Catching Cole

Chapter Nine

COLE

I sat behind the bar, leafing through the folder Hammer had given me. This was everything we had on Gunner. The man was more myth than legend, because as it turned out, we didn’t have all that much on him. He was one of the oldest members of the Hell’s Hounds MC in Michigan. He served as the Sergeant in Arms, which already told me he was a badass. It looked like him and the old Pres were best friends, which would have made Sadie the equivalent to a club princess. I read the police reports detailing the shoot out with a rival club that saw their president Thorn dead, and that’s where things seemed to change. The club looked like it took a completely different direction and Gunner just left. 

I sighed once more as the pages provided nothing further. f**k. I was going to have to ask someone who had actually been around. 

I found Axel round the back, knee deep in grease tinkering away on an old bike. Since he’d been patched in, his road name was actually Ammo, but using the road name all the time takes some getting used to. 

“Switch,” he acknowledged me, dipping his head in greeting. I leaned against the fence, watching him work, thinking about the best way to approach this. I chose to be blunt. 

“I met Sadie this weekend in Chicago,” I stated, watching Ammo’s reaction. His eyes shot up to mine, and he looked wary. 

“s**t, I thought she was still country hopping in Europe.” 

“She is, she was just there for a conference. She’s storyboarding for that tech investment we were looking at.” 

His eyes lit up in excitement, as he decided to stop tinkering and light up while we spoke. 

“Ah, yeah, I remember you guys talking about needing some legit avenues to use as fronts.” 

I shrugged in reply, not all our business was clean, but I also knew a good investment when I saw one. I watched Ammo draw on his cigarette as I spoke. “I need you to tell me what you know about Gunner and what really went down in the club.” 

His eyes flared in alarm, as I turned towards the clubhouse, knowing he’d follow. 

Clasping his hands Ammo sat opposite me at one of the tables a few feet away from the bar. 

“What do you want to know?” He asked nervously. 

“I want to know exactly what happened. Few men simply walk from the club, with their tattoo intact.” 

Ammo sat at the table fidgeting with his hands. He looked like a lost little boy. 

“Talk,” I grunted, motioning with my hands for him to get on with it. 

“The thing is,” he hesitated. I grunted in annoyance. He finally looked up at me, and his expression was pained. 

“Jesus Ammo, what the f**k is the problem here.” 

“Well, we, um, don’t rat on one another. I feel like I’d be selling Gunner out and despite everything that happened, my pops still considers him a friend to our family.” 

Well that was f*****g interesting. When you walked from the club, you automatically cut ties with its members, so if Gunner kept his friendships up, it meant that the respect he held rivalled that of their President. 

“Are you withholding information from me?” My voice held the edge of a threat. 

“f**k no. Okay fine,” his shoulders sagged in defeat. “Gunner, Thorn and my dad were best friends. In fact, they were labelled The Villains because they were that lethal. I mean separately, they were something to be reckoned with, but together? Fuckers didn’t stand a chance.”

I motioned to Kerri the barkeep, for a beer as I settled in for this tale. 

“Layla, Myself, Sadie and Billie all grew up together. We were set to be the next rulers.”

“Who is Billie?” I asked. In all my notes there hadn’t been a mention of a Billie. 

Ammo grimmaced. “Billie was Thorn’s son. He was a nice enough guy when he was around us, but he was also crazy power hungry. Anyway, so the one day the three of them head out to sort out some gun deal, and somehow it all goes south. My dad gets shot up, Thorn dies and only Gunner walks out there unscathed. Now, if you ask my dad he’ll tell you that Gunner was adamant that something was up, that the deal felt off before they even arrived. And afterwards, things didn’t sit right with him. But with Thorn dead, he didn’t have his President’s backing. It all happened so fast that it’s still kind of unbelievable.” He stopped for a moment, pulling out his lighter and smokes - I guess he needed some sort of crutch to get him through this tale. 

“So, I wasn’t really around much for this. I mean my dad was recovering and Layla and I were still in school, so we only got snippets, but a couple of years later I sat down with my pops and tried to make sense of this. I mean what happened to Gunner and Sadie was absolutely shit.” He looked a little nostalgic as he spoke, “She was a different person back then. More open. More willing to take risks,” he laughed outright, “Actually she was a little dare devil, and constantly put my weak ass to shame. Now,” he shook his head, “well now she’s got this perfectly cultivated image that she’s created and she keeps everyone at arm's length, but deep down, that’s not her. She’s as wild as they come.” 

And didn’t I f*****g know it. Seeing Sadie come to life beneath the sheets was a delight I wasn’t expecting. 

I cleared my throat, “So, Gunner…” I edged the conversation back on course. 

“Yeah, so Billie made a pledge to step up as president. He was six-f*****g-teen. I mean we were the same age. He wasn’t qualified, and a bunch of the older guys said so, and yet he somehow got all the votes. The fucker got all the votes. Gunner called Foul - and you can imagine how that went down - and started his own investigation. They labelled him mad, consumed by the grief of losing his best friend, but my dad reckons he had never been more clear minded. He discovered that the gun deal had been a set up from the start, by none other than Billie. By that point Billie was sitting pretty as President and had actually named the rivals that had shot up his father and my pops the club’s new business partners. Pops was fuming, but because he was still recovering there wasn’t much he could do about it. So Gunner marched in and demanded a meeting with Billie. Billie obliged, because let’s be honest - you don’t say no to Gunner. I don’t know what happened behind those doors, but my pops reckons that Gunner told him that we knew he’d endeavoured to have Thorn killed by the rivals and that the whole thing was a setup. f**k knows what Billie had on Gunner, because by the end of it they seemed to be at a stalemate and Gunner just, well, he walked.” 

We sat in silence as I absorbed his tale. Mother f*****g Balls. 

“Why have we never heard of Billie?” I asked, working through what he’d just told me. 

“You have,” he smiled tightly, “Billie was just a childhood nickname. His real name is Edward Thomas Sail.” 

“Viper?” I asked in disbelief. 

Ammo waved his hands in surrender, worried that I might do something in my fury. 

“The same president that decided to align his charter with the Cobras?” I pressed

Ammo nodded once. And yet, I still couldn’t take that as confirmation. 

“He aligned himself with child traffickers?” I’m not sure why I needed the confirmation so badly, but I did. 

“Yeah,” Ammo croaked. “Why do you think I didn’t patch in there?” 

Honestly, I had wondered about it, but figured he just wanted some distance from his dad so he could make his own mark on his terms. f**k. The Cobra’s were bad news. Don’t get me wrong, my club wasn’t sunshine and roses either, but we had lines, and human trafficking - especially child trafficking - was definately crossing that line. 

“What does Gunner do now?”  

“The same thing he did for the club,” Ammo smiled, “Just without the club.” 

“Actually,” he added, “I think that’s why Sadie left for Europe when she did, she wanted to be away from all the club business and all that it entailed.”

“Thanks Ammo,” I offered. 

“Nothing to thank me for,” and we sat in companionable silence drinking our beers, reflecting on Sadie’s history. Once the tension had eased between us, I asked the next question, opening up a can of worms that perhaps even I wasn’t ready for. 

“You and Sadie a thing?” 

He grinned and looked at me knowingly. 

“Nah. Maybe once I hoped we’d be, but after everything we’ve been through she’s more like a second sister.” 

He was lying and we both knew it.The feelings that Sadie evoked in a man were anything but sisterly emotions, but if he wasn’t going to be honest with himself, f**k if I was going to be the man to knock him off his post. 

I grunted in response. 

“Switch?” he asked tentatively. 

“Yeah?” 

“Just be good to her. Sadie, well, Sadie’s been through a lot and if nothing else I just want to see her happy.” 

Was I the guy that could make her happy? I wasn’t sure. Knowing her history, when she finds out how deeply involved I am with the club she might just bolt. I already had a difficult time convincing her to extend our no strings attached arrangement. I was so lucky that she ended up being one of the freelancers on the tech project, because if I was honest with myself, the first morning I walked out her hotel room, I was already thinking up ways to find her again. She was the kind of woman that once you tasted her, you were drowning.