––––––––
“Your Spidey-sense going, Z?” Cooper asked. Zach had walked off again and stood looking down the desolate, rutted gravel ‘road.’
Cooper’s SAA was not quite twenty-six years old—crazy young to wear that flash and be responsible for club protection and enforcement. But he was Rad’s oldest boy, and Rad had been a total badass in the same role. Zach was smart and levelheaded, too—more level than his old man. But the thing that had made Cooper offer him the flash was his intuition. The kid really did seem to have a sixth sense about some things. Cooper hadn’t been fucking around when he’d asked that question; if Zach thought something felt off, Coop would be ready to bail.
But Zach turned and shook his head. “Nah, I just ... this whole place vibes creepy to me.”
Horace ‘Hoss’ Harridan, the Clark County sheriff, had finally agreed to meet and picked this place to do it—the cemetery of a little nothing mining town called Searchlight. If the town signs were to be believed, Searchlight was historic, but Cooper figured all the little nothing desert towns out here had roots in that whole ‘Wild West’ bullshit. A bunch of white folks riding west, rounding up and outright killing the Native folks who’d been here, stealing their land and raping it of its wealth. He was not interested in Nevada mining history, thanks.
The town itself was not much more than a couple of intersections, just a typical wide spot in the road. There were the usual conveniences along the highway that cut through—service stations, fast-food joints, the obligatory roadside casino—and nothing about it was any more or less creepy than any other little desert town. But Harridan had set the cemetery as their meet up spot, and yeah, there was a creep factor to that.
The cemetery near Laughlin, where they’d put Gargo, looked basically like any cemetery Cooper had seen—it even had grass, which was quite the flex in southern Nevada. Most of the markers were the flat brass or granite kind, but that was pretty typical, too. The great big marble things seemed to be of an earlier time—or for rich folks.
This cemetery, though, felt like the chain-link fence around it held a different dimension, an alternate universe that hadn’t moved on from those Wild West days. Gravel and dirt instead of grass and asphalt, far more plain wood crosses than brass or granite markers. A few trees, but they were barely more than shrubs, and of the scruffy, janky desert variety. The sun streamed over the desert unfiltered, baking the world with not much less intensity here in February than in July.
He could imagine a preacher leading a small walking procession of men in string ties and flat-crowned hats and women in long skirts and bonnets, a few of the men hoisting a plain pine box onto their shoulders.
Yeah, it was creepy.
“I don’t get the appeal of this place for a meet, and that’s got my hairs up a little, I guess,” Zach said as he headed off in the other direction a few strides.
That was simple restlessness; moving ten feet wasn’t improving his sightline. Nothing obstructed anyone’s sightline in any direction.
“Harridan was born in Searchlight,” Ben said. “I think all the people he’s got here are under our feet right now, but it’s still home to him. And it’s unincorporated, so there’s no other law but him.”
“He wanted home-field advantage,” Cooper said.
Ben nodded. “That’s how Harridan rolls. He plays every meet like a contest.”
Wishing he’d known all that before they’d headed out, Cooper scowled at his VP. “Why didn’t you say something yesterday, when Harridan called to set this up?”
With a typically minimalist response, Ben gave a twitch of a shrug and said, “It’s how he works, and you didn’t ask.”
“I don’t know how Harridan fucking works, bruh. I need you to fill in the shit I don’t know because I justfucking moved here. I’m not always gonna know to ask.”
Ben squinted at him. “You been here almost six months now, Coop. You gotta start thinking about this place like it’s yours, or it never will be.”
“Fuck you. Is it a problem that we’re meeting in a goddamn cemetery with this guy or not? Are we gonna get ambushed by his zombie relatives or something?”
Zach had walked back and now stood between Cooper and Ben. “If it’s zombies, we got bigger problems,” he said with a grin. “But otherwise, I don’t think ambush is likely. We can see everybody coming for a good five miles in every direction. My take is that’s the appeal—he doesn’t know us, either, and, you know, we’re officially the bad guys in this scenario. He’s law, we’re outlaw. He’s protecting himself, not threatening us.”
Yet again, this barely man rewarded Cooper’s confidence in his being worthy of the SAA flash. That was good thinking.
“That’s it.” Ben said before Cooper could say something similar. Then Ben gave Zach a look very close to a smile. A look of paternal pride.
Cooper wanted to punch that look right off the asshole’s craggy face. A bolt of entirely unreasonable jealousy shot through Cooper’s chest, and he very nearly acted on the urge for violence. The thought that Zach washis, goddammitfilled his head—and what the fuck?
He spun and stalked off a ways, getting some distance so he could put his head back in order. Yes, of course he’d noticed, and felt, the strangeness of their charter’s makeup. Ben, not Cooper, had the best connections with the other patches and therefore the most respect. Reed was Ben’s son. Lonnie was Ben’s best friend. Kai was Lonnie’s nephew. Geno was friends with Kai and Reed. All roads led to Ben.
Zach, too, was tightly connected to the VP. He was deeply involved with Ben’s daughter and would probably be his son-in-law soon. He already was in every way but signatures on a marriage license. In the look they’d just shared, Cooper had seen Ben thinking of Zach like a son.
But Zach had, like Cooper, come from Tulsa. Without Gargo, only they two shared the long connection to the Bulls and the deep, first-person understanding of how and why the Nevada charter had come to be. They two knew the Volkovs, they two knew Bulls’ business. They two had survived the Perro years. He did not want Zach to forge a tighter bond with Ben.
He did not want to be the odd man out of the charter he fucking led. Goddammit!
Then Zach turned and looked north up the skimpy gravel road. Cooper looked, too, and saw the cruiser heading south, stirring up a beige cloud of road dust. Of habit, he reached back, under his shirt, and checked his Beretta, holstered on his belt. Zach and Ben made similar moves.
The white SUV stopped on the road, just shy of the cemetery gate and closer to their bikes than Cooper liked. As Harridan stepped out of the truck, the Bulls clustered together and headed toward the gate.