The firing and fading of bike engines echoed off the acres of asphalt and steel, a happy growling. The men called to one another, shapeless shouts that were tinged with excitement about the night’s party. It would be a huge blowout: blaring music, tons of beer, strippers, groupies, the works.
Yay, works.
Mercy found Ghost in the Dartmoor Trucking offices, the VP sorting through paperwork while the helpless desk manager looked on, her hands knotted together.
“Mr. Teague,” she was saying, her short blonde curls teasing at her ears as she peered over the biker’s shoulder. Her half-moon reading glasses were pushed up on her forehead and the nosepieces had left dents at either side of the bridge of her nose. Mid-forties, she was related to the club only through business, which Mercy knew was the way Ghost liked things. While club family often got hired for the information-sensitive jobs, Ghost liked business-minded outsiders in his offices who wouldn’t rest on their laurels, assuming the club would give them a free pass for being lazy. “I’m sure I can find it, if you’ll just let me…” She gestured to the desk that her boss had commandeered, clearly fidgety to have been displaced.
“If you can find it, why am I having to look for it?” Ghost asked. He glanced up long enough to tap his cigarette ash into a Coke can on the edge of the desk, and caught sight of Mercy. Ghost didn’t startle – it just wasn’t possible – but he paused a moment, guarded dark eyes moving up and down the full height of him.
“Merc,” he said. “Good trip up?
“Can’t complain.” Any trip in which he was traveling north of the swamps was a good one. “Mags said you wanted to see me.”
“Yeah.” Ghost nodded and went back to his papers, sighing. “Just let me…oh, here.” He shoved the mess at the desk manager and got to his feet. “I want it in my hands by the end of the day.”
She clutched the uneven stack to her chest, trying not to drop it. Her glasses slid down out of her hair and landed on her nose, lopsided. “But your party – I can have it for you first thing tomorrow–”
“Tonight,” Ghost insisted.
She sighed. “Yes, sir.”
Ghost dropped the last nub of his smoke into the soda can and gestured toward the door. “Let’s walk.”
Mercy fell into step beside him, keeping his long strides in check so they kept pace with one another.
Though a few inches shorter, Ghost was an imposing figure in his own right. The kind of man who made taller men want to bend their knees so they were on the same level. Lean and hard with muscle, his parentage of Aidan had never been in question: the same strong nose, dark hair and eyes, low brows that gave him a perpetual scowl, and a firm jaw that was always grinding. He’d boxed in the army, and he still had a fighter’s wide shoulders and catlike grace. Ghost never fidgeted; he had no nervous tics. He occupied a room with such indomitable presence, a radiant, unaffected confidence that was a part of his every fiber, and never a show.
“You saw Walsh in Atlanta back in the fall,” Ghost said as they strolled across the parking lot, in the general direction of the panel trucks that sat waiting to be rented. “I’ve no doubt he told you that things were shaking up around here.”
Ghost, like any good politician – and there were politicians in the MC world just as there were in the civilian world – had a habit of talking in veiled circles, leading you into agreeing with him before he’d ever posed his question. Mercy knew this, and still, he never managed to avoid the traps.
“He told me James was stepping down,” he said. Little nod, easy non-smile. Relaxed. Just talking. “Congrats, by the way.”
Ghost snorted. “Don’t act like it’s a blessing.” Then: “The truth is, it’s a bad time for a power shift, but James just can’t put his leg over the bike anymore, so it has to happen. The only thing worse than having a new president in this situation is having a lame duck president. We wouldn’t want word getting out that the club was breaking its own rules; undermines our presence.”
“Wouldn’t want word to get out to who?”
Knoxville wasn’t New Orleans, or even Newark. This, the mother chapter, was afforded the luxury of a low-crime place to call home. The last time any real outside threats had been present had been almost fifteen years ago, when the Carpathians had moved into town. Mercy had been part of the party that had sent them fleeing. Things had been quiet since. Well, unless you counted that business with Ava five years ago.
But Ghost said, “The Carpathians are back.”
“You’re shitting me.”
“I wish I was, man. But two nights ago, Briscoe and Dublin got jumped outside Bell Bar.”
“Jesus. Are they alright?”
“Yeah. One of the fuckers had a knife. Briscoe needed stitches.” Ghost paused and turned a serious look up to Mercy. “But they were flying colors. Three-piece patch colors. Wherever they’ve been since we last saw them, they’re real one-percenters these days.”
Back in the day, the Carpathians had been a small time riding club trying to go outlaw, illegitimate, and therefore underestimated in their danger. If they were a real MC now, that automatically granted them more power, just their patches alone.
“What’s worse,” Ghost continued, “is that someone’s using them to launder money. The Carpathians are dealing meth, and they’re sending the cash up the food chain somewhere, getting guns and bikes and real estate to build a clubhouse in return. They’re someone’s hired butt monkeys, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t going to make things personal. They hate us, and they want blood.”
“An eye for an eye,” Mercy agreed, heaving a sigh. “Guess we shoulda known that one would come back to bite us in the ass.”
Ghost scowled to himself, glancing off toward the trucks. “It shouldn’t have to benow, though,” he said, allowing himself a rare moment of pure frustration. “Not after Georgia and London just got done with all that.”
Aiding a family of vigilante security contractors, Georgia president, Stack, had been forced into a full-scale war on a business tycoon that had led the Georgia boys to London. Mercy had been part of the team that had hopped the pond. He’d been there with his brothers, and Sly Hammond, as Sebastian Rolland was exposed to the world as the perverted mastermind that he’d kept carefully hidden.
