“Guys, I get it, it’s badass, but it’s fucking not,” I said. “I got bailed out by another biker. I have no fucking idea who he was, but let’s just say if we can’t depend on the police to protect us, we can’t depend on fate to help us.”
I drew a deep breath.
“We’ve talked about this before, but I’m serious now. We gotta form our own club. Our own vigilante group of sorts. I’m fucking tired of the Bandits getting their way. One of us, against them, we’re screwed. Two of us, against them, we get hit later. All six of us, against them, we have a shot.”
Something happened that I couldn’t ever recall happening after a proposal like this—silence.
Usually, either Mason said something dry, Garrett said something to lighten the mood, or Zack said something smart. But apparently, either my idea had been thought of many times before, or it was such a shock that no one knew what to say.
“I don’t know, man,” Steele said. “Seems to me like there’s a lot more than six Bandits.”
“That doesn’t mean it has to just be us.”
“Steele’s right,” Mason said. “I’ve been around the block way longer than any of you fuckers. You’re not the first to propose a counter-group. You’d need help from the outside, and none of us have that.”
“Fuck that,” Connor said.
Finally.
“I’m with Brock here, I’m not taking another fucking drive-by from the Bandits. I don’t care if Sheriff Davis arrests all of us; I’m putting a fucking bullet through the skull of the next Bandit that tries to vandalize our construction site.”
“Fuck it, I need something to do besides pussy and booze,” Garrett said. “Who knows? It’ll make us more badass. Get us more chicks.”
“I’m in, too.”
We all turned to Zack. Even I had to admit that I had my reservations about this.
“No, Zack, you’re sure as hell not,” Mason said. “The five of us? We’re gonna be doing this gas station, security, construction, blue-collar shit until we drop dead. You got hope. You are not fucking joining a fight club.”
“Jesus, I’m twenty-four, not fourteen,” Zack shot back. “Yeah, I’m in school. Yeah, I’d like to get a good-paying job. But you know what? For what you guys do for me, the least I can do is help. And it’s not like I’m a bitch.”
Mason sighed, took a sip of his drink, and grumbled.
“Whatever you say, kid,” he said. “You do this, you’ll wind up in the same place as us.”
“With that attitude, no shit,” I said.
I said it as much to defend Zack as to shut Mason up. Zack was more mature than a typical twenty-four-year-old, but that still made him less mature than the rest of us. And nothing could get him riled up more than being called “kid.”
“Look, we don’t have to decide on anything tonight. But I’m serious, guys. We need to fucking consider this.”
My phone buzzed. Garrett made a crack about how the only thing we had to decide was if any girls would come for a party. I was glad for the distraction, as sophomoric and stupid as it was. I looked down at my phone in the mayhem and gulped.
“Thanks for taking care of us today. Much appreciated.”
Tara Rogers.
Tara
Four Days Later
“Ihear your concerns, but this happened because the girls stopped in Santa Maria. The farm will be far away from any public property. The location is far too valuable for us to pass up because they acted without consideration for their surroundings.”
I bit my lip as I sat in my family’s office, listening in on a call that the board of directors was having with my father. Though he was not with us—Elizabeth and I were listening in, unable to speak—he was fighting like hell to defend us. It wasn’t going very well.
“You cannot be serious, Bill,” he said. “Both of my daughters were mugged by thugs, and you mean to tell me you want to send her back there? Absolutely not. I will not put my daughters at risk.”
“We looked up the crime rate in Santa Maria,” one of the board members said. “The crime rate per capita is lower than it is in Albuquerque.”
