Page 45 of Knife Volume 2

“No drugs. No illegal weapons — we’re careful not to do anything to lose our FFL, so the gun shop is completely aboveboard. I won’t give you positives until you make a decision, but I can tell you a few extreme negatives.”

She took a few seconds to consider before saying, “I need to know your secrets, but if there’s something I can’t deal with morally—” She shook her head. “No. I know who you are. I know you aren’t going to be involved in exploiting children, or human trafficking, or anything like that. So yeah. Tell me everything, please.”

“Okay. Once I tell you, club policy says you have to meet with our attorney. He’ll tell you what to say if law enforcement ever asks you questions. You tell him whether you’re comfortable lying to LEO or not, and if you aren’t, which is my assumption, he’ll coach you in how to legally decline to answer, how to redirect, obfuscate. What to say until he arrives. It’s a lot, and he holds a once-a-year reminder session with all of us — brothers and ol’ladies — to go over it again.”

That was actually a relief, knowing she could call someone to help her if she was questioned, and that they’d made a plan for it.

“You still want to hear the truth?” he asked.

“Yes. The attorney thing is actually a relief. Not a dealbreaker.”

“Good. That’s good.” He took a breath. “We own an old motor hotel deal from the sixties, built before the interstates were put in. It’s the Rolling Thunder Motor Hotel, but everyone who knows about it calls it the Whore Hotel. Our girls hang out in the lobby so johns can walk in and choose them. Established customers can call for an appointment with a certain girl, and they know the wording to use on an open phone line.”

He paused, took a drink, and Tuesday had the feeling he was evaluating her reaction before he continued. She needed to hear it all before she could truly react, so she just looked at him.

“The club only hires experienced talent who come to us wanting a job,” he continued. “We don’t recruit, and management has to turn people away because we only have so many rooms. No one gets rough with the girls without making arrangements to do so — and paying extra for it — because a brother in a vest will beat the hell out of them if they do. Some of our working girls are in college, and we’re flexible with their schedules so they can focus on getting good grades.”

Tuesday wasn’t a prude and had long thought prostitution should be legal under the right conditions. It seemed to her, women were exploited by johns in ways that could be legislated away if it were legal, and the bikers were doing it ethically. But… “How do you keep them healthy? Unless they’re all shifters, but I’m guessing that probably isn’t the case.”

“Some are shifters, but there are a lot of humans. We have a retired doctor on the payroll who keeps them healthy and provides their preferred form of birth control. Also, there’s a strict no-drugs policy, and mandatory condoms with only a few exceptions, mostly involving vampires.

She sat back and looked at her plate while she absorbed it all, and finally said, “Illegal as hell, but probably as good as it gets for someone who wants to do sex work. Not that the government will see it that way, though.”

“Right.” He picked up his burger. “And that brings us to our laundromats. For a while, cash business at the bar did really well, but we could only stretch that so far, so we opened the laundromats. We have a half-dozen now, and two locations have wash-and-fold service. Cash only except for a few specialty clients.

“So you have the bike and classic car shop, the restaurant, the vertical beef supply chain, the gun shop and shooting range, and the martial arts studio? All those are legal? The laundromats mostly legal except for the money laundering bit, and then the hotel that isn’t even close to legal?”

“We’re going into business with someone for a high-end escort service that’ll include more kink options, but we haven’t even broken ground on it yet. We bought the strip mall across from the bike shop, and we’re doing reno now for a salon and tattoo parlor in two different units.”

He picked up his phone and typed into it while he said, “Brain’ll get you an appointment with the lawyer. Eat your burger.”

She picked it up and ate, thinking about Kenny running the construction company on top of the pack, and the bikers running a whole lot of businesses, not just one. But she could see it, with Brain running the finances, Duke handling overall management, and the individual managers in control of their specific business.

“Friday at five,” he told her.

“Sounds like the attorney is fitting me onto the end of his day.”

“Probably. He likes to meet with ya’ll as quickly as possible once we tell you.”

She swallowed her bite and asked the question niggling at her. “So there’s no, like… voting for mayhem or anything?”

He met her gaze. “We don’t call the cops when we have problems. Usually we hand out beatdowns, but when someone gives us no option but to go beyond that?” He shrugged. “I’d be lying if I said it’d never happened. It’s rare. And those of us who run a business, who’d be impossible to replace — they work hard to keep us out of that kind of trouble. Not always possible, but it’s the goal.”

Not the answer she was hoping for, that they do actually kill their enemies sometimes, but she worked through it in her head. She’d met these men, their significant others, and their kids if they had them. This was a group who put on huge charity events every year, and used the money to fund a women and children’s shelter, among other things.

She believed Knife when he said it was a last resort. The men she’d met wouldn’t view taking a life lightly.

“I’m not exactly happy with that last answer,” she said finally. “But I don’t think it’s a call the men I’ve met would make without exhausting everything else first.” She lifted her third burger but didn’t take a bite yet. “It’s kind of like supernatural law, right? Survival of the fittest isn’t about being fair or civil.”

He looked at her for a long moment, and she couldn’t read everything in it, but some of it was relief.

- - - ❖ - - -

A week and a half later, Tuesday rode to the clubhouse on the back of his bike. He’d taken the beef order to the restaurant and returned to get his Road Glide, and Tuesday was packed and ready to go.

The entire energy of the clubhouse was different when they arrived, with the men looking over bikes and loading the back of a box truck with what looked like parts, while the women checked off lists for snacks, drinks, first aid kits, drink cups, and lots of alcohol as they loaded them into vans.

For long road trips, some of the women rode in a van or a large, spacious RV instead of behind their ol’man. Some rode in the ‘cages’, as the men called them, for the interstate part and then got on the bike for the mountains. There would be no interstate miles for this trip, though.