Page 192 of Property of Bob

Neither of us answered to the other, but if one chapter needed the other, we were there.

That was how the Grave Prowlers worked.

Club above everything. The shit wasn’t complicated. People were the ones who liked making things complicated.

I tossed the covers back and sat on the edge of the bed. The crumpled note was on the floor between my feet. Case in point. That note was pure complications.

I kicked it under the bed and stood.

Problem solved.

I grabbed my jeans off the chair in the corner and pulled them on, then headed into the bathroom. A shower would’ve been nice, but the wood was more important. I’d get one after I made sure the delivery wasn’t fucked up.

I turned on the sink and splashed cold water over my face. The man looking back at me in the mirror looked about how I felt. Hair fucked up. Beard needing a trim. Eyes slightly bloodshot.

I grabbed my toothbrush and started brushing. Had the woman from last night been worth losing a little sleep over? Probably not, but whatever.

I stopped brushing and looked down at the running water. What the hell had her name been?

Had it been Ashley? Amanda? Something with an A.

I shook my head and kept brushing. Didn’t matter.

I finished brushing my teeth, ran wet hands through my hair, and went back into the bedroom.

The room wasn’t anything fancy, but it was mine. I’d lived at the clubhouse for years and never saw a reason to change that.

Why the fuck would I? Everything I needed was here.

My brothers, my bike, the casket biz, food, beer, and my bed.

And there was almost always a woman around when I wanted one.

Moving into some house just so I could drive back here every damn day didn’t make any sense.

The clubhouse sat at the end of a long, dead-end road on the outskirts of Marshfield—far enough outside town that nobody gave much of a shit about what we were doing.

Exactly the way we liked it.

The club owned a good chunk of the land around us, which gave us room for the clubhouse and the buildings we used for the casket business. The shop was where the guys did most of the woodworking and custom orders. Beyond that was storage for finished caskets, lumber, equipment, and whatever else we didn’t want sitting out in the open.

Some of it was completely legitimate.

Some of it wasn’t. Again, nobody around here asked many questions.

There weren’t many people close enough to ask them anyway. The road from the clubhouse ran about two miles before you hit the nearest houses.

Two of them sat side by side and one belonged to my mother. The other had been empty for a while.

I didn’t know what was happening with that place. Didn’t particularly care, either. The old woman had died, and I’d stopped paying attention after that.

My concern was the house next door. Ma had lived there for years.

I’d tried more than once to get her to move closer to town and she’d told me to fuck off. Not in those exact words, because she was my mother and liked pretending she didn’t swear, but the message had been clear.

She liked her house. She liked the quiet. She liked having the club close enough that she could call whenever she needed something.

Mostly, she liked having me close enough that she could call whenever she needed something. The fact I was the President of an MC apparently didn’t excuse me from changing lightbulbs and moving shit around her garage.