Chapter 12 Jackal
JACKAL
“Iknow you don’t want to sit through this, but let’s just get on with it, yeah?” I say, looking at the frown on Garrett’s forehead a few days later.
He hugs the coffee he just poured from the pot behind the bar at the clubhouse. “Video calls make me itch.”
“Dude. Most things make you itch.” I laugh. “Come on. You’ll feel better once we’ve caught up with Jersey.”
“You sound like a parent trying to convince an errant toddler to eat green beans,” Catfish says with a chuckle from his spot farther down the bar.
“I miss fax machines,” Garrett complains. “Handwriting on paper, then just feeding that shit into a machine to send it.”
Atom is warming his hands in front of the fire. “Like you were around when fax machines were used like that.”
“Fine.” Garrett shrugs. “I miss the idea of them. I don’t need to be seeing everyone’s face on my phone every two seconds. Don’t need to be typing on keys so fucking tiny, you need the finger size of a seven-year-old to type on them.”
“Jesus,” Grudge grumbles. “You get out of bed on the wrong side this morning?”
Garrett flips him the bird and I see the scabbed knuckles he got when we tried to re-lay some of the paving down the side of Isla’s house while she was at work yesterday.
He got it in his head that it was a trip and fall hazard after we helped her with all her unwanted stuff, and I was happy to spend a couple of hours working with him to fix it.
“That might be the most words I’ve heard him say in one go since I met him,” Smoke adds.
“Let’s get this over with, yeah?” I say, tipping my chin toward the room we use for church. Grudge said it was cool for us to use it.
“If someone hadn’t already named him Shade, we should call him Eeyore,” Wraith says.
“Eyesore?” Garrett asks, and everyone chuckles.
“Ee-yore,” Wraith enunciates. “You know. The perpetually depressed donkey in the Winnie-the-Pooh books. Fen loves him.”
“Fuck my life,” Garrett mutters, and it’s enough to make him follow me into church and close the door behind us.
There’s a laptop set up in church by Wren.
It’s as secure as fuck, apparently. Now, where possible, we’re supposed to use it to communicate, to lessen the risks of being hacked or tapped.
There are rules taped next to it on the table.
No using it for email. No saving files. No opening attachments. Nothing.
I call up Halo, the road captain of the New Jersey chapter, and while we wait, I squeeze Garrett’s leg beneath the table. “Are you okay, love?”
He sighs. “Just got some shit on my mind.”
Before I can ask what it is, the screen flickers to life, and Halo appears in a room that looks like a building site.
The drywall is half up, Spark, the club’s sergeant at arms, is in the background cutting wood to length, and someone has a song playing that I swear is Metallica but it’s being played in the tinkling keys of a piano.
“Yo, brothers,” Halo says. His hair is up in a messy bun, there’s a dust mask around his neck, and he’s removing work gloves. He drops his hands down to the ground and then stands again with his daughter, Lola, in his arms. “Say hi to Jackal and Shade, sweetie.”
She flexes her chubby fingers to wave at us. “Hello.”
“Hey, Lollipop. You got so big,” I say.
“I help Daddy.” She smiles so fucking brightly, I can see why Halo loves her.
I mean, he’s biologically her brother and it was a huge adjustment when he was suddenly left to care for her.
His father was a piece of work. Knocked up a club girl.
Then, the two of them shacked up with the baby until they were murdered.
Now, Halo and Ari, who is the club girl’s sister, are a couple and have adopted Lola.
“I can see that. How’s Ari doing?”
“Fucking blessed, man. She’s due in seven weeks. Had an easy ride compared to King’s old lady, which, did you hear, he had a little girl two days ago. Five weeks premature.”
“Yeah? Everyone okay?”
Halo nods. “Rae was a champ. Baby’s doing great in the NICU. Little fighter like her dad.”
“More like her mom.” Niro appears on screen with a pencil behind his ear. Next to him is Avery, who has a matching pencil tucked behind her ear too. “Although King’s been a bit strung out, both of his girls in the hospital.”
“Yeah,” Avery says. “We got to see her through a window. She’s in a plastic box to keep her super warm and let her grow. Her name is Imogen Juno Hills. When she was born, Uncle King cried, and then baby Imogen cried, and then Uncle Colton cried and then—”
Niro playfully places his hand over her mouth as she chuckles. “Yeah, yeah, kid. We get it. We all fucking cried.”
Avery’s hand immediately comes out, even while being gagged.
“Fuck my life,” Niro says, and pulls out two fives and hands them to her.
Out of nowhere, she pulls that grubby panda backpack she schleps everywhere with her.
“You still got the panda?” Garrett says.
“Yeah,” she says as she stuffs the two fives in it. “But I empty it once a week and give it to Uncle Vex to invest for me. I have a portfolio. Do you want to see me pick a lock? Uncle Colton taught me. I can do it in under thirty seconds.”
Garrett laughs. “Send us a video later.”
See, the curmudgeon who didn’t want a video call is now not only fucking smiling but asking Avery to send him a video later. He’s such a contrarian, at times.
I can’t help but smile too. It’s easy to see how some things don’t change when you stay in one place. Niro still swears, Avery’s investments increase, and Jersey is all growing up together, having babies and getting married and shit.
I fucking want that. I just didn’t want to live in New Jersey. I needed something with mountains and air and big sky.
“Is now a good time to talk?” Garrett asks.
“Sure,” Halo says. “Ave, can you take Lola back to the mats over there and read to her for a bit?”
Avery looks up to Niro. He’s not even her father; his best friend, Bates, is. But the two of them have had a special relationship since the day they met. I swear that girl spends more time with Niro and Cat than she does at her own house.
Avery looks to Niro for the answer.
Niro nods. “Yeah. Go ahead. You can help with the wiring when we’re done with our call.”
“You’re letting a kid do the electrical?” I ask.
Niro leans a little closer to the screen. “Yeah. The kid’s got smaller fingers than me. It’s perfect.”
I shake my head. I’m sure he’s turned off the power, but still…
“King said you guys installed new standards,” Garrett says, nudging us to the conversation we’re meant to be having.
“Yeah.” Halo points to something over his shoulder. “Can you see this?”
He angles the camera at a large board with members’ names down the left and a whole bunch of categories across the top.
“Yeah. What are we looking at?” Garrett asks, leaning forward and squinting.
“We introduced four categories,” Niro says.
“Endurance, Firearms Accuracy, Tactical Mobility, and Auxiliary Skill Set. Since we put it in place a year ago, Jersey’s men have improved endurance by thirty percent, firearms proficiency and accuracy by twenty-eight percent, tactical mobility by forty-three percent, and every member has at least two additional recognized skills.
Locksmithing, advanced driving, reconnaissance, EMT trauma basics—Switch even started a triage and nursing program. ”
“Those are good numbers,” Garrett admits.
I nod. “We’ll get to how you implemented it in a second, but what do you think caused the biggest buy-in?”
“The men would say it was that King chewed them all out,” Niro says.
“So, what’s the truth?” I ask
Halo laughs, and he flips to another chart that looks exactly the same. “This.”
The improvements look just as powerful, and then I see the names. Gwen. Iris. Rae. Calista. “You got the old ladies doing it too.”
Niro grins. “My idea. I was already doing self-defense shit with them, but they were getting bored of drills. As soon as Clutch saw Gwen’s numbers, he kicked his own up a gear.”
I can just imagine Grudge’s face if I started sharing Lucy’s numbers with him.
Halo laughs. “I remember the day Gwen fucking smashed his assault course time. The guy has now lost sixteen pounds, dropped to single-digit body fat, and runs that course every fucking week.”
“Clutch always did like cake,” Garrett says.
“So, walk us through it,” I say. “What’s in each section? How did you train the men for it? Was there pushback? How frequently do you address it?”
Garrett and I both make notes as the brothers talk about setting up an infrastructure, finding the right teachers, leveraging external expertise.
Halo hired one of his former Navy SEAL brothers to consult on an assault course they’d built on land next to the clubhouse.
Spark helped the club figure out how to walk the line between acting like a military unit, but also still feeling the freedom of the life by positioning it as increasing their success rates in carrying out club business.
As for time, each member was meant to put an afternoon a week on their additional skills, with brothers taking it in turns teaching one another.
Like Vex teaching drone surveillance or Niro teaching survival skills.
King has also made an investment in gear.
Discrete body armor during raids was now mandatory to reduce injuries.
Now, they’re more effective, with more skills, which means they make more money and get hurt less.
Halo sets the laptop back down and wipes sweat from his forehead with his elbow. “Anyway, that’s the overview. We can send you templates, the breakdown, the minimum-standards list. You can adapt it however you want.”
“We appreciate it,” I say, wrapping up writing my notes. “We might have to start small, like you did, and build up to what you have now, so if you have some of your early-day stuff too, that would be helpful.”
Garrett nods beside me. From the way he’s pulling at a loose piece of thread on his hoodie, I can see he’s checked out. Whatever’s been weighing on him this morning still has him in its grip.
“You two good?” Niro asks.
“Yeah,” Garrett answers too quickly. “Just thinking.”
“That’s dangerous,” Spark says, arriving with Archer under his arm like a wriggling and chuckling football. He waves as he walks by.
“Fuck you,” Garrett says, but he manages to pull some warmth from somewhere, so no one gets offended.
Then, Halo claps his hands. “Okay, Colorado. We got to get back to childproofing this deathtrap.”
“Childproofing?” I ask, and for a fleeting moment, I wonder whether that’s something Garrett and I should consider as we fix up our home. Mainly for my family’s visits, or maybe even our own future.
Niro glances around. “We’re turning this outbuilding into an onsite day care. Costs a small fortune to get babies looked after by strangers we don’t know. Figured there’s a tiny-people explosion around here, so having our own and paying a couple of people we know to run it keeps costs down.”
“And we know the kids are safe, here in the compound,” Halo says. “Anyway, keep us looped in and let us know how it goes.”
We say our goodbyes and then hang up.
Garrett exhales like he’s been holding air in his chest for a year.
I reach over and rest my hand on his thigh again. “What’s going on?” I ask quietly.
He stares at the closed laptop screen for a long moment before answering. “Just got some shit on my mind I’m working through.”
“Garrett.”
His head snaps to mine. “It’s Shade. We’re still in the clubhouse.”
I shake my head. “I don’t give a fuck where we are. Is the thing on your mind you and me?”
I can see the confusion etched in his features. “It’s a me thing.”
“That’s still not good enough. You’re doing that thing again. Where you pull back on me. On us.”
His eyes flick up for a heartbeat, and there’s worry in them. Something heavy and unspoken between us. But before I can push again, the door creaks open, and I snatch my hand back off Garrett’s thigh.
“Needed to get my keys,” Grudge says.
“King had his baby,” I say. “A little girl. Imogen Juno Hills.”
Grudge finds what he’s looking for, but there’s anger in the lines of his face. “Everyone healthy?”
“So Halo said. She’s a preemie baby but doing great. Are you okay, Prez?”
“Jinx didn’t show for his gate shift. Again. And the little shit isn’t picking up his phone. I’m two seconds from dragging his ass through a patch review. Catfish has stepped in, but a fucking senior member shouldn’t be on the fucking gate.”
Garrett stands suddenly. “Give us the address, we’ll go have a word.”
Which I guess means the end of our conversation.
For now.