Before she rolled to her feet, went to Lydia Copperman, and checked for a pulse, Phoebe knew she wouldn’t find one. And she didn’t.
“She’s dead,” she said, the words pushed out on a gust of shock.
“Jesus,” Vin muttered. “Oh sweet Jesus.”
Phoebe’s head began to fill with noise.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
“Okay,” Eight said, leaning back in his chair at the head of the table. “I appreciate everybody getting their asses in their seats on short notice this morning.”
Duncan looked around the table. Half the Bulls wore Sinclair greens under their kuttes, and he was one of them; they were on shift, in the shop or the bays, this morning, so it hadn’t been a particular hardship to set aside what they were doing and walk next door to the clubhouse.
Jay had been last in; for most of the week he’d been out at his folks’ place first thing in the morning, helping his old man with a particularly complicated bike rebuild. He looked irritated at the interruption of his day, but these days he was a lot better about keeping his mouth shut and not complaining about every damn thing he didn’t like.
Eight had called an unscheduled meeting this morning because he’d heard from Fitz, who was acting president in Eureka until they could get that charter established. More than a month since they’d shut down the Nameless, most of the news from the coast had been fallout from what they’d done, with very little forward movement.
The story they’d built, about the Nameless simply breaking camp and abandoning their clubhouse, had been more or less accepted; there had been a few skeptics, a few people who’d needed to be convinced or otherwise dealt with, but they’d had to end only one of those skeptics—a cousin of one of the Nameless, whom Little Jon had forgotten existed. Other than that, the NorCal Bulls had been staying low-pro, discreetly recruiting, quietly doing good around the area, strengthening relationships Little Jon had and building new connections.
“Fitz says they’re ready to hang the sign on the building. They got a roster of eight, not counting Fitz, Jazz, and Geno, who all want to come home. Little Jon will take the gavel. He’s naming Dean Barker his second and Digger Daniels to SAA. He wants our input on this. Remember, we got our first run on this route coming up in about a month, an exchange south of the border, and a handoff in NorCal, up to Vancouver.”
“Are the SoCal Horde in on this yet?” Chris asked. “Or is Nevada still crossing the border?”
“The Horde’s working their shit out,” Duncan’s dad answered. “Nevada will make this cross. Hopefully it’ll be their last, and they’ll hand off to the Horde from then on.”
“I don’t like that they don’t have a tech guy in Eureka yet,” Apollo said. “In these times, the work we do, they gotta have a tech guy.”
“Why doesn’t Jazz stay until they do?” Jay asked.
Apollo turned to answer him, and gave him a cross look as he did. “Felicia’s pregnant,” he said, as if that was an obvious answer.
If Jay saw Apollo’s irritation, it didn’t slow him down. “I know, but only like, what, two months? She found out after we were back from Cali. It would be different if she was about to pop, but that’s months away. I get that he wants to be home, but can we do without somebody handling digital security out there while Felicia gets nightly foot rubs or whatever?”
The whole table, made up mostly of firmly attached men, erupted in a chorus of laughs, groans and other noises of shared reactions that couldn’t quite be classified. Call it male turmoil. Probably they all sort of agreed with Jay, but they also all understood the consequences of agreeing if any of their women had heard what he’d said—including Jay’s own old lady.
Duncan knew maybe more than others at the table about the situation, because he’d overheard his mom and Kelsey talking about it a couple of times. Felicia was unexpectedly pregnant. Their youngest, Kaia, was about to be eight years old, and Jazz and Felicia had thought they were done making the next generation. They were, overall, happy—had come to be happy—about the new baby, but Felicia was around forty now, and the pregnancy was apparently uncomfortable in ways her others hadn’t been. (Duncan hadn’t focused too much on those details.) She wanted her man home. And Jazz wanted to be home for her.
That had been going on for a while now—most of the time since the Bulls had been in NorCal. But, though he’d been characteristically flippant, Jay really was right—they needed a tech specialist in the new charter. It was dangerous, in myriad ways, not to have someone who could handle all that. It was, objectively, more important than a wife with morning sickness.
“Jay’s right,” Duncan said aloud. “I don’t see how we can be open for business in NorCal without a tech specialist at the table out there.”
Eight stared at the Young Guns’ end of the table, wearing an expression that had become pretty familiar. They’d talked about it amongst themselves and had decided it was his ‘burned-out assistant principal’ expression. He was tired of the patches he considered ‘youngsters’ making good arguments at the table. But he was slowly developing a patience for it, Duncan thought.
Now Eight rubbed his bald scalp. “Yeah, it’s a problem. You’d think in Cali they’d have their pick of hackers and shit, but I guess Humboldt County is a lot more inbred mountain yahoos than crunchy granola tech bros.”
“I think the tech bros and the crunchy granola crowd are two different groups, Prez,” Monty said with a grin. “And the tech bros are farther south.”
“I don’t give a fuck. Okay. I’ll tell Fitz to not to pack up yet. If anybody’s got a problem with that, or has something else to say about the situation, do it now.” When no one spoke up, Eight turned to their tech officer. “Apollo, get on Jazz’s ass. Tell him if he wants to get home, then he needs to fuckin’ find his replacement.”
Apollo nodded.
“Good.” Eight picked up the gavel. “Alright, that’s the meet—oh.” Stopping just before he’d have struck the table, he set the gavel down. “Fuck. One more thing. It’s too goddamn early, but Marcella’s on my ass about it, so let me just say it so she’ll let me up for air. 2025 is the fiftieth anniversary of the Brazen Bulls MC. We should do something for that. Something big, in the summer. Trust me, I already know that’s more than a fucking year away, but Marce says we need to start planning now, and if we don’t at least give her some input about what we want, then the old ladies are gonna plan whatever they fucking want. Knowing her, she’ll make me pay by doing some girly bullshit, so let’s think about it.”
Sam put up his hand. “I got—”
Eight cut him off with a sigh. “Not now, son. I don’t want to start throwing random ideas around and turning this chapel into a party-planning office. Just think about it. Talk about it with each other. We’ll talk ideas soon enough. But let’s get back to work now.”
Sam put his hand down.
~oOo~
Jay threw out a quick see ya and booked it out of the clubhouse and back to his folks’ place as soon as Eight gaveled the meeting to an end. The guys on shift were next out, headed back to work. As Duncan, the last of those, grabbed his phones from the safe box—only the tech officers were allowed to have tech of any kind in church—his personal buzzed in his hand. He turned it over and saw that he had a stack of texts and three missed calls from ... Vin? And Margot, too?