CHAPTER 1
Overdrive
Iwas actually going to be on time for once. That was the reason I should have known my day was about to go down the shitter. It should have been a giant red flag waving in my fucking face that on a day where I had to hit a fucking timeline to the damn minute, that something was going to throw a wrench into it all.
It was a beautiful March day in Phoenix, Arizona. Winter was over, not that the winters were harsh here, and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. Everything was going exactly as planned as I stacked and loaded firearms into the cage ride I’d borrowed from my club.
I co-owned an indoor shooting range and gun store with my best friend, and club brother, Kilo. The weapons I was loading weren’t for our store, Double Tap, though. These were for club business. We didn’t sell weapons to shit bags on our streets. Every guy in our club was prior military, one branch or another,and the way we kept ourselves sane now that we were all out was by keeping our city safe.
We’d be considered vigilantes, if you needed to give us some kind of title. The weapons I was loading out of Relay’s house were earmarked for ourselves and our allies. They were all…hard…to trace. And by hard, I meant impossible.
Our friends, The Berserker’s Rage MC, in Sentinel, Wyoming—not to be confused with Centennial, trust me, I’d made that mistake the first time—needed a little extra firepower. Even though I was the vice president of the Phoenix Chapter of The Saint’s Outlaws, I didn’t actually know what our Wyoming friends were involved in this go round.
Cypher, the president up there, ran a security firm. They got involved in shit that was so far above my paygrade it was laughable. That was the kind of shit I got into while I was in the service, but not anymore. I didn’t need quitethatlevel of excitement any longer.
I was thirty-two years old and while that wasn’t exactly ancient, I felt every fucking year I’d spent running around overseas. It only took some occasional action and killing to keep me satisfied these days. Though, it’d been quiet ever since we helped Kilo’s old lady out of a scrape six months ago.
My phone rang and I grumbled as I set a heavy ass box down in Relay’s backyard to dig it out. “What?”
“Why are you still at my place?” Relay asked. “If I knew you were going to take so fucking long, I would’ve left what I was doing to help you.” There was the briefest of pauses while I shook my head at my MC brother’s words. “You’re not fucking going through my place, are you?”
“Why?” I asked, grunting as I hefted the crate back into my arms. I kept the phone pinned between my shoulder and my ear. “What would I find?”
There was a longer silence this time.
I put the crate into the back of the SUV, then narrowed my eyes. “What would I find, Relay?”
“Nothing.” His voice was too flat. The fucker was lying.
“I don’t have time for shit to go wrong today,” I warned him.
We’d been stretched thin for the last few weeks, and would be for at least another couple days until Kilo, Flir, Merc, Bolo, and Drifter got back from the run Ruck had sent them on. They’d headed over to Colorado to help out another group of friends of ours.
“Then get that shit and get out of my house. I don’t like people being there. People don’t belong in my damn house.”
“Fucking nag,” I muttered.
“And don’t touch anything,” he added.
“Sort of have to touch the crates filled with guns to get them out of your house,” I reminded him.
“You know what I mean.”
I chuckled. “What if I need to take a shit?”
“Do it in the yard.”
“I’m not shitting in the yard like a dog, asshole.” I was just giving him a hard time. Didn’t matter that I was the VP, this wasn’t my place. I wasn’t going to fuck around with it if Relay was touchy about it. He rarely let anyone over here. I honestly wondered if he had bodies buried in this back yard. Not that it would bother me if he did. We all knew what a crazy motherfucker he was.
Seriously. There was something wrong with him. But we still loved the bastard like the brother he was. “I’ll be gone in ten,” I told him, eyeing my watch on my wrist. This phone call was cutting into time I didn’t have.
Cypher and Ruck had agreed to have me and Warrant—the Berserker’s Rage Sergeant at Arms—meet at a private airstrip outside the city in forty-five minutes. I needed to get out of here in no less than ten minutes if I was going to make it on time. “I’llhave to wait for a different time to search your place,” I added, just to piss him off, before I hung up on him. I ignored the ring of the phone. He eventually got the hint as I finished loading up the rest of the crates.
Wiping my arm across my forehead to catch the sweat, I grinned. “I’m fucking good.”
The phone rang again.
Glaring down at it, I swore as all satisfaction fled. Kilo’s old lady, Mercy, was calling. She shouldn’t be calling. Her plan today was to eat chocolate and watch The Notebook. I’d checked with her before I started the day because of this tight ass schedule I was on.
