by Jessie Cooke
Jace had a few hard and fast rules for his club so far, but there was one that he addressed with any man who wanted to prospect for his club. That was: his “old lady,” Beck, would play a key role in the club whether they liked it or not. It was cleared and approved by the national chapter president in Boston, was what he told them. What he didn’t tell them, but Finn knew, was that it had been an absolute, unshakable condition of his taking this club on in the first place. Unlike other old ladies, Beck was invited to all the meetings and allowed to give her input. By now, six months into it, the men were comfortable with it and they had all witnessed that just because Jace wanted his old lady close and valued her opinion, didn’t mean he was afraid to tell her when he thought she was wrong. The president and his old lady never argued in front of the club, but Finn was sure, based on Beck’s personality alone, that they had more than a few wild rows behind closed doors.
There was no denying that Beck was smart, and savvy about people, men especially. She was also moody and it seemed that all of her moods were dark somehow, even the good ones. Some were dark funny, others dark sarcastic, and some just downright mean. She’d been nothing but mean for months after she lost the baby she had been carrying when they first got to Arizona. But Finn understood that she was hurting and they all tried to do whatever they could to ease her pain. She seemed to appreciate it from the other guys, but for some reason that Finn hadn’t been able to figure out, she just seemed to simply not like him. He was positive that all this mess would only make that worse. As she walked into the meeting that night, anger, or at least annoyance, swam in her cool blue eyes...and they were focused on Finn until she took her seat at the table.
Jace sat next to her and waited until the rest of them found a seat and began to settle down. He didn’t hadn’t have a VP yet, but he had two sergeants at arms, Streak and Punk. Finn had badly wanted one of those spots, but he’d had to suck it up and remind himself they were both in the military with Beck and had experience that he didn’t when it came to weapons and protection. It still stung sometimes, though, especially when another one of Beck’s friends showed up, a guy named “Vic,” almost six months into their time in Phoenix. They all voted to patch him in right away too...as an enforcer. Finn bit his tongue almost bloody over that one. They had a treasurer they called Boots because of his obvious affinity for the footgear. Not that they didn’t all wear boots, but “Boots” seemed to own a different pair for every day. When Finn asked him once how many pairs he owned he had told him, “I lost count after fifty.” The odd little man had a little trailer he hauled behind his Harley when he first showed up at the club. He’d had four boxes stacked on top of it. They were all filled with his boots. He came to them from California. He’d only been patched into the Westside Skulls for a few months when Jace and Beck started the club in Phoenix and needed a treasurer. The kid had dual degrees in finance and engineering, so that one didn’t bother him at all. Finn didn’t like math and he knew because of his history, no one would trust him with the cash. Someday Finn wouldn’t mind knowing Boot’s story, though...what would make someone with that much potential want to be a member of a motorcycle club?
The last three and newest members of the club, Goth, Danny Boy, and Merlin all took their seats and Jace said, “Let’s get started. The only item we have on the agenda tonight is what we should do about the man who ‘recognized’ Finn at the coffee shop.” Based on the looks that Beck was shooting him from across the table, Finn was sure that Jace already had an idea in mind that Beck wasn’t happy about. He tried to ignore the fire in her blue eyes and focus on his president instead. “The guy was treated in the ER and then taken into custody, booked, and released...”
“No bail?” Finn said, impulsively. Sometimes he had trouble keeping his mouth shut, which usually led to more trouble for him.
“Nope. Judge let him go on his own recognizance.”
“What the hell? How’s that fair?” He didn’t know why that bothered him, but for some reason it did. He felt like he always got the short end of the stick somehow and his self-pity sometimes manifested at inconvenient times.
“Shut up, Snake!” Beck snapped. He was taken aback by both her words and her tone but as if no one had said anything, Jace went on,
“We know from the police report that this guy’s name is Sean O’Hare. He’s got an address here in Phoenix, and one in Dublin, Ireland. He’s got a dual citizenship. He’s only lived in Phoenix for a month, though; before that he lived in the Bronx in New York for eight years.”
“What’s he doing in Phoenix?” Streak asked.
“Works as a bar back at a little bar downtown called Harry’s Pub.”
“He moved to Phoenix to take a bar back job?” That was Punk, but Finn had the same thought. Bar-backing meant that he stocked shelves, wiped off the bar, cleaned tables...whatever the bartender needed him to do to help. It was, for the most part, a low-paying job and not something a person would typically relocate for.
“I doubt that was the reason he chose Phoenix,” Jace said. “He worked at a little Irish-style pub in the Bronx doing the same thing for the past eight years...except once a year for three months when he goes to Dublin, Ireland to visit his relatives. While he’s there, he works for the same person he works for here, in a bar they own there. This year, though, instead of going back to Ireland, he came to Arizona. The bar he went to work for here doesn’t have any connection to the others that we know of and he doesn’t have any relatives or any real reason for being here, that we’ve been able to find out.”
“No reason other than they had some idea I was here...is he connected to O’Reilly?” Finn asked.
Finn hated to even say that name out loud. When he did, a wave of nausea passed through him and the emotion that he hated worst of all, fear. Regan O’Reilly was a self-made man with a colorful past and a story that had been told and retold so many times that no one seemed to know any longer what was actual fact and what was fiction. The documented fact was that O’Reilly was born in the 1940s to Irish immigrant parents in New York, and everything else was hearsay. The short version was that he grew up in a lower-class neighborhood in the Bronx. His mother did other people’s laundry and his father worked for a bookie. The old man had a violent streak and he used it to “bust kneecaps” and “crack skulls” of those who owed his boss money and didn’t pay it back in time. When Regan was fourteen his old man was arrested and some “interesting” things came to light...first, he had been documenting everything he learned for the past decade and a half...names, dates, crimes, everything. In order to get himself out of a murder conviction, he made a deal with the government to help bring down the men that he’d named in his “book.” Law enforcement kept it all confidential, and so did O’Reilly’s old man. The only person who knew anything was his wife and as she was supposed to be preparing the family for witness protection, she was making some different plans of her own.
O’Reilly’s mother was involved in an affair with a made man and she passed on what she knew...in exchange for that information, instead of disappearing, the family got a new house, a new car, and a monthly allowance. The old man was dead before they even got him to the courthouse to testify. So...thanks to his mother’s connections to some powerful men, inheriting her intelligence and apparent lack of conscience and his father’s knack for violence, Regan O’Reilly was a multi-millionaire by the age of thirty. Of course that money came from illegal activities and all of his legitimate businesses were set up for the purpose of laundering that money.
In the late 1980s when his operation got so large that he wasn’t going to be able to stave off the mob or the Feds much longer, he moved his business to Ireland. Once there, he legally obtained his citizenship and established himself in a large neighborhood that wasn’t “run” or “owned” by anyone. He started out by buying and fixing up properties and once he owned enough to have some influence, he began to push the city to make improvements to things like roads, sidewalks, street l
ights, schools, and other public entities. All those improvements attracted new and improved businesses to the area...most of which borrowed the capital they needed for startup from the savvy Irishman. Regan O’Reilly was on the board of some of the major hospitals in the city, he gave charitable donations by the hundreds of thousands to the arts, and for a while he had even garnered himself a seat on the city council. Some people thought of him as a sinner and others as a saint. Finn knew firsthand that he was the devil. He shuddered again and tried to shake the image of Regan O’Reilly’s sadistic face from his mind while he focused on what Jace was saying.
“Aiden Murphy did some digging into Sean O’Hare’s history in Dublin for us.” Aiden was the president of the Chosen Few, the MC that Coyote had gone to for help when Finn was in trouble. Finn had no idea that Jace was still in touch with them, and it made him wonder why they had contacted Granite about meeting with Colin instead of contacting Jace directly. Colin might just be the piece of this puzzle that was missing and without that piece, Jace and the rest of the club might be spinning their wheels. He needed to talk to his father. Maybe it was time they came clean about what he was doing in that coffee shop that day to begin with. He gave his head a little shake and once again focused on Jace. He was still talking about Aiden. “Aiden says they couldn’t find any connection between this idiot here and Regan O’Reilly, but you know how that goes, Snake...if O’Reilly saw an opportunity to use O’Hare, he would seize it regardless of whether the man worked for him or not...and O’Hare wouldn’t be able to refuse.”
“O’Reilly knows I’m alive,” Finn said, not even realizing he said it out loud until Jace responded.
“Not necessarily. I don’t know O’Reilly but from all I’ve heard, it wouldn’t be his style to send some flunky out here just to watch you.”
Finn nodded slowly; that was true. O’Reilly would have just had them snatch him up, so he could start his torture. Unless...he wanted him to know he was being followed and that was part of the torture. Or maybe they were just biding time until O’Reilly could get to the States.
“So we get O’Hare to tell us what he knows...and go from there?” Finn asked.
“We,” Beck said, rolling her eyes. “Me. I get him to tell me what he knows.”
“You?” Finn frowned. It wasn’t that he doubted she could do anything, it just struck him as odd that Jace would let her take that on by herself.
“Yeah, me,” she said. “The prospects have been on him since he left the jail three and a half days ago. He goes to work and goes home, doesn’t really talk to anyone...except maybe the women he ends his nights with when he’s drunk. Even close-mouthed men tend to talk, if there’s pussy involved.”
“He likes petite blondes,” Jace said. “And once we decided that it wasn’t a good idea to just snatch this guy up off the street and beat what he knows out of him...”
“Which was my suggestion,” Beck said, with a smile in her old man’s direction. Jace smiled back at her and went on:
“The reason that probably wouldn’t work is if he’s more afraid of who he’s working for than he is us, he’ll just tell us a bunch of bullshit and have us chasing our tails and wasting time. The other reason is that we’ve already got this mess pending from the fight in front of the coffee shop and if this guy goes missing or turns back up in a hospital, we’ll have cops crawling all over this place.” Finn’s eyes went back to Beck. Her blue eyes were still on his face. She resented him for this and since she didn’t like him much to begin with, he’d probably be waiting for a lot longer than he hoped for one of those executive positions to come his way.
8
“Damn, you shoulda seen her walk in there like she owned the place. I’ll bet every guy in there is stepping on his own dick, or at least his tongue by now.” Bubba was already in the dark blue van across the street from the bar when Finn got there. Finn had spent about an hour with his old man after church. He’d checked in with him about Colin again and Granite still hadn’t heard from him, or the man in the Chosen Few who had set up the meet in the first place. Finn suggested, not for the first time, that they tell Jace about the other guy, but Granite still thought they should wait, until they had more information.
What they ended up talking most about was Finn’s state of mind. All the talk about O’Reilly had sent his mind to a dark place, and although Jace and Beck knew the basics of what had happened to him in Ireland, his old man was the only one who knew just how bad it had really been. Finn appreciated that Granite never told him how he should feel about any of that or pointed out that he’d gotten himself into the mess in the first place. He simply let Finn talk and he listened, and most of the time that was all he needed. Of course, he couldn’t help but wonder sometimes whether if the old man had been there to listen when he was a kid, things would have turned out differently. But...he wasn’t, and they hadn’t...so, Finn had to suck it up and move on.
Finn brought his thoughts back to the present and Bubba’s comment about Beck. “I can’t believe she agreed to do it. She wasn’t happy about it, that much was obvious in church earlier.”
“She was wearing this shirt cut down to here,” Bubba said, still obviously enamored with what he’d seen. He was holding a finger in the center of his chest to show where Beck’s blouse had been cut to, and he pointed at his upper thigh and said, “And a skirt cut up to here. She even curled her hair...or did something to it. It was all...” He fluffed his short mess and said, “Floofy.” Finn raised an eyebrow. He wasn’t sure that was a word, but he was sure it was one no one ever used to describe Beck before. Bubba was batting his own eyelashes then and saying, “She was wearing makeup too. Her eyelashes were ten feet long and her lips were so red that it made a man wonder...” He didn’t say what they made a man wonder about, but Finn could guess. Bubba’s sudden death wish was what made Finn wonder.
“Boy, I think you better remember who you’re talking about.”
Bubba’s face fell and he swallowed hard. “Sorry, man. I got carried away. She was just so...fuck, I’m sorry, man. Don’t tell the boss, okay?”
Finn laughed, lit a smoke, and handed one to Bubba and said, “I’m not sure the boss is the one you have to worry about. She’ll kill you herself for thinking about her like that.” Finn had never met any woman like Beck...not that he was all that experienced with women...but he knew she was different from the start. She wore a leather vest, just like her old man, with a black or white t-shirt underneath it and jeans and boots. Finn had known her for a year by that time and never saw her in anything else. She never wore makeup and her hair was usually an unruly mess with white-blonde ringlets that all seemed to all point in different directions. Despite all of that and her attitude, it was hard to miss how incredibly hot she was...but they all tried. None of them would be stupid enough to cross their president...and then there was Beck herself; she was downright lethal and they all knew it. It kept Finn’s thoughts and his dick where they both belonged. Bubba seemed to need a reminder.
“Hope this guy keeps his hands to himself and watches his mouth or Jace might have bigger problems than another assault case on the books.”
Bubba chuckled. “You know, I’ve heard some stories about the prez’s old lady. I can’t say as I would mind witnessing that wild side...long as it ain’t pointed in my direction.”
Finn frowned. “Seriously, man, if you keep getting that goofy look on your face when you talk about her, you might see more of it than you’re hoping for.” Bubba closed his mouth. “Where’s Jace?”
“Him and Goth are around back, Vic and Punk are inside. Jace has the other guys posted between here and his place, just in case.” Finn nodded and looked back across at the bar and said:
“Wish I could be a fly on the wall.”
Bubba’s face brightened again, way too much, and he said, “Me too.”
Beck felt the gaze of nearly every man in the bar as she walked in. Men looking at her didn’t faze her much. They’d been staring at her s
ince she was thirteen years old. She used to revel in it, knowing the other women spent hours doing their hair and makeup and dressing in slutty clothes, and all she had to do was pull on a pair of jeans, and any man in the place that she wanted would be hers. It was exactly what she and Jace had fought about when he’d suggested she do this. She didn’t necessarily have an argument with the plan...although it might be hard for her not to kill this guy if he tried to touch her. Her complaint was with the fact that Jace wanted her to dress the part too. Apparently the women that this Irish asshole picked up in the bar weren’t only blonde, but slutty. In the end, she let Jace have his way...because he told her he’d fuck her silly in the skirt when they got home. It was what she loved about their relationship, she thought with a smile, the compromise.
Still, as the drunken men’s eyes roamed her scantily clad body, Beck had to fight the urge to reach underneath that skirt and pull out the knife that she’d taped to her thigh. She knew the man that talked her into this, her man, was sitting outside on his bike, making sure she was safe. She also knew that if any of these losers laid a hand on her, they’d be the ones that needed his help.
She slid onto an empty stool at the bar and ordered a shot of tequila. The bar was small, but they still had a live band playing up front. There was a tiny little dance floor and two couples hugged up, swaying back and forth more to the alcohol in their veins than the beat of the music, she would guess. She turned to face the band and arched her back as she put the tequila shot to her lips. The heated looks of all the men were almost palpable as she tossed back her head and the shot and then swiveled right so that she was facing the gaping Irishman who had been stocking the shelves under the bar when she sat down. She wasn’t surprised that he’d stopped what he was doing, or that he was staring right at her, slack-jawed and eyes swimming with lust. She had to call up every ounce of strength she had to suppress the disgust she felt and force a smile...and harder yet, a wink. The guy actually looked over his shoulder. Well, at least he’s not stupid enough to think I’m in his league. With a real smile at her own thoughts, Beck turned back to the bartender and said:
