“I agree. No need to tell Billy in particular. He’s perpetually pissed off anyway. With Roscoe finishing his last year of college, he’s got enough on his plate. And I don’t like the idea of messing with his life for no reason.”
“And I wasn’t planning on telling Cletus either.” I watched Beau carefully for his reaction. If any of us were capable of seeing a way out of this mess, it was Cletus. He was too clever for his own good. Still, I didn’t like dragging him into something just to have him shoulder the blame when or if we were busted.
Beau, I think, was having similar thoughts. He appeared to be considering our options. Eventually though, he came to my same conclusion. “No. Best if it’s just you, me, and—when he gets back—Jethro who know about this…disaster. But I’m not ready to hand over the shop, not yet. There’s got to be something we can do, even if we can put them off long enough until Jethro gets back in two weeks.”
I nodded. “I’ve been thinking about that. The way I see it, it’s the video that’s the problem. If we could get our hands on all the copies then the problem goes away.”
Beau cast me a sidelong glance. “So…we what? Go to The Dragon Biker Bar and try to hack into their system? They’ve got to have backups on the cloud, or the mist, or whatever it’s called.”
“I don’t think they’re that advanced, I honestly don’t. I bet they’ve got a PC someplace with the original video. Plus, if we go after their files, get a copy of everything then destroy the machine, we might find something to use in retaliation, maybe another video we can blackmail them with, get them to back off.”
“How are we supposed to access this PC?”
“I’ve been thinking about that, too…” My mouth turned sour because I didn’t like our best option.
Beau studied me for a long moment and, unsurprisingly, he plucked my plan out of my brain. “Tina.”
I closed my eyes briefly and sighed. “Yes. Tina.”
Beau continued like I hadn’t said anything. “Tina can get us in there. Or she can get in there on her own, no problem. She’s been seeing one of the younger guys, right?”
“No. She’s not an old lady. Since we broke up for good, she’s now one of their girls, one of the…” I tried to think what the biker gang called women they indiscriminately used for sex.
“Sweetbutts,” Beau supplied, giving me a scowl that demonstrated his dislike of the word, and the concept.
The Order wasn’t exactly known for being gentle with their women. Maybe it was because our momma regularly sported black eyes and bruised ribs at the hands of our father, but none of us Winston boys found anything remotely alluring about the biker lifestyle. The idea of fucking, and then beating random women didn’t strike me as badass. It struck me as dumbass and evil—like our father.
“Anyway, the point is, I think I can talk Tina into helping us.”
Beau studied me before asking, “Aren’t you worried about what they’d do to her? If they find out?”
“Yes,” I answered honestly. “But it would be her choice. I thought we could pay her. She’s always short on cash. And she’s shrewd, crafty. She’d be careful, I know she could do it and not get caught.”
“What if she uses this as a way to get back at you? You’re right, she is shrewd. What if she takes the files for herself and then we got two people blackmailing us?”
I gathered a deep breath, let my gaze wander as I thought about this possibility—because it was a possibility. “I don’t know, Beau. I guess you’re right. She might double-cross us. But can you think of any other options?”
I settled my eyes on my brother, waited, hoped he’d have an alternate solution.
He looked resigned as he asked, “How much time do we have?”
“Dirty Dave said we have two weeks, and that was on Wednesday.”
“Shit.”
“But I think we can stall for a bit. I got the sense they’d like to do this real friendly. They’d like us to be willing. In fact, they offered to give us a cut.”
“Well, we can work with that. Maybe put them off for a week or two, tell them we need to think it over, not say yes but not say no.”
“Yeah, then delay another few weeks, tell them we need to get the shop ready—or even say we’ll do it off-site. Maybe buy us enough time to get the files, or at least until Jethro gets back and we can beat the shit out of him.”
Beau smirked at this, but it lacked any real humor. “You want to hold him down? Or should I?”
I returned his humorless smile with one of my own. “Let’s take turns. No reason to be greedy.”
CHAPTER 11
“We all know that light travels faster than sound. That's why certain people appear bright until you hear them speak.”
― Albert Einstein
Jessica
I was in a funk.
It wasn’t a fun, funky-town funk. It was a full-on, pseudo-depression funk. Not even researching Aztec Temples and reading travel blogs about New Zealand’s geothermic sites did anything for the funk.