by Hazel Parker
About an hour into the show, Richard grabbed me and told me to meet him outside immediately. Naturally, I had zero confidence this was about anything other than the California Saints, so I didn’t even make a show of trying to find an excuse to walk outside. I just followed him straight out to the side of the building.
“I just got a call and a text from Trace Cole,” he said. “He said they’d like to have negotiations tonight and are headed this way.”
“How many of them?”
He sighed.
“All but four of them who are remaining in California. So, about thirty.”
“Jesus fucking Christ,” I groaned. “That’s not a fucking negotiation; that’s a fucking takeover.”
“A hostile one at that,” Richard said. “I’m not expecting anything less than for them to force all of us to stay here while we hammer out an agreement.”
He bit his lip, muttered some swears, and spat on the ground.
“I should have done a better job in discussions when I was there—”
“You’re fine,” I said.
I put a hand on his shoulder.
“Look, you want me to do something with the police?”
“That would be extraordinarily ideal,” Richard said. “The only advantage we have right now is that we know they’re four hours away. They won’t get here until after midnight. So it’s not like they’re at the MGM right now. But that’s literally the only advantage we have.”
He put his other hand on my shoulder.
“You are the one who has the current connections to the police,” he said. “Whatever plans you have, you had better execute them right now. Because if those guys get to this place, it doesn’t matter if the cops show up. No one is going to stop them.”
“I understand,” I said. “I’ll make some calls.”
Richard nodded, patted me on the shoulder, and walked inside. I could not say that he looked confident at all about our chances of getting through this. I couldn’t say I felt that way, either, but at this point, it wasn’t like I had much choice but to believe.
I reached into my pocket and called Jenna, but she didn’t answer. It was after eight—she should have been off by now. What was going on? I shot her a text telling her to call me.
I then dialed up some of our other contacts. I didn’t have any ideas at the moment. I just needed to know that I had them in my back pocket. I got through about three officers when Jenna called back. I quickly hung up with the one I was with and answered Jenna’s call.
“Hey, babe,” I said, not even caring that I’d said babe. “I—”
“Dom, I got suspended from the LVPD.”
Oh, fuck. We got discovered, didn’t we?
“Someone saw me with you. It must have been the night I delivered the case files to you. Chief Gutierrez is doing everything he can to protect me right now, but things don’t seem good. They want me to swear off seeing you again to avoid a conflict of interest, and… oh, fuck, I don’t know. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry I ever dragged you in…”
Fuck!
This was about as bad a spot as it could get. I needed Jenna’s help, but Jenna needed me to play the part of caring, empathic boyfriend—I guess? But there wasn’t time for a long conversation that culminated in saying we’d figure something out.
“Jenna, can you promise to listen to me with what I’m about to say?”
“Yeah,” she said weakly.
It wasn’t encouraging in tone. But right now, I didn’t have time to psychoanalyze her tone.
“The California Savage Saints are en route here on their bikes. They’re going to get here probably around midnight. We do not have the means to stop them.”
“They’re coming to attack you?”
“They’re coming to take over The Red Door, and if that includes attacking us, then yes.”
I let the words linger for a moment so she could understand the urgency of the matter. I’m going to take you out somewhere nice for this, Jenna. I promise. Or, maybe, I’ll do carry-out and treat you that way. Regardless, you’ll be taken care of.
“The Savage Saints here in Las Vegas, the club that I’m with, does not have the manpower to hold them off, and frankly, based on what you’ve told me, even if we did, I don’t want a battle breaking out within city limits.”
“Please don’t, you’ll get kicked out for sure if that happens.”
A second-order effect I hadn’t even considered just came to mind then. If a battle broke out within Vegas, even if we later agreed to give The Red Door to the California Saints, the city would probably end up finding a way to shut it down anyway. If that happened, I didn’t want to think of what the California Saints would do to us then. I didn’t know them well enough to know if bloody vengeance of that kind was something they would do.
“We need help, Jenna,” I said. “And the only group I know that the California Saints will yield to is the Las Vegas Police. I know, I know, you got suspended. I’m not asking you to create a plan to deal with them for the next year. I just need your help tonight.”
I bit my lip as I heard Jenna sigh through the receiver. I knew I was asking a lot of her—if she was going to help me while suspended, she was putting her career at risk, if not her life in dealing with this right now. But if she didn’t take that risk, then all of us in the Savage Saints would have their own lives at risk.
Yes, I was being selfish. But I needed to be selfish to stay alive.
“I can help,” she said. “I still have my cop uniform on. The suspension won’t take effect until tomorrow morning. But I can’t help you after tonight.”
“That’s all I need for right now,” I said.
I couldn’t even think beyond tonight. Nothing mattered if tonight was a failure. If we succeeded in pushing back on the Saints tonight, then at least we had bought ourselves another day to think things through.
“They’ll be coming up the highway,” she said. “The best thing we can do is to get a squadron of police vehicles to pull them over when they arrive across the border. But there’s no way I can get other cops in on this. I’m extremely uncomfortable with this already.”
“I know, and I’ll make it up to you, I swear to you, Jenna. Whatever you want, after tonight, you’ll get it.”
And then an idea clicked.
“Get me keys to the other vehicles. We’ll drive them. The Saints aren’t going to know that we’re in there. We just need you to approach and tell them to run off.”
The move would require an extraordinary amount of bluffing. If the California Saints told her to arrest them, our cover would be blown, she’d be fired—maybe even jailed—and the California Saints would take over. They didn’t seem like the kind to shoot a cop—in fact, my research on them had shown them to cooperate with law enforcement in the past—but if they did…
That was a possibility I refused to consider. I couldn’t take two of the women I cared for being murdered so viciously.
“OK,” Jenna said. “I’ll run point. This better work, Dom.”
“It will,” I said. “We just need to figure out how to get the cop cars.”
“There’s about six here with their drivers home,” she said. “But you may want to pay a visit to the chief. And try to do so subtly. He’s going to wonder what the hell is going on.”
“Got it,” I said. “I’ll come over. You stay put.”
I ran back inside to the back as soon as I hung up. I found a jacket that featured no Savage Saints imagery, took a van from the back, and drove it straight to the police station. Of course, there was the chance that this would all blow up in my face. But it had the greatest chance of working.
Which, unfortunately, was probably still not particularly high.
I got to the front and looked down at my phone. Jenna had told me Mario was leaving the station now and would be outside in just a minute. I got out of the car, stood by the entrance, and slowly chewed some gum.
“Why, hello, stranger,” Mario said, surprising
me.
“Hello there, officer,” I said, playing along. Both of us knew the game. Both of us kept walking until we were out of range of the cameras and the audio.
“What the hell are you doing here, Dom?” Mario said. “You got a lot of nerves or an utter lack of brain cells to show up like this.”
I explained everything to him about what the California Saints were doing and ended it with the emphatic request.
“I need all your police cruisers, sir. Or at least five of them.”
“You are out of your goddamn mind,” he said with a chuckle.
But I sure wasn’t laughing.
“You’re actually serious,” he said. “Jesus, fuck, Dom, what did you do to the California Saints?”
“Long story, but we aren’t asking this so we can flee and never return. I know you found out what’s going on between Jenna and me. Why would I leave her now? You see? This is a short-term solution. We recognize that if we push them back today, we can only do so so many times. It’s a one-time thing.”
Mario paused at the entrance to his car and laughed.
“I don’t know why a bastard like you would want the cruiser keys in the hallway on the third floor,” he said. “But I have no faith you’ll be able to carry this off without a hitch.”
He smirked at me, patted me on the shoulder, and got in the car. But he’d told me what I needed to know. One text to Jenna later, we had six cop cars at our disposal, with Jenna taking point in the lead one. A few more texts later, and I had all of the officers of the Las Vegas Savage Saints lined up next to me. Jenna stood before us in the darkness.
“I’m going to tell you once how to operate these cars,” she said. “And you’re going to follow my lead. Do not—do not—do anything other than what I tell you to do. Understood?”
Everyone by me nodded. Thankfully, we were all mature enough to understand that this wasn’t the time to play. Yes, it was nice to have a new toy, and yes, it especially nice that it was coming from the Las Vegas Police Department.
But lose this, and we’d lose everything.
Jenna showed us how to operate the radio, the siren, and the lights. She told us to ignore the radio frequencies and to tune in specifically to her vehicle. She said that she would handle any dispatchers reaching out to us, but that we shouldn’t have any problems. What she didn’t know was that the dispatcher for the night was also in our back pocket—and someone who would gladly keep quiet when it came to these kinds of things.
“Everyone got it?” she said at the end.
We all nodded.
“Time to go,” I said. “We’ll follow your lead to the border, Jenna.”
She gave a thumbs up but otherwise looked extraordinarily stressed. I seriously could not thank her enough. There was no dinner, no restaurant I could consider that would reward her for the risk she was taking.
I just had to be the best man for her possible. Quite telling I’m already thinking like that.
One of the unexpected benefits of driving police cruisers—which drove just like any other car except for all the equipment—was how the traffic around us not only slowed down, drivers went out of their way to dodge us. Part of me felt a temptation to roll down the windows and laugh at the unknowing civilians, but it went without saying that such a maneuver was suicidal. Instead, I kept the windows up, the radio off, and my eyes alert.
We got all the way to Primm at about ten-thirty. The one advantage of being so far out in the middle of nowhere, save for the two streets of “Welcome to Nevada” cheap casinos and stores, was that we had visibility stretching for miles. We had our lights off, so the California Saints would have no idea what was to come. We, on the other hand, would see them a good several minutes in advance, even if they were driving well over a hundred miles per hour.
I looked at the car to my left, eying Jenna inside. I waved to her and smiled. She smiled, but the poor girl looked so worried. I probably shouldn’t have done this, but I got out of the car and went over to her. Jenna waved for me to get back into the cop car, but I ignored her and got in hers.
“You’re so fucking lucky no one drove by us just now,” she growled. “If anyone had seen you get out—”
I silenced her with a kiss. She was still pissed when I stopped kissing her, but she also struggled to contain her smile.
“I appreciate everything you’re doing,” I said. “I’m so grateful to have you around.”
“Yeah,” she said.
But there was something left unsaid. She wasn’t looking at me straight on. She wasn’t even looking up. Her eyes were downcast.
“You OK?”
She didn’t answer.
“Jenna?”
“Dom, do you know how much I am risking right now for you?” she said. “You think you know, but you don’t. This isn’t just my job. This is my way of avenging what happened to Danica.”
I was left speechless.
“I’ve told you, I became a cop so I could right the wrongs that happened to her. But it’s not just about Danica and Scar specifically. It’s about catching criminals so future Danica incidents don’t happen. It’s about raising awareness of crime against women. And right now… I like you, but do I want to throw it all away for you.”
“It’s not throwing it all away, baby,” I said, hating myself for giving her a pet name in a tense conversation like this. “It’s—”
“It’s what, Dom? Think before you say anything.”
I did. And I couldn’t come up with anything to say.
“When the California Saints come, we’ll deal with them and send them back,” she said, shaking her head. “But after that…”
“Jenna, don’t—”
I stopped when I saw, way out in the distance, several small lights moving together. They were varying in height too much to be a single-vehicle.
“That’s them,” I said.
“Get back in your car and go!”
I hurried out, slamming the door shut and practically diving into my cruiser. I still had probably a full minute or two before the California Saints passed us, but I didn’t like the idea of even someone on binoculars, looking ahead, seeing me. As crazy as that sounded, how was it any crazier than us “borrowing” cruises from the LVPD for this?
I got in, my heart pounding against my chest, doing my best not to think about the implications of what Jenna had just said. Surely, we could find a way to keep things going, right? Surely—
Stop thinking about it!
I gulped, focusing on the oncoming motorcycles. They were speeding. And there were thirty of them. Holy fuck.
It was one thing to hear it. It was another to see it. It was like knowing an army was coming to kill you and your friends, but the army swallowed up the entire battlefield. Richard was absolutely right. We would never win an actual battle with these guys.
The first bikes rolled ahead. Jenna turned on her lights and sirens. The rest of us followed suit. With a loudspeaker, Jenna pulled over all of the bikers. The California Saints, being the good guys they thought they were, pulled over. We followed in turn. Jenna got out of her cruiser, took a deep breath, and moved forward.
I now had to do nothing but pray for the next several minutes that my plan didn’t cost Jenna her career or her life.
Chapter 16: Jenna
Of course, I was pissed at Dom for setting this all up.
Of course, I felt extraordinarily uncomfortable, knowing that the officers of the Las Vegas Savage Saints were in the cruisers behind me. The part I’d failed to consider was if any other cruisers in the area came by to help. If they did and discovered that the Savage Saints had taken it over… well, that was an outcome I was utterly sick thinking about.
But as soon as the California Saints roared past, it became just like any other traffic stop. Granted, this stop had thirty ornery dudes looking for violence, but I’d dealt with gangsters, assholes, womanizers, creeps, drunks, and just about every type of human being on traffic stops. This was not going t
o end poorly for me because I knew how to handle it.
A bunch of the bikers whistled and complimented me on my body as I moved past them. I ignored them. I understood even a middle finger, even a simple glare, was grounds to get me in trouble. I went to the very front, found the man with the patch of “President” on his cut, and stared.
“License and registration,” I said.
“Of course,” he said.
He was much younger than I expected. He couldn’t have been that much older than Dom, in fact; maybe by a few years, but certainly not as old as Richard or Mama. I looked at the license. “Tracy Edward Cole.” All of the information seemed to check out. I read his registration—it was current and up to date in California.
Those two things almost always gave me an excuse to pull someone over and give them a ticket, but so far, I didn’t have anything.
“How are you this evening, officer?”
Trying to small talk me and make me change my mind.
“Well, I was doing fine until you and your boys reached some pretty high speeds out here,” I said. “I understand that you may think that Interstate 15 is a speedway, but the speed limit out here is eighty miles per hour, and my radar gun has you all going at about thirty miles per hour over that.”
“Oh, we’re sorry; we’ll be happy to pay the fine and drive safely.”
“Where are you headed?”
“Las Vegas.”
“For what?”
“Business.”
I nodded.
“The problem is that you boys are not just speeding; you are engaged in the crime of reckless driving,” I said. “And unlike speeding, which carries a small fine, that is something that I can arrest you for. That is something that I can have all of you taken in handcuffs, your bikes on the side of the road, and you in jail.”
I was bluffing hard here. That could only happen if someone had gotten injured as a result of the Saints’ insane driving, and that had not happened here yet. I could have threatened to arrest them for DUI, but they would have called that bluff in a heartbeat.
