Page 13

13. IT’S NOT STALKING

BIGFOOT

“Headed out?”

Baffle and Knuckles were beside the bar as I made my way by them, headed to the front door. I stopped and turned to see that neither one of them could hold back the smirks. I narrowed my eyes on them. “Why?”

“Just wondering if you’re off to see Hawk or setting out on stalker duty.” Knuckles couldn’t even finish his sentence before he started to laugh.

“You both know why, and it’s not stalking!”

“Yeah, but she won’t even go out on a date with you. At some point, you might need to throw in the towel on that one.”

Baffle knew better. I wasn’t throwing in the towel on Sammy. She might not understand just yet, but she would. Eventually. She was being stubborn. That’s all there was to it. She still liked to text back and forth with me. We had been dancing around everything for two weeks since it all went down with her second kill. The only times I’d seen her were when I watched over her from the shadows to make sure there wasn’t another attempt on her life. It wasn’t that I hadn’t tried to see my beautiful angel. Sammy just wasn’t having it. She didn’t feel comfortable dating me when she knew it would pose a problem for the mother of my child and most likely Hawk as well. There was nothing I could say to reassure her and fucking Melissa kept dodging my calls and texts, despite the threats that she better make shit right.

Before I could take off, Dime yelled for me. “What now?” I asked out loud.

“Problem with the garden,” he announced. Not everyone that hung around the clubhouse knew about our shroom operation. Most of the time when someone mentioned the garden, everyone assumed we were growing our own weed. We did do that, since we had a legal dispensary. It wasn’t attached to the club, we had our legitimate businesses run through shell corporations that appeared to be owned by individuals who couldn’t be members of the club. In fact, my mom, Tilly was the one who owned the dispensary. Nadine, Baffle’s aunt, officially owned the club’s gas station, the V-KOA Fill-Up.

Just as I was about to ask Baffle to take the shroom problem, his phone rang. “Someone just robbed the V-KOA.”

“Couldn’t have been a local, they all know better.”

“Might be related to the MDMC,” Baffle suggested.

“Shit. You and Knuckles go handle the V-KOA. Call for Smooth if you need an extra body. I’ll handle this shit.” I turned and followed Dime to the office where we had a hidden entrance, in addition to the cave system that ran just behind our clubhouse. It ran nearly the length of our property and we long ago closed off any possible points of entry from lands beyond ours, just in case.

“Wait!” I turned to see Knuckles at the door to the office.

“What’s up?”

“What about Sammy?”

“Fuck,” I hissed. “I’ll get Kingston on her until I’m done here.”

“You sure about that?”

“Why the fuck wouldn’t I be?”

“Pretty sure the prospect is closer to her age than you are.”

“Fuck off!” I yelled at him as I dialed our youngest prospect. “Need you to follow my girl around today.”

“Melissa?”

“Fuck no. That’s Hawk’s mom, not my girl. Need you to follow Samantha Morton. She lives and works over on the land behind Morton Motors.”

“Where we take the bikes to get them serviced?”

“That’s it. Sammy works at the campground back there, and she lives at the end of the road that swings around to property.”

“Okay, but what do you want me to do?”

“If she leaves the property, follow her. Keep tabs, don’t let her know you’re there, and for fuck’s sake if she spots you, you better tell her you’re my prospect before she shoots you.”

“Why would she shoot me?”

“She won’t so long as you don’t get caught tailing her.” I chuckled as I heard the kid audibly swallow. “Don’t worry kid, just keep her safe and call immediately if you see any bikers not affiliated with our club approach her.”

“Okay, Prez. I’m on it.”

“Good.” I hung up on the kid and followed Dime down into our cavern, shroom grow house.

It didn’t take long to see what the emergency was with the mushrooms. There was an entire section of them that had a weird webbing on the caps. “What the hell is this? We have spiders down here?”

“No, I don’t know what it is but look over here. It seems like it started here in the back of this section. Not only does it have the webbing but the caps are full of dark spots, and they appear to be dying off.”

“Son of a bitch. If this is some kind of disease or virus, we have to worry about the rest of the crop,” I said. I turned to look at just how close and closed in the rest of the crops were. “We need someone who knows what the hell they’re doing down here and then we need them to train several brothers.”

Dime nodded his head as he continued down the row of raised beds. “Losing Twitch fucked us with this stuff.”

Twitch had been our mushroom expert. He was the whole reason we added the shroom business to our club. He knew what the fuck he was doing and after two years of careful cultivation on his part, we finally had a crop that net us a huge chunk of profit. We saw our profits soar over the next four years and had huge contracts with sellers across four states. That meant we couldn’t afford to lose a single mushroom, never mind the entire section that seemed to be infected. If whatever happened to the section spread to the rest of the mushrooms throughout the cave, we were fucked.

“We need to find someone who can handle this shit.”

“Well, it’s not like we can take out an ad for a fucking mushroom farmer. That might tip off the fucking cops.”

“For now, I want you to get whoever you need to down here to help seal off this section from the rest. Let’s hope whatever this is can be contained and that it hasn’t already spread down the line too far. Set it up like this section is in a clean room. Plastic walls, whatever the fuck you have to do to minimize the spread. Let’s get it done.”

“On it,” Dime told me as he ran off to the supply room to grab what was needed. Luckily, we kept sheets of clear plastic down here for various reasons. We’d probably have to restock once the barrier walls were put around the infected mushrooms, though.

Two hours later, we finally got the plastic wall up, but I wasn’t sure if that was enough to keep the other portion of the crop healthy. Something had created the right environment for the section we sealed off to grow fucking webs, or whatever it had done. I worried that it wouldn’t be our only loss, despite our efforts. None of us knew enough about the crop to really be effective. If I didn’t find someone who knew what they were doing, we would have to drop the mushroom business, and no one wanted that because it was booming. The demand for psychedelics had risen again in the past two years due in part to a fresh study that claimed micro-dosing them could basically cure depression and anxiety or some shit.

I didn’t really know the science behind the shit, but when I got ready to look it up online, my phone rang. “Bigfoot,” I called down the line even though I knew exactly who it was.

“There’s someone following me,” Sammy said in a calm tone.

“Who is following you?”

“How the hell should I know? He’s young, wearing a leather vest thing like you do, but I can’t see the back of it to know who he belongs to.”

“What does he look like?” I asked.

“He’s tall, maybe a little over six feet. Skinny. Young. He looks like he might still be in high school, if I’m being honest.”

“How long has he been tailing you?”

As she answered I shot Kingston a text.

Bigfoot: Is anyone else tailing my girl, other than you?

Prospect K: No. She’s at the library. Just the librarian, me, and your girl here.

Bigfoot: Okay, keep it that way, if you can.

“Sammy, where are you?” I asked and she huffed at me.

“Library. I needed to study, and the big house doesn’t have internet hooked up right now.”

“How the hell do you not have internet? I thought Brady said there were security cameras out there.”

“There are security cameras, but they’re hardwired into his system somehow. They don’t require the internet. You know who does though? Me. I require the internet for research purposes.”

“Okay. Stay there, I’m on my way.”

“You better hurry before I have to handle your business again.”

I chuckled. “Please, don’t shoot my prospect.”

“Your prospect?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Why is your prospect following me around?”

“He’s there to keep you safe because I had something I needed to take care of before I could leave the clubhouse.”

“Okay, fine. I guess I’ll see you when you get here, then.”

“You’ll definitely see me, baby. Soon.”

I could almost see her roll those beautiful multi-hued eyes at me.