Duncan rolled to his feet and spun around at once, ready to help his father.
Lopez and Dad were both on the ground. Neither was moving.
“Fuck! Dad!” Duncan clambered over the mess and dropped to his knees beside his father. Blood soaked the front of his hoodie.
“Dad!”
“I’m okay,” Dad groaned. “I’m okay. It’s my shoulder.”
He groaned again, louder, and tried to sit up. Duncan helped him, then started tearing the zipper of his hoodie down.
Dad brushed him off with one hand. The other, on his wounded side, was limp. “Hold up. Make sure we’re clear first. Check ‘em.”
With a nod, Duncan stood and did a check of the bodies in the room. Four men, zero pulses. It looked like Arlo had been choked out. Lopez had Dad’s knife in his chest. In his heart. Duncan had killed the others with his father’s gun.
“They’re dead. All of ‘em.”
Dad nodded. Maybe he thought he was okay, but he was pale and sweaty, and his face was creased with pain. Duncan dropped to his knees again and finished opening his father’s clothes until he finally reached his bare chest. The wound was high on the right side, in the meat between his clavicle and his armpit. The gash was deep and puffy, bleeding freely, and the skin around it deep red, working toward purple. But there were no organs up there, so yeah, probably not fatal. As long as he didn’t bleed out.
“My own fuckin’ knife,” Dad said in a groany half-chuckle.
Duncan grabbed the bandana out of his own pocket and pressed it to the wound. “Hold it there. We gotta get you sewn up.”
“You too,” Dad said. “You’re bleeding.”
Duncan wiped the blood from his cheek with his sleeve. “Fuckhead’s wearing a big ring. I’m okay.”
Dad took over the bandana with his good hand. “We have to deal with the bodies first thing. Make yourself presentable, go out to the truck, and get the supplies. I’ll walk you through this, but you’re going to have to do it on your own, son.”
The supplies. Those meant to dismember a body and turn it into trash, so it would look like they’d been helping Lopez work on his boat.
Duncan was going to have to do that for four bodies. On his own.
He took a deep breath and stood up.
~oOo~
“You did good, kid,” Eight Ball told Duncan.
He held out his hand, and Duncan took the thing he offered: the Righteous Fist flash.
Duncan looked down at it. His hand shook a little, so he clenched his fist around that strip of embroidered cloth. “Thanks, Prez.”
Sitting shirtless in a vinyl recliner in Little Jon’s front room while Digger sewed him up, Dad gave Duncan a look that was equal parts proud and sympathetic. He understood that Duncan had had no ambition for this ‘honor,’ and he also understood that he had done what needed doing, without hesitation, nonetheless.
Duncan now understood that about himself as well.
The whole crew was back, and the job was done. The Nameless were no more. On their side, Arlo was their only loss, and Dad and Duncan were the only wounded. Digger had stuck three stitches in Duncan’s cheek, and he was working on about a dozen in Dad’s chest. Dad was also getting a transfusion; Digger, it turned out, was a nurse at a local hospital and had ready access to pretty much any medical supplies they might need. Including O-negative blood.
The other squads had gone off without a hitch, except for Eight and Jay’s squad, and Fitz and Sam’s—and, as a result, Dad and Duncan’s. Justin Graham and Brad Stevenson had simply not been where they were supposed to be, because, apparently, Bruce Lopez had called them over to help him with his boat. The squads hadn’t been able to communicate the trouble because they were in the hills, and they wouldn’t have known where they were anyway, so Dad, Duncan, and Arlo were caught flat-footed.
But they got it done, and Duncan had singlehandedly dismembered four bodies and bagged them up like trash, hauled them to Arlo’s truck, cleaned up the scene, and gotten his father to the truck, all without any notice from the neighbors. It had helped that it was dusk by the time he was moving around outside.
When they were finally able to get hold of Eight and report the situation, Eight, Jay, Fitz, and Sam come to Samoa to collect all the bikes and ride off like they were the dead men on their way out on a run.
Now Billy, Dean, Chris, Sam, and Monty were burying the bodies in the forest. Each one had been interred in an old oil barrel, covered in lye, and sealed up. The Nameless had a field just like the Bulls had in Tulsa, but far more bodies had been buried in these hills over the years.
Duncan had done a lot of disgusting shit as a prospect, cleaning up after the patches had handled some messy business. He had a strong stomach, and he understood his family, so that work had been unpleasant but not existentially upsetting. But this, disposing of bodies he’d made, while he was still working through a new understanding of just how far his club—his family—would go to get what it wanted, had put his head in an existential rock tumbler. He was exhausted and vaguely ill.
He slipped the new flash into his pocket and went looking for a drink.
~oOo~
“Since the plan is to let the Nameless’s clubhouse look like it’s shuttered for a while,” Eight told the group the next day, “Little Jon’s place here will be the Eureka charter clubhouse until the timing is right to hang the Bull on the building. The story we’ve got is good, so let’s keep it straight and solid.”
“Can we go over that story again?” Billy asked.
Little Jon sighed with extreme rhetoric. “Listen up good, kid. The Nameless bailed on Eureka. That’s the story. You know it makes sense, people’ve been wanting us out for a long while, and we’re broke as shit.”
“Don’t say ‘us,’ Jon,” Cooper said quietly.
“I gotta say ‘us’ for a while, Coop. And remember, those men we killed, they were my brothers. For decades, some of ‘em. They weren’t good men, sure, but none of us are. And I loved some of ‘em for most of my life. Believe me when I say what we’re doing ain’t easy for me, but I did it, and I’m in. I’m a Bull now, but until we can hang the sign up, it does no good for any of us for me to forget I was Nameless.”
Cooper stared hard at him, glanced at Eight, looked back at Jon, and finally nodded. “Just keep your allegiance straight.”
“I know where my loyalty lies, and you should, too. I just buried my family in my damn yard to prove it.”
“Okay, okay,” Eight said, obviously impatient. “Let’s get back on track here. Caleb?”
Caleb stood, went to a table in the corner of the room, and brought a cardboard box back. He set it on Little Jon’s dining-room table in front of Eight and Cooper.
They both stood, and Eight opened the box. “As president of the mother charter of the Brazen Bulls Motorcycle Club, I officially welcome Little Jon Androuet, William Graves, Dean Barker, and Douglas “Digger” Daniels to our new Northern California charter.”
As the men crowded into the room applauded and offered or accepted congratulations, Eight and Cooper dealt out five Bulls patches, and five bottom rockers that read NorCal. One of each was for Arlo. His body had not yet been buried, so that he could be put to rest as a member of the club he’d died for. Arlo had no people, and the Nameless had few MC friends, so they would bury him here, but with respect.