Page 10 of Absinthe Dreams
The police would catch him. They had to.
I was making a mountain out of a mole hill…
Except it really didn’t feel that way.
Something in my gut told me to make the call, but it wouldn’t hurt to sleep on it before I did – would it?
CHAPTER FOUR
Chainsaw…
I hated that Ruth had gotten away for so long with the shitIhad initially pulled by playing opossum. It was how we’d gotten a decent foothold in our internal civil war within the club. I’d played dead, had healed up, and when I’d gotten fit enough to move around and get shit done, I’d come a runnin’ and brought Hell with me.
Methodical like, I’d started taking out the lower-ranking members, the newbies who none of us owed shit to. It’d been me an’ Axe or me an’ Saint. Sometimes, it’d been me and LaCroix takin’ ‘em down or completely out one by one.
It’d been slow, painfully slow, making this one look like an accident, that one look like an overdose, setting these three up to go to prison for a long fuckin’ stint – but Ruthless knew. Somehow, he knew that none of it was as coincidental as all of that.
Now we were on the receiving end of the same type of play, only thanks to Saint’s new woman, who happened to be Louie’s sister, we’d unraveled the Gordian knot of Ruth’s bullshit faster than he’d caught on to ours.
We’d only lost one before finding him out. He’d lost more. Just another spotlight on the truth that that narcissistic fuck couldn’t come up with an original idea if his life depended on it – which it did.
His years of drugging had taken their toll, and he wasn’t half as smart or clever as he used to be.
I looked from one to the other to the next of my brothers around the table, as we plotted and planned our way through the fuckin’ cabinet of the Bayou Brethren based on the intelligence that Velina had gathered for us.
We’d taken out the schmuck she’d been forced into proximity with, along with one other just a little while back, and it was time to make a play for the next one. We weren’t concerning ourselves over much with the lower rank and file.
We knew by this point what they were like, and what they were like was easy fuckin’ pickin’s. Cut off the head of the snake and they’d topple and scatter. They didn’t know the meaning of loyalty. They hadn’t been tested and found true. Not like they should have been. Not like we’d been when it came to each other.
Shit, Louie’d taken out his ownmother.Put club over family and madeushis family in the offing.
I’d done some pretty heinous shit to prove my own loyalty back in the day to Ruth, but as it turned out, he was the disloyal one.
That still rankled me to this very fuckin’ day.
“So, who’s on our hit list now?” Axe asked without any preamble.
Saint was looking tan and refreshed after his time out in Florida with his woman. Hex got up with a piece of chalk in his hand and went over to our cabinet board. We only had the fuckin’ thing because things grew so fast and changed so quick as a result under Ruthless.
We’d actually needed a fuckin’ blackboard to keep track of his cabinet changes on his whim when any one of us fell out of favor with him for longer than five fuckin’ minutes.
It was blank, now. Had been since we’d booted his and every one of those lame-ass motherfuckers outta here.
We knew who we were and what role each of us served within our club. We didn’t need a fuckin’ board – but it was good it was here. It served a new purpose now.
Underpresident, Hex put Ruth’s new name – Lazarus – though I doubted any of us would ever fuckin’ call him that.
He went down the line, and the board ended up lookin’ something like this at the end…
Club President: Lazarus
Chapter President: Rebel
Vice President: Strychnine
S.A.A.: Hatchet
Enforcer 1: Spite
