“First thing I want to say is job well done in Baltimore. That situation was red hot, and all of you handled yourselves,” Dare said. Words of agreement all around. “I want everyone to stay vigilant the next few weeks. Keep your eyes open for anything out of the ordinary in our backyard. Keep your ears open for any unusual activity. Given the caliber of the conflict we were engaged in, I just want us on the lookout for any possible repercussions.”
“I put out some feelers,” Caine said, his pale gaze ice-cold serious. In addition to their racing/betting activities at the track, the other major business the club ran was a trucking escort service. Mostly this involved providing escorts for container trucks or convoys carrying sensitive cargoes of one type or another. They had a few regulars they worked with and also took on one-offs on a case-by-case basis. When the money was right. This gave the club contacts and associates not just in central Maryland, but along the Interstate 95, 70, and 81 corridors into Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Virginia. “Haven’t heard anything, but I’ll keep you posted.”
“What is it you’re anticipating?” Doc asked. If anybody considered the men around this table family as much as Dare, it was his grandfather, one of the Ravens’ founders. Frank Kenyon had gotten his nickname not because he had any medical expertise, but because he’d gained a reputation for fixing or figuring ways out of problems and had a knack for giving the kind of advice and tough love the guys needed.
“To be honest, I’m not sure, but my instincts tell me I’m missing something about what went down in Baltimore, missing some loose end. Maybe I’m being paranoid given the strength of the groups we were up against. Though the Church Gang was pretty well obliterated, someone else will rise in their place. If nothing else, that’s something to keep an eye on,” Dare said, wishing his gut could nail down what was bugging him.
Ike sat at the far end of the table, the ink on his head and neck making him look like the hard-ass he could sometimes be. “Since I’ll be heading back to the city this week, I’ll make sure any intel Nick’s team acquires gets passed on here, too.” Nick Rixey was a good friend of Ike’s and the unofficial leader of the team of former Green Berets the club had fought alongside in Baltimore these past weeks.
“Good,” Dare said. “That’s real good.”
“How worried do you think we gotta be?” came a deep, quiet voice from the back corner of the room. Sam “Slider” Evans, his nickname earned almost a dozen years before when his back tire hit a patch of gravel on an old country road and he went off into a ditch. He’d missed a huge tree by inches, skidded over the root system, and ultimately laid down his bike in a gully. Not a single serious scratch to rider or machine. For years they’d referred to him as one lucky SOB for coming out of that wreck without sustaining any damage, but no one had said that about him since his wife died of breast cancer three years before, leaving him with two young sons to care for on his own. Slider even attending a club meeting was noteworthy, as he’d nearly withdrawn from everything but his job and caring for his boys.
“Not worried, just cautious,” Dare said. He fucking hoped he was right.
Wearing a black doo-rag knotted around unkempt, light brown hair that probably hadn’t seen a haircut since before his wife died, Slider heaved a breath, a troubled frown on his face, but he said no more.
“One other thing we probably ought to hash out while everyone’s here,” Dare said, his shoulders heavy with the weight of this topic. “The guns we picked up during the ops in Baltimore.” The Ravens had taken the hardware in partial payment for providing muscle in the Hard Ink team’s fight—that was back before losing two of their own had brought the Ravens into the fight of their own free will. No payment required.
Doc sighed and scrubbed his hand over the whitish-gray hair of his beard. “Guns stolen from the Church Gang. This is dirtier shit than normal, Dare.”
Dare nodded, knowing Doc hadn’t agreed with the club taking possession of the weapons captured during an ambush of the Church Gang a few weeks before. It had been one of their most heated meetings and most divided votes. And Dare understood why. From the very beginning, going all the way back to when Dare first pushed to rebuild the Ravens’ membership in the years after he’d arrived there, he’d made a commitment to Doc that he wasn’t trying to recreate the Diablos’ way of life in Maryland. That meant he didn’t want to turn the Ravens into One Percenters who prized violence as proof of loyalty and a rite of passage, and who fought and killed to defend territory, usually because they wanted to control drug and gun sales in that territory. Dare’s father’s full embracing of the hardest parts of the hard-core MC culture was what had created the ice-cold rift between Doc and his son when Dare was just a snot-nosed kid.