Page 10 of Sinful
A few hundred head visible from here, but there are thousands more scattered across pastures that stretch to the horizons.
In the distance, oil derricks pump steadily, the modern money that keeps the old money comfortable.
Their rhythmic motion is almost hypnotic—up,down, up, down—pulling liquid gold from Texas soil that gives and gives and never seems to run dry.
The clubhouse sits a quarter mile from where I'm sitting, a converted barn that's been expanded and fortified until it's more fortress than building.
Started as a simple horse barn back in the fifties, but each generation added to it.
Now it's got reinforced walls, security cameras hidden in the eaves, and enough square footage to house fifty members comfortably.
I can see members moving around down there—prospects washing bikes with the kind of attention to detail that means they're still trying to prove themselves, full patches drinking on the deck and bullshitting about runs and women and whatever else bikers talk about when they're not working.
Someone's working on an engine that's been giving them shit for weeks, the sound of wrenches on metal carrying across the distance.
Spur, probably.
He's been fighting with his Softail since spring.
It’s a normal Friday evening at Sharp Shooter Ranch, except nothing about tonight is normal.
The smell of the ranch is distinct this time of day—dust and grass and cattle, mixed with diesel from the trucks, leather from the tack room, and underneath it all, crude oil.
That particular scent of Texas wealth that's been here so long it's soaked into the soil itself.
A hawk circles overhead, riding thermals as it huntsfor dinner, probably after the prairie dogs that burrow in the south pasture.
Life and death, predator and prey, all playing out the same as it has for millennia.
The only difference is now we've got motorcycles and guns and a Mexican cartel trying to take what's ours.
"Beer?" Phantom's voice comes from the doorway.
I turn.
He's holding two Lone Stars, condensation already dripping down the bottles in this heat that doesn't quit, even as the sun sets.
Even at near-dark, it's still eighty-five degrees.
By midnight, it might drop to seventy if we're lucky.
Texas doesn't believe in gentle transitions.
Phantom's in his early fifties, but he carries it well.
Lean and hard like the land that raised him, with silver threading through dark hair he keeps short.
Easier to manage in this heat, and harder for enemies to grab in a fight.
Practical, like everything about him.
His face is all angles and scars—the kind you earn, not the kind you're born with.
A knife scar along his jaw from a bar fight in Laredo twenty years ago.
Another through his eyebrow from a wreck that should have killed him.
Small pox marks on his cheek from chicken pox as a kid that scarred worse than normal.
