SNEAK PEEK TORCH’S TEMPTATION
Chapter 1
The marine-supply owner saw the bikes before he heard them.
Three Harleys swung off Route 6 and nosed into the gravel lot behind Tidewater Rigging & Supply, and by the time the engines cut, every man on the loading dock had found somewhere else to be.
The bay doors stayed open. Nobody ran. They just quietly stopped existing in the space where the motorcycles were.
Torch swung off the Heritage and left his helmet on the handlebars.
Squall and a prospect named Denny flanked wide, covering the dock exits without being told.
The October salt wind off the harbor carried diesel and the cold stink of bait barrels, and somewhere inside the shop a radio was playing classic rock at a volume meant to suggest everything was normal.
It wasn't.
Gary Phelan owed the club eleven thousand dollars. He'd owed it for three weeks. He'd ducked Diesel twice and left Breech standing on his front porch like a Jehovah's Witness with neck tattoos. Now the president was here, and Gary Phelan's window for creative accounting had just closed.
Torch walked through the bay door without knocking.
The shop floor was what you'd expect from a man selling marine hardware on a coast with half the fleet it used to have—racks of turnbuckles and shackle pins, coils of dock line going yellow in the fluorescent light, a glass case of GPS units nobody was buying.
Phelan stood behind the counter with his hands flat on the register like it might run away from him.
"Gary."
"Dave. Listen—"
"Don't." Torch stopped six feet from the counter. He didn't lean in, didn't cross his arms, didn't do any of the things men did when they wanted to look dangerous. He just stood there and let his size fill the room. "You owe Diesel for the parts run. Eleven even. Three weeks ago."
"Business has been—"
"I can see what business has been." Torch's gaze tracked the shelves behind Phelan.
"You moved the Garmin units to the front case.
The big Lewmar winches are gone. You sold the stainless stock that was racked along the back wall last month.
" He paused. "You've got the money, Gary.
You spent it on something that wasn't us. "
Phelan's mouth worked. The radio filled the silence with a guitar solo that sounded embarrassed to be there.
"I had the fuel-dock contract come due—"
"Eleven thousand." Torch held up one hand, palm out, the burn scars catching the overhead light. "Right now. Cash or a check I can hand to my road captain tonight. Pick one."
"I don't have it in the register."
"I know you don't have it in the register.
You've got it in the Mosler safe in your back office that you bought used from the credit union when they moved to the plaza.
I watched you haul it in." Torch tilted his head.
"You want me to walk back there with you, or you want to handle this like a man who wants to keep doing business on this coast? "
Phelan went into the back office. He came out four minutes later with a bank envelope that he'd counted twice, if the mouthing of numbers was any indication. He set it on the counter between them.
Torch didn't count it. He picked it up, folded it once, and put it inside his cut.
"We good?" Phelan asked. His voice had the shaky quality of a man who'd just passed a kidney stone and wanted to know if there'd be another one.
"We're good when you don't make my brothers drive out here three times for money you had the whole while. Diesel's time is worth something. So is mine." Torch held his eyes for a beat that lasted exactly long enough. "Keep your account current, Gary. I don't want to like you less than I do."
He turned his back on the man—the only real threat in the gesture—and walked out into the salt air.
Squall was leaning against his bike with his arms crossed, squinting at the harbor the way a man who'd fished it for a living never quite stopped doing. He read the answer in Torch's walk and gave a short nod.
"Prospect," Torch said. "Ride with me."
Denny scrambled onto his bike like he'd been electrocuted. The kid was twenty-three, eager, built like a fire hydrant, and scared of exactly the right things. He'd make a brother someday if he learned to stop talking first.
They rode south along the waterfront, three bikes in formation, Torch up front where the president rode and nobody argued about it.
The October light was going copper over the harbor, the breakwater a dark line against the chop, and the smell of the coast was everything it always was—salt, diesel, rope tar, the faint sweetness of rotting pilings.
Torch had been riding this stretch since before the club existed, back when he was hanging steel off the new span and these same shops were where he bought his lunch. Half of them were dark now.
That was the coastline's story. The work left, the money left, and the men who built the place got a shrug and a pamphlet about retraining. The Blood of Patriots weren't a response to that. They were what happened after the response stopped mattering.
Denny pulled alongside at a red light, visor up, looking like he wanted to say something. Torch waited.
"You want to hear about the thing on Fiske Street?"
"I want to hear about everything. Talk."
"Diesel sent me down to check on the strip south of the Anchor.
The bait shop, the laundromat, the little bodega on the corner.
" Denny wiped his nose with the back of his glove.
"All three are paying somebody. Not us. They clammed up the second I started asking.
Like, hard clammed. The bodega guy practically ran into his stockroom. "
The light changed. Torch rolled through the intersection and let the information settle into the space behind his ribs where he kept the things that needed handling.
"How long?" he asked over the wind.
"The bait shop owner's kid said something about it being a year. Maybe more. Somebody's running a shake on the whole block, and they've got it locked down tight enough that nobody even whispers."
A year. A full year of somebody taxing storefronts two blocks from the Gaff, and not one word had reached the table. That meant whoever was running it had either scared these people past the point of talking or had been careful enough to stay out of the club's sightline. Neither option was good.
"Anybody see who collects?"
"Two guys. Suits, not leather. They come in a black Escalade on the first and the fifteenth." Denny paused. "The bodega owner's wife crossed herself when I asked about them. Like, actually crossed herself. That's not a money thing. That's a pain thing."
Torch filed it. Two blocks south. Black Escalade. First and fifteenth. Suits, which meant organization, which meant money behind the muscle. And a woman crossing herself, which meant the muscle had already made examples.
He pulled the throttle and took them north on the coast road toward the Gaff.
The roadhouse sat where it had sat for forty years, a low-slung box of salt-scoured clapboard with a tin roof and a parking lot that held thirty bikes on a good night.
The sign—a rusted gaff hook over the door—hadn't been repainted since the Reagan administration, and the plank floor inside bore the scars of every fight, every celebration, and every boot heel that had crossed it.
The jukebox was already going. It was always already going.
Torch backed his Heritage into the row of bikes along the front wall and killed the engine.
The sudden silence was its own kind of loud.
Squall and Denny slotted in beside him, and the three of them walked through the door into the smell of spilled beer and old wood and the particular warmth of a room that belonged to them in every way that mattered.
Half the brotherhood was already inside.
Anvil stood at the far end of the bar like a load-bearing wall, his massive frame absolutely still, a glass of water in a hand that made it look like a shot glass.
Diesel sat at the corner table with a laptop open, running something logistical that Torch would hear about at church.
Breech was at the pool table, not playing, just using the felt to lay out something mechanical, and Wraith sat facing the door because Wraith always faced the door.
"Phelan?" Diesel asked without looking up.
"Paid." Torch set the envelope on the table. "He had it the whole time. Spent the month hoping we'd forget."
"Imagine thinking we'd forget."
"Imagine thinking that and being wrong." Torch pulled out a stool and sat. The bartender—a civilian named Fitzy who'd been pouring at the Gaff since before the club took it over—set a black coffee in front of him without being asked. "Church in twenty. Get the table set."
Diesel closed the laptop and went.
Torch drank his coffee and looked at the room.
These were his men. He'd found most of them on this waterfront, in the bars and the union halls and the boatyards where the work used to be.
Every one of them had been something before the patch—ironworkers, fishermen, truckers, the kind of men who built things with their hands and got told their hands weren't needed anymore.
He'd given them something to belong to that couldn't be outsourced, couldn't be downsized, couldn't be taken away by a man in an office who'd never stood in weather.
Now somebody was running a protection racket two blocks from his front door, and he'd missed it for a year.
He finished the coffee, set the mug down, and walked to the back room.
The chapel was a windowless space behind the bar with a heavy oak table that seated eight and a door that locked from the inside.
The table was scarred and stained and had never been refinished, because refinishing it would have been like sanding the memory out of every decision that had been made on its surface.
The officers' chairs had no markings—no carved titles, no nameplates.
You knew where you sat because you'd earned the right to sit there.
They filed in. Squall to his right, Diesel beside him, Anvil filling the chair at the far end. Breech and Wraith took their places, and the door closed, and the jukebox on the other side of the wall became a muffled heartbeat.
Torch laid it out. Phelan, paid. The parts run, squared. Then the other thing.
"Denny's been checking the strip south of the Anchor," he said. "Two blocks of storefronts paying somebody who isn't us. Running at least a year, maybe longer. Black Escalade, suits, twice a month. The owners are scared past talking."
Silence at the table. The kind that meant every man was running the same math.
"A year," Squall said. His voice had the flat quality of a man who'd found a leak below the waterline. "Right under us."
"Right under us."
"Who?" Anvil asked. One word. Anvil didn't waste them.
"Don't know yet. But whoever it is, they've been eating that strip block by block while we were looking the other direction. And those blocks run straight at our harbor."
Diesel pulled up a mental map. You could see him doing it, the same way he'd mapped every highway in the northeast corridor from behind a windshield. "Fiske Street is two blocks south of the Gaff. Three blocks from the fuel docks. If somebody's holding that strip and pushing east—"
"They're pushing at us," Torch finished. "Whether they know it or not."
"They know it," Wraith said from his chair by the door. He said it the way he said most things—quiet, certain, already past the part where it was a question.
Torch looked around the table. Six men who'd go through a wall for each other and never ask why. Six men who kept this coast because nobody else wanted the job, and because the job was the only thing left that meant what it said.
"Find the name," he said. "I want to know who's collecting on that strip, who's behind them, and how far east they've already reached. Quiet. No contact, no pressure, just eyes. I want the picture before I decide what to do with it."
Nods around the table. No questions. The brotherhood didn't ask why when the president said move—they asked where.
Church ended. The men filed out, and the jukebox swelled back up through the open door. Torch stayed in the chapel for a minute, alone with the scarred table and the quiet.
Two blocks south. A year of somebody else's hands in pockets that sat on his waterfront.
He could still feel the weight of Phelan's envelope inside his cut. Eleven thousand dollars from a man who thought he could wait the club out. Small money. Small problem.
The quiet strip on Fiske Street wasn't small.
He killed the light and walked out to his bike.