Page 6 of Texas Hold Em'
Maybe she had a point there.
“Does she at least make you breakfast?” Abel asked.
“Has she asked you to help her paint her toenails yet? You’ve got a real steady hand, don’t you, Tex?” Gabriel said.
“I’ve got a real steady fist too, dickhead,” I said.
Suzie patted my arm. “Ignore them.”
I sighed and slumped into one of the open chairs.Bastards.
“Anyway, she’s not going to sit still much longer,” I said. “She’s getting antsy. I can feel it.”
“Well, she’s going to have to deal with being uncomfortable for a little while longer,” Jackson said.
“She’s not used to waiting,” I said. “She’s used to being in on the action. She’s used to calling the shots.”
Jackson shrugged. “Now isn’t the time for her to get too big for her britches. She knows what she got herself into. If she doesn’t want to take orders, she can take her ass back to Austin.”
None of this felt that simple to me. For starters, I didn’t think Carrie was getting too big for her britches at all. I thought she was a strong woman who could handle her own shit, and from where she was standing, she probably thought we were the dipshits standing around with our cocks in our hands not having a damn clue what to do next.
She was capable.Verycapable.
“Maybe we should cut her some slack,” Mason suggested.
Jackson shook his head. “Now isn’t the time. We lie low while Hogey’s trial moves ahead. Carrie keeps her head down. We let the dust settle.”
Luckily, things were moving ahead after Hogey’s arrest the way we all had hoped. Our efforts to move the corpses of two of Bates’s men into Hogey’s storage facility to frame him had been a success, and we no longer had the full heat of the police’s attention on our backs.
We had room to breathe. To recalibrate.
I didn’t know exactly what was going on in Jackson’s head, but I knew what was going on in mine.
This fight was getting bigger than the Devil’s Luck. Much bigger. As Treasurer, it wasn’t my place to step up and tell Jackson what I thought he should do, but one of these days, the other shoe was going to drop and we weren’t going to get out of the fire without being burnt.
If we wanted to get out of this alive, we had to be as ruthless and relentless as Bates. I wasn’t sure if we even had that in our blood.
He was a fucking psychopath.
Jackson stood and nodded toward the shop in the yard. The bay doors were open, exposing the shop’s insides and the half-dozen bikes inside. The rest of our bikes were out on the driveway. “We should head to the Well,” Jackson said. “We have work to do.”
More construction bullshit. More nails. More splinters. More tedious work that didn’t bring us any closer to putting Bates six feet under.
Regardless of all that, we followed our President down the steps and to our bikes. Suzie kissed Mason goodbye before heading into the shop to tinker with some of the bikes that belonged to paying customers.
We rode for the Well. The engines of our bikes growled in unison as we traveled in a pack. Cars kept right for us and other riders on the road didn’t dare turn down the same street as us.
The wise ones pulled over and let us pass.
CHAPTER 4
CARRIE
Ipinched my phone between my ear and shoulder, and I opened Tex’s fridge for the tenth time that afternoon, hoping that, by some miracle, new food might magically appear.
My colleague back in Austin, Dan Abbot, spoke with reservation on the other end of the line. “I’m just worried about you, Carrie. I don’t like that I’m not there to back you up.”
“Be glad you’re not here.” I closed the disappointing fridge with my knee and slumped against the door. “It’s hotter than hell and I have quite literally zero friends in the department. They’re all assholes.”
