Wild Fire (Chaos #6.5)(5)

She pressed her lips tightly together before she unpressed them to ask, “What? Drugs?”

“Black market.”

“Black market what?”

“Black market everything. Designer gear. Pharmaceuticals. Maple syrup. Freakin’ sperm. Anything and everything.”

She looked surprised. “Maple syrup?”

“Yeah. That was my reaction. I looked it up. It’s a thing in Canada. Farmers sell it under the table.”

“Whoa,” she muttered.

“This guy is part of a bigger operation,” Dutch told her. “An operation that gets their hands on a kid like that, with a brain like his, he’s hacking for the Russians at a million dollars an hour or worse.”

He now saw humor in her expression as she said, “You have a very inventive mind.”

He saw no humor in this situation at all and therefore laid it out.

“No, my dad’s throat was slit in the parking lot of a pizza joint when he was gettin’ into his truck to bring dinner home to his family. This put my mother in a tailspin it took nearly two decades for her to haul herself out of, which meant the man who loved her who was breathin’, a man she also loved, didn’t have her until it was almost too late for them to make their own family. And I know, along that road, no matter how much support I had, I asked myself the question of what the fuck’s the point? A good man tries to do good, and gets his throat slit. A good man tries to do good, and gets a bullet to the neck and bleeds out on his neighbor’s bedroom floor. So my mind isn’t inventive, Jules. I know that dark place it goes when you think this world is so fucked, the only course you got is to get what you can for yourself and fuck everyone else.”

“Point taken,” she murmured.

“Talk to Vance,” he ordered.

She shook her head. “I had Roam come in, chat with Carlyle, the wall he has up…” She paused, got closer, lowered her voice, and kept going. “I’m not saying I’m giving up on him. I don’t give up on them even if they walk out that door and give up on us. I’m just warning you, Dutch, that sometimes, there’s no help they’ll accept. Sometimes, they’re so set to stay in that dark place, you could run yourself ragged, and there’s no pulling them out.”

Roam used to be a kid in that shelter.

Roam was now known off the street as Roman, and he was a member of the badass brotherhood at Nightingale Investigations.

“It isn’t a Black thing,” he told her, because Roam was also Black.

“Roam was in this shelter. Roam gets it.”

“It’s a murdered father thing, Jules.”

She nodded.

“I fucked up, making it a Black thing,” he said.

“Yes,” she agreed quietly.

“Fuck,” he muttered.

She read his face again and went back on what she’d said earlier. “You could still get in there, Dutch. I mean, he was reading Tom Robbins last week.”

“Yeah, but now I’m that well-intentioned, clueless, white dude biker so I’m out before I was ever really in,” he returned.

“I don’t think so. Roam told him about your dad.”

Dutch clenched his teeth.

Jules kept talking.

“Roam told him about your dad, and he picked up that book, Dutch. There are different kinds of brotherhoods, and sadly, you two belong to an unusual one. And Carlyle is not one of those smart kids who’s so topped out in brains, he’s got no room for logic. He’ll put it together that a biker wearing a cut isn’t coming to a shelter and focusing on him because he wants to brag over cocktails that he’s giving back to society. Just give him time.”

Dutch looked over her head, something he could do, because the woman was not short, but he was six two.

“Vance dropped that bug in your ear about Carlyle for a reason, Dutch,” she said.

He looked right at her.

It was not lost on him they’d played him. It was not lost on him that Vance, who was sober, was hanging at the Chaos Compound while the guys were throwing some back, when he rarely hung at the Compound, and he was talking about one of Jules’s kids for the exact reason he was hanging at the Compound, talking about one of Jules’s kids.

He was maneuvering Dutch’s ass to be right there in an effort to get shit sorted with one of Jules’s kids.

Nope, Juliet Crowe never gave up on any of her kids.

“I’ll figure something out,” he said.

She smiled at him.

And taking that smile in, knowing the woman she was, the heart she had, the grit, he had no idea how old she was, he just knew she was older than him by more than a decade.

But if she was not married to a man who she made clear was her heartbeat, and the mother to their three kids, Dutch would want in there.

Permanently.

He nodded, muttered some words of farewell, and moved out.

His phone rang as he made his way to his truck.

He pulled it out again, saw it was Jagger, and felt a frisson of disquiet slide up the back of his neck.

Three calls in less than an hour, that wasn’t about going out and tying one on.

It could be their mother. Hound. Their little brother, Wilder. Any brother, really, in Chaos, their woman or one of their kids.

This on his mind, he took the call as he angled his ass into his truck.