Page 107 of Smooth Sailing

“Knew the Club?”

He rolled to his back, pulling me partly on him and up, so we were face-to-face.

“Our president, Rush’s old lady, Rebel, she’s a movie director. She made a documentary about Chaos.” He took a beat before he concluded, “I think you should watch it, Di.”

Oh, I was so totally doing that.

“How cool,” I said.

“We used to be outlaws.”

Hmm.

I wasn’t so sure about that.

“What does that mean?” I queried carefully.

“Ran guns. Ran security for shipments of illegal shit. Ran a stable of whores. My mom was one of Chaos’s girls.”

Holy crap!

“Harlan, I…that doesn’t…” Ulk! “Whoa.”

“Yup,” he agreed with my stunned stammering.

“That isn’t a problem for you?”

“Most the brothers didn’t want to be messed up with that shit. They got out. They took care of all of their girls when they did, at least they did that as best they could. Took ’em a while to extricate themselves, and it was dangerous, but they did it. By the time I was with the Club, they were clean.”

I was beginning to get it.

“But they used to be adrenaline junkies, and to get a fix of that, you all hooked up with Resurrection.”

“Not exactly,” he replied. “In making the statement they were no longer outlaw, Resurrection went outlaw the other way, becoming vigilantes.”

Ummmmmmmmm…

Holy crap!

Though, this shouldn’t surprise me too much, considering Hugger and Big Petey showing up to do what they were doing for me and Madison.

Nonetheless, providing security for a couple of chicks and looking into why some criminal madman had targeted your club was a lot different than being a vigilante.

“Not what you’re thinkin’,” Hugger told me. “We just kept our patch clean. That’s it. No drugs, prostitutes, any a’ that shit around Ride, our store and the garage we run. We ran out of enemies, we stopped doin’ that, and now we leave it to the cops. That said, anything like that gets close to the store, we shut it down. But we minimized our patch to a couple a’ blocks around the store, not miles around it.”

“Right.”

He was studying me closely while advising, “You need to watch the documentary.”

“I totally do. Wanna watch it now?”

He sounded surprised when he asked, “You wanna watch it with me?”

“Are you in it?”

“No.”

“Do you not want to watch it with me?”

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