Crash (Brazen Bulls MC #1)(42)
Griffin whistled. “Those guys are scum.”
“They are. I mean to kill this son of a bitch. That could start a beef with the Rats.”
Delaney shook his head. “We do not have the time or attention for a war with those shits, Rad. You know damn well that’s true. If he hasn’t found her, maybe he won’t. Sit on this for now.”
“I can’t let him get another go at her.”
“You just met her. She’s not family. She’s not known. Her trouble is not our trouble. One patch running us headlong into another crew is enough for now. I’m sorry, brother. Let it be.”
Willa’s trouble was Rad’s trouble. “I want to vote it.”
With a lift of his eyebrows and a tilt of his head, Delaney conceded. “Do we sanction Rad to go after this Dirty Rat? Nay.” He turned to Rad.
“Aye.”
Simon and Ox voted with him, but they were the only who did. The final vote was seven to three against.
He was disappointed, and he was frustrated, but it didn’t occur to him to go against the vote. Rad had been a Bull for twenty years. He was a Bull first; he was a Bull last. Acting against a vote was treason, and he was not a traitor.
He couldn’t act first and get ahead of the problem.
So he would have to be there when and if Jesse Smithers showed up.
oOo
The very next morning, however, Rad rode east, with Delaney and Dane, and with Wally, their other prospect, driving the club van behind them. He was going hundreds of miles away from Tulsa, leaving Willa on her own.
As bodyguards went, he was shit.
She didn’t want anyone else hovering around, but he’d asked his brothers to do regular turns around her neighborhood, just to be sure. He took some solace from the fact that she was having her last day of vacation and had no plans but rest.
The night before, he’d gone to the market for her and filled her fridge and cupboards. He’d bought tampons. He hadn’t even done shit like that for his wife.
She had no reason at all to leave her house and all its locks. Or her pit bull. He’d instructed her to stay put, and he’d forced the point until she’d finally promised. He knew she’d been planning to take it easy anyway, so she’d been arguing with him about it just to argue, just to make sure he understood that it wasn’t his call. She seemed to enjoy that.
Rad did not. But he’d gotten his way in the end, so he was content.
The day was warm and sunny, and the ride east was smooth. Tulsa to Signal Bend was a near straight shot—I-44 all the way to the turn-off for the town, just about two-hundred-forty miles of smooth riding. Once they were out of Tulsa, there wasn’t much traffic beyond long-haul trucks, and the sun was high enough in the sky not to be weaponized, so Delaney, Dane, and Rad settled into their saddles, let the tension out of their legs, kept Wally and the van in their mirrors, and enjoyed the ride.
On a run like this, just a few Bulls and an easy road, Rad let his thoughts spool out, as if they followed the ribbon of highway before him. This run was the first time since they’d returned from the Houston charity run that he’d had a chance to let his thoughts find their proper place in his head. Since that wreck, everything had been a jumble—all emotion and upheaval, nonstop.
Willa had been coming home from the very same event in Houston. He liked the idea that she rode, and that she’d been riding as long as she’d been driving. Longer than that—her family all rode, and they started off on dirt bikes. Rad looked forward to getting her bike back on the road, and her leg back in shape, so they could ride together.
With all the shit she had with Smithers, he was surprised she’d gone back into Texas to meet her family in Houston, but she’d told him she thought it was far enough from Duchy, and the event itself was big enough to be anonymous there.
He had his doubts about that—on the other hand, for the past few years, the entire Dirty Rats club, all charters, had been banned from that event and most charity events Rad knew of, ever since they’d started a shootout at an event in Alabama. Fourteen people had been killed in that disaster, and it had brought a shit ton of heat down on MCs across the country. Now, other clubs were happy to help organizers and local law enforce that ban, and it wasn’t safe for a man in a Rat kutte to be seen in the same zip code as a sanctioned biker event.
The Dirty Rats were filth, and everybody knew it.
That wouldn’t preclude a psycho from leaving his kutte at home when he was looking for trouble. Just like Gunner, when he wanted a beating. Smithers had to know that Willa’s family was in Houston, and if he had two brain cells to rub together, he could make a good guess that she might meet them there.
Rad wanted her safe, but part of him hoped Smithers had figured out where she was. He wanted a way to end him without breaking with the club, and that meant Smithers had to make the first move.
He didn’t want that to happen until he was there with her to handle things, however.
A little more than three hours after they left Tulsa, they pulled off I-44 and headed toward Signal Bend. This part of the world looked a lot like the part Rad had grown up in. Less flat, maybe. But Oklahoma wasn’t all that flat near Tulsa, anyway.
Woodland and farmland, far as the eye could see. The houses and outbuildings were rundown, some barely standing. Too many fields had gone to seed, too many houses were leaning over. Hard times had come.