Page 1 of Knox Unleashed
1
KNOX
If there’s one thing I hate more than liars, it’s rats. Knowing there’s a rat connected to our club is making all of us itch, and worse, it’s making my men distrust one another.
The air-conditioning unit hums. It might only be June, but the air already dances with the humidity the small town of Gator Flats, Florida, is known for. We don’t usually do church on a random weekday evening at midnight, but as the senior leaders of this club, we need a new plan.
Six weeks without an answer is too long, and I can see the misery of it etched into each of the faces seated at the perfectly round table in the center of the room we use for church.
When I was a kid, I read about how King Arthur had a round table for his knights to symbolize equality, ensuring that no man, regardless of rank, could claim a position of status higher than any other. So, as soon as I became president of this club seventeen years ago, I threw out the oblong one and brought in this round beauty. I run my fingers over the smoothed edge of the cool wooden surface that’s been built to last a lifetime.
It’ll be here long after I’m gone.
Sure, I’m the president of this club and protector of Gator Flats, but I’m no better than any of the other men who sit at this table with me.
Austin “North” Fletcher, my vice president, chews on nicotine gum until his jaw aches. He’s trying to quit smoking, but it’s hard in a place like this. He favors law and order and manages our strip club. I’d always assumed my biological brother, Drew, would occupy the seat to my left that North sits in, and I think knowing that is a chip on his shoulder. Doesn’t help that I once heard him call it thedead man’s chair.
My road captain, Everett “Ridge” Boon, drums his fingers to my right. His thick dark hair falls in front of his face such that I can’t see his eyes. There’s grease under his fingernails from a solid day’s work at the garage that the club owns and he runs. He’s the kind of guy that can be relied on to do what needs to be done, but even he hasn’t found a trail for us…yet.
Agitation has Hayes “Havoc” Doyle fidgeting in his seat. There are big, fat Viking braids in his thick dirty blond hair. He’s a man of few words and relies on action. As my sergeant at arms, he’s no doubt itching for a direction to go attack the trouble. But the truth is, we have no idea who the rat is.
He’s sitting next to his childhood best friend, the biggest man at the table, Gideon “Vandal” Ward. He’s six foot seven and is a solid wall of muscle. Havoc and Vandal are chaos personified and have a terrible habit of not listening to orders. But I’ll bet my life there are no better fighters than the two of them. They were born on the same day, April first, which goes a long way in explaining who they are. Aries. Ram-headed. Charge first and ask questions later. When they were celebrating their twenty-first birthdays, they stumbled into a tattoo shop and got matching rams with sharply curling horns inked on their ribs.
“Why couldn’t they have just tortured the fuck until he told them who it was?” Vandal has raised this question so oftenduring the last few weeks that even I’m getting sick of it. I’m sure the man is conjuring up the different torture methodshewould have used to get an answer.
Five years ago, I asked Jackal, a brother who was a Florida Outlaw at the time and now hangs with the Colorado chapter, to strip a biker called Jonathan “Sidekick” Paltrow of his patches and remove his club ink with a blow torch.” We no longer call him his road name. It was given to him as part of an honor he is no longer worthy of carrying. And recently, Paltrow got information about Jackal’s new location and went there in an attempt to kill Jackal’s partners, Shade and Isla. Thankfully, Jackal and the club found them in time, but what happened next was gnarly. But it had also revealed an unlikely love story between Jackal and Shade, and the woman they’d invited to join the two of them.
Jackal had privately told me what happened when I saw him two weeks ago for Drew’s milestone birthday memorial. My brother would have been forty, if he’d not been shot like a dog on the side of the highway thirteen years ago by Sheriff Harrison Caldwell.
“Jackal told me the shit that went down in that mine shaft. The club was there. All of them. I’m sure it wasn’t a decision any of them made lightly. But Paltrow was not prepared to say who told him where Jackal was. Which, in my mind, says it was someone connected to the club who would be in danger from being found out.”
“Paltrow wasn’t super close to anybody.” Rowan “Lock” Robinson makes a good point. The club treasurer makes keeping two sets of books and washing cash for the club look easy. The guy spent over a decade in the army, a unit supply specialist. He wasn’t the guy kicking in doors, but he was the one who made sure those door kickers had bullets in their mags, fuel in their vehicles, and kits stocked before anyone ran low. Hesaw firsthand what happened when the government made cuts, when he couldn’t get his men the things they needed.
“Damn good biker, though, before the whole, ‘he’s a pedophile and was fucking around with his sister’ disaster.” The comment comes from Lucas “Sunny” Reed, the club’s tail gunner and one of the younger members of the club. He never thinks before he speaks, and it’s gonna get him killed one day. But not before every woman in a hundred-mile radius has fallen for his green eyes and dimples. “Like, he got along with people. Wasn’t an asshole in public.”
“Wish I could have gotten my hands on him, first,” Gabriel “Reaper” Bennett, the club medic with cheekbones that seem to attract the ladies, says. “Would have sharpened my blades to do a medical castration.”
Reaper got his name in the military, and it carried over. As a combat medic, he’d triage people in a heartbeat, making a life and death decision about who had the chance of survival and who didn’t. And Reaper has no problem being the arbiter if it’s someone’s time to die.
Sunny occasionally makes fun of his road name, given it’s not uncommon in the biker world, but Reaper simply punches him in the face. Sunny’s like the frog in the jar that somehow never remembers he’s not supposed to eat the bee.
Thinking of one of the details I haven’t shared with the men, I decide to tell them. I know Jackal won’t mind. “Didn’t need a medical castration—Jackal cut off Paltrow’s dick and made the asshole choke on it.”
Everyone at the table winces for a second, like any man does when any infliction of pain to the cock is mentioned.
“Fair play, Jackal,” Havoc says.
Ridge nods in appreciation. “Feel better knowing his death wasn’t a peaceful one.”
“Might as well tell you the rest. He made Paltrow take his nine-inch fishing blade up the ass too.”
North mock vomits. “Jesus. Bet that was messy. I’d be throwing that blade away after.”
Vandal shrugs. “I don’t know. Depends on how much I loved the blade. But I’d be giving it a solid decontamination and bleach boil before I ever touched it again.”
I see some of the pressure lift from their faces as they all look to me. “All we know is that Paltrow found out from a woman where Jackal was. Is there anyone left that we haven’t spoken to?”
Reaper shakes his head. “We’ve run through them all. Wives. Club bunnies. Dancers and bartenders at the strip club. House mouses.”
