Asher nodded and left. He knew that King needed nothing more from him.
In truth, King did not think Asher would succeed. This was not the only that King had courted the Devil’s Patriots. The first time, the biker had returned with a story of a slashed tire and a threat of being shot the next time someone came. The second time it happened, King got a package in the mail containing the messenger’s middle finger. The rest of the messenger was never seen again.
Suffice to say, not only was the message not subtle, there was no reason to think it had ever changed.
But the tides of the Southwestern power struggle were shifting. And the only thing worse to King than losing power was failing to acknowledge that power was slipping away. He had to do something now.
Otherwise, the Titanic would be sinking sooner rather than later.
Prologue
Sam “Satan” Briggs
Five Finger Death Punch blared on the speakers as I worked on the Dodge pickup in front of me. Grease covered my fucking hands, just how I liked it. The scent of oil and gasoline filled the air, as appealing to me as cologne to some high-class pussies.
No one else was in the repair shop at the moment. Sonny and Spawn would be rounding up the rest of the Devil’s Patriots, but the actual work—the shit that kept the government off our ass—was my fucking stomping grounds. I had built this repair shop up from the ground—quite fucking literally, unlike a bunch of fucking soft stores that just rented out a place—and had made everything that I had become with my bare hands.
Yeah, I fucking liked money, but you know what I liked more? Work. Being self-sufficient. Not giving a fuck about what other people think. Getting under the skin of the right people.
I couldn’t remember who it was—enemies and losers tended to fade from my mind faster than beer cans in my fridge—but some competitor had once said that I was so fucking ruthless that I was like Satan. I had just laughed when I’d first heard the nickname, and now I had adapted it as my club name ever since. It worked well; prospects looked at me like I was their god, club members knew not to fuck with me, and officers knew that I would unleash hell on anyone that fucked with them—including other members.
But more than anything, I just liked the silence.
Some people with dark backgrounds preferred noise. A chance to distract them from the shit they’d gone through. You couldn’t have flashbacks if your mind was occupied with social shit.
Not me. I found that shit too shallow. Far better to get lost in good work with your hands, to get into flow or whatever hippy-dippy dumbasses called it, and to not even let yourself think.
“That’s why they call me…” I muttered, singing along to the song on the stereo. “Bad company, I can’t deny…”
I heard the sound of a motorcycle pulling up. I didn’t think anything of it; a biker club mandated choppers coming and going through the area. The sound of the bike stopped, and a few seconds later, Sonny walked in.
Sonny was, actually, my son, but I didn’t treat him any differently than any of the other club members. He and everyone else preferred it that way. The only time I treated him as a son was off club grounds.
“You hear the news?” Sonny said, wiping his hands clean.
“Why the fuck would I?”
I wasn’t an old fart. I was in my late thirties, Sonny in his early twenties. But I’d started becoming Satan just around the time the Internet became popular, and let’s just say this lifestyle didn’t lend itself to fucking computers and dumbass phones and shit.
Sonny, on the other hand, though he was a hardass, had shit like Facebook and that Tweeter or whatever the fuck it was called.
“Apparently, some massive MC war went down in New Mexico,” he said. “It’ll probably be on the TV news.”
“Didn’t they have shit like that in California a few years back?” I grumbled. “Don’t they ever fucking learn?”
The best way to win a war is to be so fucking powerful that competition never even arises in the first place.
“Yeah, that sounds right,” Sonny said.
He grabbed the remote and flipped on a nearby TV.
“Holy shit,” I said, looking at the footage that showed bullet holes and blood stains at what was supposedly an active office building near Albuquerque.
That was much different than I thought it would be. I figured some shitasses had had some tussles over pussy or land and had taken a bloodbath in the desert. Taking it into the city was dangerous as fuck.
It was one thing to combat local officials. Doing shit like that was a good way to draw in the big boys. And not even the Devil’s Patriots could fight the entire fucking U.S. Army. Not the least because I’d been there, done that, and knew it wasn’t to be fucked with.
“They really went at it,” Sonny said. “Black Reapers is their name. Same club that was in California.”
