Vicious Cycle (Vicious Cycle #1)(17)
Barry “Boone” Michaels, our treasurer, sat across from me at the table, twirling a skull-and-crossbones cigarette lighter between his fingers. He was just a few years older than me, although his salt-and-pepper hair and beard made him appear even older. We’d both gone through our prospecting period together, and we’d been patched in the same night. He liked to give me shit that as the president’s son, I’d had it a lot easier. The truth was Preacher Man had them go twice as hard on me to prove my worth. He wasn’t going to let any son of his get by just on who he was.
Next to Boone sat our secretary, Steve “Mac” McDonald. His tattooed hand sat poised over a notepad, ready to document everything that happened. He was forty-five. He’d patched into the Raiders twenty years ago. He was a good bridge between the two distinct generations in the club.
A tense silence choked off the air in the room. Something heavier than we had faced in a long time had gone down or was about to go down. Unable to stand the quiet any longer, I demanded, “So what’s shaking, Prez?”
Case shifted in his seat like he was physically affected by the news he had. “Nordic Knights are stirring shit. Again.”
A low, united growl came from all my brothers. It was an unwritten rule that clubs would have beef with one another from time to time over territory disputes and business dealings. But there was no club we despised more than the Nordic Knights. Regardless of all the alliances we had made with other clubs, we would never have peace with the Knights. There was too much bad blood between us.
“What are those bastards up to now?” Boone asked.
“We heard this from one of our insiders in the Atlanta PD. It seems the Feds reopened a case on the Knights. There was a big drug shake-up four months ago. An informant had brought them lots of information about the inner workings of the Knights drug ring in trade for immunity.” Case paused to run a hand over his salt-and-pepper beard. I sucked in a harsh breath because it was one of the tics he had before unloading some really heavy shit on us. His gaze cut over to mine. “This informant had been playing as a courier for her boyfriend, Jamey Ericson, one of the Knights. Before she could testify in court, she and Jamey were murdered execution style in their apartment.”
As the pieces of the puzzle slowly fit together, all the breath left my body, and I momentarily wheezed before I could speak. “Lacey.”
“Yes.”
“Jesus, what was she thinking?” I murmured. Since the day Willow had been brought to my door, I’d been searching for information about who could have killed Lacey. I knew she had been involved in some deep shit, considering how no one connected to her would talk, regardless of the amount of money I offered them. The person closest to her, Willow, sure as hell wasn’t talking, and even if she could, she was too young to understand who the people were in her mother’s world. In the end, I’d been led to believe it was a drug deal gone bad—she or her boyfriend hadn’t coughed up the money they owed.
“Deacon, there’s more,” Case said.
“More than finding out the mother of my child took up with some Knights scum and then turned rat?”
Rev shook his head. “Maybe she needed immunity to stay out of jail for Willow’s sake.”
“Knowing Lacey, I have a hard time believing she was thinking of anyone but herself,” I argued. Feeling Case’s intense gaze on me, I glanced from Rev to him. “What?”
“He said there were a lot of mentions of a guy named ‘Seagal.’”
I bolted forward in my chair as Rev sucked in a harsh breath. “He just overheard all this shit, right? What if what he’s hearing as Seagal is really Sigel?” Rev asked.
Case grimaced. “Yeah, it is. He’s out. Been out for five months for copping a deal.”
“How the f*ck are we just now hearing he’s out? I thought we had eyes and ears all over the jailhouse,” Bishop demanded.
A tense silence fell over the table. Just the mention of the name “Sigel” hit me, Rev, and Bishop especially hard. Frederich “Freddy” Spears, or Sigel, as he called himself now, was the president of the Nordic Knights. Sigel gave the Raiders far too many f*cking reasons to want him six feet under. There was the racist bullshit he spewed about being the son of an actual former Nazi soldier, but there was also the fact he was once one of our own.
Of course, he was just Freddy back then. Most of the time he was known as Fucked-Up Freddy because of his heroin addiction. Like the legendary Hells Angels, the Raiders had a bylaw about no needles in the club. You might snort crank or smoke some crack, but shooting up rained a whole different type of shit down on you and your brothers.
Preacher Man tried to intervene to help Freddy, but he finally had to kick him out of the club and take his cut. It wasn’t too long before Freddy adopted a new road name, Sigel, after some sun bullshit in German mythology. It was a nod to his ties with the Aryan Brotherhood. He then formed his own club, the Nordic Knights, and did everything he could to f*ck with us, including trying to move drugs in our territory. Regardless of some of our less-than-legal business dealings, we never dealt in drugs or women. Preacher Man worked tirelessly to push Sigel and his Knights out of Raiders territory.
Our true hatred of Sigel came from the fact he had our father’s blood on his hands. And not metaphorically from some hit he’d put out. He’d pumped Preacher Man full of holes at point-blank range when the two were meeting under a truce flag. My fists curled in rage as I remembered cradling my father’s dying body. As his sergeant, I had gone with him to the meeting.