Nolan: Return to Signal Bend (Signal Bend)(10)

They could afford a small police force now, and about once a year or so, somebody at a town meeting floated the idea, but it never got any traction. Since the Horde had put down Julio Santaveria and gone straight, Signal Bend was a safe, quiet place. Almost no crime happened here, and that was because the Horde was the law, and when people got out of line, it wasn’t a courtroom they were in when the penalty came due. So far, most of the townspeople, even the newcomers, were content with that arrangement.

The business owners all paid the club for protection, but the residents got it for free. There were some people among the newcomers who didn’t quite know what to make of bikers riding around town, enforcing the rules, and those were usually the ones standing up making an issue of needing the police or the county sheriff. Once they saw the numbers and understood the bargain they were getting, most of them shut up, too.

If no one from away ever came to Signal Bend, then they’d have had themselves a little utopia. But a big part of the town getting better and stronger was attracting people from away to spend money in Signal Bend businesses. Not everyone from away was down with the rules. The Horde handled that, too.

During the day, the Horde assigned a couple of members in four-hour shifts to be present in town—hanging out on Main Street or sitting in Marie’s Diner with a cup of coffee, whatever. Just visible. During the night, they did the same thing, but they checked every few hours on the closed shops in town, they did a circuit over all the residential streets, and then they parked their asses at Tuck’s, where shit, if there was any, almost always went down.

Tuck’s had been the roughneck bar for decades, and it looked it. There was a level of violence that was expected, even welcomed, within its beer-soaked walls. A lot of town tension had been worked out in neighborly brawls, and the Horde had participated in most of them. It was their job to keep things neighborly: no weapons, no serious injuries, and no destruction of property. When things got going, everybody moved the furniture out of the way first, and when things calmed down, everybody put the tables back and had a drink together.

When *s from away got to breaking those rules, the Horde took care of it. And they were on the hook for any damage, too. That was part of their end of the protection deal: They made right what they couldn’t control.

Nolan’s favorite club work was patrol, and since he’d taken the SAA flash, he was in charge of it. He’d been sitting at the bar waiting for Len to come out of that meeting with Badger, Isaac, and Show so they could take their shift.

That hadn’t been the first time that Badger had sat down in his office with the old leadership of the club. Nolan had asked before why they were meeting out of the Keep like that, and Badge’s answer had been that he was just getting some advice. It made sense, Nolan supposed: Isaac, Show, and Len had a lot of years in kuttes, and they had shepherded the club through times of quiet and chaos. They were also major leaders in the town itself, in business and in the community. Badge had only had the gavel for a year and a half.

Still, Nolan would have been happier if those ‘advice’ meetings had at least included the rest of the current officers: him; Double A, their VP; and Dom, their Intelligence Officer. He loved Isaac, Show, and Len about as much as it was possible for him to love, and he liked the thought that the Horde table was balanced by leaders on each side—the old and the new—but Badger wasn’t the sole new leader of the current club.

As open as Badge was about sitting down with them, as much as Nolan trusted all of those guys, he didn’t like it.

While he and Len rode their patrol on this frosty night a couple of days before Christmas, Nolan kept his mind turned toward that topic. He wasn’t working out a solution so much as trying to decide whether a solution was warranted. He decided he was going to call Badger on it again.

He was also trying not to think about kissing Iris. He felt quite sure that Len would be on him about that as soon as they dismounted at Tuck’s, so he figured he’d deal with that problem then.



oOo



He was right; he hadn’t even gotten his helmet off before Len said, “You and Iris?”

Nolan ignored him and locked his helmet down. As he walked around the bikes, Len put his tattooed hand on Nolan’s arm. “You know you can’t play around there.”

Nolan stopped and faced his brother. “Fuck you. You think I’m a moron? Or just an *?”

Len smirked, his eyes alight with good humor. “I think you had your tongue in Show’s little girl’s mouth, and I think you like your pretty face just like it is, so I’m wondering if you’re one or the other, or maybe just nuts.”

Nolan didn’t know why he’d kissed Iris. He never had before.

Back in the day, while he was still prospecting—and still a moron—he and Rose had made out a few times. They were almost exactly the same age, and she was pretty, and he’d thought, for a minute and a half, that he’d have liked to be with her. But the more he got to know Rose, the less interested he got. She was nice enough, but her interests were nothing like his. He’d found her boring. Luckily, the feeling had been mutual, and they’d easily fallen back to club-kid affection for each other. He liked Rose better as a sister or cousin or whatever.

He’d always thought of Iris as the little sister. She was cute; it wasn’t that he didn’t find her attractive. She was short and had more curves than Rose, with a really great rack. Her weight fluctuated a little bit from visit to visit. Tonight, he’d noticed that she was pretty damn fit, and those tits had been hard to miss.