Now that the temperatures are no longer in triple digits, everything’s on fire. The humidity and temperature have both fallen over the last week or so, but we have wildfires in the area and some of my coworkers are under mandatory evacuation. The biggest fire is near locally is near the Waller/Montgomery County line and has consumed 22,000 acres so far. It could be another week before it’s contained. Chances of rain are pretty much zero for as far into the future as the meteorologists can see. And they say we’ll be back in the +100 zone again after the weekend. Sheesh. My buddies up in Pennsylvania are suffering from too much water and we could use it.
Had a few good writing sessions this week and am up to about 7000 words on the new book. It hasnt’ been announced, so I won’t say what it is yet. My editor told me the art team was meeting a week or so ago to discuss cover art. Looking forward to seeing what they come up with.
Watched the second episode of The Hour last night. An interesting time. Nasser has just “repatriated” the Suez Canal and England is trying to figure out how to respond. All that’s going on at the global level while on the more intimate level there’s this creepy guy who has himself embedded in the BBC as a translator who’s up to no good.
Also caught up with the season premiere of Sons of Anarchy. Wow.
In the meantime, the US Attorney has brought in the FBI and they plan to use RICO to clean up the whole area. They have an FBI agent embedded with the Russian mobsters who ran the gun business while SAMCRO was incarcerated and they plan to sting the whole bunch. They’re led by Lincoln Potter, played by the guy who was Rev. Smith in Deadwood. He’s a little bit kooky.
The Russians took advantage of SAMCRO being out of circulation. They had some enforcers on the inside stab Jax to prove their reach and then took a huge cut of the business. Now that SAMCRO is out, it’s time to renegotiate the deal. And SAMCRO has a rather unique way of negotiating. Opie’s wedding takes place on a Navajo reservation and they use the cover of the reception to send a bunch of club members to a meet with the Russians, where they load up their newly acquired weapons and strafe the whole lot of them. Oops. Including the under cover FBI agent.
The local cops call the party a “Who’s Who of Bad Guys.” Everyone’s there, including the Niners, the Mayans and the Russians. The Russian boss has some of his new guns to show off to SAMCRO, and they go off into the woods for some target practice while Opie dances with his new bride. Bang, bang, bang goes his body guards and Jax finishes him off with a knife in the gut to repay him for the prison stabbing. “Just business,” Jax tells the dying man, throwing his own words back at him. All to the tune of a soulful rendition of “It’s a Wonderful World.” As the coup de grace, they left the bodies at the gate outside Hale’s new development site. That should take a bit of the bloom off the rose.
Speaking of prison stabbings, the final part of this well orchestrated hit on the Russians involved the one remaining SAMCRO guy behind bars. With the full cooperation of the guards, he fakes a suicide attempt to get him into the infirmary. A guard delivers another Russian (against his will, it seemed) and a scalpel, which the biker shoved into the guy’s ear! Ho-lee cow, was that ever…eyew. Yuck. I assume that was the guy who actually carried out the stabbing.
Meanwhile, Jax is a daddy of two boys and he knows he can’t raise them in Charming. The question is: how is he going to get away. He’s an OK mechanic with a GED. The gang is making mad bucks with this new gunrunning deal, so his plan is to stick with it long enough to put away a nest egg. He figures Clay is going to have to quit soon because of his hands and that will leave a void and a chance for him to escape. Remains to be seen if he can stick to that plan.
