“You gonna take her out?”
“Makin’ her dinner at my place tonight.”
Tack nodded. “Just wanna make sure you know what you’re gettin’ into.”
“She’s funny.”
“Good to know she’s got that as well as bein’ easy to look at.”
“And she’s more.”
Tack stared in his eyes. “I know, Rush. She’s a lot more.”
“Right. So what I wanna know, Dad, is would you want me to have anything less?”
“Absolutely not.”
At the clarity of his father’s response, Rush’s back straightened.
Tack kept talking.
“You got years on you, son, and you got experience. But you’re still young. And it wouldn’t take a father who loves and knows his son to see this one is different. Straight up, if I could plan out your life, both you and your sister, I would want you to have more time and more experience before you settled in. That way did not happen for your sister. She knew what she wanted, landed it, and she’s all kinds of happy. So I’m good. But I see where this is goin’, Rush, and I just want you to be prepared.”
“We haven’t even had a date yet, Dad.”
His father’s head snapped to the side. “Am I readin’ this wrong?”
He never read anything wrong.
“No,” Rush told him.
Tack righted his neck. “Not tellin’ you what to do. Just wanna make sure your eyes are open.”
“I want a handful.”
Tack said nothing.
“It’s just the way, and it’s a good way, and you know what I mean, Dad. I want a handful,” Rush went on. “I wanna wake up and not know what the day is gonna bring, mostly because she’s gonna make it an adventure. I want kids, and I want the woman I choose to make them with to be about them. To have all the love in the world for them. To make it so they know that and never doubt it. And you know why I want that.”
“Yeah,” Tack whispered, and Rush knew he knew all about making babies with a woman who did not give that to her children.
“And I want her to have more. I want her to have kids and me and a life. Drinks with her girls or making movies, or I don’t know and I don’t give a fuck, just as long as she’s the kind of woman who needs it and goes after it and gets it. I wanna get pissed and I wanna be challenged and I wanna be surprised and I want my balls busted and I want my mind blown and I wanna laugh a lot. I want it all, Dad. I want what you got, but I want it my way and I want it to be all mine.”
“Not thinkin’ Rebel Stapleton’s not gonna be an adventure,” Tack murmured.
“Exactly,” Rush replied.
Tack got intense.
And even though Rush was used to it, he braced.
“Your stepmother got kidnapped, twice. Once gettin’ stabbed nearly to death, lookin’ after her friend and hookin’ her star to me.”
“I haven’t forgotten that, Dad. And I’d erase that for you and Tyra if I could, but I can’t. That said, bottom line with that, if she washed her hands of Lanie when Lanie made stupid choices, or you because what she felt for you couldn’t survive the life you lead, you wouldn’t have wanted her and obviously you wouldn’t have gone on to build the life you have with her. In other words, you wouldn’t have it any other way and you went in knowin’ just that. I don’t know what’s gonna go down with Rebel. We haven’t even had a date yet. But just so you know, I’m goin’ in knowin’ what I’m getting into. And if the promise of her is real, heads up. Because I already know I want just that.”
Tack studied him for a few beats.
Then he nodded.
Right.
Rush knew his father.
His father knew him.
It had been Tack who’d nicknamed him Rush in the first place.
That was done.
Time to move on.
“She’s givin’ money to Harrietta Turnbull, seein’ as Harrietta told her she could get Chew to confess to her friend’s murder.”
Tack’s mouth tightened.
Yeah.
That had been his reaction.
“She knows she’s bein’ played now and that’s gonna stop. But she says Harrietta is also in with Valenzuela,” Rush continued.
That made his father’s eyebrows rise. “Seriously?”
Rush nodded. “Rebel thinks it’s also because Valenzuela wants Chew, and Harrietta is dangling him at them both.”
“Just when you think this shit can’t get more fucked up, it does,” Tack muttered.
“And there’s another suspect in Diane Ragowski’s murder. It’s Digger Benson of Bounty.”
“Shit, fuck,” Tack growled.
“Yeah. That’s not a coincidence, Digger and Chew both goin’ at that woman.”
Tack shook his head. “Bad blood between those two, Rush. Back in the day, Chew was taken on by Chaos, Digger was a huge pass. They were tight. Chew scraped him off for his new Club. Digger wasn’t a fan of that.”
“Stands to reason they’d make amends after Chew renounced the Club, wanted to see us hurt and set about doin’ that.”
Tack lifted his chin but said, “Doesn’t jive, Rush. Wouldn’t put it past Chew not to mind sharing. But the reason Digger was a pass for Chaos was that even back then, with Crank in charge, he was not Chaos material. Man’s a deviant. I had to call it, straight-up pedophile. Saw pictures of her. Diane Ragowski would not be his thing. She was beaten down by drugs, but she was very much a woman.”
“She was dressed in a school uniform when she died, Dad,” Rush reminded him.
His father’s mouth twisted as he said, “School uniform and schoolgirl are two different things, Rush.”
“Can’t say I know how a degenerate’s mind works, but maybe he took what he could get. But bottom line, there’s the link between Bounty and Valenzuela and Chew. It’s Digger, and they got more in common than twisting Digger’s club up in this shit.”
Tack drew in breath and replied, “I’ll tell Mitch and Slim.”
“When Rebel’s out, we need to hand all of this shit over to them.”
“Rush,” Tack sighed.
“Valenzuela is off Chaos. We can retreat from the ten-mile radius back to the five-mile radius we claim as ours and hand criminal shit off to people who get paid to deal with criminals. Then when it’s all done, we can quit with that vigilante gig altogether and just run Ride.”
“How ’bout we table this until we see the end of it by finding Chew?”
“How ’bout we let Slim and Mitch or Hank and Eddie find Chew, we get Rebel out, and see the end of it?” Rush returned.
“Son—”
“Dead bodies on our picnic table, Dad?” Rush pushed.
Tack leaned back and aimed a staredown at his son.
Rush was no longer eleven.
His father’s staredowns didn’t work anymore.
So he kept at him.
“Natalie dead?”
“Not our doing,” Tack growled.
“Valenzuela’s got the bones of two men Chaos took out. Every brother who was a brother back then is on the line for that. Especially Hound.”
“It’s been nearly twenty years and those bones have been moved, Rush. They won’t have the crime scenes. They don’t have the weapons. They have no witnesses. Fuck, son, they haven’t even identified those skulls.”
“One of those skulls being Crank, they find that out, they’ll look to Chaos. And Chew knows who they are, where they were done, and they’ll eventually have him.”
“He wasn’t there. He doesn’t know dick. And even if he leads them to the scenes, they’ve been scrubbed. There’ll be nothing to find.”
“We’re vulnerable.”
Tack uncrossed his arms, straightened from the car and put his hands to his hips. “As much as this sucks, Rush, it’s a fact and you gotta learn it. You can be tough. You can be badass. You can be armed to your teeth. You can be trained. You can be vigilant. But in one way or another, you’ll always be vulnerable. It’d take a goddamned abacus to count all the ways I’m vulnerable. But I’ll share five right now. Tyra. Tab. Ride. Cut. And you. Only choice you got is to protect your vulnerabilities and still get the fuckin’ job done. You could pull back, do nothin’, let someone else take care of it, but that way you couldn’t know the job got done and done right. We are not pullin’ back, doin’ nothin’, and lettin’ someone else deal with our problem. We’re gonna make sure the job gets done.”
“At what price?” Rush clipped.
Tack leaned back. “I can’t see the future. I can only do what I can do. Protect my vulnerabilities and get the fuckin’ job done.”
They stared at each other.
This was not the first time they’d had this chat.
It probably would not be the last.
His dad’s voice lowered when he said, “You were a kid. You had no stake in this. No say when it all went down. I can see you needin’ to pull out and lettin’ the men—”
Oh . . .
Fuck no.
“I’m Chaos,” Rush bit. “It’s all in or not at all. This is the way the Club goes, I go with it. But I don’t have to like it and I don’t have to keep my mouth shut about not likin’ it.”
Another lip quirk before, “Nope. You don’t have to do that.”
Rush was finished with this conversation.
“Right, I gotta get on what I wanted to get done on this car today and then get to the market to get food for Rebel. We done?”
“We’re done.”
Rush turned back to the car.
He felt his father didn’t leave so he looked to him.