Epilogue #2
But maybe he wasn’t the only brother who felt adrift.
“They jumped in for you, for Carlyle, and I know that,” Rush
carried on. “But it was not lost on me they jumped in. Chompin’ at the
fuckin’ bit to have something righteous to turn their minds to.”
“I still don’t get what you’re sayin’,”
Dutch told him, though he thought he did.
He felt it in his gut.
A heat.
The good kind.
“Chaos needs a righteous cause and I have no idea what that
is and how to give it to them, but I have a feeling you can help me,” Rush
replied.
“Fortunately, there are not many Carlyles
in this world,” Dutch pointed out.
“Yeah. So I suggest you and me go talk to Beck.”
Dutch blinked in shock. “Say what?”
Beck was the president of Resurrection, another Denver area
MC.
And Resurrection was to Chaos what Nightingale
Investigations was to the Denver Police Department.
For the most part, the causes they took on were just, but
their route to resolving them was seriously direct, nebulously legal, and in
Resurrection’s case, if need be, brutal.
“The brothers who want something to sink their teeth into,
they’ll get it. The brothers who want to kick back and enjoy life without that
shit can do that,” Rush told him.
“You know all the brothers will kick in,” Dutch said.
Rush shrugged.
Then grinned.
After that, he got down to business.
“It’s not once, but a number of times Beck has come to me to
ask if we’d wade into shit they got goin’ on.”
“I know. You bring that to the table. And it’s always voted
down.”
“We weren’t ready. I think now we’re ready.”
After their own dance on the dark side, Resurrection had
leapt so far to the good, they were on the other edge of the dark.
It was understandable. They had all, but mostly Beck, lost
hold on their decency.
A man with something to prove was a man to keep an eye on.
A biker with something to prove was a man you didn’t take
your eyes from.
An entire fucking MC with that was a force of nature.
Chaos knew that all too well.
The last situation Rush had brought to the table from
Resurrection had been about a woman whose husband had cleaned her out—every
dime in their accounts, every stick of furniture—left her with a mortgage, a
toddler, a baby in her belly, but not one thing else, and disappeared.
Dutch hadn’t paid much attention, because he knew in the end
how the vote would eventually go, but discussion had been intense around the
Chaos table before that was voted down.
Though he had been one of three—him, Jagger and Hound—who
had voted “in.”
Word was, the guy was found.
And when Dutch heard, he’d thought distractedly, because it
wasn’t in his sphere, that he wished he knew how it did, and he wouldn’t have
minded being a part of that.
“We’d be assist,” Rush said. “Not up to our necks, but
enough to give the men something to feed that need. And I think you’d be a good
go-between. Know what we’d want, bring it to the table, even know if
Resurrection passes on somethin’ we’d pick up.”
“Rush, you were totally against this vigilante shit the
entire time we were doin’ this vigilante shit,” Dutch
reminded him.
“That was then, this is now, and this is entirely
different.”
“How do you reckon?”
“We’ll have control of what we get involved in and we won’t
get involved in anything that will get our women kidnapped, for one.”
There was that.
“For another, this won’t be about attacks on the Club we gotta defend against. We won’t be on our back foot. Ever.
We can go in knowing what we’re facing, discuss it and decide.”
And there was that.
“And last, this isn’t us going out and possibly buying
trouble in an effort to keep our patch clean. Risks will be measured and
discussed. And we can cut loose if shit goes somewhere we don’t wanna follow.”
And yeah, there was that.
Rush studied him acutely. “You’re not into this idea.”
“I’m one hundred percent into this idea.”
And he was.
He was no cop and no private investigator.
What he was, was Graham Black and Shepherd Ironside’s son.
And he’d been thinking it was either go to Jules and see if
he could work with other kids on a volunteer basis or suck it up and enjoy
building things with Georgie while he sold fan belts.
This was better.
Way fucking better.
“I’m glad you said that. Because what I haven’t told you yet
is that Lee has also been in touch. They got so much business, it’s comin’ out their ears. In that, there’s a steady stream of
people who need him, approach him, but when they find out his rates, they gotta take a hike because they cannot afford him. He told
me he does a shit-ton of pro bono work, but he needs a good place to punt. What
you did with Carlyle, he reached out and asked if we wanted to be a receiving
team. I said I’d take it to the table.”
Dutch was back to staring at his brother.
It didn’t take long before he started smiling, slow.
It took even less time for Rush to return it.
And his was fast.
“I’ll call a meet,” Rush finished it.
“And I’ll be there. But just sayin’,
I got as far as I got with Carlyle’s case mostly because of Georgie.”
“Is she going anywhere?” Rush asked.
“Fuck no,” Dutch answered.
Rush smiled again and this one was bigger.
And Dutch returned it.
They clasped forearms, Rush turned and jogged back to the
Compound, and Dutch finished making his way to Cherry’s office.
He barely entered it when Elvira declared, “I love your
girlfriend, and me gettin’ to do this isn’t the only
reason why.”
With that, she slapped a little black shopping bag against
his chest that had white writing on it and a pretty flower stuck to it.
“Now, I gotta get back to the
commandos,” she said and walked right out.
Dutch looked to Cherry behind her desk.
“I think Georgie will really like them. But if she doesn’t,
she can take them back and get what she wants. Don’t open the box and look,
though, honey. They tie it up really pretty and she’ll want to undo it,” Tyra
said.
He nodded and said, “Thanks.”
“Anytime. Seriously,” she replied.
He lifted his chin to her, walked out to the steps that led
up to her office and looked into the bag.
At the bottom was a little black box tied up with white
fabric ribbon and it had another of those flowers stuck on top.
Such total class, even if Georgie didn’t dig what was
inside, she’d like the packaging.
He’d stowed the bag and was back behind the counter of Ride,
shooting the shit with Chill and a prospect they called Hugger (and they called
him that because the dude hated to be touched) when his phone rang.
And he saw from what was on his screen, if it was what he
thought it was, that day was going to be a very good day.
“Yo,” he greeted Eddie.
“Thanks for the heads-up, man. Dropped a few lines in a few
ears, people started opening their eyes and watchin’,
then a coupla supervisors called in a few female
employees, and Jackson Stamper has been creepin’ on
them somethin’ sick. They didn’t want to say anything
because they thought they were bein’ too sensitive
and it was only them he was gettin’ too close to, pushin’ for dates, and findin’
ways to rub up against them that couldn’t exactly be called sexual harassment,
even when it totally was. He was let go this morning, and so they didn’t do
that ugly, he was warned not to ask for a reference, and told, in a nice
government HR way, he could go fuck himself for severance.”
All right then.
Dutch didn’t know if that was cerebral.
But he hoped like fuck it’d be long-lasting.
“Right.”
“We got any other issues we don’t know about that you do
that you can help us solve?” Eddie joked.
“Not right now,” Dutch told him.
“You know my phone number when you do. Later, Dutch.”
“Later, Eddie.”
Dutch tucked his phone in his back pocket.
“Why you grinnin’ like that?”
Hugger asked.
The kid was surly. Big. Beefy. According to Carissa, he was
“teddy-bear good-looking.”
But he was a teddy bear to teddy bears like Chucky was to
dolls.
None of the brothers knew what was under his skin.
Except maybe Rush.
Rush had put him forward and Rush read—and the man had done
nothing since they took him on five months ago to contradict it—that the core
of Hugger was decent, solid.
So he wasn’t lovable.
Hound had hidden he was that for two decades.
Catch the man with his mother, or Wilder, for two seconds,
you’d know where he was at.
“It’s just a good day,” Dutch answered.
“Yeah, I’d have a good day every day, I woke up next to your
tail,” Roscoe declared while strolling up to them, giving Dutch his usual shit
about Georgie.
Dutch opened his mouth, but Hugger got there first.
“You wanna taste your gonads in
your throat after I punch them up there, you keep talkin’
’bout his woman like that.”
And there was the solid.
“Relax, mountain man, I’m just givin’
him shit,” Roscoe said good-naturedly, “mountain man” being what Roscoe called
him since Hugger was blond, with a massive, bushy light-and-dark beard, like
Grizzly Adams.
“Find somethin’ else to give him
shit about, leave his woman out of it,” Hugger warned.
And Dutch had to hand it to the guy, he was prospect, and he
didn’t hide he wanted the patch and was willing to work for it, but he was not
backing down from a patched-in brother.
Roscoe was assessing him, unoffended, but with interest.
Then Coe looked to Dutch. “You good?”
“Yup,” Dutch answered.
“Excuse me, do you carry WD-40?” a woman asked.
They all looked to her.
She was pretty.
And she was stacked.
“Let me lead the way,” Roscoe offered magnanimously.
They took off.
Dutch turned his attention to Hugger. “It’s his way of tellin’ me he digs I got a good woman, man. If he didn’t
like Georgie, he’d keep his trap shut on all accounts. So appreciate the
backup, but you can chill.”
Hugger looked him right in the eye.
“You don’t talk about women like that.”
And there it was.
What Rush read in Harlan “Hugger” McCain.
“You’re heard,” Dutch muttered.
Hugger grunted.
Chill gave Dutch a look.
Dutch shook his head.