DAGGER (Bone Hollow Sinners MC #17)

Prologue

Astrid

There are nineteen photographs pinned to the wall of my hotel room in Knoxville, and I have looked at every one of them so many times that I could redraw them from memory if the building burned down tonight.

Some nights I think it might. The wiring in this place hums when I run the kettle, and the man at the front desk has the look of someone who stopped caring about fire codes around the same time he stopped caring about anything else.

But the photographs would survive in my head, because that is where I actually keep them.

The wall is just so I can see the shape of the thing all at once.

The pipeline. The web. The four years of my life spread out under the yellow light of a lamp that flickers when a truck goes by on the interstate.

Red string connects the photographs. I bought the string in a craft store in Berlin two years ago, and the woman at the register asked me, in German, if I was making something for a child. I told her yes. It was easier than the truth, which is that I was making a map of how my sister died.

The map starts in Odessa. A warehouse, a manifest, a shipment of modified rifles that should have been melted into slag under a UN decommissioning agreement and instead got loaded into a container labeled agricultural equipment.

From Odessa the string runs to a freight forwarder in Rotterdam, then across the Atlantic to a port in Savannah, Georgia, where a customs broker with a gambling problem signed off on cargo he never inspected.

From Savannah the string runs north. Up through the trucking corridors, off the interstates, onto roads that get smaller and darker and older until they vanish into a part of the southeastern United States that most maps render as a green smear with no detail at all.

The Appalachian mountains. And somewhere inside that green smear, the string stops.

It stops because that is where my information stops.

I know the weapons go into the mountains.

I know they come out the other side, scattered across the country into the hands of people who use them the way people always use weapons that travel in unmarked containers.

But the middle of the trail — the part where the rifles change hands, where the money gets clean, where the network breathes — that part is dark to me.

I have a name for what lives in the dark. I have had it for eight months.

Bone Hollow Sinners.

A motorcycle club. I almost laughed when I first traced the connection, because it sounded so much like something from a film, so much like the kind of cartoonish American outlaw fantasy that I, a Swedish woman who has spent her professional life in spreadsheets and shipping manifests, had no business taking seriously.

But I took it seriously, because the financial records took it seriously.

Because three separate shell companies that touched the Savannah shipments shared a registered agent in a town I had never heard of, at the base of a mountain I could not pronounce, in the territory of a club whose patches I have only seen in grainy surveillance photographs taken by a DEA agent who later told me, off the record, over a bad phone connection, to leave it alone.

I do not leave things alone. It is, depending on who you ask, my best quality or my worst.

I sit on the edge of the bed and pull my wallet from my jacket and open it to the photograph I keep behind the clear plastic window where most people keep a driver's license.

Ingrid is laughing in it. We were at the harbor in Stockholm, the summer before she died, and I had said something — I genuinely cannot remember what, and it kills me a little that I can't — and she had thrown her head back and laughed with her whole body, the way she did everything, the way I never learned to.

My sister was the warm one. I was the careful one.

People always said it about us as though it were a fixed law of physics, Ingrid is sunshine and Astrid is the cold front behind it, and we both leaned into it because it was easier than being complicated.

She was thirty-four. She was sitting in a café on Drottninggatan with a colleague, drinking coffee, talking about a trip to Lisbon she was planning, when a man walked in with a rifle and changed the temperature of the world.

The rifle was a modified AKM variant. I know its serial number, or at least the part of it the shooter didn't file away, which is enough.

I know its provenance because I made knowing its provenance the entire purpose of my remaining life.

The official investigation closed it as a tragedy with no further leads.

The weapon was untraceable, they said. The supply chain was too fractured, too international, too deliberately obscured.

They were not wrong. They were just not willing to spend four years following a thread that thin into a place that dangerous.

I was willing. I am still willing. I will be willing right up until the moment I am standing in front of the person who put that rifle into the world, and then I will find out what I am willing to do next, because that is a door I have not yet let myself open.

The radiator clanks. Outside, the interstate sighs.

I should be afraid. I am aware that I should be afraid, the way you are aware that you should feel cold in a freezer even when the dread has gone numb.

I have been in places that were genuinely going to kill me.

There was a weapons bazaar in a town in Yemen where I spent two days pretending to be a logistics consultant for a buyer who did not exist, and the men I sat across from would have fed me to dogs if the lie had cracked.

There was a shipping container in Moldova where I lay flat for seventy-two hours with a camera and a bottle to urinate in, photographing transfers through a gap in the steel, listening to the men outside discuss what they would do to anyone they found watching.

There was a warehouse in Odessa where I was held at the end of a barrel for six hours, and I talked, and talked, and talked, in three languages, until the man holding the gun decided I was more useful confused than dead and let me walk out into a snowstorm that nearly finished the job for him.

I survived all of it because I understand a specific thing about dangerous men that most people who write about dangerous men do not understand.

They are not chaos. They are systems. They have inputs and outputs and rules, and if you learn the rules, you can move through them like water moving through a pipe.

You do not fight the system. You become a thing the system does not know how to reject.

So I am not afraid of the Bone Hollow Sinners.

I am afraid of the same thing I have been afraid of since the morning a Swedish police officer stood in my doorway and rearranged my understanding of what a coffee cup could mean.

I am afraid of failing. I am afraid that I will spend four years, then five, then ten, then the rest of my life, and the rifles will keep coming through the mountains, and somewhere a woman will sit in a café drinking coffee and planning a trip she will never take, and it will be my fault for the same reason it was no one's fault — because the trail went dark and everyone agreed to leave it alone.

I will not leave it alone.

I begin packing. The camera, with the long lens that makes me look more like a tourist than I am.

The recorder, small enough to live in a coat lining.

The press credentials I had made in Berlin by a man who makes very good press credentials and asks no questions, identifying me as a freelance journalist on assignment for a magazine that publishes human-interest features about disappearing rural communities.

It is a thin cover. But it is a cover that gives me a reason to ask questions, and questions are how the careful sister works.

Ingrid would have walked into that mountain town and made everyone love her by lunch.

I will walk in and make everyone tell me things they did not plan to tell me, and they will not realize until much later that the warm Scandinavian woman with the recorder was warmer because she wanted something.

I take down the photographs from the wall. Each one goes into a folder, the string coiled and bagged, the whole architecture of four years reduced to a case that fits in the trunk of a rental car. I leave Ingrid's photograph where it is, in the wallet, against my chest.

I drive north as the light goes orange.

The interstate gives way to a state highway, the state highway to a county road, the county road to something that barely deserves the name.

The mountains rise on either side of me like they are closing a door behind my back.

My phone loses signal somewhere around the third switchback, and I keep driving on the route I memorized, because I always memorize the route, because the day you depend on a signal is the day you are stranded in the dark in a place that does not want you.

The trees press in. The asphalt cracks and patches and gives up and becomes gravel in stretches.

A deer stands in my headlights and watches me with the flat, ancient patience of something that has watched a great many people drive into these mountains.

At full dark I come down out of a pass into a small town in a valley, a single main street, a gas station, a diner with half its letters lit, a church, a motel.

The nearest human settlement to a place called Bone Hollow, which I know from the maps sits another nine miles up the mountain along a private road I will not be driving tonight.

I check into the motel. The woman behind the desk looks at my license, looks at me, and tells me checkout is at eleven in a voice that suggests she has watched a hundred people pass through and expects to watch a hundred more.

The room smells like cigarettes and pine cleaner fighting to a draw.

I sit on the bed. I take out the wallet.

I look at my sister laughing in the light off the water.

"I'm close," I tell her.

She does not answer, because she is a photograph, because she is ash in a cemetery in Stockholm, because the world made her into a thing I carry instead of a person who carries me. But I say it anyway, the way you say things to the dead, which is not really for them.

I sleep for two hours. I do not dream, or if I do, I do not keep it.

At the first gray edge of dawn I am awake, and dressed, and sitting in the diner with half its letters lit, ordering coffee from a waitress who calls me honey, and I begin, gently, warmly, with the particular careful warmth that has carried me through Yemen and Moldova and Odessa and four years of red string, to ask my questions.

I do not know yet that the trail does not end in a network. It ends in a man. And the man is going to find me first.