Stand (The Brazen Bulls MC Book 7)

by Susan Fanetti

  “What the fuck? Who runs that place?” Rad asked.

  Apollo answered. “I did some checking, but hit a dead end fast. The city took it over two years ago for nonpayment of taxes. It’s a squat. There was a Hound there, but he didn’t put up a fight when we took her away. I didn’t recognize him.”

  “The Hounds don’t run places like that,” Becker answered. “They supply their party favors, but they don’t run them.”

  “It’s club business now. I want the bastards who did this to her,” Maverick growled. “Every one of them.”

  Delaney looked down the table and met Maverick’s eyes. “So do I. But we got to tread carefully, Mav. We can’t start a new beef with the Street Hounds.”

  “They’re still in Tulsa because we let them stay, right?” Wally asked. “We beat their asses.”

  “They’re still in Tulsa because Irina didn’t want us to drum them out,” Simon corrected. “It was part of her truce with the Abbatontuono family. With whatever she’s got cooking south of the border right now, she will not want us turning up the heat here and causing her trouble back East.”

  “I’m so fucking tired of being on our knees before that woman. If you’re saying we can’t make this right for Cecily, for Dane’s girl, because the Volkov bitch has her fist up our ass…”

  “It’s not a Hounds place, Mav,” Apollo cut in. “And it’s on our turf. We can act. We just have to give the Hounds a heads-up, so they don’t get caught in whatever we do.”

  Gargoyle leaned his hefty body forward. “I got a question.” The table waited, and Gargoyle turned to Maverick. “You’re saying she was dosed—with GHB, I assume—and dumped at the crack house. Then she was shot up with smack and left to be fucked.”

  “Fuck, that is so fucked up,” Gunner muttered.

  Gargoyle glanced his way and went on. “That sounds like a hunt to me. The dude at Tempest was taking a doe. Why?”

  “Jesus,” Apollo breathed. “You think we got somebody trying to build a stable this way?”

  “What?” Gunner asked. “You mean, make hookers out of girls they put on the needle? Isn’t that like the ring Novak closed down last year?”

  Again, Delaney slammed his fists on the table. “Enough. I can’t take this shit anymore. It’s just fucking enough. What the fuck is happening to our city?” He closed his eyes and sighed, and, again, everyone at the table waited for him to regroup. “Apollo and Rad—you’re on this, whenever you can. Find out who this guy at the club was—”

  “She thinks his name is Cole,” Maverick interrupted.

  Delaney nodded. “Find him, and bring him in. Check out this house, see who’s running it. Mav, keep her safe. She doesn’t want anything to do with any of us but you, so that’s on you. And I don’t want her mother knowing this shit, not from us. If Cecily tells her, that’s up to her. But Joanna doesn’t need any more shit to deal with, especially not secondhand. So keep your gossiping mouths shut with your women—and Mav, that goes double for Jenny, with Ciss in your house. Keep it in your house.”

  “Jenny was going to tell Mo this morning, D. That deed’s probably done.”

  “Fuck. Okay. I’ll handle my old lady. The rest of you, shut the fuck up. This is Dane’s daughter we’re talking about. Her father died on our floor. Whether she likes it or not, she’s ours. It’s on us to take over for him, and we’ve been letting him down.” The heads around the table bobbed in solemn agreement. “Now. We got assignments for the next Russian runs.”

  “Hold up, D,” Rad said, putting his hand up. “I got somethin’, too. It’s related to the runs.”

  “Go ahead,” Delaney said.

  “We need somebody who speaks Spanish. At least on the Galveston run, we need somebody who understands what those Abrego bastards are saying to each other. They make my spine twitch. With Ox away, we’re half deaf on that run, and I don’t like it.”

  “You’re saying you want to bring a prospect in?” Eight Ball asked. “I don’t know. The table’s plenty big as it is, and I don’t want to cut the pie any more.”

  Rad scowled. “Table’ll be a lot smaller if those murderous Salvadorans double-cross us and we can’t see it comin’ ‘cuz we don’t know what they’re sayin’.”

  “You got somebody in mind?” Delaney asked.

  “Yeah. Terry.”

  “The hangaround?” Eight Ball asked, shocked. “He’s Spanish? His last name’s Carter or something.”

  “Capewell. He’s fluent. His grandmother’s Dominican, I think.”

  “He’s black,” Wally pointed out. “Is that a problem?”

  “Why would it be?” Rad retorted. And then the table went quiet for about the hundredth time in this profoundly uncomfortable meeting.

  Caleb discovered that most of the patches were turned his way. With Ox away, he was the only not-lily-white man in the club, and apparently the token voice on racial matters. Great. “It shouldn’t be. There’s nothing in the bylaws that says it’s a problem.” He still had the bylaws memorized; that had been a requirement during his prospect days. Race was not a factor in eligibility. “I fucking hope it’s not a problem.”

  Simon cleared his throat. “So do I. What happened in ’98, with Patrice and Griffin, and Dane, a lot of that was shit we didn’t see about ourselves, and I hope we used the chance to take a good, hard look at who we are.”

  Caleb nodded. He’d been only a prospect back then, so new to the club that the leather of his kutte had still been stiff. And he hadn’t hung around the clubhouse before that. Gunner had brought him in from outside—they’d gotten to be decent friends street racing, and he’d told Gunner some things about his frustration with life at home. Caleb had been little more than a witness to the chaos that day in the clubhouse, not privy to much about the circumstances that had led the Bulls to that moment. But even from his seat in the stands, with his particular perspective from a life on the margins, it had been clear to him that racism had played a part—the insidious kind. Not hatred or meanness. Just passive prejudice. Assumptions made without thought. That kind of racism could do a special kind of damage, because you didn’t see it coming.

  What had kept him in the club despite it was how shocked most of them had been by it all—like the great tear that had gone through the club that day had exposed some disease they hadn’t seen spreading. The reckoning had taken years to settle. But the club was different now. Some patches markedly so. Apollo, who bore scars from his own reckoning. Gunner, who’d lost his father and nearly everything else in the aftershocks of that day in ‘98. And Simon, who’d designed and ignited the fire that had led to that bloody scene in the party room, and whose old lady, Gunner’s sister, had been hurt in those aftershocks.

  There was a quiet darkness around Simon since. Not malice; more like a shadow. A singe. A couple of months ago, he and Deb had announced that they were expecting. Since then, that singe had spread. Simon had been more confrontational at the table, more reluctant to take on new risks.

  “It wasn’t her color that was the problem, Si,” Delaney grumbled. Their president had been among the most reluctant to acknowledge the club’s fault. Caleb thought he understood; Delaney wasn’t so different from his grandfather. He’d built something, a family, and it had been shaken to its roots. His reaction was to hunker down, dig in. So he couldn’t admit his own wrong. “She had Northside family, and she didn’t have club ink.”

  “Her uncle had no connection to the Hounds except an incidental one,” Simon countered. It looked like he was ramping up to fight hard on that point, but then he backed off with a wave of his hand. “I don’t want to dig that up again. Terry’s a neighborhood kid. He hung around the station when he was younger, he’s been hanging around the clubhouse for a few years. We’re using him like a prospect these days, putting him at the bar, having him clean up, run errands. He’s strong and not stupid, and he knows about keeping his mouth shut. We need a Spanish speaker, and he speaks Spanish. There’s nothing about him to stop us from givi
ng him a kutte. If we don’t, it’s about us. And that will fuck me up.”

  “And me,” Caleb agreed. He said the words calmly but firmly. He’d ridden through a lot in his time with the Bulls, and he was proud to have his top rocker, to be one of them. He loved these men. He understood them. Though he still felt like an interloper in this room, he could feel himself finding his fit—unless they chose not to give a black man a prospect kutte because he was a black man.

  “Me, too,” said Apollo.

  Delaney turned to Rad. “Are you putting his name up?”

  “I am. I move we give Terry Capewell a kutte and a prospect rocker.”

  Caleb seconded a motion for the first time at this table.

  Delaney nodded. “All in favor?”

  When the vote was unanimous, Caleb breathed out a gust of relief.

  ~oOo~

  “Hold up, kid.”

  At Maverick’s voice, Caleb almost flinched. It had been a couple of years since Maverick had beaten him to a pulp over Cecily, but that harsh a whooping left a mark on more than the skin, and Maverick had been wound tight just now in the chapel. Caleb was all snarled up in this new shit with Cecily, and he didn’t want Maverick coming after him again.

  He kept his voice steady and turned. “Yeah, Mav?”

  Maverick nodded at him. “She did that to your face?”

  Self-consciously, Caleb brushed his cheek, under the row of six stitches, courtesy of the Hominy Community Clinic. “Threw a bottle of vodka at my head, yeah.” He put his hands up, warding off any possible attack that might be headed his way. “But I swear, she was mad because I was checking on her, that’s it. I wasn’t trying to do anything except help.” And apologize.

  Maverick smiled, and Caleb breathed. “I believe you. She’s like a cornered bobcat when she’s hurt—claws and spits at anybody around, even when they’re trying to help. But you did good. You thought smart, and you got her out of trouble. She won’t thank you, because she’s too busy blaming us for losing her dad to see she’s still part of us, but I just want to say, you did good.”

  Not knowing how to respond, Caleb only nodded. Then a question occurred to him. “Why’s she talk to you?” Maverick was a Bull, too, but apparently Cecily still liked him.

  “I don’t know. I made a pest out of myself, I guess. Wore her down.” Maverick shrugged. “Or maybe it’s just that I was there when she needed her dad, and she didn’t have a better option than me.”

  Caleb didn’t want to be her replacement father. Not remotely.

  ~oOo~

  “You done chopping that suet?” Caleb’s grandfather stood at the counter with his hands in the air. Those hands had been deep in a bowl of raw ground beef.

  Caleb pushed the rough bits of suet off the cutting board and set the knife down. “Ready.” He took the board over to the bowl of meat and pushed the chunks of fat in. Behind them, Levi was flattening the buttermilk dough for the fry bread crusts of these meat pies. Ace paced the floor between them, waiting for the inevitable drop of some tasty morsel.

  Losing all the women in their family on one shitty day, the three remaining Mathews had had to learn how to keep a house. James Mathews had taken on the responsibility with both shoulders. He’d been a traditional man, still was in most ways, but he’d learned to be mother as well as father to his grandsons. Levi and Caleb could both cook, and sew—nothing fancy, but mending—and make a bed so tight you could bounce a quarter on it. They could fix a fence and mend a dropped hem with equal ease, clean a bathroom and muck a stall, make meat pies and build a table to serve them on.

  As his grandfather pushed his hands into the bowl and blended the meat, suet, and spices, he asked, “Do I want to know what happened to your face? Did you and your friends get into some kind of trouble again?”

  His ‘friends.’ The closest the man would come to acknowledging the Bulls.

  Levi, who knew a version of the story, laughed. “A chick did that, Grampa.”

  Grampa turned his weathered face back to Caleb and grinned. “A woman? A fierce one, then, like iňloňka.”

  To his grandfather’s eternal disappointment, neither Caleb nor Levi was fluent, or even functionally literate, in the Osage language, but he knew that was the second time today that somebody had compared Cecily to a wild cat.

  “Yeah. She’s fierce. And pissed off.”

  “Did you hurt her?”

  “No, Grampa. Jeez.”

  The old man grinned. “You like this woman. A fierce woman is a good mate.” He took the beef mixture to the butcher-block island, and they all stood around it and started filling fry bread dough with meat. “Is she Osage?”

  Red hair, blue eyes, fair skin, rosy-pink lips. The faintest spray of freckles just on her straight, slender nose. Cecily was about as white as any god made. “No.”

  “Pawnee, then?”

  “She’s white,” Levi answered with a smirk. Caleb tossed a nasty look his brother’s way, but Levi’s smirk grew into a grin. He liked stirring up shit.

  Their grandfather paused with his fingers pressing the edges of a freshly made pie. “White? No, Caleb. Turn your head to your own people. Whites come to us only to take from us. My father was murdered by scheming whites.”

  A tale oft-told. “That was seventy-five years ago, Grampa.”

  At Caleb’s words, Levi clucked and shook his head.

  Now their grandfather was getting riled up. “You think that was the last time whites took from us? Look around you, boy. Look at this town, the way it crumbles. The Osage were once strong and mighty warriors. We were rich, until whites stole it. They stole our ancestral home and shoved us here and told us to farm, knowing it was worthless for growing. When we discovered it was good for cattle to graze, and there was oil beneath it, they lied and cheated, stole and killed to try to get it from us. We’re still fighting to hold our rights, and they’re still trying to take from us.” He plopped the meat pie onto the baking sheet with the others. “Nothing good will come from loving a white woman. She’ll bring you nothing but loss. And she won’t be welcome in this house.”

  Caleb had no intention of loving Cecily, much less bringing her to his family, but his grandfather’s old way of thinking pissed him off. Rather than simply assure him that there was no chance he’d be getting with Cecily Nielsen, he picked up the argument. “Grampa, it’s the twenty-first century, not the Wild West. Things are different now.”

  “You’re a fool, boy, if you think that.” He closed another meat pie. “Go set the table.”

  ~oOo~

  Earlier, Caleb had kind of thought he’d see if Kelly wanted to hang out, but after dinner with his family, he wasn’t in the mood anymore. His grandfather had spent the whole meal, and some time after it, telling them the same stories they’d heard a thousand times about the injustices done to the Osage people, from the time they were forced from their lands across Missouri, Kansas, Arkansas, and shoved onto this rocky corner, to William Hale and his plot to steal Osage oil headrights in the Twenties, and the dozens of Osage murdered by Hale’s gang in those years. Including George Mathews, Caleb’s great-grandfather, shot in the head before his only son had yet been born.

  Grampa was a gifted storyteller. He got into his audience’s head and drew the pictures on their brains. Even in the thousandth hearing, it was impossible not to be dropped in the middle of the action. By the time he and Levi left, Levi was practically ready to get a raiding party together, and even Caleb, who generally felt pretty distant from all that ancient history, had a contact high from their grandfather’s quiet rage. He was definitely not in the mood to make nice with a chick, not even an Osage chick.

  So he’d come home with Levi and gone to his room. For a while, he strummed aimlessly on his guitar, staring at the old black-and-white television, its screen blank because he was too lazy to get up and turn it on. He thought about his grandfather’s sonorous voice, calm but smoldering with anger older than he was.

  Caleb knew how disappointed—
upset, really—it made his grandfather, and Levi, that he didn’t get more worked up over stories like the Osage Murders. But he just didn’t feel he lived in that world. Not that he thought the world he lived in was so great. That was it, really—there was plenty of hatred and suspicion and racist bullshit going on right now, but what he saw and experienced was different, and it was immediate.

  How many of the idiots who called him ‘Chief’ without a second thought knew the history of his people, or of any Native tribe? Most of those idiots didn’t even hate him or realize why it was offensive to call him that. They had no idea that every tribe was a different culture, with a different language, and its own story. They just saw his difference. They just saw ‘Indian.’