Into the Storm (Signal Bend #3)(66)

“Perfect, of course.” She wrinkled her nose. “You smell like road.”

“Is that bad?”

“You know, it’s not. Gasoline and leather and…wind, or something. Also the obvious lack of a shower.

It’s surprisingly hot, after the first whiff.”

He hooked his arm over her shoulders and tucked her close. “You’re a real biker bitch, you like that smell. Come on. We’re in the Keep first, but then I’m gonna take you back and let you smell me some more.”

oOo

The mood around the table was high. It had been a great run, a reminder of what they loved. Though the quiet since Ellis and the end of their meth business was a desperately needed respite after a devastating war in which they’d lost much, the Horde had been getting restless. Show felt it less than most, because he’d been checked out for the first full year.

The Horde was still the power in town, and probably always would be. But now the talk in the Keep was usually about business proposals and event schedules. With the exception of a few low-profile runs for the Scorpions in the fall, and a couple of times someone had needed to be ‘convinced’ to toe the line, they had not done any kind of shady work since Ellis.

This was a table full of rebels and bad boys, who now spent their days keeping order and promoting town growth. With the exception of their years running the pipeline, they’d always been small time outlaws.

They all had straight day jobs. Even when meth was at its peak, they’d worked their day jobs—and had needed to. But some of the Horde—Vic and Havoc in particular, and Len, too, though he was smarter and better understood the value of the quiet—were beginning to chafe at the constraints of legitimacy. When, at the last town meeting, Mayor Fosse had timorously suggested that it might be helpful if the Horde stopped the regular brawls at Tuck’s, rather than simply controlling them, Isaac had had to grab Havoc back by his kutte to keep him from jumping the mayor in the middle of the meeting.

Show, however, didn’t mind the quiet. Maybe it was that he was looking down the barrel at fifty. Maybe it was what he’d lost. Maybe it was the ache and fatigue that was with him always since the accident. But he was glad for the quiet. He knew Isaac, hotheaded as he was, liked it quiet, too. Families were safe, because they weren’t on anybody’s radar.

Or they wouldn’t be, as long as they kept control of the movie thing. That was the business Isaac and Show had conducted at the rally—a meeting with the heads or representatives of most of the crews with which the Horde was allied. To a man, they expressed concern about how this movie deal could hurt their business. Having just approved the script rewrite (and both Shannon and Show had made their point with Gordon before he left) they gave their friends as much reassurance as they could that the story that would be told would not expose or in any way compromise the conditions of any other club. The Scorpions were written out of the rescue of Lilli—which was a shame, because they wouldn’t have been able to do it without them. The Joplin and Tulsa crews, which had supplied weapons for the fight, were not mentioned.

Even the meth had been whitewashed. No secrets had been exposed. The writers had been frustrated to the point of hair-pulling, at least in Harrie’s case, but the script told the right truth—the story of a town that had saved itself from a much more powerful, ruthless enemy.

Whether that made a movie anybody still wanted to make remained to be seen. Despite the possible financial boon, Show would be perfectly content if it never got made, and he knew everybody around this table agreed with him. Everybody but Bart. Bart, whose job it was to keep track of all the movie news, was deeply invested in the idea of having celebrities running around Signal Bend, even for a little while.

“So that’s where we are with this movie shit. Sam, Dandy, Becker and the rest have given us their trust, and we have given Stan and his production company our trust. We will be severely f*cked up if this goes south.” Isaac turned to Bart. “So you need to make sure you catch every mention anywhere of what’s going on in L.A.”

Bart nodded. “Yep. So far, everything looks clean. Still a lot of chatter about casting, but it’s moved down the feed some. Right now, everybody’s more focused on…” He stopped and laughed. “None of you would have any idea what I’m talking about. But there’s another movie deal that’s got everybody’s attention right now, so we have some breathing room.”

Isaac nodded. “Good. I talk to Stan regularly, but I know damn well I’m getting company line bullshit from him. I can feel him f*cking managing me, and he’s damn lucky he’s two thousand miles away.

Probably why he hasn’t come to town himself. Fuck, the way these Hollywood people talk.” He shook his head. “Anyway. That’s the update on the movie.”

He lifted the gavel and paused. “Anybody got anything else?”

“I do.” That was Havoc. Isaac and everybody else raised their eyebrows in surprise. Havoc was more the sit back type when it came to club business. Show couldn’t think of the last time Havoc had brought new business to the table.

Isaac nodded and set the gavel down. Havoc scooted his chair forward on its rollers. “We need another bar in town—one where the out-of-town *s can go and drink their f*ckin’ Chablis or whatever and leave Tuck’s alone. I know we needed things to change to keep the town going, but I’m starting to wonder what we’re changing into. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I f*ckin’ need Tuck’s to be like it’s always been. I need a place to be, where I can swing a f*ckin’ fist.”