Chapter 7
He put her in his cabin.
Not the bunkhouse, not one of the guest rooms in the converted fishing cabins on the hill.
His cabin. His bed, his footlocker, his cut hanging on the hook by the door.
He'd moved her duffel in while she was still standing in the gravel lot looking at the lake, and when she'd walked in and seen her bag on his floor beside his boots, she'd looked at him with those gray eyes and said nothing, which was the same as saying everything.
He expected her to stay there.
Two days later, he went looking for her at seven in the morning and found the cabin empty, the bed made with corners tight enough to bounce a quarter, and her boots gone.
He found her in the armory basement with Proof.
She was standing at the workbench with a Remington 870 broken down to its components, and Proof was leaning against the wall with his chemical-burned forearms crossed, watching her reassemble it.
She was doing it clean—stock, action, barrel, slide—her hands moving through the sequence without hesitation, and when she racked the slide and checked the chamber and set the weapon down, Proof looked at Buckshot with his eyebrows up.
"Didn't teach her that," Proof said.
"Nobody did," Tamsin said, not looking up.
She was already reaching for the next one on the bench.
"I spent four years working in a building full of weapons that weren't supposed to be there.
You learn how they go together or you learn the hard way what happens when someone else knows and you don't."
Buckshot leaned in the doorway and watched her strip the second gun.
He should have been irritated. He'd told her to stay in the cabin, not because he thought she couldn't handle herself—that argument had died in a motel office doorway with a dead man behind her—but because the compound had rules about who went where, and a woman who wasn't patched or claimed didn't walk into the armory basement without an invitation.
But Proof didn't look bothered. Proof looked interested, which was a different thing entirely coming from a man who tested everything twice and trusted nothing that hadn't proven itself on the bench.
"She's got good hands," Proof said quietly as Buckshot came down the stairs.
"I know."
"I mean for the work. Steady. Patient. Doesn't rush." Proof glanced at him. "She wanted to see what we had. I figured showing her was better than telling her no and having her find out anyway."
Buckshot watched Tamsin set the second weapon down and turn to the ledger pages she'd brought with her—the torn sheets from her motel office, smoothed and ordered and spread across the end of the bench like a map of everything that had gone wrong.
"I need something from you," she said.
"Name it."
"A territory map. Every road the club rides, every property you know about between the lakes. I want to match my booking records against your roads and see which waypoints this operation is using besides mine."
Proof looked at Buckshot. Buckshot looked at Tamsin.
"You think there are more."
"I know there are more. The trucks that came to my lot weren't starting from Springfield and ending at The Pines. They were passing through. That means there's at least one stop before me and one stop after, and if the plates cover four states, there are more than that."
She said it plainly, the way she said everything—no drama, no trying to impress, just the shape of a thing she'd already figured out and was waiting for them to catch up to.
Buckshot went upstairs and got the map.
Twenty minutes later, half the table in the chapel was covered with a worn road map of southern Missouri and northern Arkansas, and Tamsin was marking it up with a pen she'd taken from Still's desk without asking.
She cross-referenced her ledger entries against the map—dates, plates, the nights the trucks came, the direction they'd been heading—and started circling locations.
A rest stop on Highway 76 east of Branson. A storage facility off the Table Rock Dam road. A campground on a back hollow south of Osage Beach. A closed gas station at a crossroads the club rode through twice a week.
Current came in halfway through and stood behind her, looking at the map over her shoulder.
"She's right," he said. His voice had the quiet certainty of a man who knew every road in the Ozarks the way he'd once known every rapid on the Current River. "Every one of those sits on a road we ride. Every one of them is isolated, low traffic, easy to load and unload without being seen."
"How long has this been running?" Proof asked.
"Longer than three months." Tamsin tapped the map. "These aren't improvised. Someone scouted these locations. Someone drove these roads and picked the spots that worked and built a route through territory they don't control, and they've been running it long enough that nobody noticed."
"We noticed," Buckshot said.
She looked at him. "I noticed. You came to rent a room."
Cottonmouth, who'd been standing in the chapel doorway with his arms crossed and his pit viper tattoo catching the light, made a sound that was almost a laugh. "She's got you there, brother."
Buckshot didn't argue. She was right, and the fact that she was right—that she'd been watching, recording, tracking this operation for months while the club rode past her highway and saw nothing—settled into him like a stone in deep water.
Still came in.
The brothers moved. Not dramatically, not with fanfare—they just shifted, making room, clearing the president's line of sight to the table the way men did when hierarchy walked into a room.
Tamsin didn't move. She stood at the map with her pen in her hand and her weight set on both feet, and when Still looked at her she looked back.
Seven patched men in a chapel doorway, and she didn't drop her eyes.
"Walk me through it," Still said.
She did. Point by point, location by location. The booking pattern. The truck schedule. The four-state plate spread. The way the operation used isolated properties on roads that belonged to someone else, moving freight and men through a network that nobody owned because nobody was paying attention.
Still listened the way he always listened—patient, unhurried, the kind of silence that made men talk until they'd said everything they had. When she finished, he looked at the map for a long time.
"You built this off a motel ledger," he said.
"And three months of not sleeping through the night."
Still nodded. Then he looked at Buckshot, and something passed between them that didn't need words—an acknowledgment of what this woman was, what she'd brought to the table, and what it meant that Buckshot had put his hands on her face in a wrecked parking lot and called her his.
"Current," Still said. "Ride every one of these locations today. I want eyes on what's there."
"Done."
"Proof, pull the callback number from the crate lid and run it against everything we've got. I want a name."
"Working on it."
Still looked at the map one more time, then at Tamsin.
"Stay close," he said. It wasn't a command the way it would have been to a brother. It was something else—an invitation to remain in the room where decisions were made, offered to a woman who'd earned it with a pen and a ledger and three months of sleepless nights.
The brothers filed out. Buckshot stayed.
Tamsin was still looking at the map, her pen tapping the rest stop on Highway 76.
He came up behind her and put his hands on her hips—both hands, spread wide, fingers curving over the bone, pulling her back against his chest. She let him.
Leaned into it, even, her head tipping back against his shoulder.
"You didn't need me in there," he said.
"No."
"You walked into a chapel full of patched men and held the floor without anybody speaking for you."
"That was the point."
His arms wrapped around her from behind, hands locked at her stomach, his mouth against her ear. "I'm not protecting a woman who needs it. I'm standing next to one who doesn't. And that's worse, Tamsin, because it means I want to be here, not that I have to be."
She turned in his arms and looked up at him. Her hands came to his chest, palms flat over the scars she'd traced in the dark two nights ago.
"Worse?"
"Harder." He kissed her forehead. Deliberate, slow, tender in a way that didn't match his hands or his voice or anything else about him.
"Harder to let you walk into rooms I can't control.
Harder to watch you stand in front of men who could hurt you and know you'd rather do it yourself than let me do it for you. "
"That's who I am."
"I know." His hands tightened on her waist. "Doesn't mean I won't put myself between you and it every chance I get."
She kissed him. Quick, hard, a promise and a warning in the same breath. Then she pulled back and picked up her pen and went back to the map, and he let her go because holding on wasn't the same as keeping, and she'd taught him that in three days.
The afternoon went quiet. Current rode out. Proof disappeared into the basement. The compound settled into the thick, humid stillness of an Ozark afternoon, cicadas going in the trees and heat shimmering off the gravel lot.
At four o'clock, a call came up from the Highway 76 corridor.
Buckshot was on the deck with Spillway when Cottonmouth came through the clubhouse door with a phone in his hand and something cold in his eyes.
"Convoy," Cottonmouth said. "Three trucks worth of hijacked freight, rerouted off the southern line. Headed north. And a man named Royce Tillman is putting hired muscle on the ground to correct the problem."
"How many?"
"Enough that somebody's paying for it."
Buckshot looked at the lake. Gold light on the water. The sound of the cove lapping the dock pilings. Everything peaceful, everything still—and underneath it, the machinery of something much bigger than three men in a motel office grinding toward them.
"There's more," Cottonmouth said. "Two vehicles ran the cove road last night. Twice. Didn't stop, didn't slow, just drove past the gate and kept going. Somebody's mapping us."
Still came out onto the deck. He'd heard. He always heard.
He looked at Buckshot, then at Cottonmouth, then at the lake going dark as the sun dropped behind the bluffs.
"Sleep near your guns tonight," he said.