “Wiping out half of an MC in one night.”
“Of course you don’t know who I am,” the man said. “But I can tell you this much: I was an Enforcer for the club.”
“OK.” Scars was puzzled. “So?”
“So. My specialty was toxins.”
“Ahhhh.” Suddenly Scars knew exactly who he was talking to. “Bones Gallagher.”
“That’s me.”
“OK, well. If you say you can poison half your crew, I believe you. Frankly, I’d doubt anyone but you, based on what I’ve heard. You’re a legend, man.”
“Yeah, well. I was .” Bones sighed a bit wistfully. “Poison was a bit too elegant and subtle for Crusher Alcott, so my ways became old-fashioned, and I got put out to pasture, more or less. Crusher preferred a more… direct approach to problem-solving. Liked his victims to watch him watch the life ebb out of them, eye-to-eye. Toxins were too removed from the action for him; he was a hands-on kind of guy, as I’m sure you’re aware.”
“Ain’t that the truth.”
“I’ll send you pictures when it’s done,” Bones said abruptly. “The state of the bodies will leave no doubt that they’re dead, I can assure you of that. I need a phone to send everything to.”
“Give me your number now,” Scars said. “I’ll text you from a burner in ten minutes. Use that number for the pictures, and put Wolf on the phone with me as soon as you fucking get eyes on him, and use the number I send you to text me the meet-up spot.”
“OK. Agreed to all of it.”
There was a brief pause as the men tried to think if they’d overlooked anything, forgotten anything, but that was all for now. Bones gave Scars his burner number, and after a few more seconds of silence, both men disconnected. There was nothing else to say.
For good or ill, the plan was in motion… however it was going to end up. Scars had found his trapdoor, and now he just had to drop himself into its depths and darkness totally blind. Hope for the best.
For all of us .