Chapter Eleven
Roan
I wake at five in a house with the light on over the sink.
She has not been in it since Sunday and I have left the light on every night since, which is not hope, it is that turning it off would be a decision and I have not been able to make it.
There is a plate in the fridge with a paper towel over it that she made on Saturday. I have not thrown it out either.
Junior calls at six twelve.
“Roan.”
“Say it.”
“The north bay.”
I am already putting my boots on.
The Yard road is straight for three miles and I ride it too fast and there is nothing at the end of it.
Junior is standing in the mouth of the bay in yesterday’s shirt with his hands on top of his head, and behind him the bay is a concrete floor with a chain hoist hanging over the middle of it and a rectangle of clean floor where twelve crates were sitting on dust for eleven days.
The flatbed is gone. The rack it lives under is empty.
“The dogs did not,” Junior says. “Roan, the dogs did not make a sound. I would have heard the dogs.”
“Where were you.”
“Back room.”
“Then you would not have heard anything.”
I walk into the bay.
There is nothing on that floor. That is the thing. There is a clean rectangle and there is a mark where the hoist chain has been swung and let back, and it has been let back onto its hook, which is a thing you do at the end of a job when you are not in a hurry.
Hollis gets there at twenty past seven and stands beside me and looks at the same floor.
“Bay door was shut,” he says.
“It was shut when I got here.”
“Somebody shut it.” He crouches at the edge of the clean rectangle. “The hoist is on its hook.”
“I saw.”
“Roan, whoever did this put the hoist back on its hook.”
“I saw, Hollis.”
He gets up.
“Then that is a man who has been in this bay before,” he says.
Church is at eight, and there are nine chairs and eight men in them.
Fritz is standing at the wall by the door with his arms folded. He has been at the Yard since six and I have not spoken to him and he has not spoken to anybody.
“Sit down, Curtis,” Deacon says.
He sits.
Priest opens the book and writes the date and the hour and stops with the pen down.
“Say it out loud, Hollis,” I say. “All of it, so nobody has to guess.”
“Twelve crates,” Hollis says. “Long guns, re-serialed, banded in threes. They came off the Oakland line in June and they were due to move on the Thursday after the bag arrived and they did not move because of the bag. So they have sat in the north bay eleven days. They were to go out this morning at nine to a buyer at the Line.”
“Value,” Torch says.
“To us, on delivery, a hundred and sixty,” Hollis says. “That is not the number that matters.”
“Say the number that matters,” I say.
“If they are not at the Line at eleven this morning, we have not lost a hundred and sixty thousand dollars,” Hollis says.
“We have lost a buyer who has taken four loads off us in fourteen months without one problem, and we have got twelve crates of ATF-traceable long guns in a truck belonging to a company with our name painted on the door, out in the world, being driven by somebody we cannot see.”
Nobody says anything for a moment.
“Deacon,” I say.
Marcus Oyelaran puts one hand flat on the table.
“Wendell,” he says. “Rule four.”
Priest does not have to turn back any pages this time. He has the book open at the front where the rules are, because he opened it there when he sat down, and I watched him do it and said nothing.
“Theft from the club is death,” Priest reads. “No vote on the sentence. Vote only on who carries it out.”
“Again,” Deacon says.
“Marcus.”
“Read it again, Wendell.”
“Theft from the club is death,” Priest reads. “No vote on the sentence. Vote only on who carries it out.”
Deacon takes his hand off the table.
That is all he does. He does not look at me and he does not look at Fritz and he does not say a single word about what it means or who it might be or what any of us ought to feel about it.
He does not say that he is sorry it is written that way.
He does not say that it has been on that page since 1971 and he did not put it there.
I have sat at this table for nine years watching men fill a silence and this is the one man alive who will not do it.
“So we are not voting on the sentence,” Junior says.
“There is no sentence to vote on,” Deacon says. “The sentence is the rule. When there is a name, we vote on who.”
“And if the name is.”
“When there is a name,” Deacon says.
Junior shuts up.
“Alright,” Torch says. “Then let us get to a name. Who knew that load was in that bay.”
“This table,” Hollis says. “Everybody at this table. Four prospects who helped bring it in from the Oakland run in June and have not been told anything since. The buyer at the Line. And whoever the buyer talks to, which is nobody, because he has never once talked to anybody in fourteen months, which is why he is our buyer.”
“So it is us or it is them,” Torch says.
“It is not us,” Wade says.
“Wade.”
“It is not us. That is thirty-one men and I will stand behind every.”
“Nobody said it was you,” Torch says. “Sit back.”
“Say the obvious thing,” I say.
Torch looks up the table at me.
“The Saints,” he says.
And I watch it go round the room, and this time it does not go at different speeds. It goes all at once, the way a thing goes when everybody has already been holding it.
“Eleven days,” Fritz says.
It is the first thing he has said in the room and everybody turns.
“Go on,” Deacon says.
“That load sat eleven days because of the bag,” Fritz says.
“The bag came Sunday the ninth. The load was due out the Thursday and it did not go, because we were all in here doing what we have been doing for eleven days. So whoever put that bag in the slot bought eleven days of that load sitting still in a bay on a yard that anybody could walk onto.”
“That is right,” Hollis says quietly.
“That is very right,” Torch says. “That is the whole shape of it. You do not send a man four photographs to make him ashamed. You send him four photographs to make him hold nine meetings.”
“They stopped the load with a paper bag,” Junior says.
“They stopped the load with a paper bag,” Torch says, “and then they came and took it while we were sat in a concrete room talking about a motel.”
Priest is writing. He is writing fast and his hand is not doing what it usually does.
I say nothing.
I want this put down as accurately as I can put it, because I have gone over it in the eleven months since more than I have gone over any other four minutes of my life.
There are things I know at that table at twenty past eight in the morning that nobody else in the room knows.
I know that Sol was in Priest’s kitchen on Monday, because Priest told me on Tuesday, and I know exactly what Wendell Cobb is like in his own kitchen with a woman he has known since she was fifteen, and I know that man cannot hold anything back when he is being kind.
I know she loaded a chain hoist and put it back on its hook, because she has watched it done for eleven years, and because Marisol Idrizi has never once in her life left a thing hanging.
I know the office key is on the top of the frame.
I know that if she has gone, she came south through the Neck, because there is one road and I built my whole life on the fact that there is one road.
And I know that the four men in this room who are angriest at the Saints right now are angry in a way that is useful, and that useful is a word I have used about people for nine years, and that I am doing it again, right now, at this table, about my own wife.
Here is the sentence. It is eleven words long. I had it ready.
She was in Wendell’s kitchen Monday and she knows the road.
That is all it takes. That is the whole thing.
I say those eleven words and this room turns like a truck and Torch does not go south with three men to look at a Saints body shop, he goes east, and Ada gets a phone call at nine in the morning, and there is a woman on an interstate in a flatbed with our name painted on the door and about a six hour head start.
And they would find her. That is not a maybe. Fritz could put four men on the right stretch of road inside two hours.
And then there is a name.
And the sentence is the rule.
That is what I told myself, sitting there. That is what I have told myself in every version of this I have run since, and it is true, and it is not the reason, and I am not going to write down the true thing and then dress it up.
Because here is what happens when I open my mouth in that room.
Eight men understand at once that I knew before I sat down.
Eight men understand that I let Torch stand up and name the Saints while I sat with my hands on this table.
And Deacon asks the second question, the way Deacon always asks the second question, and the second question is not what did she take.
It is why did she go.
And the answer to that is four photographs on a bar, and a room of thirty men who let her read it off their faces, and a man who has not told his wife a true thing since 2019.
And every man in this room already knows all of that.
So it is not that either. That is the other lie I have tried on and it does not fit.
The truth is smaller and worse and I have got it now, at four in the morning in the eleven months since, and it is this: if I say those eleven words, they find her, and it is finished.
Whatever she is doing out there stops today.
And underneath the fear and underneath the rule and underneath every good reason there is a thing in my chest that does not want it to stop, because she is out there doing something, and for eleven days I have watched her be a woman standing in a bar room reading photographs, and this is the first thing that has happened since Sunday that is not that.
I do not want her caught.
That is what I cannot say at this table. Not that I love her, because that is allowed. That I would rather she was out there with our guns than in this room being a wife somebody did something to.
So I sit with my hands flat on the wood and I let Ellis Brannigan take the room.
“I will take it,” Torch says.
“Take what,” Deacon says.
“The hunt.” He looks up the table at me.
“Roan, I want it, and I will tell you why and then you can say no. You cannot go. You cannot be the man who rides into a Saints shop this week, because if this ends up in front of Sutter at a meet we cannot have the president’s name on it.
And Marcus cannot go, because if Marcus goes somewhere it means something. ”
“He is right,” Deacon says.
“Fritz, I want your road,” Torch says.
“You have got it.”
“Junior and Wade with me. Hollis, I want to know every one of their vehicles that has come north through the Junction in eleven days.”
“I have got a list,” Hollis says. “It is not a good list.”
“Give me the bad list.”
“Wait,” I say.
The room stops.
Here it is, then. The last off-ramp, and I have it, and I know I have it.
“Ada,” I say.
Fritz does not move.
“Ada is out at those pumps at five every morning of her life and she sees every vehicle in both directions,” I say. “Somebody call the Springs and ask her what went south.”
“I called her at seven,” Fritz says.
I look at him.
“And what did she say,” Deacon says.
“She said she saw nothing,” Fritz says, “and Ada does not miss a vehicle, so either it went past before five, or it did not go past.”
“Or it went north,” Junior says.
“Nothing goes north,” Fritz says. “North is the Line. You cannot take twelve crates of long guns over the Line at a cattle guard, because the buyer at the Line is ours and he would have called us before lunch.”
That is true. Every word of it is true, and every word of it is Fritz Nakagawa standing at the wall of a sealed room with his arms folded, refusing to say one thing that is not, and building a fence out of true things.
I look at him for about two seconds.
He looks back.
Nobody else in that room is looking at him at all, because they are all looking at Hollis’s bad list.
“Then it went south before five,” Torch says.
“Then it went south before five,” I say.
Priest writes it down.
“Vote it,” Deacon says.
“Vice president takes the recovery,” Priest says. “Road captain gives him the road. Enforcers with him. Treasurer gives him the list.”
Eight hands, and then mine.
“Doors,” Deacon says.
Everybody stands. Chairs go back. Junior is already talking about the Coldwater shops and Wade is telling him to shut up, and Torch stops at my shoulder on the way past and puts a hand on it for a second, the way he has since we were twenty-two, and I let him.
“Roan.”
“Yeah.”
“When we get it back,” he says. “The load. That is all that this is. We get the load back.”
“Yeah.”
“I am saying that out loud for a reason.”
“I know why you are saying it out loud.”
He goes.
Fritz is the last one at the door, and he stops in it with his hand on the frame, and he does not turn round, and for about a second and a half I think he is going to say something, and I would not be able to tell you which of us it would have been worse for.
Then he goes too.
Priest closes the book.
“You are very quiet,” he says.
“I am always quiet.”
“Not in this key,” Priest says, and puts the book under his arm, and leaves me sitting in a concrete room with the door open on an empty bar.