Page 57 of Dozer (Rolling Thunder MC #14)
Chapter 57
Dozer
I was miserable without my little flower, but she didn’t turn the tracking feature off on her phone, so at least I knew where she was.
Brain told me she had a furniture delivery coming the following week, and I was debating whether it would be over-the-top to ask him to hack into the furniture company and find out what she’d bought when a text came through from him with a list of things. You’re on your own to look them up and find the pictures, but this is what she bought.
Thanks, brother.
Don’t give her too much time.
She’s buying furniture. Would she do that if she wasn’t planning to keep living in the house?
I’m not sure I’d take that logic to the bank. We’re picking up the old stuff. Anything you want to keep?
As long as she isn’t getting rid of anything in the kitchen or game room, send it to someone who needs it.
A few hours later, Bubbles texted me that Daisy had made an appointment with Lexi, and his girl had worked her in early the next morning before the shop officially opened.
My heart fell into my feet at the idea she might cut her beautiful hair, but I’d given her time away from me, so it wasn’t like I could call her and tell her she didn’t have permission to cut it.
Fuck . Whatever she had to do to figure her shit out, we’d deal with. Hair grows back.
I texted Brain. Are we short-staffed anywhere? I’m free to work, if we are.
Brain called me on the app. “I think it’s time to see how Shaggy does on patrol, so grab him and show him the ropes. We’re going to vote on three of the prospects Sunday, but I’m of a mind to make it four, based on a few things I’ve seen from Shag in the past days.”
Shaggy is a skinny guy. Tall with wiry muscles. He’s a great horned owl, which means he’ll bring us someone else who can work during the full moon. He’s also black, and wears his hair in braids most of the time, which means he doesn’t actually go to owl all that often.
Why do we call him Shaggy? Motherfucker has a Great Dane named Scooby Doo.
“I’ll sign up for the first week in the cabin, if we vote the humans in and they agree to be changed .”
“You sure?”
“Yeah. She wants time alone, I’ll let her know she has it.”
“Careful with that. You don’t want to get her too used to not having you around.”
“She’s keeping herself busy. Eventually, she’ll realize it’s lonely in the house, but I’m not a dog who comes when called. I’ll tell her when I’ll be back. She doesn’t get to invite me back home.”
Shaggy was helping Brain man the gate, and I directed another prospect to follow me out, and then put him with Brain and took Shaggy with me.
Prospects are sent to buy shit, or sent to mow everyone’s yards, at first. Bullshit jobs that won’t be the end of the world if they fuck up. If they do okay, we bring it up for a vote to give them a little more responsibility. Eventually, we take them with us for important shit, and let them work the whore hotel to see how they handle it there.
Shag had passed every test with flying colors. Going on patrol with me into a part of town where it was likely I’d have to deal with a problem meant Brain figured we were really close to voting him in, and I agreed.
“You know our territory,” I told him as we walked. “We have it divided up into sections. Think of a tic-tac-toe grid. The top, left to right, is One-B, One-C, and One-D. But our territory isn’t a perfect square, so, the second row is four squares across, with one jutting out to the left, and that’s Two-A, which means Two-B comes right below.” I glanced at him, saw him watching our surroundings, and approved. “It’ll make more sense when you can see it on the map, and you don’t see that unless you’re wearing a patch, but we’re headed to the edge of our territory. Peaches took over the Playas three weeks ago, and so far, it’s been quiet, but we expect him to test us sooner rather than later.”
“What are the parameters, if they encroach?”
“Beat the fuck out of them, toss any drugs into the storm drains, take their cash, send them on their way. Don’t break their legs because they need to walk away. No head injuries that might kill them, but it’s fine to whale on their face so long as you remember they’re human.”
“Do I keep my hands banged up, or do I change them so there’s no proof of the fight, later?”
“Depends. If we’re gonna need to meet with management about the incursion, best we’re still sportin’ the evidence of the fight. If we fuck up and hurt someone worse than we intended, we almost always get rid of anything incriminating. You’ll have us to tell you what to do, for now, and by the time you’re out on your own, you’ll know how to figure out the best choice.”
Three minutes later, we rounded a corner and saw a drug deal going down on our side of the street. Technically, the street itself is supposed to be a buffer, but they were six inches from the sidewalk, and no way was I letting this pass with just a warning.
“You take the Playa, I’ll handle the buyer,” I told Shaggy, and then stepped forward and said, “Too close, motherfuckers.”
Shaggy took the dude wearing Playa colors down with a single punch, and he pulled medical gloves from his pocket before he grabbed the bag in the asshole’s hand and poured the contents in the grass. There weren’t any storm drains close, so that would have to do.
I grabbed the buyer by the back of the neck and held him so he couldn’t try to hit me, and handed his wallet to Shaggy. “Grab his cash out of this and return the wallet to him.” I shook the asshole a little. “Got any more cash on you?”
“No, man!”
A lie. I squeezed the back of his neck enough it hurt, and said, “Where is it?”
“Inside jacket pocket!”
I nodded to Shaggy, who opened the asshole’s jacket, unzipped the pocket, and pulled three twenties out.
“Go, and make sure you tell all your friends it isn’t healthy to buy your drugs on Rolling Thunder’s territory.”
Dude was jonesin’ for a fix and we’d taken the last of his cash from him. No need to add insult to injury and give him a beatdown.
I kicked the man on the ground a few times, and another Playa showed up on their side of the street.
“Come get your man,” I told him. “Tell Peaches he needs to give ya’ll a refresher course in territory lines.”
I recognized the asshole but didn’t know his name. It was probably time for Brain to give us all a refresher in the known Playas.
We did a two-hour patrol, and thankfully, the rest of our time we got to be good Samaritans. We helped a harried mom carry groceries onto her front porch, since I had the feeling taking them all the way into her kitchen would’ve made her nervous, and I checked in on a few elderly people sitting on their front porch. One had a jar she hadn’t been able to open, and I went inside with her and opened it, along with another she was going to want opened the following day, and she thanked me and told me what a nice young man I am. Another told me her friend had told her she needed new tires, and I looked at her car and saw she was desperately in need of them. Her husband had been dead a few years, and it was likely she hadn’t done anything to the car since he’d died.
“The next day you don’t have plans, drive it to our shop. I know it’s for bikes and classic cars, but we’ll take care of you. Ask for Bubbles or Bash, and tell them Dozer told you to bring your car to them. They can change your oil and see what other maintenance needs to be taken care of, and put new tires on, too.”
I texted Bubbles, Bash, and Brain as we walked away and explained the situation.
“What if she can’t afford the tires and oil change?” Shaggy asked.
“Brain will look into her finances. If she can’t afford it, whoever works on her car will make something up about having the tires on hand because someone ordered them and never got them put on, and we’ll tell her she gets a discount on the oil change, plus it was on sale right now, and we’ll give her a number she can handle.”
“Why?”
“Because we can, but also because having the goodwill of our neighbors has helped us more times than I can count. In Atlanta, during a gunfight, a young teen I’d helped when he was a kid came out with his gun and stood beside us and fought. He’s a patched member in Atlanta now. Also, you’d be surprised what you can learn when you stop and talk to the old people on their porches. They don’t miss much, and they know the score. It don’t cost anything to be nice, and the benefits can be huge, down the road.”
He was quiet. Thoughtful. I gave him about five minutes of silence before I asked, “Any misgivings about oathing in, if it comes to it? Any questions? I can’t promise answers, but I’ll do my best to give them to you without breaking any rules.”
“No misgivings. None whatsoever, and if there’s a way for me to prove myself…” he shrugged. “Rumor has it, you kill someone to protect the club, or do something else really big, you can get patched in early.”
“But if you kill someone unnecessarily, it might keep us from voting you in at all. We aren’t looking for hotheads, and so far, you’ve proven yourself levelheaded.”
“I’ve worked everywhere except the hotel.”
“You got an interest in working there?”
He shrugged. “I get that I’m not physically threatening like you and Bubbles, but I’m good with people, and I think I’d be good at figuring which girl to assign a john, when to be understanding and nice to the girls, and when to point out they have a job to do and they should get their ass in gear and do it.”
“There’s a lot of legal shit you’ll have to learn before you can do that job, but yeah, I can see you’d be good at it. Slick does a great job of being the emotional support they need, while at the same time expecting them to do their job without drama. I mostly tell them to suck it up and get to work, when I’m stuck working there.” That wasn’t completely right. “Actually, I mostly patrol and act as security. I’m only on the counter when there’s no one else on the premises capable of handling it.”
“You only have one black dude with a patch, and two of us tryin’ to prospect in.”
“Your point?”
“You trying for diversity? I don’t want to be a number. A boost to your stats.”
“We give zero fucks about shit like diversity numbers. We are looking for more non-wolves, so we have more people to man our businesses during the three nights of the full moon, but we won’t let anyone in we aren’t a thousand percent comfortable with.”
“All humans who prospect in are made wolf, right?”
“Most are.” Horse is too powerful to turn just anyone, and bears don’t survive as often as wolves, anyway. Wolves have the best survival rate of the apex predators. Plus, we’ve gotten quite good at teaching control since Ghost learned some tricks from Bran a while back.
“You have to know it’s hit the gossip channels that Cora is meeting with some of the prospects.”
I hadn’t known, but it was good information. Randall had only required he vet any wolves after they were turned and had been taught control, but Cora wanted to meet them before we turn them, and she’d been adamant about it when we negotiated terms for existing in her territory. Overall, she hadn’t been difficult to coexist with, so we’d set a meet with her for the day before we were due to vote them in. If she didn’t think someone was wolf material, there was no sense in us taking a vote on them.
“How often do you fly?” I asked him.
“My sister braids my hair, but it takes a couple of hours to do it if she does them fat, and about six hours to do the skinny braids all over. It needs to be redone somewhere between two and three months, and I usually change and fly a few nights in a row, to give my owl as much time in the air as possible between times, but I always time it so she can rebraid my hair before I have to be around people too much. When ya’ll needed me to go to owl last month for some recon, Lexi and another chick did it together, two working on me at once, and they did the skinny braids I have now in just under three hours. Lexi’s faster than my sister.”
“It’s possible we’ll need to keep that in-house in the future. Don’t want your sister talking about your hair needing to be braided again if an alibi is dependent on you having braids.”
When he didn’t respond, I asked, “That gonna be a problem?”
“As long as she still does it every couple of months, it shouldn’t be. We’re close, and she’s done it for years.”
Nice that he had a sister he was that close to. So many people who prospect in don’t have much of a family.
“What made you decide you want to be part of us?”
“At first? You’re badasses, right? But then, once I started hanging around, my reasons changed. Some of ya’ll need a family, I think, but that isn’t it for me. I have a family, but it’s all women — my grandmother and my mother raised my sister and me. My mother has a sister who moved to New York to be a dancer, and she isn’t a star or anything, but she lands enough jobs she’s made it her home, and we rarely see her. I like having brothers, men to hang with, and you’re right — skin color isn’t as important as animal. I didn’t expect that. And it isn’t like skin color don’t matter, which is stupid because it’s part of who I am, and ya’ll get that. Idiots who say skin color don’t matter have no idea that’s a slam.”
“So, your mom’s an owl? Your grandmother?”
“And great horned owls aren’t African, right? My grandfather was biracial, or dual-heritage, or whatever the fuck they’re calling it these days — white and Latino, but as far as what it means for me, the DNA says he was white, and doesn’t care what his first language was. He was a great horned owl. My grandmother was a Verreaux eagle-owl, which are native to Africa, but the magic picked great horned for my mom and her sister. My grandfather was fifty-six years older than my grandmother. At seventy-four, he looked like he was in his thirties, which was still too old for his eighteen-year-old bride, but I guess times were different back then. Mom didn’t have me until she was in her thirties, and my grandfather only made it to ninety-six, so he was gone long before I was hatched. He died young for a shifter, but he went out as the owl one night and never came back.”
“And your dad?”
“Human, and he freaked when he found out what she was. The vampire made him forget being told, and mom told the vampire to send him to another city, make him fall out of love with her, and make him forget she was pregnant. She wanted to be clear to me that he hadn’t abandoned his children, but to my mind, he did. Doesn’t matter, though.”
“Birds usually have a lot more than two kids at a time.”
“It’s the most common number for great horned owls. It can be one to four, but it’s most often two, followed by three, then one, with four being rare. In the wild, the natural ones might occasionally manage five, but not shifters, for some reason.”
“You consider yourself black, and not biracial?”
“My grandmother, mom, and dad are all black, so I’m, like, seventy-five percent African, assuming there weren’t any other white people farther up the family tree. The important point is I look black and not biracial. I mean, I’m not as dark as Ghost, but not many are.”
“Knife says you learned fast in the slaughterhouse.”
His scent told me he wasn’t a fan of working there, but his voice remained casual. “Ain’t rocket science. Kill’em fast — before they know to be scared and dump all the fear chemicals into their bloodstream — hang them by their back legs, get all the organs and such out, and then turn what’s left into steaks and such.”
“Still, he’s a hardass about doing it right, and he sends more people away than he keeps, so kudos.”
And the fact he doesn’t enjoy it but has still done an exceptional job spoke well of his work ethic.
“I had the idea prospects who can’t work on bikes and cars get sent there to work, and we’d get different jobs if we get patched in.”
“We go where we’re needed, and when we have a big order and I’m not assigned somewhere else, I get sent to help slaughter, too.”
“Right, and fill-in is more than fine, but if ya’ll vote me in, it’ll be good if another prospect can come in and learn, so I can do something else as my regular job.”
That wasn’t good. We thought we’d found our new butcher. I spoke carefully, gauging his scent and expression as I told him, “You’re the butcher our people are used to seeing when they drop by to pick up their steaks or whatever. You may not realize it, but it’s put you ahead of the game politically. Aaron Drake knows you by name. The Amakhosi’s lionesses, the ones who personally shop for him, know you by name. As a prospect, you have casual access to supernatural royalty that most patched members would have trouble acquiring.”
He sighed. “I mean, if you patch me in to keep me as an employee, and you won’t if I don’t want to do the job, then I’ll do it for however long you need me to. It’s just, I was kind of hoping to move to something else, but I get that we all go where we’re needed, and I don’t have any other marketable skills.”
His words were truth. We’d need some more conversation about it, but he meant it that being voted in was more important than what job he ended up doing. “Good to know — both that you aren’t happy with the job, and that you’ll keep doing it anyway.”
Once we were back, I put him back on duty at the gate, and I made my way inside. Brain was inside, and I motioned him towards the conference room. I closed the door, and the sounds in the clubhouse went away, but I put some music on anyway before I told him what I’d learned.
“Damn, I thought Shaggy fit into the butcher job. How did we miss that?”
“I think it’s because he thought it was a short-term thing, the shit-job prospects get, but they grow out of once they’re patched.”
He sighed. “Yeah. I can see that. Not sure it changes my vote, but it’s gonna make me rethink it.”
We don’t just vote people in because we like them, we also have to need them. They need to fill a spot in our organization that needs filling. We’re a club, but we’re also a whole bunch of businesses who need loyal employees, and there’s no one more loyal than someone oathed in to an MC, someone who’s officially part of the family.
Viper is our only employee who doesn’t hold down a regular job with us, but he patrols and fills in when needed, and he takes off his day job the three days around the full moon and works fifteen-hour shifts for us on those days. We’d have that from Shaggy, too, since he’s an owl, but we’d all assumed he was going to be our permanent full-time retail butcher. We don’t sell to the public, we’re set up kind of like Costco, so you have to be a member to buy from us, and we don’t offer memberships to just anyone. We don’t have enough cattle to sell to just anyone, and we only sell beef from cattle we’ve raised. It’s why we can demand such a high price for our beef.
“Right there with you, but the fact he’s an owl and not a wolf is a definite plus,” I told him.
“You sure about spending a week with the new wolves, if we vote to give them the option?”
“Yeah.”
He didn’t argue and didn’t ask again, though his scent told me he wished I’d change my mind.
I drank a few beers in the clubhouse, but watching the ol’ladies cutting up without my little flower with them hurt my heart, so I went to my room, changed to wolf, jumped on my bed, and brooded until we fell asleep.