Chapter 5
BANDIT
The gate is twelve feet of concrete and rolls open like it's expecting us, and I've spent the whole ride trying to picture what his club looked like. I was thinking chains, bare bulbs, men who go quiet when a stranger walks in, the kind of quiet that's a threat with the volume off.
I've watched too much television.
What's behind the gate is a yard full of motorcycles in a neat black row, a guy maybe my age with a rifle on his back lifting two fingers at Bones, and the smell of onions hitting something hot.
Inside somewhere, a woman is yelling that if one more person touches her mustard she will start naming names.
Bones takes me through a steel door into a room the size of a small church.
Orange lamps hung low on chains. A wooden table down the middle long enough to seat a large wedding party.
The mustard argument is ongoing. There's a redhead behind a bar drying a glass, and a girl no bigger than a minute losing the mustard fight and not looking sorry about it.
Nobody goes quiet. Nobody even looks up for long.
It feels, more than anything, like a kitchen on a holiday. The kind I've only ever seen from the doorway.
"Come on, Bandit." Bones tips his head at the room. "Coffee's better than the clinic's. Low bar, but still."
It's the Bandit that does it.
The small girl's head comes up off the mustard like a hound off a scent. "Bandit?"
"It's not …" I start.
"Her name's Riley Bennett," Bones says.
"No, no, no." She abandons the bowl and crosses to us, sharp little face, eyes that have already decided we're going to be friends.
"He does not hand those out. Bones has called me Eliza twice in my life and one of those was at a funeral.
So." She plants herself in front of me. "Bandit.
I need the whole thing. Leave nothing out. "
"There's nothing to …"
"There is so much to."
And then a second girl steps in from the hall, dark-haired, small, swimming in a flannel, and stops dead when she sees my face. Something crosses hers I can't place until she says it.
"Riley." She says it likes she knows me. "Night shift. You kept my pills."
The floor tilts a quarter inch.
Brightmoor. The girl two doors down from Darling who walked in swearing she wasn't crazy and vanished into thin air as far as I could tell, because one morning her bed was empty and nobody would say a word about it. Lily.
"You got out," I say, stupid with it.
"I got out." She comes the rest of the way and takes my hand in both of hers like I'm the one who needs steadying. "You kept my pills and said you'd find someone who really needed them."
"I did."
The redhead is around the bar now. "Hold on. Hold on." She looks between Bones and me, delighted. "Is this the supply thing? Bones … is this your supply girl?"
"This is plenty," Bones says, which is not a no.
The small one, Birdie, somebody calls her Birdie, has both hands flat on the table, leaning in. "What supply thing.”
And Bones gives up on this fight.
"Okay, yes, it's her. She lifts kits out of Brightmoor before they hit the dumpster. Sealed gear, a week off expiration, thrown out by the pallet. Takes it on the bus across town to the free clinic so nobody has to reuse a needle."
I should leave it there but I can't help myself.
"I'm not lifting or stealing," I hear myself say. "I'm reallocating resources."
The room comes apart.
Birdie makes a sound like a kettle. Phoenix has to put a hand on the bar. Even the guys on the other side of the room are laughing.
"Reallocating resources," Birdie wheezes. "Smoke. Smoke, did you hear her. Oh, she belongs here, she's staying."
"It's a recognized practice," I say, with all the dignity I have left, which is none.
"Bandit." Phoenix wipes her eyes. "Welcome. Sit. You need food? We always have plenty."
I shake my head. I'm usually starving but not today. Bones fed me the best burger I've had in a long time. But I do sit and now I'm at the wedding-long table with my guard down feeling like I could belong somewhere instead of just stopping by.
Then a man comes in from the back, tall enough that the low lamps barely clear his head. Black ink up his neck, silver in the beard. I don't need anyone to tell me. He's the boss here.
He pulls out the chair across from me, sits, and the noise drops without him asking.
"Riley," he starts.
"Bandit," Bones corrects him.
The man smiles and continues. "So Bandit. People talk about you a lot."
My eyebrows fly up my face. No one talks about me, I've perfected the art of being invisible most of the time.
"Yeah, the first one was … Jessie something …"
Now I'm puzzled, why did Brightmoor's ambulance driver talk to them about me?
"And then Sweetheart." He tilts his head toward Lily, the girl who escaped from the center. "She told us about you last week. We owe you for the pills."
I shrug it away.
"Tell us about Darling."
So I do.
I tell them what I just told Bones. How she came in mean and funny, fighting the wheelchair like it had wronged her personally.
How within days the meds took her down to a place where she barely surfaced and how the night they loaded her into the ambulance she got her hand around my wrist and made me promise to tell her boys, her bastards where they'd taken her.
Nobody moves. Birdie's eyes have gone glassy and she isn't bothering to hide it.
"I thought she was confused. I almost talked myself out of looking at her file. And then three days after they shipped her out, I did and it looked that she had no one in her life."
"She's got us," Birdie says, low and fierce. "She gave me my name. She let me live in her house when I had nothing in the world. She put a plate down in front of me before she knew one thing about me." She drags her wrist under her nose.
Bishop lays it out for me then, plain, the way you'd explain a diagnosis to family. A development company wants a long stretch of the coast, and it's been buying it off from reluctant sellers one parcel at a time, having them declared incompetent when they don't cave in fast enough.
Darling sits on a piece they need. So does Sweetheart. That's how they both landed at Brightmoor. Birdie was living with Darling when they took her, so Birdie got swept up in it.
"They isolate them," he says. "Get them declared unfit. Take the land while nobody's looking."
I nod slowly as an entire list of things I'd filed under weird start to make perfect sense.
Lily, well Sweetheart now, speaks up beside me. "But it's over now. Tell her, Cash."
A man down the table wearing a white dress shirt under his leather jacket, sets his coffee down. "Two easements got filed last week. One on Lily's parcel, one on Darling's."
I frown as I don't get it.
"They're conservation easements, once they'll be recorded, that land can never be developed. No subdivision, no roads, nothing, forever."
"They're recording now," Bishop says. "Days, not weeks."
"The project is dead," Cash says. "There's a hole in the middle of the piece of coast they wanted that can't ever be used … but they just don't know it yet."
It should feel like a win and yet, I can see around the table that it doesn't. For a second I don't understand why and then I do.
"And when they figure it out, what will they do with Darling?" My voice has gone thin as I guess the answer to my own question.
No one keeps an old woman locked up for the fun of it. Never mind that she costs money, it looks like they have money. No, the problem is that she's a risk they can't afford to take.
I look at Birdie, at Sweetheart and at Bones and say it out loud. "She was worth something while they thought they could get the land. The second they work out that they can't …"
The laughter from five minutes ago is so far gone it might never have happened.
"Then she's a loose end," Bones says.
I came here with Darling's message. I thought handing it all over was the end of my part in it.
It's not. Now I know the day they stop wanting her to get to her land is the day they stop having a reason to feed her.
And the easements record in days, not weeks.
We need to find her.