Page 39 of DOG Part 2
3
Kane
It had beena few sleepless nights and nerve wracking days. By the time night fell again the anxiety had coiled up so tightly in my stomach it felt like a venomous snake just waiting for the opportunity to lash out. Banner and I had spent this morning planning, figuring out what to do and when to do it. He’d spent nearly an hour in my office on the phone with his daughter, trying to convince her to go to his mother’s in Idaho. The girl refused. She was as stubborn as her father. By noon when he called her one last time, Banner’s shouts at her would permeate the thick wood and fill the entire floor of the clubhouse. He was exasperated.
After that, Banner took a couple men and went out to go do a patrol of our half a dozen nightclubs and bars. Not much had been resolved. Staking out the Arroyos Bandidos and implementing a direct attack on them was what we both wanted to do, but at that point it was still too risky. We knew where their clubhouse was, of course, off near Picacho Peak, but we also knew they were no doubt just waiting for the Rugged Angels to launch an attack on them so they could surround us and do us in for good. We needed an advantage, and hitting them on their turf was not going to cut it.
The next evening, I was just about to leave the club to ride around for a bit and clear my head when the side door banged open and Deuce rolled in from the garage entrance. He was angry, and a thunderstorm of wrath showed on his face. Deuce was always mad as hell but this time it was worse. This time the man turned into the kind of storm that threatened to take out a whole town. He was seething, his eyes wide, his broad shoulders squared under his cut, and his fists clenched at his sides.
He stopped in the foyer and stared at me, taking in a breath as the jawline beneath his short trimmed black beard grew tighter by the second. I waited for him to speak. There was nothing else to do. When Deuce got this angry he needed more time to say his peace. Also, it had only been a matter of time before news of the Arroyos Bandidos’ next move would get to us, and now that I was standing there waiting for it I was exceptionally calm.
As my Vice-President finally got his breath the words came out with steel edges. “They’ve attackedFever.Banner has been shot.”
“Shit.” I bit the inside of my cheek. They were brazen to hit our best nightclub like that. The next words were hard to say, but they had to come out. “Is he alive?”
Deuce nodded sharply. “Yes, but it’s bad. Stomach wound. He’s still over there. They took him to the reinforced back room. Steph is working on him.”
Pulling my black leather cut on over my white t-shirt, I turned swiftly and walked back through the foyer, towards the side entrance to the garage. Deuce’s boots thudded heavily against the smooth boards as he followed.
“Anything else? Did they take anything?”
“No. They just busted in, an army of them, and one shot Banner. The club wasn’t open yet.”
“Good.”
“Good? What do you mean this is good?”
“I mean exactly what I just said.”
Deuce and I were good friends. The best, really. We went far back, having done one tour in Afghanistan together. He knew things about me no one else in the Rugged Angels knew, but that didn’t mean I was going to pander to his stupid questions. It was the opposite with us. It meant I could be assertive with him, borderline asshole even, and he wouldn’t take it personally. He knew me too well. We had an understanding between us.
Still, his questions. Sometimes they were stupid. Like right now.
If we were lucky, no one in the neighborhood had heard the shots and reported them. Even better, no one outside the circle had been hurt, especially patrons. The last damn thing we needed was the police showing up. Motorcycle clubs like ours didn’t do police, just like we didn’t do hospitals or anything else that required us to show personal records and face.
I cleared the few steps down into the garage, landing heavily by my black Harley. “Does Steph know if her help will be enough yet?”
Deuce climbed on top of his own bike. “I’m not sure. She didn’t when I saw her last, and I came to tell you right away. You didn’t pick up your phone. Why the hell don’t you ever answer that thing?”
That was another question I wasn’t going to answer. Like an idiot, I’d left it on vibrate somewhere upstairs. I wasn’t going to tell Deuce that. I had my most recent burner flip phone in my pocket, but that was only for emergencies, for when I had to keep a low profile and receive or make calls that we didn’t want traced back to us.
Gritting my teeth, I reached over and hit the button to open the garage door. The world blurred and shook in an odd manner. The repercussions of Banner dying would be too hard to handle. It was exactly the blow the Arroyos Bandidos were looking for. No doubt they hoped that by taking out the Rugged Angels’ ex-president we would have no choice but to come to them. That retaliation meant walking right into their clutches.
I wasn’t that stupid, and I couldn’t be duped by such a rookie move. We rode the back way to the night club, keeping to side streets as much as possible. The dry summer air whisked by, lapping at my face and kicking up the open sides of my unzipped leather jacket. The ride felt nothing like it usually did. All exhilaration was gone, replaced by a tight nervousness that scratched beneath every inch of my skin.
Outside of the night club was quiet when we got there. It was dark, and still an hour or so until opening time. Apparently no one had heard the gunshots or called the police. Or maybe they were too afraid. Or it could be they just hadn’t cared.
Banner was in the back office, stretched out on the table with his head on a smooth, shiny pillow that had been nabbed from one of the club’s couches. Steph, the old lady of one of the club’s members and a woman who had worked as a nurse in a past life, was hovering over him. Her husband, Danny, managed the nightclub and was standing in the corner conversing low with Skate, our MC Secretary and Treasurer.
“Kane,” Skate said when he saw me. He had his long brown hair tied into a low man-bun at the nape of his neck and his jaw was flinching with tension. Skate was a pretty boy. He could have been one of those male models, if he hadn’t gone for two tours in Iraq and then picked MC life. His good looks were something that constantly made him the easy pick for provoking around the clubhouse. It also got him into trouble with the ladies. Sadly, after a day like today, with Banner shot, joshing around again was going to be a long ways off.
Skate took a step toward me. “It was a surprise attack. They outnumbered our team four-to-one. The thing is, they knew what they were doing. They didn’t shoot anyone but Banner. This was a planned, targeted attack. Right after they stormed the front door and came in, one of them shot Banner, then were gone before we even knew what was happening.”
“So no one else was hit?”
“No. Just Banner.”
“They were targeting him.”
