Page 6 of A Wrench in the Plan
“He’s gotta put up with you, so I think that’s more than enough payback,” Trav joked right before he darted out the door, all of Row’s stuff loading down his arms. Evan’s laughter danced right out of the room with him.
“You’re supposed to be on my side,” I said to Evan, putting on a butt-hurt face. This only caused him to laugh harder as he tossed a clean shirt at me.
“I’m always on your side, babe,” he said.
Glaring hard, I held his eyes as I walked around him to get to the bathroom. He popped me on the ass, but I saw it coming, so I quickly whipped around and tackled him to the bed.
That turned into a thirty-second make-out session, which I wasn’t going to complain about.
“We’re so gross,” he said as he playfully pushed me off of him. “Morning breath is not cute.”
He had a point there. But I also didn’t find myself caring so much when it came to him.
We brushed our teeth, then ran out the door. I didn’t want us to be the last ones there. Sparrow followed Sidekick out of his room. I sent her a tight smile as we all fell in line, headed for Church. I knew she had to have been beaming inside, since she hadn’t turned Prospect all that long ago and here she was going into the forbidden room.
Prez got started right away.
“Though I’m not really happy about how it went down last night, I will say that Sparrow was able to find what I couldn’t,” he said, looking a little unhappy. “Yes, I suspected there might be a plant in our club. I figured it was a prospect, but couldn’t catch any of them doing anything that made me think twice. Not beyond the stupid shit prospects tend to do anyway.”
The entire table was silent as LT took a moment. One hand stroked over his beard, while he drummed the fingers of the other hand on the table.
“Some of you know what’s been going on,” he continued. I wasn’t one of them, but I tried not to look bent outta shape about it. “I haven’t told the whole table and I regret that. I needed to keep this as contained as possible.”
He sat up straight and began to fill in those of us that were clueless.
Apparently, the Indiana chapter had been dealing with a club called The Bloody Jokers. Some old club from California that the FBI took down something like twenty years ago. Seven, the Prez of the Indiana chapter, hadn’t been getting a good vibe from the newly resurrected club, and had been trying to brush them off. He refused to make any deals with them. It seemed like they were trying to make a move on our club. We hadn’t seen any of them down here, but Seven and LT both figured it was just a matter of time until they came poking around since we were the head chapter for the gun runs.
It looked like their hunch was right. Only, they’d gotten the jump on us and they’d had someone planted in the club for months.
I slyly tried to glance over at Evan and my sister. I was a little surprised Prez was talking so freely in front of them. I guessed, us being gun runners really shouldn’t have been that big of a surprise, though.
It kinda made me feel a little better that it was out there. One, it showed that Prez trusted them. And two, one less secret between me and Evan. I wasn’t sure why that mattered so much, but it did.
“It wasn’t until the fire that I really started to suspect we had someone in the club fucking with us,” Prez said. “I knew Evan never had anything to do with it, but I needed to make it look like I had someone pinned for it for anyone that might be wondering if we were looking into it. I knew that fucker was watching closely, and that was why I had Evan hiding out in the apartment here. I’m sorry if I made some of you worry, but sometimes you have to trust me.”
I felt Prez’s eyes on me, but the guilt was sitting like cement in my gut. I turned my head and glanced at Evan over my shoulder as I fidgeted in my seat.
I didn’t deserve Evan in my bed. Didn’t deserve his friendship, not after the thoughts I’d had about him setting the fire. It didn’t matter that deep down, I knew there was no way he could have done it. Because, there had been quite a few times after LT had taken him away that I’d doubted Evan’s intentions, his innocence, his reason for getting close to Cat and me and the club.
I wasn’t sure how to make it up to him, or if that was even something you could make up for. I hadn’t told him that I’d had those thoughts, but that didn’t make it okay.
LT went on to talk about the device or whatever Twigs had found in the rubble, explaining how it worked. Someone had rigged something to spark and set off a fire in a vodka bottle. It sounded pretty cool to me, except for the fact that it happened to our fuckin’ bar.
“So, there’s really no telling who could have set that up?” I chimed in with once he was done.
“Right,” Prez said, looking pissed over the fact. “But then Sparrow blew everything up when she came to me and raved about how there was a mole in the club.” As he glanced at my sister, his face was a mix of frustration and pride. “She got the prospect I was trying to flush out. So now we’ve got him and that fucker is in the box. We’ll see what we can get out of him soon enough. Figured I’d let him sweat it out a while.” He ended with a satisfied smirk.
“We have no idea what this club is planning?” Grass, the new Road Captain, asked. He was a club kid like me, but he grew up around the mother chapter in Moon Hill.
“No,” LT answered. “But right now, they still think they have the advantage. They don’t know we have their man. I want to move quick on this. Seven is keeping an eye on them up there. So far, they have just been hanging around the area, moving between motels. They haven’t made any moves to plant roots that he’s seen. Seven has made it clear that Conception is their territory, but there are a lot of clubs up that way. Small ones. Most of them don’t start shit with the others, but it’s still a bit congested in those smaller, rural areas.”
“What do we do?” Sidekick asked.
“Act like everything is normal, but keep your eyes open. Be ready for anything. I want the prospects knowing absolutely nothing from now on. With the exception of these two, since there’s nothing I can do about that anyway.” He waved a hand in the direction of Evan and Row. “I don’t trust he is the only one. For now, I’m stopping the prospects on patrol at the container yard. I’m going to keep them closer to home, where we can all keep an eye on them. That means, Sparrow and Evan, you will be working patrol shifts at the container yard to help out. I’m adding more to the patrol rotation. I want three on guard at all times until further notice. Knight, you work on the schedule for that for now. Same is going to go for runs. Evan and Sparrow will be the only prospects allowed on those.”
I guessed it shouldn’t have been a surprise that he was going to tighten up on the club. It was going to suck for Evan.Andfor me. Probably meant that I wasn’t going to be seeing a lot of him for a while. At least if we got to go on runs together, we could find time to sneak off after everything was offloaded.
Prez went on about how we were a brotherhood and that meant we had to trust one another, trust him. I kinda zoned out since I did have complete trust in my club, and especially LT.
