Chapter 9
The call came at nine in the morning.
Buckshot was in the armory with Proof, loading magazines, when Cottonmouth came down the stairs with his phone still to his ear and a look on his face that Buckshot had only seen twice in five years—once before a bar fight that put three men in the ground, and once before they rode on a meth lab in a hollow south of Osage Beach.
"Watcher on the highway," Cottonmouth said. "Three trucks just turned off the main road toward The Pines. Convoy formation. And the lead truck has eleven men in it and behind it."
"Eleven."
"Eleven hired. Plus a thick man with a shaved head running them. Royce Tillman."
Buckshot set the magazine down. "They're going to strip the rooms and burn what's left."
"That's the read."
Still was already in the chapel when Buckshot came up the stairs.
Word moved through the compound the way it always did—fast, quiet, brothers appearing in doorways and on the deck without being called.
Nine men ready to ride in under four minutes.
Bikes fired in the gravel lot, the rumble shaking the trees, and Buckshot swung onto his and looked back at the cabin door.
Tamsin stood on the step with her boots on and the shotgun in her hands.
"No," he said.
"It's my building."
"There are eleven men—"
"And I know every connecting door, every crawlspace, and every blind angle in that building.
You don't. None of your brothers do." She came down the step and crossed the gravel, and the brothers on their bikes watched her come without a word.
"You need me, and you know it, and if you ride out of this lot without me you're leaving your best advantage behind because your ego won't let a woman into a fight she's already been in. "
Still, astride his bike at the front of the formation, looked at Buckshot.
Buckshot looked at Tamsin.
She stood in the gravel in her work shirt and jeans with the shotgun held low and her jaw set and her gray eyes locked on his, and she was right and he hated it and she knew he hated it and she didn't blink.
"You stay at the corridor mouth," he said. "You cover the rear. You do not come into the lot."
"Fine."
"If it goes wrong, you get to the laundry block and you hold it."
"I know my own building, Buckshot."
He grabbed the front of her shirt and pulled her to him and kissed her hard enough to taste the coffee on her mouth, right there in the gravel lot with nine patched men watching, and when he let go she was breathing hard and so was he.
"My woman doesn't die today," he said.
"Neither does my man."
Cottonmouth made a low sound from his bike that might have been approval. Tamsin climbed into her truck and the formation rolled out—bikes ahead, her truck behind, the whole column moving fast on the lake road toward the highway.
They beat Tillman to The Pines by twelve minutes.
Tamsin had them inside in eight. She took the club through the back of the laundry—a service door she'd installed herself that opened into the maintenance corridor running behind rooms one through six—and from there into the building without crossing the lot.
She moved through her own motel like a woman walking her fence line, showing them the connecting doors that opened between rooms, the crawlspace access under room four, the blind angle behind the ice machine where you could see the whole truck lane without being seen.
Buckshot put brothers in rooms three, five, and seven.
Spillway and Current took the far end through the maintenance corridor.
Cottonmouth went up the ridge behind the building where the tree line gave him a clear line down into the lot.
Tamsin held the corridor mouth where the laundry opened onto the pool fence—covering the rear, the way he'd told her.
Then they waited.
Tillman's convoy came down the access road at nine thirty-two. Three trucks—a box truck, a flatbed, and a panel van—pulling into the lot in a line and fanning out to cover the room doors. Men got out. Eleven of them, armed, moving with the flat confidence of hired muscle being paid by the job.
And Tillman himself. Thick through the chest, shaved head, truck-driver's squint. He stood in the middle of the gravel lot and looked at The Pines with the expression of a man looking at a scheduling problem. The boarded windows. The closed sign. The plywood Tamsin had screwed over every room.
He pointed at room nine. Two men went to work with a pry bar.
Buckshot let them get the plywood off. Let them get the door open. Let four men go inside and start pulling whatever was left.
Then the doors of rooms three, five, and seven came open all at once, and ten men came out of the middle of a lot Tillman thought he'd surrounded.
The first thirty seconds were the worst.
Buckshot came out of room five into the narrow gap between the truck line and the room doors—six feet of gravel, truck panels on one side, motel wall on the other—and the fight collapsed into that space like a fist closing.
No room to maneuver, no clear lines, nothing but close-range chaos between men who couldn't get away from each other.
He worked it the way he always worked it.
Wide. The sawed-off tore through a truck panel and the man behind it went sideways into the gravel.
He racked and fired again, driving two more out of the gap between the flatbed and the box truck, and Spillway cut them down as they stumbled into the open lot.
A man came out of room nine firing. Buckshot felt the bullet pass close enough to pull at his shirt, and he put the sawed-off through the doorframe and the man went back the way he'd come.
Cottonmouth's rifle cracked from the ridge. Once. Twice. Two men who'd been trying to circle behind the trucks dropped in the gravel and didn't move.
The fight broke into pieces. Men running between vehicles, firing from behind wheel wells, trying to get to the panel van and out. Brothers cutting them off, driving them back into the lot.
Then two men came through the pool gate.
They were flanking—coming around the south side of the building, past the empty pool, heading for the corridor mouth where the laundry opened. Where Tamsin was.
Buckshot heard the shotgun blasts before he could turn.
Two shots, fast, the heavy boom of a twelve-gauge echoing off the pool enclosure. He came around the corner of the building and saw the two men down on the concrete apron and Tamsin standing in the laundry doorway with the shotgun smoking and her feet planted and her face white as paper.
She met his eyes. Nodded once. Racked the slide.
He turned back to the lot.
Tillman was at his truck. The thick man with the shaved head had made it back to the crew cab and was trying to get in, trying to pull the door open, and Buckshot walked across the gravel toward him without running, without hurrying, the sawed-off held low.
Tillman got the door open. Got one foot on the running board.
Buckshot put the sawed-off against the wheel well and fired. The tire blew and the truck dropped and Tillman came off the running board and stumbled backward into the gravel, and Buckshot was on him before he got his balance, racking the slide and pressing the barrel against Tillman's chest.
"Who sent you?"
Tillman's squint narrowed. Blood on his hands from where the truck panel had cut him. Sweat running down his shaved head. He looked at the barrel and then at Buckshot's face and said nothing.
"Who runs the network?"
Nothing.
Buckshot didn't ask again.
The blast put Tillman against the wheel well of his own truck and left him there, and the lot went quiet. The echo came back off the hills, bouncing through the hollow, and faded, and after that there was only the sound of the fire.
Room nine was burning.
Something in the fight—a muzzle flash, a ricochet, the chemical stink in the crates that had been stored there for months—had caught, and orange flame was licking through the boarded window and smoke was pouring out the open door.
Thick, black, chemical smoke that rolled across the lot and turned the morning into twilight.
"Brother down!" Current's voice, somewhere in the smoke. "He's in nine—I can't get to him!"
Buckshot started toward the burning room. Tamsin got there first.
She came out of the corridor at a dead run, crossed the walkway, and went through the door of room nine into the smoke before anyone could stop her.
Buckshot's heart stopped. He reached the doorway and the heat pushed him back—wall of flame, visibility zero, the chemical stink thick enough to taste—and he was pulling his shirt over his face to go in when she came back out.
She had the brother by his cut. Dragging him backward, one hand fisted in the leather at his collar, her other arm over her face, coughing, stumbling on the doorframe.
The brother was bleeding from the thigh—a bullet wound, not the fire—and he was too heavy for her to carry and she was dragging him anyway, one stubborn step at a time, through the smoke and out onto the walkway.
Buckshot grabbed the brother's other arm and they pulled him clear together. Tamsin dropped to her knees on the concrete and coughed smoke out of her lungs, and Buckshot's hand was on her back and his chest was tight with something that had nothing to do with the smoke.
"Don't," he said. His voice was raw. "Don't ever do that again."
She looked up at him with soot on her face and her eyes streaming and her hand still fisted in the wounded brother's cut.
"He was in my building," she said.
The fire crew—Spillway and two brothers with extinguishers—got the blaze under control before it spread to room ten. Room nine was gone. The walls stood but the inside was char and melted furniture and the chemical stink of whatever had been in those crates burning to nothing.
The lot was full of dead hired men. Tillman slumped against his truck. Three vehicles shot to pieces, leaking fluid into gravel already dark with blood. Eleven men had come to strip a motel and burn the rest, and none of them were leaving.
Buckshot stood in the middle of his woman's parking lot with the sawed-off empty and his hands shaking—not from the fight, not from the smoke, but from the image of Tamsin disappearing into a burning room and the two seconds before she came back out when he'd understood exactly what losing her would feel like.
She was still on the walkway, helping Current put pressure on the wounded brother's leg, her hands dark with soot and blood, her voice calm and steady, telling the brother to lie still and shut up in exactly the tone of a woman who'd handled worse.
She looked up at Buckshot across the ruined lot.
He looked back at her.
Neither of them said anything, but the thing that passed between them—across the gravel and the blood and the smoke still drifting off room nine—was bigger than words and older than claiming and had nothing to do with possession and everything to do with the terrifying simplicity of needing someone more than you'd planned to.