Arsen

by Kathryn Thomas

  “So you want to bring her into the club?” Zane asked, just to make sure Arsen understood what he was saying.

  “Yes.”

  “As your old lady?”

  “If you want to look at it that way. Look, we need her, okay? When the Advocates dropped a dime on the Horsemen, they also told me they want to double their order size. This works because we ship enough of the legal shit to cover what we use for the molly. But if the molly orders outpace the soap by too much, then we’ll have a hard time explaining where all the stuff is going. That’s when people start crawling up our asses with microscopes. But if we can push the soap right along with the rise in molly, that keeps us under the radar.”

  “You’re talking about giving her a share?”

  “Two. She’d earned it, don’t you think?”

  The Blades operated on a share system. The club took its cut, then what was left was divided among the members and their old ladies. If you worked for the club, you got a cut. One share for general labor, such as running the machinery in the plant, packaging the product, or maintaining the clubhouse. Two shares for skilled labor, like machine maintenance, handling the books for the club, or in Quinn’s case, marketing their legitimate business. Arsen and Alex got three shares because of their more specific skills, and the officers received an additional share for running the club.

  “I don’t know about this,” Zane muttered. “I agree she earned the shares, but I think we’re taking a big risk letting her know where the money is coming from.”

  Arsen nodded in understanding. “She’s going to know the shares aren’t coming from B3. I know the code, but I trust her.”

  Phil looked at him. “You up for that? You’ve been pretty protective of her.”

  Arsen met his eyes. “If it comes to it, I’ll take care of her myself.”

  Zane and Phil looked at each other. “So long as you know this is on you if it goes tits up,” Zane said.

  Arsen nodded. “It’s on me.”

  Chapter 23

  Arsen found Quinn in the lab, swiveling slowly in a chair. “Come with me,” he said.

  “Where are we going?” she asked as she rose to her feet.

  “You and I have a couple of things to discuss.”

  She felt her blood run cold. “Have I done something wrong?”

  “No. But we need your help.”

  He led her back into church and motioned for her to sit at the table. She sat, glancing nervously between Arsen, Zane and Phil.

  “First off,” Arsen began, “I want you to know why we excused you. The club took a vote and we’re going to have to deal with the Chrome Horsemen. I would like you to tell us everything you can remember about your time there. The layout of the inside if you know it. Anything like that.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’ll help us plan.”

  “No. Why are you hitting them? What have they done to the Blades?”

  Arsen nodded, expecting the question. “Before I answer that, I want to make you an offer. Zane, Phil and I have talked about it, and we want to offer you a position in the club. You won’t have voting rights, but if you continue to work on marketing B3, we’ll give you two shares.”

  “Shares? What’s that?”

  “A share is some amount of money. It changes every month because it depends on how much income the club generates. The club takes fifty-percent off the top. The other fifty percent is put into a pool. However many shares there are, that’s how the money is divided up. If there are a hundred shares, and the pool is a hundred bucks, each share would get a dollar. You would get two shares.”

  “Okay. But there’s a catch, isn’t there?”

  “Only one. As part of the club, you have to protect the club. If you leave, you can’t reveal what goes on here. I suspect it’s much like the Desert Riders in that respect.”

  “I understand,” she said, nodding.

  “One more thing. Fifty-percent of your shares will be held back for the first year. You’re not really a prospect, but that’s standard for us. If you are accepted, then the balance of your shares will be paid to you. Think of it as a signing bonus,” he said with a grin.

  “Okay.”

  “Do you accept you’ll be expected to abide by the charter of our club?” Arsen asked.

  “I do,” she said solemnly.

  Arsen nodded at Phil. “Swear her in.”

  Phil stood and placed a leather jacket in the palm of his hand with the Blacktop Blades colors showing. “Left hand on the colors and raise your right hand.” Quinn did as she was told.

  He used the standard prospect induction since prospects didn’t have voting rights anyway. If Arsen didn’t take her as his old lady, and they accepted her into the club, they have to come up with some modification of the regular oath. They were treading new ground with her. They were giving her the same rights as an old lady, but she wasn’t, and therefore Arsen wasn’t responsible for her conduct. But because she was a woman, she wasn’t eligible to be a full member either.

  When she was sworn in she smiled as the three men congratulated her and shook her hand, then she sat down again. “Now that you’ve agreed to abide by the rules of the club. I have something to tell you. You understand, what I’m about to say never leaves this clubhouse?”

  She bit her lip, not liking how that sounded at all. “I understand.”

  “The answer to your question, about the Horsemen, is they are counterfeiting our product.”

  “Soap?” she asked in confusion.

  “MDMA. Ecstasy. Molly.”

  She paused, considering. “You run molly?”

  He shook his head. “We don’t run it, we manufacture it. It’s pharmaceutical grade, very pure, and as safe as a Schedule 1 drug can be.”

  “Where?”

  “Where do we make it?” He chuckled. “You’ve been in the plant dozens of times.”

  “There?” she cried in shock. “So you don’t make soap and bath salts and stuff?”

  “No, we do make and sell them as well. We make the MDMA in the same reaction vessels as our legal product. We make an MDMA run once a week, then switch back over and make salts or whatever the other four days.”

  She stared at him a moment. “Hiding in plain sight.”

  “That’s pretty much it. We have a reputation for high quality, safe drugs. The Horsemen tried to take over the market a couple years ago and failed. Now they’re trying again. But this time they’re trading on our good name. Our product is stamped with a heart on one side and a knife on the other. The street calls them Hearts and Daggers. The Horsemen have started selling their own MDMA with a heart and dagger, but it’s not good quality and it damages our reputation. Hell, people could get sick on that shit. I called the President of the Horsemen to warn him off, but he’s willing to go to war over this, so war it’ll be. That’s where you come in. I want to know everything you know about them.”

  She looked at him a moment. She’d heard of ecstasy, but didn’t know much about it. It was a party drug. It wasn’t nearly as dangerous as cocaine, heroin, or meth. She wasn’t sure how she felt now that she knew the Blades were an outlaw club, no different than the Riders were. But then she gave a mental shrug. She didn’t mind being an old lady in the Riders, why would she mind being part of the Blades? At least with the Blades she got a piece of the pie, and she wasn’t working with the drugs if all she was doing was marketing the B3 products.

  “I don’t know a lot,” she began. “Except when I was…” She paused and swallowed hard as she gathered herself. “Except for when we were being used, we were kept in a locked bedroom.”

  “Any idea of how many members?” Phil asked. “We estimate between seventy-five and a hundred.”

  “I don’t know,” she said quietly, “but a lot more than the Blades.”

  “What about the layout inside the clubhouse?” Phil asked.

  She shrugged. “It’s bigger than here. The front of the clubhouse is open, like this one, but I’m
pretty sure the front wall is glass that’s been painted black. You can sort of see light through it.”

  “Anybody living there?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Anything else you can tell us?”

  She shrugged. “They’re heartless bastards who party a lot. Even when they were leaving us alone, we could hear the music thumping, and they always seemed to be either drunk, hung over, or high on something.”

  The three men looked at each other. “Pretty thin info,” Phil muttered.

  “Yeah,” Arsen agreed.

  “I’m sorry I don’t know more. I only saw a few rooms.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Arsen said. “The partying all the time might be useful. Wait outside, please.” Quinn nodded and rose, taking her colors with her. “What do you think?”

  “I think we need more intel before we hit their clubhouse.”

  “I agree,” Zane added. “What if we hit their lab first and shut that down? That would deny them the revenue and let them know we’re serious. Maybe we can draw them into an ambush.”

  “We don’t know where it is,” Arsen pointed out.

  “No, but they do,” Phil said, warming to Zane’s idea. “What if we hit them tonight, before they can go to ground? If we go now, we can probably bag one of their guys and squeeze him.”

  “I like the idea of hitting them hard and fast, but we don’t want to walk into something ourselves,” Arsen cautioned.

  “That’s just it. We’re not hitting them head on. Think of this as a diversionary strike. Let’s try and stretch them a little.”

  Arsen thought about it. “How fast to get it set up?”

  Phil shrugged. “How fast can you free me up some men?”

  Arsen smiled. “Now.”

  They spent another fifteen minutes thrashing around ideas and refining the plan. When they stepped out of Church, they had decided that Phil and Zane would leave for Phoenix right away with as many men as they could free up and put eyes on the Horsemen. He would follow as soon as he could shut down the plant, bringing the rest of the brothers with him. If they got a chance they would bag a Horseman and have him ready to interrogate when Arsen got there.

  “What’s going on?” Quinn asked, pulling him to a stop.

  “We’re not going to hit he Horsemen straight on, not this time. We’re going to take down their lab, if we can find it, to let them know we’re not fucking around.”

  She clung to his arm. “Don’t do this! You saw what happened to the Desert Riders when we went up against them!”

  He glanced around, then pulled her back into church. “You need to get on board with this.”

  “You don’t know them! They’ll kill all of you, us!”

  “They may try.” He paused as he looked into her eyes. “It’ll be okay. We’ll be careful. I know you’re afraid of them, and with good reason, but we can handle this.”

  “That’s what Bob, the Riders’ President, said too, and you can see what happened.”

  “So we’ll learn from his mistake. If you can’t get on board with this, I need you to stay home. I can’t have you questioning me in front of the brothers.”

  “I’m not questioning you! I’m worried! I lost everything to the fucking Horsemen once. I don’t want to lose it again!” She looked down.

  “Hey,” he said, tipping her head up. “We’ve got this. There may be a time when you need to worry, but this isn’t it.”

  She pulled her head away and looked down again. “Yeah. You’ll forgive me if I’m still worried.”

  He tipped her head up again. “I need about three hours to idle the plant, then I’m going home to get a few things. You can either stay here or wait at home, your choice.”

  “I can’t convince you to not go?”

  “No.”

  She sighed. “Where are you going after you’re done?”

  “Probably home.”

  “Then I’ll wait there.”

  Chapter 24

  Arsen and Quinn were on the way home when the call came. When they reached his house, and he checked his voice mail, he found Phil had taken one of the Horsemen while he was on the way to the clubhouse. The man wasn’t in a talkative mood, and Phil wanted him to bring his “kit.”

  “What kit?” she asked as the message ended.

  He grinned. “A little something Doc Holiday put together for me.” She went slightly pale and he chuckled. “Nothing like that,” he grinned, knowing what she was thinking.

  “Don’t go,” she said softly.

  “I have to. I’m not going to ask the brothers to do something I’m not willing to do myself. Besides, I’m the one who has the kit and knows how to use it,” he said as he reached onto the top shelf of his closet and pulling down a small metal box with lock on it. He opened the gun case it so she could see the syringe and a small vial of drugs inside.

  “What’s that?”

  “Scopolamine and morphine. Most people know it as truth serum, but it doesn’t work it like it does in the movies. Done properly, it puts them into, what Doc calls, twilight sleep. It’s not that they can’t lie, or not speak, but because they’re out of it, they tend to say whatever pops into their head. It’s kind of like they are talking in their sleep.”

  “And it won’t hurt them?”

  “Do you care?”

  “No, not really. It’s just the Blades are so…different…than the Riders. If Riders wanted to know something, they would beat the shit out of whoever until they talked.”

  Arsen nodded. “Then they tell you whatever they think you want to hear. And if it’s a tough guy, it takes a long time to break him.” He snapped the lid closed on the box and relocked it. “This is better. Give him the shot, wait an hour or so, then ask your questions. Ask it four or five different ways to see if you get the same answers, and there you go. The best part is when you tell them what you’re doing, their own imagination does most of the work for you. They don’t feel bad about telling you what you want to know because, after all, they were drugged and didn’t have a choice,” he explained as he prepared to leave.

  “Even though they could lie?”

  “Yes. Or not speak at all. The drug doesn’t make them talk. It only makes them more willing to talk. Of course, I don’t tell them that. I feed them the same line from the movies and television shows, how they are going to tell me everything I want to know and they won’t be able to stop.”

  “Have you done this before?”

  “Once, on Zane, when Doc showed me how to do it. I found out he wanted to fuck Holly. He offered to trade Michelle for Holly for a night.”

  “You asked him that?” she cried.

  “No. He volunteered it,” he said, then grinned. “Doc and I had a good laugh because we knew he would never act on it. He doesn’t remember a thing and I never mentioned it to anyone. You’re now the third person to know, besides me and Doc, and I would appreciate it if you keep it to yourself.”

  “And how does Doc know how to do this?”

  Arsen shrugged. “He’s a doctor, and no, he didn’t work for the CIA or some shit.”

  He had his gear packed and paused at the door to the garage. “I’ll be back in a few hours. Don’t worry. I’ll be okay. There will be twenty of us, all of us watching each other’s backs.”

  She bit her lip. “If I asked you to stay and make love to me, would you?”

  He grinned. “I know what you’re trying to do. I have to do this. When I get back, I’ll make love to you for hours if that’s what you want, but business before pleasure.”

  She fought to hold her tears. “Call me as soon as it’s over?”

  His smile widened. “Are you worried about me?” he teased.

  “It’s not funny!” she snapped. “You’re still my rock, okay? Sometimes, when the voices are whispering, knowing you’re there is the only thing that keeps me going. If something were to happen to you, especially with the Horsemen, I think I’d go crazy!”

  He looked into her
eyes then slowly kissed her. “I’ll call as soon as I start back to Tucson. I won’t answer my phone while I’m working on the guy, so if I don’t answer, don’t panic. I’m coming back right here as soon as I’m done. Don’t worry.”

  She nodded, not trusting her voice. He kissed her again, then stepped out the door. She heard the car start, then the garage door rumbled down. It was the first time he’d been away from her since he picked her up on the side of the road, and she instantly felt his loss.

  She wandered the house for a while, trying to keep the rising panic at bay, then fixed herself a quick dinner. She tried to watch television but finally gave up and threw herself on his bed, pulling the pillow in close so she could detect the lingering smell of his scent, and prayed he would come back and hold her.