CHAPTER NINE
The short, chubby womanwith a long, greying braid running the full length of her spine opened a green two-pocket folder and laid out an array of papers across Cooper’s dining room table. “I recommend our full service package—that’s a team of two for a weekly clean, including full clean of the house, plus laundry. It also includes a quarterly deep clean—interior windows, baseboards, curtains, and appliances. Everything but the room you said stays locked.” She handed him a sheet of pale yellow paper titled FULL SERVICE PACKAGE and listed the included services—and the price, which was purported to be twenty-five percent less than their ‘a la carte’ fees.
His main thought about the price was that housecleaning was a fucking racket.
However, he guessed he needed it. The president of the Nevada Brazen Bulls couldn’t really be the slob he’d always been, and he’d need either an old lady or a personality transplant to be good at cleaning up after himself. He had no interest in either.
He hated cleaning far more than he disliked mess. Mess didn’t bug him at all. In fact, an aggressively clean house seemed unnatural to him—and the smell of cleaning supplies? Like Pine-Sol or Lysol or any other ‘sol’? Gak.
Back in Tulsa, living in a little apartment and hardly ever home, he’d lived in clutter, not filth. He’d called a sweetbutt over every now and then to do the dishes and the laundry, run a vacuum back and forth a couple times. Then he’d bang her and send her on her way.
However, here in Nevada, all these months without much of a social life yet, he’d been home far more often than ever before. He was also living in far more space than he’d ever had before, and somehow that made formoremess, not less. Yeah, even he thought things around here were getting pretty gross.
He couldn’t very well bang a chick he’d picked up on the Strip and then ask her to clean his house. Sweetbutts were a breed of their own; they knew the score, and they got something from being the Bulls’ on-call pussy and maid service. There were no sweetbutts yet because they hadn’t opened the clubhouse officially. Cooper had a list going of likely girls; the others had a few names as well. Kai would need to run background checks on them all, but until everything was in place and ready for prime time at the compound, they weren’t ready to invite girls into their home.
The things that made their new compound safe—set out a ways in the desert, with nobody close for more than a mile, nice flat land with great sightlines—also made it challenging to get the clubhouse running like a clubhouse should. They were too remote to pull any drive-by interest, and word of mouth was moving more slowly than he’d like.
In fact, everything about the way they’d had to set up this charter felt ass-backward. Nothing was organic. They’d identified the place and then moved in to start a charter, so they had no infrastructure, few relationships, almost nothing fertile in the ground to give them a strong start. No home, few friends, no confident understanding of who was ally and who was adversary. Fuck, he barely knew most of the men who sat at his table, the men he was meant to trust with his life and with the well being of the charter.
Eight was starting to talk about a third charter, further expanding the Bulls’ reach—and the Volkovs’. Cooper was fine with that, but if Eight asked him—and maybe even if he didn’t—he’d suggest they find a small, established MC and patch it over rather than start a charter from nothing.
This shit was hard. And fucking expensive.
“Yeah, I guess full service works,” he answered the woman, whose name was ... he searched his mind but couldn’t quite catch it. Usually he was good with names, and he made a practice to be extra charming with the older ladies and the less physically fortunate chicks. He got a little rush making a woman like the one before him blush and giggle. But he found himself distracted lately and way more short-tempered than usual.
He should’ve fucking stayed in Tulsa.
He had not, however, and he wasn’t about to be a little bitch about living his own fucking choices. And come on. He was the president of this charter. Top of the heap. That was a good thing, right?
Honestly, probably not. However, here he was, and no bitching allowed.
“I want the same team in here every time,” he said. “And I want their names up front.”
“We always do what we can to keep the same team at every site—”
“Not ‘do what you can.’ I’m saying, the same team every time or nothing. If that team can’t make it, you don’t clean that week.”
The woman—right, her name was Geri, or however she spelled it—pursed her lips in irritation at his interruption and his insistence. “We can make that work. But it’s not our policy to give clients the full names of our employees. First names only.” She picked up another sheet—this one pale blue—from the folder. “But as this page explains, all of our employees are fully bonded and insured.”
He brushed the paper aside. “Again, if I can’t have their names ahead of time, no deal. I thought you understood my situation.”
He wasn’t going to give somebody a key to his goddamn house unless he could have Kai run a Bulls background check, which would, first, identify any possible issues with the housekeepers, and second, give them some leverage if there was a problem. Family, friends, home—the usual places to apply pressure.
Ben had recommended this housekeeping service; it was a different kind of cleaning than Haddon Restorative Cleaning, but both kinds of cleaners bumped elbows here and there in the region. Geri, the owner of Bright ‘n Fresh Maids, was Mojave, a citizen of the tribe and a resident of the reservation, and Cooper was always happy to give custom to minority-owned businesses. But that didn’t mean he’d go easier on them.
Now Geri’s lips were drawn so tightly together she was in danger of her whole face sucking into her mouth like a black hole. But after a long, loud, extremely rhetorical sigh, she said, “I’ll talk to my teams. If I have one willing to let you have their names and run a check on them yourself, okay.”
Cooper smiled. He liked this broad. She had some spine. “That works.”
“If I have a team that will work under your conditions, do we have a deal, Mr. Calderon?”