21. 20 - A Cancer Among Us

20 - A Cancer Among Us

“Walker, Snake, Trouble, and Hollywood,” Quickshot called out as he stomped across the common area. “Church in five.”

We all stood and got ready to head to the soundproofed room where we held our club meetings. I looked down at Reesa and then leaned in and kissed her. “You okay with the kids?”

“Go handle business. I’ve got them.”

“I’ll help her as soon as I find a spot to take a shower and get some clean clothes on,” Trinity announced.

“We have an ensuite in the room they put us in. Use that. If Reesa’s shit doesn’t fit you, have her check with the other old ladies to see if they can find you something comfortable.”

“Thanks, Walker.” Trinity called out.

“We owe you for putting your neck out and then sticking around to help out.” I didn’t wait to hear if she had anything to say back to me. Keeping everyone waiting when we were already sitting on the edge of a cliff ready to dive headfirst into whatever was thrown our way wouldn’t be smart.

No sooner than I got into the room, Ghost, Chief, and a few other club brothers piled in behind me. “We have some serious shit to handle, and I’m afraid some more bad news for some of us to process.”

Quickshot looked like he had been put through the fucking wringer and Ghost didn’t appear to be holding up much better. I assumed that was because Jamie was still in a holding cell downstairs. No one had addressed where the fuck Sweet had gotten off to. I couldn’t imagine him leaving his woman in a cell in what used to be his clubhouse without a hell of a fight.

“First thing, since I know you’re all wondering, Sweet took the kids to West Virginia when Smoke left with the other women and children.”

“What the fuck? He left his old lady here?” Snake asked.

Ghost looked as though he’d aged a good ten years in the past two days as he dropped down into one of the chairs. “My daughter isn’t well. Unfortunately, instead of trying to get her help, Sweet attempted to handle it on his own. Doc came down from the Dakotas with a specialist friend of his and they checked her over.” I glanced over to see tears dripping unchecked down Quickshot’s face and they were soon mirrored by Ghost.

“She, um… Fuck!” He cleared his throat and tried again. “Jamie, Angel Girl, has a lesion on her brain. It isn’t operable and it’s led to a type of dementia where she has delusions and then she acts based on the altered reality. For anyone not paying attention, she seemed to be operating at full capacity. Sweet thought so as well. He was concerned that she had become more ruthless over the past year or so, but it was still normal behavior for the most part. That was until Jamie shared her plan with him to put the kids in a cell-like area on the S.H.E. property like what we have here.”

“The kids?” I asked. “As in their kids?”

Ghost nodded his head and let it hang there for a moment. “She thought they were spies sent to figure out how to dismantle the MC from the inside out, so they could start up the human trafficking ring again. MiMi did not help with that delusion. She never fully recovered from her last attack. How the fuck no one noticed is beyond me, but she fed into my daughter’s delusions and when she saw Joey Farina in town again, she devised a plan to get the mafia in bed with them so that they would have backup when the traffickers came calling.”

“Jesus-fucking-Christ, how in the hell did no one in their club notice that bullshit?”

“I told you that Jamie was operating at top tier within her delusion. She kept what they were doing hush, hush from the other women because MiMi convinced her that they didn’t know who they could trust anymore.”

“What the absolute fuck?” I growled. “All this time, dealing with Sweet fucking me raw every other day over this shit his old lady was pulling and you’re telling me it’s because she had a fucking tumor that is making her irrational?”

“That’s what I’m telling you. I know that out of everyone present today, she has caused you the most problems, but I want you to know she’s been handled. My daughter is going to come back to Cedar Falls with me once I get this shit handled and she’s going to live out whatever remains of her life with family around her.”

“Man, I’m not about to tell you that I need revenge or some shit. That’s fucked all to hell. Wish I’d known Sweet was dealing with that shit. If he needed a whipping boy to keep her in line, I would have signed up for the abuse until he could figure shit out.”

Snake slapped me on my back a few times and then roughly shook my shoulder. I knew what the gesture meant. He was proud of me, but it wasn’t about that. I could not, for the life of me, imagine having to go through that shit and watch my old lady suffering and falling to pieces in front of my eyes. For sure couldn’t imagine having to protect my kids from a woman who swore to love them forever.

“I’m sorry to hear about Jamie,” I offered. “That’s a raw fucking deal for everyone. If you need anything, let me know and I will do what I can, but for now, we have other pressing security issues to move on to. If the two of you need to step aside and handle family affairs, we can get someone here who you trust to help Snake out while we navigate the mafia fiasco.”

“We’re not stepping aside just yet. I have a meeting we’re phoning in with Giovanni Martinelli in about five minutes. Wanted you all here for it. Keep quiet and let me handle shit, but pay attention because I don’t think it’s going to be as easy as it should be to get these fucks back out of the area now that they’ve settled in.”

Five minutes later, the phone rang. Ghost picked it up and introduced himself.

“I hear there has been some trouble in your neck of the woods.”

“That is a fucking understatement,” Ghost told him. “One of the S.H.E. MC founding members, and an old lady of our founding member of the Sierra High Chapter of the Aces High MC, was killed yesterday.”

“My condolences, but from what I was told, it was not my men who killed her.”

“It was a woman pushed by your man, and your man who was threatening another old lady and her kids.”

“Would that be the Ambrose family?”

I had a hard time keeping my mouth shut as my woman’s name slipped free of his so casually. “That would be them,” Ghost admitted.

“Well, they have a $462,000 debt to settle up.”

“Do you even know where that supposed debt came from?” I asked. When Ghost didn’t tell me to sit down and shut the fuck up, I knew he wanted me in on the call for a reason.

“Gambling debt.”

“Wrong!”

“You’re going to have to explain.”

“Your man, Joey Farina, thought he knocked up the woman who went nuts yesterday. She made him believe he fathered her oldest child back when he went to high school here.” I paused to see if the fucker on the other end was going to admit to knowing any of this.

“I’m listening.”

“Well, he stupidly didn’t ask for proof and started paying her three grand a month for child support. He did that for twelve years of the girl’s life until Terry Matheson sent Josh Ambrose to him for a gambling loan. Josh, or one of his buddies, let it slip that he needed the extra money to pay child support to Terry.”

“She had both men on the hook for the same kid?” Giovanni asked.

“From what I’ve managed to put together, that seems to be the case. That was when your man loaned Josh $30,000 to gamble on making more, so that he could pay off the child support debt he owed to Joey. That was $432,000 of the debt you quoted earlier. It wasn’t your debt. Joey was the dipshit paying support for a kid he never had tested. That money is on him. As for the $30,000 that was borrowed by Josh Ambrose, your boy had him killed and set it up to look like he died on the fucking job two damn years ago.”

“I don’t understand. Last time I spoke with Joey, he assured me that the wife of Josh had received a hefty payout of insurance.”

“Boss, the bitch who told Joey that lied,” we heard a man say from Giovanni’s side of the call before the other side of the conversation was muted temporarily.

When the call was reconnected, Giovanni Martinelli shocked us all by apologizing. “You have my condolences on those lives that have been lost. My apologies for the misdeeds of a man whose actions fall on my shoulders at the end of the day. What I cannot do is pull my men from the racket they have set up in North Carolina. I have it under good authority that both motorcycle clubs are located in Georgia.”

“Less than an hour from the casino you’re operating around,” Ghost clarified.

“That does not matter. We were invited there by one of the MCs in question and that invitation has not been rescinded.” He chuckled. “It wouldn’t matter if it was. The deal has already been struck.”

Ghost glared down at the phone knowing he couldn’t explain his daughter’s condition as it would weaken both MCs to do so. “The Flaming Irons MC is located in your area. They have several chapters throughout Illinois, Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Wyoming. We’re looking to join patches with them to bridge the gap between our other chapters and the one we have in the Dakotas.”

“Is that so?”

“That’s so. I think you’ll find that you’ve spread your interests a bit too thin and when push comes to shove, it will only take a little puff of air to knock over your throne. Rethink your answer. You have one week to close shop and get your men the hell out of the south. This territory is ours. If you fight me on it, your territory in Chicago will also belong to the Aces High MC. Don’t fucking test me. This whole fiasco was one man’s vendetta that turned into a shitshow with a good woman dead and her two kids now growing up without a mom. We will not let that go unanswered.”

There was silence on the other end of the line for so long that I thought the asshole had hung up. Finally, he spoke up. “A delivery will be made to your clubhouse within the hour. Do what you will with the package. We will consider the slate wiped clean. I will analyze the situation there and give you my answer about closing shop at the end of the week.”

“I don’t want an answer at the end of the week. I want all your men gone,” Ghost demanded.

“I don’t take kindly to threats made against me and my establishment.”

“And I don’t fucking handle our women being killed at all. You’re lucky you got a fucking courtesy call from us, and you only got that because I thought maybe your man had gone rogue. You should probably take the out you were given, or things are going to get excessively bloody in your neck of the woods.” Ghost hung up the phone then and turned his attention back to the rest of us.

“We’re staying for Tash’s funeral. If they haven’t made a move here by then, they probably aren’t going to. I want someone on top of this situation when I’m gone.”

“Is Quickshot going back with you?” Snake asked, clearly having not been in the loop about Angel Girl before.

Quickshot was the one to speak up. “No. I’m going to say my goodbyes here. My woman and I are now both in charge of the MCs and we can’t abandon them, especially when we all need to recover from the damage that was done.”

“No one would blame you for taking some time.” I told him.

“I would blame me. Part of taking this position is knowing that the club comes first. If Angel-Jamie was all there right now, she would understand that, too. I took over from Sweet too recently for someone else to have to step up and take over for me.”

I admired Quickshot’s dedication to the club because it would cost him the prolonged goodbye he needed with his lifelong friend.

“We need a man on Spike every day between now and the funeral. Probably afterward too. He isn’t handling Tash’s death well.” My heart cracked open in my chest.

“He probably blames himself for tossing her Reesa’s keys that day.”

“Whatever the reason, we need someone to be there for him and someone to take his kids in.”

“I’ll talk to Reesa. She’s already had Griff and Diesel with her this whole time and D seems comfortable with her. Plus, he’s just a year older than Josh Jr.”

“That’s settled. The kids will stay with Reesa and Walker until Spike pulls it together.” Ghost turned my way. “Is her house big enough for all of them?”

“I’m sure we can make it work as long as the threat has been eliminated.”

“Every one of those motherfuckers is about to die,” Ghost promised. He hadn’t been idle in his promises, because an hour later, Joey fucking Farina was brought to the clubhouse beaten, bloody, and about an inch away from death’s doorstep. He didn’t even make it down to the cells before Quickshot drove home the deathblow that took the man out for good.