*
Butterflies and fear raced through me as I read his words. I smiled to myself when I saw the new nickname he had for me. I still don’t know what had possessed me to tell him that silly story. I’d nearly died of embarrassment the day I tried my hand at baseball. I never forgot the expression on the coach’s face as my ball crashed through the front windshield of his car. He was furious. It didn’t matter that I had actually hit the ball for the first time; he was too busy freaking out about his car. I never was able to hit the ball like that again, and eventually I gave it up altogether. Sports were just not my thing.
*
Chapter 2
Guardrail
?
“How’s our little project going? Have you found out anything we can use?” Maverick asked.
“I know she isn’t frightened of the club life like she should be, if that’s any indication of how much she talks to her brother,” I told him as I took a drink of my beer.
“You think she has any idea what he’s been up to?” he asked.
“No. Nothing has come up on any of the feeds. He hasn’t been to her house, and there hasn’t been any communication between them through her phone or email. The prospects are still rotating shifts, and none of them have seen any sign of him.”
As Vice President of Satan’s Fury, it was up to me to find Tony, the lowlife motherfucker that stole a fifty thousand dollar shipment from the club. Because he’d been a long-standing leader of one of the street gangs in town, he’d gotten a unanimous vote at the table for the drug distribution. He was a professional, but in the end, he’d decided he could fuck us on our money. Surprisingly, the asshole actually thought he’d be able to get away with it.
He’d forgotten that Satan’s Fury owned the whole damn town. Because drugs were an unavoidable reality in the outer east and west side of our territory, we negotiated which gangs could run product and where. It was the best way for us to keep control of what drugs were sold in our area. We’d allowed Tony and his minions to distribute our product, same as the other little set on the west side. We used them out of necessity. Our product kept us in control of the territory. They did the distribution, and we took our cut… a large cut.
Nobody in the clubhouse talked to anyone about anything, so we were caught off guard when Tony managed to manipulate Maverick’s girl, Hailey, to get information about the club. It cut deep. Maverick had it bad for Hailey, and no matter how many times she’d come and gone, he was always there for her. Hell, he didn’t even realize she’d gotten hooked on junk until it got bad, and even after that it took an overdose for him to finally be able to cut her off. Although we all knew he would never share club business, the whole situation had us all on edge.
The last time she called Maverick begging for money, he’d tried putting her off by telling her he was going on a run and wouldn’t be back for a week. Unfortunately, Hailey’s decision to give Tony that little tidbit of information had given him a five-day jump that nobody saw coming, and it had cost us… big. We’d come home early only to find that Tony and his crew had taken off with our money, and Hailey was nowhere to be found. It was a shit ton of fuckery.
They had to be found… all of them. We knew Tony was hiding, and we had eyes everywhere. It was only a matter of time before we found him. We started with their families. Unfortunately, none of them kept any strong family ties that we could pull intel from. They had kids like kittens, and too many baby’s mamas to count. Since we decided that cutting the head off the snake was our best option, Maverick, our Sergeant of Arms, and I have spent weeks searching for information on Tony’s whereabouts. When we came across the name of his sister, we both agreed she was our best lead.
“Has she said anything about Tony? Do you think she knows where he is?” Maverick asked.
“Nothing yet, but she’s opening up more every day. If she does know anything or he contacts her, I’ll get her to talk,” I told him confidently. I could tell she was beginning to trust me. A part of me felt guilty about misleading her, but in the end, I knew I didn’t have a choice.
“You’ll find him. Once you put your mind to something, there’s no stopping you,” Maverick told me as his hand slapped against my back. “That’s why the Pres put you on this.”