“Got it. But nah, it was just the wishful thinkin’ of an old man. Shits goin’ down with the Nightstalkers and I’m not sure who to trust, to tell you the fuckin’ truth of it.”
King frowned. “You think you got a rat?”
My phone buzzed in my pocket. I held up a finger for King and answered, “Yeah.”
“Prez, there’s another fire,” Nova said over the sound of revving engines in the background.
“Fuck, where this time?”
“The grow-op near Squamish. We got Officer Hutchinson over there now, he’ll deal with keepin’ the illegal nature of the warehouse on the down low, but there’s more.”
“Say it,” I growled.
“They hit the tattoo parlor and the truckin’ company too. There’s graffiti everywhere and they took all the money from the till at Street Ink Tat Parlor, but there wasn’t anythin’ to take from Edge Trucking. This was to make a fuckin’ point.”
“Motherfuckers,” I spat. “How the fuck they’d know about Edge Trucks, huh? Buck’s owned that company since before he was even a fuckin’ member and it’s under his old fuckin’ name. Explain that to me, would ya?”
“Can’t,” Nova said grimly. “Got that kid Curtains on it. I’m headin’ to Street Ink, Bat’s over in Squamish and Buck’s at the trucking company.”
“I’ll meet Bat,” I said.
“Uh, I’d meet me, Prez, the staff sergeant’s at Street Ink and he’s claimin’ the business was ‘unsafe’ and in violation of about a dozen fuckin’ codes.”
“Fuck,” I roared. “Who the fuck told them about this shit? I swear to motherfuckin’ God that heads will fuckin’ roll for this shit.”
I hung up, jammed the phone in my pocket and stormed over to the door.
“Later,” I called over my shoulder to King,
He was up and movin’ though. “I’m comin’.”
“You’re not a member of this club, kid.”
His eyes flashed grey as a lightning strike just like mine. “Fuck that. We both know I was born a member and I’ll die a member. Just ’cause I ain’t prospectin’ doesn’t mean this isn’t my goddamn family that’s been fucked with.”
I clapped him on the back and brought ’im close to press our foreheads together and squeeze the back of his neck. “How’d an old fuck like me end up with such a kickass kid?”
He grinned and clapped me on the back. “Pure luck.”
It was late, or fuckin’ early dependin’ on how you looked at it. It’d been a long fuckin’ night of puttin’ out fires, literally and metaphorically. Our friendly neighborhood cop, Hutchinson, had dealt with the fire at the grow-op but we’d lost the entire fuckin’ thing. It was a huge loss even for the scale of an operation like ours and to say I was pissed woulda been the understatement of the fuckin’ year.
There were three more of those glossy eight-by-ten photographs, one at each scene and each mutilated violently. King’s stuck in the empty till at Street Ink, Cress’s plastered on the gates to the Edge Trucking lot and Lou’s on the mailbox at the grow-op.
More warnings.
Only they weren’t warnings anymore. They were threats and I wasn’t havin’ fuckin’ anymore of that shit.
The problem was, I didn’t know where the fuck these fuckin’ Nightstalkers were. They weren’t actin’ like bikers. I didn’t see ’em drivin’ down the streets of Entrance in their colours or hear tell of them in any biker bars on the Sea to Sky. They were just these invisible enemies playin’ a game I didn’t want any fuckin’ part of.
They were bein’ smarter than last time, which meant that they had someone else helpin’ ’em. Someone smarter, and I intended to find out who that fuckin’ well was.
None of the brothers would be sleepin’ for a long fuckin’ time, includin’ me, but I was tired as shit, mad as hellfire and I wanted—fuckin’ needed—my girl.
Which was why I’d parked my bike down the road from her house and was calmly breakin’ into the backdoor of the Lafayette mansion. They had a weakass-alarm that I disarmed easily with a little help from The Fallen’s resident computer hacker, Curtains, and then crossed softly in my boots through the house and up the epic fuckin’ staircase.
Wasn’t a man who liked opulence, gold plated this or eighteenth century that, but even I could recognize that the place was worth a fuckin’ mint. It was fucked to me that my Lou grew up in a place like it, like a fuckin’ museum. There were no pictures of the kids on the walls, only old guys with huntin’ rifles, and there was no life in the house. No clothes on the stairs or keys and shit on tables. Just rich furniture and a smell like clean money.
I knew which bedroom was Lou’s from the letters. She’d always talked about the huge willow tree outside her bay window, about the fact that her nanny had let her paint her door pale pink in defiance of her parents and then promptly been fuckin’ fired for it.