Crash (Brazen Bulls MC #1)(27)

One thing about a confusion like this: it wasn’t all that difficult to move through it without becoming part of it. Everybody’s attention was elsewhere. He had to deke and duck a few times, but he made it to the table in a matter of seconds, without taking or delivering a blow.

He felt his brothers right behind him, also free and clear.

Gunner was being held, arms and legs down, by four men while the fifth, straddling him, bashed him again and again with a fist full of rings. He struggled against the holds, but he was f*cking laughing. Rad could hear the blood in the sound, even over the battle boiling around them.

He was wearing his goddamn kutte. He’d caused this trouble with the Bull on his back.

Stupid, crazy-ass motherf*cker.

With a brisk wave of his hands, Rad sent his brothers to flare out around the table. It would be one on one, except that Gunner had already lost his matchup and was about to get himself f*cking killed.

They hadn’t been noticed yet. Seeing no other choice, Rad put up his hand, thumb and index finger extended, and Eight Ball and Simon took out their guns at the same time he did. Ox pulled his blade.

With his nod, three Bulls put the muzzles of their weapons to the temples of three men holding their brother down. Ox put his blade to the throat of the fourth.

“Let go,” Rad muttered in his guy’s ear and was immediately obeyed. “Now call him off. Or you all die here.”

“Booker!” his guy yelled. “Man, enough!”

Gunner, still conscious and now freed, managed to land a decent punch on the side of Booker’s face. That got the guy’s attention, and he saw the way the field had changed. In that break of focus, Gunner managed to flip him off the table and sit up. He grabbed at his side and turned a swollen mess of a face at Rad. “Cavalry to the rescue,” he said, grinning. His beard dripped blood.

Rad thought that was what he’d said. It was loud, and his mouth was a mess, but it sounded like that. Or close.

Then Rad felt the prick of sharp steel in his back, at his kidney, and a female voice at his shoulder said, “Back the f*ck off, biker boy.”

Rad pulled the muzzle of his gun up, but before the guy he’d had it on, or the chick with the knife, could react, he sent his elbow backward and connected with something solid—her face, he hoped. The knife was gone from his back. He punched the guy before he turned, going for the gut. As that guy grunted and fell back, doubled over, Rad spun.

A woman with brassy red hair and prodigious cleavage had one hand over her gushing nose. The other hand still held the knife. Rad hated to hurt a woman, but he wasn’t going to get ganked by one, either. He hit her again, this time going for her arm. The knife clattered to the floor, and he stomped his boot down on it.

Before he could bend down to take control of it, the guy he’d put his gun on sailed at him from the side, and that was it. With Gunner still sitting on the pool table, bleeding and laughing, the Bulls were fully engaged in this mess.



oOo



It was a war won by attrition. When Rad next looked at his watch, nearly thirty minutes had gone by. But the brawl was over, and he was still standing. So were Ox and Eight Ball, and about a dozen other men who’d gone the distance. Gunner had finally passed out, and Simon was sitting against the wall, holding his side. He’d been stabbed, but insisted the blade had missed anything important.

The floor was littered with dazed and unconscious bodies; moans, grunts and coughs filled the air.

Terry, the owner, a big man with dark skin and light eyes, picked his way over the wounded and came up to Rad. He knew the Bulls and knew Rad was the closest thing in the place to an authority. He’d been in the fray, too. His practice was to protect his business and his employees as much as he could when shit like this went down, so he put his waitresses in back and kept himself to the bar with his trusty aluminum softball bat. But his eyebrow was swelling, so he’d taken a hit or two.

“That sumbitch is banned,” he growled at Rad. “This the third time he’s started trouble this year. You know I don’t mind some scrappin’, but look at this bullshit.” He indicated the room with an angry fling of his arm. The place was all but destroyed. Delaney was going to lose his shit. The whole club would be up Gunner’s ass, because they’d be on the hook for most of this damage.

Rad considered the heap that was Gunner. “What the hell happened?” Gunner could start a brawl on a whim, but this mess had been so much bigger than a brawl.

Terry pointed at an unconscious body on the floor near their feet: Booker.

Rad shrugged. He didn’t know him, except for his first name. “Booker somebody.”

“Booker Howard. Runs the Street Hounds crew in Chicago. Tight ties to New York and LA.”

“Chicago? What’s he doin’ in Tulsa?”

“Recruitin’. Your boy just gave him a chance to do tryouts in my f*ckin’ livelihood.”

Ox came over and picked up Gunner. “Got their bikes on the flatbed, Sarge. Eight’s helpin’ Simon to the truck. I’ll get ‘em both back to the clubhouse. Eight’s on your six.”

“Thanks, brother.” He turned back to Terry. “I don’t f*ckin’ understand half the shit that went down here or what you’re tellin’ me. How’d this start?”

“Way it always starts with Gun. Hustled Booker, then laughed at him. The f*ckin’ mouth on that moron. Booker called him a cracker, circled his men up around him, and it went to shit from there.” Terry watched Ox carry the moron in question out, cradling him like a baby. He shook his head. “You know I’m a friend to the Bulls, man. But this shit has got to stop. We ain’t had a gang war ‘round here yet. All our troubles, we ain’t had that one. The Dyson crew got their foibles, but they keep it quiet at home. I don’t got race problems in my place neither. Now some ass with a death wish is stirrin’ shit up and givin’ some outsider like Booker Howard somethin’ to say? Goddamn.”