convince Pru to do so as well, it might be an okay week.
Finally, they arrived at LAX, checked their bags with a skycap, and sent Joe and Eleanor away with a
wave.
Riley gave her long, blonde hair a flip and hooked arms with Pru. “Okay. Onward to the heartland.”
CHAPTER TWO
Bart sat at the bar, alone in the dim Hall of the Night Horde MC clubhouse, his main laptop open in
front of him. He wasn’t working. Mostly he was daydreaming, bouncing around entertainment and gossip
websites, killing time until Isaac, the MC President, showed up. Isaac liked to be the last one in. He wanted
to walk in and get straight to work. Waiting around pissed him off mightily, so pretty much all the Horde
made a point to get in early when they were meeting the boss or were due in the Keep. Bart didn’t have far
to go; he still lived in the clubhouse. He’d never had much interest in finding a place of his own. There was
an eighty-inch television on the wall and a fully stocked bar right here. And chicks to do his laundry and
clean his room. Seemed stupid to lay money out for something else.
He was perusing the results of a Google image search when the front door opened, and Isaac walked in,
hooking his shades into his kutte pocket. Quickly, Bart minimized the photo of Riley Chase wearing a very
small bikini, then turned and stood. He was six feet tall, and he worked out, but he always felt like a
shrimpy little shit when he stood next to Isaac, who had seven inches on him and maybe eighty pounds, all
of it muscle. “Hey, boss.”
“Morning, Bartholomew. Got an update?”
He did. Isaac sat on an adjacent stool, and Bart took his own seat again. “Everything’s good to go.
Tanner Stafford and Riley Chase are due in this afternoon. Douglas Warness and Peter Gruen are in the day
after tomorrow. Everybody else is coming in just for a night or two, next week. The only snag is Lindy
Timmons.”
“Who’s that again?” Isaac had gotten impatient with the movie a long time ago, and he was relying on
Bart more and more to be the one in charge of the details. Frankly, it scared the crap out of him. He’d
already fucked up once this year—or, at least, Isaac thought he’d fucked up—by not finding out that
Showdown’s old lady had put a kid up for adoption when she was eighteen. Not that he would have found
the info on a twenty-year-old closed adoption by hacking. Those records were probably still paper—or, at a
minimum, even assuming that an adoption agency twenty years ago had been digitized, records that old
were probably stored offline. But still, intel was his job, and as far as Isaac was concerned, he’d dropped
that ball.
“She’s playing Daisy. They made that role bigger in the rewrite, when we made them pull back on the
details about what Lilli went through. She’s coming in to talk to people about Daisy. She’s only staying a
day or two, but Show doesn’t want to meet with her.”
Daisy, Show’s oldest daughter, had been killed horribly in the violence with Lawrence Ellis, the
powerful druglord Signal Bend and the Night Horde had ultimately defeated—all of which was the focus of
the movie coming to town. Lilli had been kidnapped and tortured. Neither she nor Isaac—nor anybody else
—wanted to make the details of that ordeal public. Show had offered to cooperate, giving Hollywood
Daisy’s story in detail. He’d talked at length with the screenwriters several months back. But the prospect of
sitting down with the girl who would play his daughter had him unsettled.
Isaac nodded. “I’ll talk to him. Won’t lean on him—if he doesn’t want to talk to her, then she’ll have to
figure it out on her own. But I’ll talk to him. What else?”
“That’s pretty much it. The gossip sites have been pretty quiet about this trip. The studio has the lid on, I
guess, so I don’t think we’ll see reporters around this week. It’ll be a different story if they do any location
shooting. But for now, it’s just the actors and whoever they bring with them. The B&B is booked solid. I’m
going to take the B&B van and pick up Riley and Tanner, and their people, this afternoon.”
