After the Fall (The Fallen Men 4)

“How the fuck are we gonna do that?” Heckler demanded. “We’re not fuckin’ pigs.”

“Man has a point, King,” Axe-Man said, calm and slow as he always did. “Not investigators.”

“No, but we’re goddamn criminals. We can pick a lot, intimidate someone into confessing, stalk a copper to find out his filthy secrets and blackmail him into tellin’ us more. I’m tellin’ ya, we got options. Smarts ones if we rein in the fury.”

“Not reinin’ in shit, and I’m shocked as hell you’d be such a fuckin’ pansy about the shit when it’s not just your Prez, but your dad locked away,” Wiseguy grunted.

“Hey, man, not cool,” Bat chastised, but I was already seein’ red.

I leaned over the table so far, my boots almost left the ground, a snarl affixed to my face as I stared Wiseguy down. “You think I’m not about to go apeshit, you’re fuckin’ wrong. Got a dad better than damn man now locked away for the second time? New babies at home, tender wife goin’ through that shit alone, and he didn’t even do anything? I’m fuckin’ livid, Wiseguy, and you say shit about it again, I’ll knock your teeth in. I’m tryin’ to be smart here so we can get him the fuck outta there.”

“Somethin’ needs to be done now to show that motherfucker who he’s dealin’ with,” Skell shouted.

“They know who they’re dealin’ with. He’s made it his life’s mission to take down the club. You don’t think he’s bracin’ for attack and makin’ plans to fire back at us? Listen, Machiavelli said, ‘if you need to injure someone, do it in such a way that you do not have to fear there vengeance.’” I pounded my fist against the table. “‘If you do them minor damage, they will get their revenge; but if you cripple them, there is nothing they can do.’”

“Pretty words,” Heckler spat. “Don’t mean shit.”

“You’re not listenin’. Danner did this? We need to end him. I’m just sayin’ we need to end him in a way he doesn’t come back and rip apart more lives. Got a woman I’m about to marry, you think I want to spend my honeymoon in the hole? Bat, you got kids, you want them growin’ up without a father? Buck, you want Maja growin’ old without ya?” The silence was precarious, each brother a stick of dynamite held perilously over a fire. “We target the cops separately, see if we can get one of them to flip. Doubt Hutchinson knows anythin’ that could help, seein’ as he’s been in our pocket for years. Take them in pairs, bring them in, let Priest have his special way with them and see what we can’t get on Danner and the rest.”

“Zeus was fuckin’ framed for murder,” Buck said, and as soon as he did, I knew it was over for my tactic before it’d even begun. “Danner needs to feel the wrath of biker fury, and he needs to feel it now.”

“Hear, fuckin’ hear!” a few of the brothers shouted.

Nova kicked his foot against mine under the table like an apology.

“Let’s get to the vote,” Buck ordered.

And it was no surprise, twenty minutes later, when Buck was announced interim Prez.

Cress was asleep in my bed at the clubhouse, passed out after another day lendin’ her services to Loulou. Wanted to join here there, get sunk deep in the oblivion of sleep, but Boner, Lab-Rat, and Heckler were out on a ride by Danner’s house, doin’ that drive-by Buck’d been so hot on.

Didn’t sit right with me. Felt like walking straight into a trap Danner’d spent months makin’ just right. He knew bikers enough, watched us enough over the years, to know how we’d react. He’d want exactly that.

I sighed into my Blue Buck before suckin’ back a gulp of cold brew and knocked my fist against the hardcover of The Prince on the bar in front of me. Sometimes, there was a barrier between me and my brothers because they disregarded anythin’ they couldn’t immediately understand. There were a few exceptions, like Priest who’d memorized near every religious text he could get his hands on, and Bat who’d been in the military long enough to question things even if they’d stood for eons unchanged, but on the whole, bikers were not the kinda men who liked to be told things from a book, however worthy.

And I was that man, exactly that man who lusted after knowledge with a palpable kinda thirst. One’a the many reasons I’d fallen for Cress so fuckin’ hard was because she had a brain like the Delian problem, a brain I’d never be able to fully understand no matter how long I puzzled it over.

Words and prose made sense to me in a way I thought if I cut open a vein, ink would run down my arm and populate a page with verse.