When I told him I had wiped my finger on my skirt right away, he looked at me with a pained expression. “Please, baby girl, will you just do this for me?”
It was hard to not do as he asked when he was looking at me with pleading eyes and a furrowed brow.
“Fine,” I said, surrendering to his adorable good looks. When I glanced over at Sybil she was smiling back at us and I had to turn away, afraid my eyes would betray me and she would see through the thin veil of my façade. That despite what I said about being just friends, my heart still wanted something very different.
CALEB
I was late to chapel the next day.
With good reason.
Everyone was seated when I walked in and threw the massive marijuana plant down on the redwood table.
I had their attention.
“Gentlemen, here is the answer to the southern weed drought,” I said.
Immediately, the air became ripe with the sweet scent of pot.
“Fuck me, look at the size of those buds!” Hawke said with a lovesick cadence only a marijuana fiend could understand. “They’re the size of my fucking fingers!”
“Where the hell did you get this?” Bull asked.
“And give me the directions because I’m ready to ride out there now,” Matlock added, eyeing the plant like it was a priceless object.
He went to touch one of the buds, but I stopped him with a warning. “You touch it and I’ll break every one of your fingers.”
“You got some secret nirvana where the marijuana grows like trees?” Vader asked with a gleam in his eyes.
“Kind of, I found these out at the Calley cabin. There has to be thirty or forty plants just growing wild by the river.” I looked at Bull. “Remember Sybil’s marijuana crops of the seventies?”
“Of course. This clubhouse is standing on the land we bought from the profits.”
“These plants are from those crops. She kept the seeds and grew a few plants for her own purpose. But she hasn’t been out there in nearly a year and a half. Didn’t realize these had even survived or repopulated. Or how many there were.”
“So what are you proposing?” Cade asked.
My older brother hated the drug trade. Just like our granddaddy, he hated the heroin and the meth, hated what it did to people and what those people did to others. But he wasn’t averse to smoking a joint.
“Things have been tight since Head Quarters burnt down and we lost five months of production. I propose we recoup those lost earnings by supplying weed to the Knights.”
We had lost close to three-million dollars thanks to a psychopath with a vendetta against the club. He’d burned down the studio as part of his plan to get my brother and cousin out on the road in the early hours of the morning. Then he had lain in wait and assassinated my cousin with two bullets from his sniper rifle.
“You mean go into business with those fuckers?” Hawke asked, clearly disgusted. “No fucking way. The Knights are a bunch of motherfucking cunts. You can’t trust them.”
As clubs went, the Kings were bigger. The Knights were a younger, broken fraction of a now defunct club from the north. They were growing in size but they lacked the finesse and discipline of the Kings of Mayhem. Their rules and our rules greatly differed.
“The Knights have trade in place. It would take months for us to set something like that up. I say, take advantage of their network and let them distribute it. We’ll grow and supply, for an attractive cost, of course.”
“Yeah, but trading with the Knights? Come on, man.” Tully had the same look of disgust as Hawke.
“I don’t know, I think it’s worth thinking about,” Maverick said, eyeing off the furry buds.
“What’s to stop them from cultivating their own crops?” Vader asked.
“Different county, different law enforcement,” I explained. “We have Bucky. They don’t.”
Sheriff Buckman had been in our pocket since day one. He would turn a blind eye. For a hefty fee, of course.
“Besides, they’ve kept their fingers out of the porn business,” I reminded them. “They’ve kept their hands off our trade.”
“This might just work,” Bull said, staring at the massive plant on the table in front of him. He looked up at all the men gathered around the table. “All of us in favor of the Kings reaching out to the Knights and offering a supply deal, say aye.”
The room reverberated with sixteen men saying aye.
All except one.
Hawke pouted like a petulant child.
“Hawke?” Bull questioned.
“I hate the idea of doing any business with those fuckers,” he sneered.
“We’re just reaching out. We’ll need to finalize how much we can supply, how much setting up the production will cost. But before that, we’ll need to know if they’re even interested in a supply deal.”
“You’ve got your numbers. Sixteen votes to one.” Hawke continued to look pissed.