Road Tripped (Satan's Devils MC Utah #1) - Manda Mellett Page 0,68

fingers from the table. “Perhaps, as it’s a Devil we’re speaking to, the story goes back further than that?”

Pip tilts his head slightly as he thinks. Then he dips his chin. “Perhaps it does.”

Snatcher nods, then takes over. “It was fifteen years or so back, I was in my current spot. VP to the old prez. Butler and I worked well together. Some of the members we had then, we still got. Thor, Piston, Rascal. Thumper was here as well. It was before Honor and Duty’s time, and the others who sit around the table now.” He pauses to take a sip of his whisky. “There were another half-dozen members. We were Satan’s Devils then too, patched over in Drummer’s father, Bastard’s day. You heard about how Bastard ran his club?”

I nod, my teeth grinding together. Drummer doesn’t have much good to say about his dad, and the shit he got the club into. Drug and gun running, prostitution as well. His dirty dealings had ended with a police raid which had decimated the club. Members jailed or, in the case of Bastard and several more, killed outright. Drummer stepped into the hot seat and cleaned up the club.

“Drummer was fairly new to his role; I suppose hiding shit started there. Butler and I were quite happy making money the easy way. We’d go to meetings with the mother chapter, said our ayes and nays in all the right places, then came back and did what the fuck we wanted. Oh, we’d learned lessons from what happened to Bastard, but didn’t take them to heart well enough. Thought we had, but we were wrong. What we did do was make sure our dealings were watertight, concentrating on keeping beneath the radar of the cops. Thought if we kept the law off our backs, everything else would stay in place.” He shakes his head. “Thought we could be cleverer than Bastard.”

He seems to grind to a halt, so Pip encourages him. “Tell him the rest.”

“It wasn’t the law that came for us, but the mafia crew. See? We’d gotten into a lucrative gun trade without realising our supplier was ripping them off. We thought we were the big boys, hell, we weren’t anywhere close. They didn’t mess around. Butler led the run making a delivery, and they were all taken out. We lost our prez and darn near half the club in one fell swoop.”

“That’s when you stepped up?” I prompt.

“Yeah. I didn’t have much choice. We took a club vote and decided maybe Tucson did have it right after all. But how do you go legit and put food in men’s bellies, when they’ve been drug and gun running all their lives? We couldn’t even continue our prostitution business—the mafia stole that from us too. With so little manpower left, we couldn’t defend ourselves.”

“You could have asked Drummer for help.”

“Not our way, Brother. We’d fucked up, we had to make it right. Just was a struggle trying to find some way to do it. Grinch, Mystic and Goofy worked their asses off building up an auto-shop. Thor turned his hand to mechanics and backed them up. We were on the bread line, only just surviving. Continued that way for three years. We had no choice, the mafia was always in the background, watching in case we stepped on their toes again.” He nods at Pip.

“I’ll pitch in now.” Pip raises his chin at Snatcher. “I was with the CIA, one of their top hostage negotiators. Yeah, I’ll say it myself. I worked with embassies all over the world when there were international kidnappings. I was the one they wanted when they needed to get hostages released. My last mission though was a bust. It was a setup, and I never had a chance of success. The mistake was on the clown who called me in. I should never have been involved.” He sighs heavily and picks up his whisky. After a large sip, he replaces the glass on the table. “The kidnapping was staged to cover a premeditated murder of someone a powerful senator wanted out. There was never a chance of a rescue, and I quickly figured it out.” His face reddens and his fist hits the wooden tabletop. “I was taken for a fuckin’ fool, but fool I certainly was not. I saw it for what it was and sent the message up the chain. Another message came back down.” He takes a deep breath. “I was terminated