Chapter 1

Venom

T oday is starting out well. I’m in church, side-by-side with most of my club brothers. This is where I belong, I was always a bit of a loner when I was a kid, and I used to wonder what was wrong with me. But then I realized I just hadn’t met my people. I grab a seat beside Rage, we both joined the Savage Legion MC around the same time and have become pretty good buddies. He’s a medic and has this no-nonsense attitude and always says what’s on his mind, which means I never have to wonder what he’s thinking about.

He jerks his chin at me. “Mornin’, brother. How’s it hangin’?”

“Barely still attached.” I respond wryly. “The wedding reception for Haze and his old lady was wild. That club girl who had a thing for him, hate-fucked all those feelings out on me before moving onto the prospects.”

Rage glances towards the still-open door to the bar area. “Be careful of that one, Ven. Brittany’s the type who can get a man’s head all twisted around and fuck up his life before he even realizes what’s happening to him.”

“Yeah, noted, Grandpa.”

“I’m being serious, Ven,” he says in a stern tone.

“Sometimes you just gotta loosen up. But I’m hearing you loud and clear, brother—now that Haze’s off the market, she’s gonna be looking for her next victim. No matter how good the sex is, I ain’t stepping into that honey trap.”

“You don’t want her for an old lady. Trust me on this.”

Rage still doesn’t get it. I wave one hand through the air in a dismissive gesture. “You’re preachin’ to the choir, Rage. The last thing in the world I need is an old lady tellin’ me what to do.”

He finally gives me a genuine smile. “There are too many beautiful women hanging around this clubhouse who are eager to please to put all your chips on just the one.”

“Agreed. We’ve got our whole lives ahead of us. Plenty of time to play the field. No fucking brother should give up his freedom before he’s damn good and ready,” I say.

“Besides that, I doubt you’d find yourself an old lady who’d put up with your roommate and all the drone innards littering your suite. Unless she’s got a kink for scrapyards and serpentariums.”

Before I can answer, Siege drops the gavel and calls our club meeting to order.

“Quieten down and listen up. We’ve got a lot of ground to cover today. Let’s start with old business and then we’ll have reports from our club officers. First off Haze has something to say.”

Haze gets to his feet and looks around at everyone. I can’t help but smile at him because he’s a righteous brother who with our help, managed to save his old lady from desperate circumstances.

“I just wanna thank you all for the wedding gifts, you really shouldn’t have. Yeah Tank, I’m lookin’ at you bro. You really shouldn’t have,” he pauses and Tank, our VP, starts laughing. I’m guessing it must be an in-joke. Haze continues, “We’re gonna take a few days off to sail down to Santa Catalina Island—that’s in Anna’s father’s yacht, not in the fucking My Little Pony pool float, fuck you very much Tank,” his speech is drowned out by the sound of me and my club brothers laughing at the mental image. “Anyway, we had a ton of food left over, so Anna and Trix are dropping by later this morning with the sides, and the prospects are setting up the grill now.”

A ripple of excitement moves through the room, because every brother loves a cookout.

Siege turns to Haze and says, “We were glad to be there for you and your old lady when things were bad. That’s what the brotherhood is all about.”

When Haze drops back down into his seat, Siege continues, “Next, Dutch has a few words to say about what we recovered at Rick’s hideout.”

Dutch stands up and glances down at his tablet as he gives the report. “It took a while to secure Mr. Tyler’s property. Turns out, as well as his assets, there was quite a stash of loot.”

Impressed murmurs run around the room as my club brothers whisper their approval. Most of our jobs involved helping out for the sake of doing the right thing, and therefore operated at a net negative. It was good to find that one finally paid off.

He continues, “The shipping container beside his cabin was sold for four grand, however, in the outbuilding we found a false floor hiding a safe. We recovered nearly a hundred grand and some gold bars.”

My mouth drops open. But before anyone can ask, Dutch explains. “We suspect he was a prolific hit man and what we recovered from his property was a small percentage of his overall wealth. We’re still debating whether or not to track down more information on this man or let sleeping dogs lie.”

Glancing at Siege he announces, “The total haul is around a quarter of a million dollars. We’ll take thirty percent off the top for the club coffers and the rest will be evenly distributed amongst all the brothers who participated in the raid.”

Reward follows risk. This is standard operating procedure for our club, so they aren’t gonna get any pushback from the brothers about how they handled dividing the money. I can’t remember the last time we ended up with a bonus from doing a job. Mostly, we all work individual jobs and pay our dues. I suppose outlaw clubs earned more through their club than working outside jobs, but that wasn’t the way with non one-percent clubs.

Dutch wraps it up by talking about the weapons we confiscated. “There were several trunks holding weapons and a couple full of ammo. We’re adding most of that to our armory. You never know when extra weapons will come in handy. The killer was a professional. That means the weapons were well maintained, wiped clean of fingerprints, and had the serial numbers filed off.”

There’s a cough from the back of the room, Dutch asks, “You got something to add Smoke?”

Our club attorney shakes his head, “Not really, just remember what happened the last time we got caught with illegal guns on our property, if it wasn’t for Serena’s quick thinking, Rigs might still be doing time.”

“Point taken, brother,” Dutch says. “Given the number of weapons, we’ll see if we can store them off-site.”

When he sits down, Siege stands again. “I feel a lot more confident about our ability to protect ourselves from anything the Grave Diggers MC throws our way with our coffers replenished and our armory filled to the brim. Now, for new business. Rider, come and talk to us about the suspicious activity your team has seen around our area.”

Rider stands and turns to address the brotherhood. “As you know my team has been tasked with being on the lookout for any push into our territory by the Grave Diggers MC. Since they patched over the Hellfire Hounds, we’ve been concerned they might be using that as a backdoor into Las Salinas.”

Rigs speaks up, “Tell them the rest.”

Shooting Rigs a serious look, Rider launches into a short, but pointed explanation of a situation none of us were privy to, until just now. “Someone seems to be setting up shop in our territory. We’ve noted a number of out-of-state panel vans exiting off the interstate and moving through a sparsely populated area on the southside of the city, before going back to wherever they came from.”

Smoke rubs his chin thoughtfully before asking, “Do they leave right away or hang around for a few days?”

“There have been several times when we saw them leaving the area within an hour or two,” Rider replies.

“Sounds like some kind of smuggling operation,” Smoke responds. He’s saying what we’re all thinking.

“That was our thinking as well.” Siege motions to Zen, our IT guy. And within seconds our phones are all buzzing. “I just had Zen send you the exit number and the general area they’re circulating through.”

Rider looks around the room, “Here’s the thing I need you to remember. We can’t all swarm that area or begin randomly following every van with out-of-state license plates. We don’t want them to know we’re investigating the situation. If we spook them, that’ll cause them to become more secretive and go to ground.”

Rigs adds pointedly, “The goal for our surveillance is to go unnoticed.”

“Rigs is correct,” Rider interjects decisively. “Moving forward we’ll be handing out assignments. If you get one, your job is to show up at the specified time and report back on what you see. You are not to engage with any of the drivers, interrogate other people to find out what they know, or follow anyone unless we give the order. The club officers will be talking to the townsfolk on our own. If every brother does their part, we should be able to get to the bottom of this fairly quickly.”

Dutch reminds everyone, “What we see as suspicious might be nothing more than some big corporation surveying land they just bought, maybe with an eye to building an oil refinery or something along those lines.”

Rider cuts him off. “It doesn’t matter what all these out of towners are doing in our area, we’ll figure it out. We always do.”

“I’ll second that,” Siege announces as he gets to his feet again. “Operational security is a serious concern. Modern technology is making it more difficult than ever to keep club business private, so no communicating outside of our encrypted app.”

“Fucking technology,” Rigs mutters.

“Much better when it was just pen and paper,” Tank adds.

“Didn’t you used to chisel messages into a rock, back when you were a boy?” Vapor says with a smirk.

“Fuck off,” our VP glares at him. I know it’s just good-natured banter, Tank and the twins are long-time work colleagues and constantly jerk each other around.

After the meeting is over, Rage and I go out back to the patio to grab some food. I’ve not shoveled more than a handful of bites into my mouth before my phone goes off. So does Rage’s and by the pings on all sides, our other club brothers are getting their assignments too.

I pull out my phone and scan the message. “I’m headed out to exit 408. They want my drone in the sky. How about you?”

Rage frowns, “I’m headed to the other side of town. They want me to follow the river down through Brush Creek and report back anything I see out of the ordinary.”

We quickly shove a few more bites into our mouths and wash it down with coffee before getting on our motorcycles. I check the storage compartment on my bike to make sure I have my mini drone. I can cover more ground, zoom in on objects, and capture images with this drone. I think my club brothers would approve because they have in the past.

***

I ride down the interstate on my Harley, intent upon doing exactly what my club brothers asked me to do. I can’t think of any logical reason why there would be an influx of panel vans with various out-of-state license plates—other than for something nefarious. My club officers always have their ears to the ground as far as any developments in Las Salinas goes, so if it had been legitimate business I think they’d have gotten wind of it. Looking at the map Zen sent, they’re exiting off into one of the more remote areas of our county. Our club officers are right to be concerned. It could be anything from stripping native burial sites for artifacts, to some kind of smuggling operation, or even some organized criminal elements dumping bodies in our area. To be quite honest, I’m as curious as I am worried.

I park up at a junction where two overpasses meet. There’s a scenic viewing area that allows me to stop without drawing the notice of people driving past. The exit is clearly visible below. I can see for miles in every direction over the treetops. but there are huge trees obscuring my view of the ground, especially the road leading from the exit to the wilderness. This is clearly the reason our club officers wanted me to bring a drone, it can track what my eyes can’t.

I quickly pull out my favorite drone and get it in the sky. When it zooms out above the trees, the views are fantastic. Absolutely nothing beats the beauty of nature. This is definitely my happy place.

It takes me a minute to find the road again and I hover around for about thirty minutes before the first panel van exits off the interstate. I pull up high, so they don’t catch sight of my drone and follow along with their journey. They turn onto a secondary road, but something catches my attention on the left.

I try to stay on course with the van but decide to sneak a quick look at what’s going on. It could be another van or something important. I manipulate the controls, pulling the drone off my original target and fly it over a cornfield. At first, I think there’s a large animal running at breakneck speed through the field because no human could move so fast through the dense foliage.

When I drop down a bit and zoom in, I realize it’s a woman. She’s not skipping through the cornfield like in a movie, all pretty and graceful. This woman is panicked and running for her life. Although I can’t see her face. I do see her shoving her way forward as her black hair streams behind her.

A lump forms in my throat as I watch her terror-fueled sprint. At first, it’s unclear whether she’s desperate to get somewhere in a hurry, or to get away from someone or something that’s chasing her.

I begin to search around, and it takes me only a couple of seconds to see she’s being pursued by two animals. Worry niggles in my gut that they are coyotes. When I zoom in, I discover they are dogs, large hounds by the looks of things. I can see them sniff around and stop as they try and catch her scent.

I quickly get the drone back to the woman and watch her claw her way up a sharp embankment to the highway. She runs out when a car stops, and she jumps into the passenger side. When they drive away, relief courses through my body and the tight knot in my chest finally loosens.

The hounds begin running up the embankment, sniffing and pawing at the edge of the road. Suddenly, they stop and race back the way they came. I follow them with my drone hoping to catch a glimpse of the asshole who lost control of his hunting dogs.

Eventually, the dogs run to an older man wearing hunting gear and an orange ballcap. He’s carrying a rifle. I just want to beat his ass for the tragedy that almost took place because of his negligence. But then he takes out a piece of cloth and I watch him squat down and rub it forcefully in the face of each dog. They get riled up and start running towards the road again.

That’s when I realize this isn’t all just some kind of innocent mistake on his part. He was using the dogs to track the woman. She knew she was in serious danger and that her life depended upon giving those dogs the slip.

I wasn’t about to let the old bastard get away with what he just did, so I bring my drone lower and closer to the man, hoping to capture an image of his face. Unfortunately, the sunlight glints off the side and he catches sight of my drone. Before I can focus in on his face, he raises his rifle and shoots my favorite drone right out of the sky. I don’t know who this old man is but I’m already building a nice healthy dislike for him. There were no two ways about that.

I sigh and stare off in the direction of the road the van had disappeared down. Today I’m zero for two. I didn’t manage to track the van long enough to discover where it was going, nor did I capture an image of the old man’s face. On the upside, at least the woman managed to get away.

I go back to my motorcycle and head to the clubhouse to pick up another drone. I’ve got a job to do and I’m not going to let the Legion down, not now, not ever.