Chapter Sixteen
REDWATER IS A picturesque small town. One straight strip of main street, storefronts shoulder to shoulder.
I park near the doors to the little grocery store and climb out of the truck with Wyatt’s hundred dollar bill in my pocket.
The store smells like overripe fruit and floor cleaner.
There’s country music playing softly over the speakers.
I grab a cart and zigzag through the aisles—produce, dry goods, prepared foods.
I’m considering a box of pasta when I become convinced I’m being watched, a tingling-at-the-back-of-my-neck kind of feeling. I turn around and do a quick scan and see a girl looking at me. At first I don’t recognize her out of context.
Bleached blonde hair, too much eyeliner, staring at me like she’s seeing a ghost.
It takes my brain a second to catch up.
“Babydoll!” I blurt out. The name is barely out of my mouth before I want to clamp a hand over it. I’m supposed to be hiding from the O.D., not calling out to one of their girls in the middle of the grocery store.
But I’ve known Babydoll since I was fourteen, since I ran away from my foster home and moved in with Billy.
Her old man, Cipher, was one of Billy’s roommates, and then one of the first members of the Order of Disorder.
About ten years older than me, Babydoll has always been kind to me.
She’s as close a thing to family as I’ve ever had.
I’m moving toward her automatically, unable to stop myself, just going on instinct.
“What are you doing here?” I ask, stunned.
“I could ask you the same thing,” she answers.
I notice the roots of her hair are showing, dark beneath the blonde. It’s scraped back into a practical ponytail, not curled like she normally wears it. She’s dressed in a worn-out tank top under an open flannel, jeans that have seen better days. Her mouth is bare. No lipstick.
Her eyes flick down my body, then back up.
“Jesus,” she says. “Aren’t you a fucking cockroach.”
The words get a laugh out of me. “Nice to see you too.”
“You’re supposed to be dead. Or in Mexico. Or in prison. Take your pick.”
“Yeah, well.” I shrug. “I’m not good at doing what I’m supposed to.”
Her gaze cuts past me, flicking around the store. “You alone?” she asks.
“Yeah,” I answer, surprised by the question. Then, maybe because I don’t know what else to say, I turn it around on her. “You?”
“Yeah.” She nods. “Cipher’s at the clubhouse.”
A thousand questions crowd into my mind at once. Babydoll is here, Cipher is at the clubhouse…
Babydoll can tell me what’s happening there.
Babydoll is recon.
“What’s happening at the clubhouse?” I ask. “I heard about Silas and Billy.”
“What happened to you?” she fires back. “You disappeared that night. Dutch and Ray been saying you and Ryan had something to do with everything that happened.”
“No.” I think quickly. “We escaped, that’s all. We…had to.” I leave it there for now.
“You with the feds?” she asks.
“What?”
A woman comes around the corner pushing a baby carriage and briefly interrupts us as we separate to let her pass.
“The feds,” Babydoll repeats once she’s past. “They get to you or something?”
“No.” I shake my head. “Ry-Ryan and I had to escape. Billy turned on us, you know. That’s all I know.”
She studies me for a moment, then shakes her head, looks at me almost pityingly. Another shopper passes between us, lingering to compare jars of pasta sauce.
“Hey,” she says. “You got a bit of time? Wanna go somewhere and talk?”
“Yeah,” I nod. “I’d like that.”
I follow Babydoll’s car down Main Street to the Bean & Barrel, a squat brick building with a painted coffee bean on the sign, and park beside her.
Inside, there’s a chalkboard menu over the counter, mismatched mugs hanging from hooks, old rodeo posters framed on the walls.
The floor is scuffed wood and the tables are all different sizes with different colored chairs.
We take a table by the window. I order a latte, and Babydoll gets a glass of wine.
“It’s happy hour somewhere,” she says with a shrug.
The server leaves us, and for a moment we just look at each other over the empty table, searching for where to begin.
“So,” Babydoll says finally. “Start talking, cockroach. What happened that night?”
That night. The collar. The stage. The blue pills. Seeing Ryder after all that time.
I wrap my hands around the warm mug when it arrives, buying myself a few seconds.
“Billy lost it,” I finally say. “More than usual. You know how paranoid he was getting. He decided Ryan wasn’t loyal enough. Decided I wasn’t either.”
“Yeah, I got that part,” she says.
“Ryan had…an opportunity. A way out.”
“What kind of ‘way out’?” she asks, eyes narrowing.
“People owed him,” I say. It’s not technically a lie. “He’d been lining things up, I guess. All I know is, one minute I was on the stage out on the airfield and the next minute everything went sideways. When I woke up, we were gone.”
Babydoll snorts softly. “It was wild, man. Someone yelled that there was a fire on the stage and then suddenly Billy hit a bad line on the bike.” She twirls her finger to mimic a spinout.
“Crowd thought it was for show until the fucking gas tank blew. Big fireball, half the raceway lights cut out, people started screaming. Total chaos, everyone’s freaking out.
Medics took off, couldn’t be found anywhere…
Cops roll in, find fucking Silas dead, and then it’s the whole cavalry after that.
ATF. Sirens, spotlights, everyone face-down on the concrete.
” She sighs, like just the memory of it is exhausting to her, and takes a sip of her wine.
“Zipped up the bodies, took pictures, asked questions, and then everyone cleared out but a few of us. Haven’t seen anyone since. ”
She tilts her head at me questioningly.
“We didn’t even know you and Ryan were gone for a couple of days. You must’ve left in the middle of it.”
“Uh…yeah, we just missed it,” I say, hoping it doesn’t sound as unconvincing as it feels. “We went to a motel first, somewhere out of state. Then nowhere.” I lift one shoulder. “We’ve been keeping our heads down. I’m done with Billy’s world. I don’t want anything to do with it.”
Her gaze softens, just a touch. “You with Ryan still?” she asks.
I think of Wyatt with his ribs wrapped, looking exhausted. I think of everything he’s done for me that she’ll never know about.
“Yeah,” I say quietly. “Still together.”
“And the suits?” she asks. “You sure you’re not with them?”
“I’m definitely not with any suits,” I say.
She rolls the stem of her glass between her fingers, thinking. “So, you’d already heard about Billy and Silas, eh?” she checks.
I nod. “Ryan heard—from someone he knows.”
“Did you hear about Senator Hargrove, too?”
I suppress a flinch and shake my head, innocently.
“People are saying that’s who Mr. White was. Big wig politician who got hauled in with a trunk full of cash and blow and O.D.’s name on it.”
“Wow,” I say noncommittally, playing dumb.
“Yeah. Far as the boys are concerned, it’s all bullshit. Media hit job. Election year. Who knows?”
I wait for her to say more, but it doesn’t seem like she knows much about it.
“What happened at the clubhouse after?” I ask. “After…that night. What’s the vibe?”
“It’s weird, you know? Like a ghost town. Just a few of us living there, going through the motions, but everything’s changed. Then two days ago, bunch of guys in suits showed up. Two black SUVs, no badges.” She lifts her brows. “Not ATF. No logos, no sirens. These ones came quiet. Felt scarier.”
My skin prickles. “What did they do?”
“Fucking walked in like they owned the place. Holding guns, knew exactly where they were going. Went straight to Billy’s office and then they hit Silas’s nerd cave. One guy had this little black device he put on the fingerprint scanners and the doors just opened.”
She snaps her fingers.
“Brothers who were left didn’t like it,” Babydoll says. “Didn’t like strangers acting like they owned the place. But what were they gonna do? Get shot protesting? Billy’s gone. Silas is gone. Ryan’s fucking…gone.” She darts an uncertain glance at me, like she’s afraid she might offend me.
I nod—yes, he’s gone.
“Club’s a joke right now,” she continues. “The people who are there are scared, but they’re not stupid. They know the party’s over.”
“What did the suits do?” I press.
“They went into all the locked rooms,” she says. “Took anything that beeped. Computers, boxes from Silas’s room, whole bunch of papers, too. They kept asking us about mirrors. ‘Is anything mirrored? Are there mirror systems? Any data stored off-site?’ Like we were gonna fucking help them.”
“Silas did run a ton of surveillance,” I try. “Cameras and mics. Maybe it was about that stuff.”
“Yeah, he was always jerking off to his screens,” Babydoll says. “You couldn’t pick your nose without him seeing it.”
“So if the suits cleared out all his hardware…” I trail off. “What were they missing?”
“No idea,” she says. “I stay out of nerd shit. All I know is they hauled a fuck ton of stuff out of Silas’s cave.”
She hesitates, then adds, “Thing is, they never went out back. Not really. They did one lazy walk around the yard, but they didn’t step foot in those new bunkhouses.
” She gives me a pointed look. “You know he spent a lot of time out there, right? Whatever he was doing, nobody said anything about it. We kept our mouths shut and hoped the suits would take their boxes and fuck off.”
She drains her glass and studies me for a beat.
“I’m glad you’re okay, kid,” she says, softly. “I never liked any of that stuff Billy did to you, the collar and everything. Things were getting real fucked up around then, you know? Like, with Danny and everything?”
Danny. I remember the way the news ripped through the clubhouse. Billy shot a prospect execution-style because he walked off his post.
“Yeah,” I say quietly. “Things were getting bad.”
“They were fucked,” she agrees. “Guys were scared to breathe wrong. Silas knew where everyone was every second. Billy started needing bigger and bigger shows of loyalty. And then you show up on a leash and it’s like…yeah. That tracks.”
Shame burns hot under my skin, even though none of it was my choice.
“Now you’re standing in front of me dressed like a college kid,” she says with a rough laugh, looking me over again. “No collar. No brothers in sight.”
Babydoll’s always called them that, brothers—old-school clubhouse language.
“Not sure I’d call any of them ‘brothers’ anymore,” I say.
“That’s the thing,” she says, leaning back.
“The ones left at the clubhouse, they’re the ones who still believe that word means something.
The originals, you know? The guys who were there when the O.D.
was about rides and runs and maybe some light felonies.
Not trafficking and politicians and whatever the fuck Billy turned it into. ”
I picture faces—Cipher, Pluto, some of the older patch-holders who always seemed vaguely embarrassed by the newer crop.
“They didn’t like the direction things were going,” Babydoll goes on.
“Didn’t like the extra product. Didn’t like all the paid girls.
And they really didn’t like what happened to you.
Don’t get me wrong, nobody stood up and made some heroic speech.
But they looked away. They drank harder.
Some of them still can’t look each other in the eye about it. ”
A bitter taste fills my mouth. “If they thought it was so terrible, they could’ve done something.”
“I know,” she says. And for the first time, there’s real shame in her voice. “I could’ve done something too. I didn’t. I’m not saying they’re heroes, Max. But if you walked in there now, the guys who are left aren’t the ones who thought the sun rose and set out of Billy’s ass.”
I stare into my latte, the foam collapsed into a thin ring.
“They still give a shit about you,” she says quietly.
“In their fucked-up way. Some of them are even thinking about getting out,” she adds.
“They talk about calling some hotline they saw in a PSA.” She snorts.
“They won’t. Not unless somebody holds their hand the whole way. They’re boys who never grew up.”
“Are you going to stay in the clubhouse?” I ask.
She shrugs, looking out the window at Main Street like the answer might be written on the pavement.
“That place has been my home for…what? Eight years? More?” She huffs.
“I wouldn’t know where else to go. I keep thinking I’ll pack a bag and just drive.
But every time I get as far as the door, I end up behind the bar again, pouring beers for idiots. ”
I believe her. I also don’t. Babydoll has always been more capable than she gives herself credit for. But the clubhouse is a gravity well.
“It’s so quiet right now,” she says. “It’s weird. No parties, practically nobody there. Just a bunch of lost idiots waiting for someone to tell them what happens next.”
We finish our drinks talking about nothing for a few minutes—old gossip, who hooked up with who, some story about a fight between two charters that sounds like it belongs in a soap opera.
It feels almost normal if I squint. Two women in a small-town coffee shop, catching up and gossiping about people they know.
But underneath it, my brain is humming.
After we leave the coffee shop, I watch Babydoll walk to her car and light a cigarette before she gets in, cupping her hand around the flame. She looks smaller. Not physically, she’s still all legs and attitude, but the edges of her seem worn. Like somebody took sandpaper to all that shine.
She catches me watching and flips me off half-heartedly, then softens it with a little salute. I lift my hand in answer. For a second I want to run after her, grab her shoulders, shake her, tell her to leave, to get out while the club is still stunned and stupid.
Instead I let her drive away, taillights disappearing at the end of the street.
On the drive back, two things sit solid in my mind.
One: the evidence is definitely gone. The “suits” have to be Billy’s cleaners.
But two: it doesn’t sound like much was pillaged outside of Billy’s office and Silas’s tech room. There could be another location where Silas was keeping stuff—like the barracks.
I drive back thinking about everything Babydoll said—the suits and the leftover bikers at the club and their loyalty to Ryan, to the idea of what the O.D. was supposed to be. I’m going back armed with valuable information.
No longer a girl on a leash. Now I’m the one holding it.