“Were you a one-percent club? Did you sell meth like your old man did? How’d you keep the bills paid?”
“I would never sell meth after what I saw growing up. We… dealt in secrets,” she said, taking the soda from me with a tightening of her lips that could maybe pass as a smile. If you were using your imagination.
“Is that a nice way of saying blackmail?” Saint asked.
“It is.”
“Who did you blackmail?”
“Married men, mostly. A club full of beautiful women… it’s not hard to honeytrap a philanderer into a compromising situation.”
“You fucked these guys to blackmail them about it?” Slash asked.
Dylan’s eyes flashed at that.
“No, we didn’tfuckguys to blackmail them. It doesn’t have to get that far for an angry wife to get her panties in a twist and her lawyer on the phone.”
“That’s taking a lot of risk,” Sway said.
“Is it? When the rest of us were around to make sure the jobs went as planned.”
“So, how did you come across Roach?” Slash asked.
“That was one unfortunate night,” Dylan said, exhaling hard. “We were over in L.A. for the night, working on two separate jobs at once. Which we’d done a bunch of times before but it must have made what we were doing more obvious to someone paying attention.”
“And Roach was paying attention,” Slash said.
“Yep. I guess he started staking us out. As I’m sure you’ve figured out by now, the clubhouse was pretty rural. Lots of ways not to be seen. And they weren’t. Seen.”
“How’d they get in to take it over?”
“That was on me. I went out of town for a month to be with one of the girls while she had surgery and through some of her recovery. By the time I came back, it was too late.”
“You can’t blame yourself,” I said.
“And yet…” she said. Her finger slipped under the soda tab, making it click and hiss as she popped it.
“Your girls were that far gone that fast?”
“Haven’t really known people who use meth, huh? It’s a fast addiction. Especially if you are injecting, and especially if you have the money to keep getting more each time it wears off. And Roach would have been supplying them around the clock, knowing his window was limited.”
“And what about the clubhouse itself?” Slash asked. “How’d he get to keep his hands on it?”
“The bastard drafted up fake lease agreements and proof of payments.”
“Proof of payments?”
“One of my girls used to help me with the banking and the books. She would have cashed the checks, I guess. I’m locked out of the accounts now, so I can’t say for sure.”
“Still, I don’t think that would have held up in court,” Rook said.
“The lawyer I contacted had mixed feelings about it. Apparently, he’d switched all the utilities over to himself and started paying them. It all looked legit. All I had was my word. He had paper trails. He said I could revisit it once the term for that contract was over.”
“What was the term?” Slash asked.
“Two years.”
“So, it was time to take things into your own hands,” he said.
