CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The bar in LaPlace looked like it had been built out of storm damage and bad decisions. It didn’t look like a ‘yuppy’ bar at all but maybe by Bunny’s standards it was.
It leaned low beneath a rusted tin roof at the edge of a two-lane road where the swamp pressed close enough to breathe through the walls. With the rain still coming down, they wondered if it would get washed away in the next good wind.
Mosquitoes gathered in the porch light though the sun had not fully gone down, thick black commas circling the yellow glow. Gunner saw the yellow glow of gators’ eyes in the distance, lightning leaving a trail of electricity in the distance.
A hand-painted sign over the door promised cold beer, boiled shrimp, pool, and no trouble, which told Gunner the place had hosted plenty of the last thing at one time or another.
Gunner parked his bike beneath a dead cypress and let the engine tick itself quiet.
Skull rolled in beside him with his shoulders hunched forward, Razor came next with mirrored shades hiding eyes that missed nothing, and Iggy killed his headlight last, leaving the four Shadow Warriors standing in the rain and damp heat with road dust and mud on their boots and suspicion already between their teeth.
“This the place?” Iggy asked, looking at the sagging porch, the bug zapper snapping blue over a trash can, the warped screen door patched with duct tape.
“Bunny picked it,” Razor said. “Which means either she trusts it or she wants us uncomfortable.”
Skull spat into the gravel.
“Woman named Bunny working twenty years inside the Graveyard Saints doesn’t survive by being cute.”
Gunner said nothing. He watched the door. The swamp air carried fryer grease, spilled beer, and the green rot of the bayou. Somewhere behind the building, frogs called back and forth like men passing coded warnings. He had met informants in prettier places and trusted them less.
Inside, the bar was narrow and dim, with deer heads over the liquor shelves and dollar bills stapled to the ceiling until they formed a sagging green canopy.
Two yellowed ceiling fans that had once pushed cigarette smoke in slow circles, never clearing it, still spun in a slow, gentle circle not providing any air or ventilation to the old place.
A jukebox glowed red in the corner, silent for now. The bartender watched the men come in and decided quickly that polishing glasses was safer than asking questions.
Bunny sat in the last high-top table beneath a neon crawfish sign with one pink heel hooked around the rung of her chair and a sweating glass of bourbon untouched in front of her.
She was older than her name implied, sharp at the edges, hair pinned up with a silver clip shaped like a knife. Her denim jacket hung open over a black tank, and the small Graveyard Saints patch sewn inside the lapel had been folded back where only someone looking for it would see.
“You boys planning to stand there and soak up ambiance?” Bunny asked. “Or did you ride all the way to LaPlace to learn something?”
Gunner slid into the booth across from her. Skull took the outside position, blocking the aisle with his bulk. Razor stayed standing long enough to check the back door, the hall to the restrooms, the two old men pretending not to listen at the bar.
Iggy dropped into the chair at the end and smiled like he had not already counted every bottle that could become a weapon.
“Start with Neela,” Gunner said. “How bad is she?”
Bunny’s mouth twitched as she got up from her seat to take a chair beside them.
“That depends on whether you mean dangerous or desperate.”
“Both.”
She lifted the bourbon, but only to roll the glass between her palms.
“Neela has always been both. That’s why people follow her.
Or why they used to. She can scare a man into shutting up, then turn around and get your kid placed in a hospital bed that apparently wasn’t there before, with the right doctor paid in full before dawn.
She makes you feel like the fire is under control because she’s the one holding the match. ”
Razor leaned against the booth post.
“You love her or hate her?”
“Yes,” Bunny said. Iggy gave a soft laugh.
“That clears it up.”
Bunny finally looked at him, and the laugh died without anyone touching it. This woman was hard. Hard as nails and it was apparent she’d chosen to stay undercover.
“I have been inside the Graveyard Saints almost twenty years. I have patched their cuts, cooked their books, lied to sheriffs, buried guns, moved girls out of bad houses, and watched presidents come and go like hurricanes.
“Before the last one, there were at least six in five years. Most died from in-fighting within the club. Neela was barely out of her teens, with rage in her bones, when I first saw her. She grew teeth because the world kept putting fingers in her mouth.”
Skull’s knuckles tapped once on the table.
“We didn’t come for a biography.”
“Then listen faster,” Bunny said. “Because her biography is the motive.”
Gunner let that settle. A waitress came by with a tray and thought better of stopping when she saw the booth.
The neon crawfish hummed over Bunny’s shoulder, bathing one side of her face in red.
Behind the bar, a television played a weather report with the sound off, the radar blooming red, yellow, and orange over the Gulf like a bruise.
What was more concerning was the purple off in the distance. A hurricane.
“She lost money,” Gunner said. “Millions. We know that much.”
“She was losing it,” Bunny corrected. “There’s a difference. This morning when I left, she was smiling again. Not relaxed. Neela doesn’t do relaxed. But lighter. Like she had found the bottom of a flooded room and could push off it.”
Razor’s head tilted knowing the possible reasons.
“Because of the market?”
“Because she found a different investment,” Bunny said.
“Wouldn’t tell me the name. Wouldn’t tell Tank either and he pretends that doesn’t bother him.
She had calls coming in before sunrise, one of them from a trader out of Houston, another from someone overseas.
She kept saying the window was narrow, that if she moved fast enough she could not just recover the loss, she could cover the promise. ”
Iggy’s smile disappeared.
“What promise?”
Bunny looked down at her bourbon. For the first time since they walked in, she seemed almost tired.
“The one Edison made.”
Gunner’s jaw tightened at the name. Edison Hale, the real name of the previous president of the Graveyard Saints, had been dead ten years and still managed to cost living people sleep.
“Say it clean.”
“Twenty million to the Swamp Rats,” Bunny said. “Promised before he died. Not borrowed on paper. Not clean enough for court. But promised in front of men who don’t need signatures.”
Skull sat back slowly. The booth creaked beneath him.
“For what?”
“Passage, protection, and silence,” Bunny said.
“Edison wanted a pipeline through their swamp routes without paying every time a shipment moved. The Swamp Rats wanted a stake big enough to buy loyalty for a decade. Edison gave them a number he thought the next war would cover. Then he died, the war didn’t pay, and Neela inherited the throne with that promise sitting under it like a bomb. ”
Razor took off his shades and folded them carefully.
“Due date?”
“Friday at midnight,” Bunny said. “At least that’s what the whisper became after the Swamp Rats sent word last week. Pay by then, or the debt stops belonging to the club and starts belonging to Neela personally.”
Iggy stared at her.
“How does a debt become personal?”
“The old way,” Bunny said. “Blood and leverage. They take everything around her first. Safe houses. Garages. Trucks. Names. Even bikes. Then they come for her piece by piece until somebody decides mercy is cheaper than revenge.”
Gunner looked toward the dark window. Beyond his reflection, the road was empty except for the parked bikes and the slow blink of insects in the porch light.
“So Neela gambled club money because Edison wrote a check with somebody else’s future.”
“She didn’t call it gambling,” Bunny said. “She called it buying time. She called it keeping the Saints independent. She called it making sure no man who hated her got to say Edison’s chair was too big for a woman.”
“And what do you call it?” Razor asked.
Bunny smiled without humor.
“Neela being Neela. Brilliant right up until brilliance needs a body count.”
For a long moment none of the Shadow Warriors spoke.
The bar seemed to lean closer around them.
Ice cracked in Bunny’s glass. The ceiling fan groaned.
Out by the pool table, one of the old men scratched badly and muttered a curse, but even that sounded distant, as if the whole room understood the conversation at the back booth had lowered the temperature.
Gunner finally leaned forward.
“This new investment. You think it’s real?”
“I think she believes it is,” Bunny said. “And that scares me more than if she knew it was rotten. We all know she’s been stealing from the club for years, making investments that she wants, not the club. The boys are becoming suspicious and she’s in deep shit.”
Skull folded his arms.
“Why agree to see us?” Bunny’s eyes went to the door, then to each of them in turn.
“Because by Friday, every hungry club between here and Baton Rouge will smell blood. The Swamp Rats want their twenty. The Saints don’t have it. Neela thinks she can pull a miracle out of a market that already tried to eat her alive. And if she fails, she won’t be the only one who burns.
“If she can’t get her hands on her daughter, they’ll take the club, the bikes, the members, all of it.
Willing or not. Then, they’ll take her. She’ll go from president of a club to a club whore being used for the entertainment of everyone.
Do you know how many clubs will line up at the Swamp Rats club to get a piece of her? ”
“I can only imagine,” said Gunner.
“No. No, you can’t. I have a bad feeling about this recent investment but she’s not the kind of woman that will listen.” Bunny looked at the clock and frowned.
“One last question. How does she figure her daughter is worth twenty million? One woman. That’s a lot of money,” said Iggy feeling the bile rise in throat.
“Because what Neela didn’t know is that the kid owns everything. It all belongs to her. The club, bikes, businesses, warehouses, all of it. The old man left it to her, not Neela. They’ll come for Neela, they’ll get their licks in with her but what they’ll really want is Olive.”
The table was silent except for the pattering of rain on the roof and the sounds of pool balls hitting one another.
“I have to get back before I’m missed. Just keep the kid safe.”
“She’s not a kid anymore. Neela wouldn’t want her if she was,” said Skull.
“That’s where you’re wrong. If she were a kid, she’d want her even more.” Bunny stood and walked out of the bar, headed to her own bike. Just as they were about to stand and leave, the sound of gunshots filled the air.
The men in the bar, so used to gunfire just stared at one another.
“That ain’t somebody shootin’ gators,” smirked the man at the pool table.
Gunner ran out first, his own weapon drawn. Lying across her bike, it appeared as if Bunny was bleeding everywhere. The life in her eyes gone, her breath no longer her own. Skull stared at the scene, Iggy and Razor looking for tail lights. Iggy finally summed it up.
“Fuck.”