No shit.
Speaking of shit, he needed to check his fucking pants after that.
Four men stood in one of the open bays of Dutch’s Garage, staring at him. The oldest one had his greasy hands planted on his hips over his just as greasy gray coveralls and was shaking his salt and pepper head, heavy on the salt.
The driver’s door on the old rusty 1948 Ford wrecker squealed like a stuck pig as he opened it and climbed down. A little WD-40 would fix that right up. It would have to since he didn’t want to spend the dough right now to restore the tow truck.
“That ‘48 looks familiar,” the old man shouted across the parking lot. His grin quickly disappeared as his gaze dropped to Trip’s cut. He had removed it, flipped it right-side out and shrugged it back on as soon as he’d stepped onto the concrete. “Fuck. That looks way too familiar, too.”
Trip eyed up the foursome cautiously, not sure which way this encounter would turn yet. “It should, old man.”
“Who you callin’ an old man, boy?”
“One whose face has deeper cracks in it than my ass.”
The old man stepped forward, breaking out of the line of thoroughly confused men. “Recognize that truck, recognize the colors, tryin’ to recognize your ugly mug. Strugglin’ though, must be my old, addled brain.”
“Or inhalin’ too many gas fumes.”
Trip approached him and they met halfway between the old Ford and the garage. Dutch’s eyes dropped to Trip’s name patch and his dull brown eyes widened.
“Fuck,” Dutch muttered under his breath. Trip’s own shoulders dropped a bit when he saw the old man relax. “Sorry ‘bout your granddad. Good man. But what the fuck you doin’ here? Thought you were off fightin’ for my freedom to drink beer and eat pussy.”
Trip guessed word hadn’t gotten back to Manning Grove that he’d been fighting for his own freedom. Maybe his granddaddy kept it quiet, since his own son had ended up dead over stupid shit and then both his grandsons ended up in prison over doing stupid shit, too.
Like father, like sons. Clyde Davis had probably been far from proud of the rotten fruit that fell from the family tree.
“I inherited the farm.”
Dutch yanked his grimy baseball cap off his head and slapped it back on with a jerk. “No shit. Gonna sell it?”
He guessed Dutch hadn’t heard Trip had been back in town permanently for the past couple of months, either. Trip must have done a good job keeping low. Plus, he’d bought the motel under a business name and sold the warehouse quietly to a developer who was going to rip it down. It probably also helped that the Amish certainly weren’t hanging out in town gossiping. “No.”
His thick salt and pepper bushy eyebrows rose. “Gonna farm it?”
“Fuck no.”
“What’re you gonna do?”
“Bring back the Fury.”
Dutch scowled and sputtered, “Well, that’s just plain fuckin’ stupid, boy.”
Trip ground his molars. He figured he’d get some resistance. But so far, he was two for two.
“What’s the point of that?”
“Wanna rebuild my father’s club.”
Dutch jabbed a crooked finger in his direction. “See? That there’s a fuckin’ big problem. The Fury wasn’t your father’s fuckin’ club. It was our fuckin’ club. All of ours. That was one mistake Buck made. It was supposed to be a brotherhood. He was not the goddamn king.” Dutch shook his head, muttered a curse under his breath and said, “Need a goddamn beer.” As he strode away, he waved his arms at the three men still standing there listening to everything that had been said. “Get the fuck back to work. I ain’t payin’ you to stand around and scratch your fuckin’ nuts.”
The three guys grinned and disappeared back inside. Then Trip heard, “You fuckin’ comin’, boy?” from the open garage door.
Trip guessed he was having a goddamn beer.
Not ten minutes later, after two goddamn beers and at least a dozen loud belches between them, Dutch was still shaking his head with his grimy boots kicked up on a desk that probably hadn’t been cleaned off in at least ten years.
Trip was slouched in another chair on the opposite side of the desk in a cluttered hole of an office. He had a can of generic piss water hanging from between his fingers and held between his spread knees. Because men with big balls like him needed to give his sac some room. Or at least Dutch had told him he had big balls by resurrecting the MC. Trip took it as a compliment. Dutch probably didn’t mean it as one.
“Where you gettin’ the scratch to do all this, boy? Clyde’s life insurance couldn’t have been that much.”
Trip took a long drag on his hand-rolled, then let the smoke roll out of his mouth toward the ceiling in rings. “It wasn’t. Only twenty grand. But it gave me a down payment for The Grove Inn.”