“This is some Crow-level gory shit,” Sway said as he scrubbed the wall with a mop soaked in blood.
He wasn’t wrong.
The sun was high in the sky. We were all taking turns cleaning and digging graves. Neither of the tasks was easier than the other, given how much of a mess we’d made in the house.
“Shame we couldn’t just torch the place,” he added, wincing as he scrubbed harder at a stain that didn’t want to release.
“Yeah. But it makes more sense for it to just sit and decay while Dylan technically still owns it,” Rook said, dropping a rag into a bucket that was looking more red than clear with each passing minute. “No one will come snooping. The bodies will get a chance to decompose. We should plant some trees over ‘em.”
“Not a bad idea,” Sway agreed. “What’s Dylan thinking about this place sitting abandoned?”
“Think she’s worried a little about the taxes for something that is just gonna sit. But I will cover that. Eventually, she can probably sell it.”
We buried the bodies far enough back on the property at the bottom of a downward slope that would make the area nearly impossible to build on.
Even if someone eventually bought the place, they’d knock the clubhouse down and build in the same area. They’d never know about the bodies in the back.
If someone somehow did come across them, they’d have a hell of a time identifying them without the teeth that were going to be tossed into the ocean once we made it to L.A.
Nasty work, removing identifying markers from a corpse before burying them. But necessary.
I wanted this chapter closed for Dylan.
For good.
Nothing that could ever come back to bite her (or us) in the ass.
That said, we were fucking hurting. All of us. But especially me, Saint, and Syn, since all of us refused to sit by and let Slash, Sway, Riff, and Rook do all the work.
Detroit and Raff were holding down the fort back in Shady Valley, taking care of business, taking care of the animals and the women.
Raff, it seemed, was finally back on his feet and even itching to get back on the road again, though Slash was grounding him for another few weeks at least.
He had gone over to the motel to grab all of Dylan’s stuff and move it into my room, though.
“That all the drugs?” I asked when Slash came out of Roach’s room with something in a bucket.
“Yeah. Flushed the actual drugs. But there are pipes and needles.”
“We can crush the pipes,” I said. “And there are community sharps drop-off locations in L.A. We can get rid of them there. Find anything else in his room?”
We’d continued to rent out Dylan’s moving truck (with a lot of grumbling from the company), so we were going to load up the back with all the clothes and personal effects to get rid of or donate.
Nothing was going to be left in the house but the furniture and unplugged appliances.
With how much work we had to do, I figured we would all be crashing at the clubhouse for the day, taking shifts while some napped.
My gut twisted at the idea of being away from Dylan for even a day, but I reminded myself that once this was handled, it was done. We were free to go to L.A. Then, finally, home.
“Roach was no genius. He had all his passwords written down. So we got access to all his shit. Rook, I’ll have you on that and all the electronics once the cleaning is done.”
Most of the guys weren’t coming to L.A. with us. There wasn’t anything for them to do there. So it was just going to be me, Dylan, Slash, and Saint. Syn wanted to see it through to the end too, but Saint was pissed enough that he wouldn’t sit out all the work with his arm dangling down like it was. He’d teamed up with Slash to force the younger brother back to Shady Valley to get looked at and recover.
“Yep. I’ll get everything I can off of everything before wiping and getting rid of ‘em,” Rook agreed.
The personal effects for the girls were going to go in a storage unit in L.A. for the girls to go through once they got out of rehab.
We didn’t know what they would be doing after. Dylan told me that almost none of the girls had any family. It was how it was so easy for Roach to keep them under his thumb. There was no support system for them after they were sober.
