“There were a lot of times, over a long stretch of years,” Dad went on, “where I thought maybe there wasn’t a place for me in the club anymore. That scared the shit out of me—the Bulls are the only family I’ve ever had. But I couldn’t get right with the road we were on, and I couldn’t get enough brothers to agree with me. The most I could do was make everybody think twice, try to do what we were doing safely, take it all seriously. Every time I thought I’d hit the end and I had to walk away, somebody—Becker, or Eight—would talk me out of it. They always said they needed me to keep them honest. That was just enough handhold to keep me at the table, I guess. That and loving these fuckers all the way through. Even Eight. I hated that fucker for a long time, but I loved him, too, even back then. Leaving the club would have meant walking away from my family, and I don’t know I would’ve survived it, even with your mom and you kids. I had to get right with who the Bulls had become. I had to figure out where my place was in that.”
“I know this stuff, Dad,” Duncan said. His father seemed to be wandering off into old memories, and none of this seemed relevant to his own worries.
Dad turned back and focused on Duncan. “Yeah, I know you do. I guess I’m saying it all again because it sounds like you’re having your first struggle like I used to, where the club is taking a road you don’t want to travel. I’m real glad to know you are, Dunc. It says a lot about the man you are. You should have doubts. You should fight against the dark. You should say your worries out loud, with your chest. That way, when you follow the club anyway, you know you, and everybody else, have really thought it out. We all understand the reason, and the price. That’s how I finally got right with the club and my place in it: I saw that being the speed bump is my place. It’s not my job to stop the club from doing what it needs to do, but it is my job to make the club know for sure that we need to do it. That’s why Eight tapped me to stand at his side. He knows he’s a hot-headed asshole who hates not getting his way, and he knows that’s no way to wield the gavel. He knew I’d be his leash.”
Duncan processed all that for a while and then asked, “So this plan—you’re convinced it’s the right way? Sneaking up on these guys and killing them?”
Leaning over his handlebars and peering deeply into Duncan, Dad said, “First, you’ve sat at our table often enough while we hashed out this problem with the Nameless to know not a single one of those guys is a good man. The club terrorized this area for decades. They are abusers, at least one’s a serial rapist, every bad thing in the book. They don’t keep their business on the dark side, either. They beat, bully, and shake down regular folks as a matter of course—and that’s gotten worse since weed went legal and they’ve had trouble earning. Not one of these guys deserves a worry from you or anybody else.”
“Little Jon and Arlo, they were part of all that, too, right? We’re gonna put the Bull on their backs.”
“Yeah, true. Apollo and Jazz read them as ... call it reformable. They were soldiers in the Nameless, not making the decisions. Little Jon’s record is the least worrisome of anybody in that club. He did time for the weed, nothing violent.”
Duncan started to challenge that, but his father put his hand up. “No, look. These guys being no loss to the world isn’t the main thing. The main thing is that we need this place. And we need to do it as clean and quiet as we can. Don’t romanticize a frontal assault, Dunc. War is not honorable. Not ever. Yeah, if we went in through the front door, they’d see us coming, but for them, the result would be the same—dead. Difference would be, they’d probably take some of us down with them, and we’d make a big, noisy mess in the middle of Humboldt County. That could mean arrest, prison, you name it. Not to mention trouble getting established here, which is the whole fucking point. Doing this quiet is the best result for everyone. It’s the right call.”
“I guess,” Duncan conceded. “It just feels different from who I thought we were.”
“We’re outlaws, son. We are family, we protect our own, and we are one-percenters. This is who we are. We run guns, sometimes we run drugs. Sometimes we’re killers. Nobody’s gonna confuse us with the Pope, or Gandhi. That’s the thing I finally realized: this life is not honorable. Never has been. Why the fuck do you think I fought so goddamn hard to keep you kids out of it?” He dismounted and came over to Duncan’s bike. Setting his hands on Duncan’s shoulders, he said, “You’re in it now, so here’s my last bit of wisdom. What Arlo said earlier is right: killing is killing. In the end, it doesn’t matter to these fuckers if we go in through the front door or the back. But to us, it’s the difference between everybody riding back into Tulsa on their own bikes, or some of us coming home in the back of the van. All I give a shit about is my family. Keeping us whole and getting done what we need done is all that matters. Taking these guys out quiet is the right call.”
Duncan looked into his father’s eyes and saw the truth. But it shook him to his core.
“You taught me to be honorable. You taught me to be a good man. Now you’re saying we aren’t.”
Dad squeezed Duncan’s shoulders, then turned and rested beside him on his bike. “I did, and you are. I’m proud as fuck of you, son. But what I mean by honor is being the best man you can be in the life you live. You treat people with respect. You’re decent to women. You take care of people in need. That’s honor. Having doubts about club business, expressing them, helping the club make the best decisions it can—that’s honorable, too. We keep our dark shit in the dark—there’s honor in that. Maybe that’s the only kind of honor anybody can really have—to do the best we can inside the life we live. We can say we’re no worse than the people we fight, including the people running the world. And I really believe that—the world is deeply fucked, and there’s no outlaw as bad as most of the shitheads in suits, running the place. But you will make yourself crazy trying to shape it in your mind that we’re the good guys, like in stories. We’re not, Dunc. We’re just guys, making our way best we can, trying to keep our mess to ourselves. There’s honor in seeing that for what it is, but nobody’s gonna pin a medal on our chests for it.” He laughed quietly and slapped the Righteous Fist flash on his own kutte. “Our kind of honor gets us this.”
Righteous Fist: awarded to men who’d killed in service of the club.
Duncan had not earned that flash yet. But it looked like he would soon.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Tyrone Miller, the lawyer Margot worked for as a paralegal-slash-secretary, put his elbows on his desk and gave Phoebe a serious look. “It’s good you haven’t called her yet. We should have a clear strategy before you do.”
“I don’t want to talk to her at all,” Phoebe said. “I wish I’d never heard her name.”
“Understood. Do you have solid evidence that this woman,” he glanced down at the notepad before him, “this Lydia Copperman is the one who filed the complaint? Or is trying to get your donors to cut you off?”
Phoebe pressed her fingers to her forehead. She could feel the beginning of her scar there, and beneath it the slight dent in her skull. Her head hurt worse today than it had in years, and she was having a lot of trouble making sense of what Ty was saying. Since she’d been injured, stress created a fog that rolled through her head and made it difficult to find her thoughts and put them in the right order, and she’d been running on maximum stress for days now. Since that fucking certified letter.