Chapter 4
FOUR
DUKE
Rosie called at seven in the morning. That was the first sign something was wrong, because Rosie didn’t normally call so early unless there was a problem.
She was behind the counter by five-thirty, had the coffee on by six, and didn’t stop after the breakfast rush unless someone was bleeding.
We’d always looked after Rosie and her diner if there was a problem.
It had a knack of being a magnet for problems passing through town.
“There’s a man in my diner asking for Trixie by name,” she said. “Asking for Ruby too. Says he’s her husband. Drove from out of state, says he’s been worried sick and wants to see his family.”
My hand tightened on the phone.
“Where’s Trixie?”
“Upstairs with Ruby. He came in during the breakfast rush. I clocked him before Trixie did. Something about the way he looked around the room. Like he already knew she was here and he was waiting for her to see him. I pulled Trixie into the kitchen, told her to take Ruby upstairs and lock the door. She didn’t argue, Duke.
She didn’t ask a single question. She just took the girl and went.
It’s like she knew she’d been found by someone in particular. ”
That told me everything. A woman who’d argue with you about accepting a free tow didn’t walk upstairs without a word unless the man at the counter was exactly what I’d been afraid he was.
“I’m coming in.”
I rode into town in under ten minutes. Parked outside Rosie’s, sat on the bike for a second, and looked through the front window.
He was at the counter. I saw the suit first, charcoal, tailored, something nobody in Forsaken wore.
Then the posture. Relaxed, open, shoulders back, one arm resting on the counter, coffee in front of him.
A man who took up space by making everyone around him want to give it to him.
He was talking to one of the regulars, a trucker named Dean, and whatever he was saying had Dean nodding along with sympathy written all over his face.
Hank was leaning in from his usual table, already involved.
I walked in. The bell jangled. He looked up.
Forties. Clean-cut. Warm eyes, easy smile. Everything Trixie had described on the mountain, sitting in front of me, making friends with my town in the most manipulative way.
“Morning,” he said. The smile reached his eyes in a way that was technically perfect and totally false.
“You local? I’m Buck Hawkins. I’m looking for my wife, Trixie, and my daughter, Ruby.
They’ve been gone two weeks and I’ve been driving every town between here and home.
” He shook his head, the picture of exhausted concern. “I just want to know they’re safe.”
The room was watching. Hank at his table, Dean at the counter, two other regulars by the window.
They were watching the way people watch when a story is playing out and they’ve already picked a side.
The worried husband. The good father. The man in the nice suit who’d driven hundreds of miles to find his family.
I could feel the weight of their sympathy. It was aimed at him.
“She’s safe,” I said.
“Thank God.” He put his hand over his heart. The gesture was smooth, practiced, the physical punctuation of a man who knew how to perform and it couldn’t have been more false. “Can I see her? Can I see Ruby?”
“No.”
The word landed in the diner like a stone in water. Dean shifted on his stool. Hank’s newspaper came down. I could feel the room adjusting, recalibrating, trying to figure out why the biker in the leather cut was telling the worried father he couldn’t see his kid.
Buck’s smile thinned. Just a fraction. If I hadn’t been looking for it, I’d have missed it. The warmth in his eyes cooled by a single degree, and the man underneath the performance looked out at me for half a second before the mask settled back into place.
“I understand,” he said. Gentle, reasonable, a man making allowances for an obstacle he hadn’t expected. “She’s probably scared. She left in a hurry, wasn’t thinking clearly. I just want to talk to her. Let her know I’m not angry.”
Not angry. The way he said it. Like anger was his to give or withhold, like Trixie’s leaving was an offence that required his forgiveness, and the generosity of withholding that anger was supposed to be the thing that brought her back.
I’d heard this language before. In interrogations, in the quiet, careful speech of men who controlled people without ever raising their voice. The words were reasonable. The architecture underneath them was rotten to the core.
“She doesn’t want to see you,” I said. “That’s all you need to know.”
He looked at me. Held my gaze for a beat longer than a worried husband would, and the warmth in his face was still there but it had changed temperature.
Colder now. Assessing. A man figuring out what kind of problem I was and how to solve me.
Anyone else might not have seen it. But anyone else isn’t me, and I see it for what it is.
“I don’t think I caught your name,” he said.
“I didn’t offer it.”
I turned and walked out. The bell jangled behind me. I could feel the room watching me leave, could feel the sympathy in the air bending toward the man at the counter, and I knew exactly how this was going to play. Concerned father, turned away by a rough-looking biker. The story wrote itself.
I called church.
The brothers were at the table within the hour.
Angel at the head, Ghost on his right, me on his left.
Hawk, Doc, Rook, Razor, Priest filling in around.
I laid it out. The man at Rosie’s, the wife and daughter hiding upstairs, the performance I’d watched him give to a room full of people who were already on his side.
“What do we know about him?” Angel asked.
“He’s a county commissioner,” Rook said. He’d already been digging because I’d asked him to, I’d known this was coming. “Buck Hawkins. Elected twice, runs clean on paper. Well-liked, well-connected, active in the community. Coaches little league. Sits on three charity boards.”
“Record?”
“Nothing. Not even a parking ticket.”
Silence around the table. I could feel the weight of it, the calculation happening behind seven pairs of eyes. A man with no record, a public profile, community standing. A man who looked good on paper and looked even better in person.
“Duke.” Angel, watching me. “What’s your read?”
“Trixie told me he controlled every part of her life for six years. What she wore, where she went, who she talked to. He isolated her financially, kept her dependent, and eroded her sense of self until she didn’t trust her own judgment.
She left with four hundred dollars and a five-year-old and no plan because staying was worse than having nothing. ”
“She tell you anything physical?”
“Not yet. But she flinches when people move too fast near her. Rosie noticed that she jumps at sudden noises.”
“That’s not evidence,” Doc said. Carefully. “That’s instinct.”
“My instinct’s been keeping men alive for twenty years. How about you?” I replied. Perhaps more abruptly than I meant to.
Angel looked at me. Held my gaze. I could see him weighing it, the way he weighed everything, with the steady, unhurried patience of a man who’d been making life-and-death calls during our time in the military and long after it too.
“We watch,” Angel said. “Hawk, eyes on the town. Rook, keep digging. I want to know everything about this man that isn’t on the campaign website. Duke, she’s yours. Keep her close.”
She’s yours. The words landed in my chest and sat there, heavy, warm, loaded with more than Angel probably intended. Or maybe exactly what he intended. Angel didn’t waste words, and he was no idiot.
Buck didn’t leave town like I’d hoped he would.
He checked into the motel on Route 12 and he stayed.
Came back to Rosie’s the next morning, same stool, same eggs, same easy warmth.
Tipped well. Talked to the regulars, and even talked to the sheriff’s deputy who stopped in for coffee on his rounds.
By lunchtime he’d shaken hands with half the town in that practiced way he’d learned.
Trixie called me from the diner landline that evening. Her voice was flat in the way it went when she was trying to hold something together with both hands.
I needed to go to her. Up the back stairs of the diner, they were narrow and creaked on the third step. The door was locked, of course. I knocked.
“It’s me, Duke.”
The lock turned. The door opened. She was standing there with Ruby on her hip and her face stripped bare, every layer of composure she’d built in the last two weeks gone.
Her eyes were wide, red-rimmed, and she was holding her daughter the way you hold something when you’re afraid someone’s going to take it.
“Hank told me I should hear him out,” she said. “This afternoon, while I was pouring his coffee. He said Buck seems real worried about me. That it might be worth hearing him out.” Her voice wavered. “Hank. The nicest man in this town thinks I’m being unfair to my husband.”
“Hank doesn’t know what you know.”
“He’s been here two days, Duke.” Her voice was tight, thin, the voice of a woman being squeezed from the outside in. “Two days and people are already looking at me differently.”
“Rosie doesn’t buy it. I don’t. Angel doesn’t.”
“Everyone else does.”
She looked at me. Ruby was quiet on her hip, her teddy pressed between them, her eyes moving between her mother’s face and mine with the particular focus of a child who understood more than she should.
“Maybe I overreacted,” Trixie said. Her voice was small. Careful. The voice of a woman trying on an old thought, seeing if it still fit. “He didn’t hit me. Not really. Not in a way anyone would... he just...”
“Don’t.”
She stopped. Looked at me.
“Don’t do that,” I said. I kept my voice even but something underneath it was shaking, something hot and dangerous that I was keeping on a very short leash.
“Don’t make yourself smaller so his version of things makes sense.
You drove across state lines with everything you owned in a suitcase.
You left everything behind for a reason.
You showed up on a highway with nothing because staying with him was worse than that.
You don’t overreact to a good marriage, Trixie. Nobody does.”
Her chin trembled. Just once, a single quiver she locked down before it could become anything else.
Ruby pressed her face into her mother’s neck and Trixie’s arms tightened around her and the two of them stood there in that small apartment above the diner, holding on to each other, and the fury in my chest was so big I could taste it.
I wanted to go downstairs and put my hands on Buck Hawkins.
Wanted to walk into Rosie’s and drag him off that stool and show him what it felt like to be afraid of a man who was bigger than him.
Every instinct I had was screaming at me to go, to fix this, to be useful in the way I’d always been useful, with my hands, with force, with the blunt-instrument problem-solving that had defined my entire adult life.
I didn’t move. Because my hands couldn’t fix this. Buck operated in smiles, in systems, in the patient, methodical dismantling of a woman’s reality, and the only thing that would stop him was the work Rook did in the dark with a laptop and a list of questions nobody had thought to ask yet.
So I stayed. I sat down at the small table by the window, the only table in the apartment, two chairs tucked under it.
Trixie put Ruby down and the kid walked straight to me, teddy and all, and climbed into my lap with the absolute certainty of a child who had decided where she was safe.
She pressed her face against my chest and I put my arm around her and felt her breathing slow.
I didn’t know quite what to do with this feeling, of being thrust into her orbit and wanting to nothing more than protect her and her mother.
And right now, I wanted to hurt Buck in every possible way for doing this to them.
Trixie sat in the other chair. She watched her daughter curl into me and something in her face came apart, quietly, in the way of a woman who’d been alone for so long that seeing someone else hold her child undid her completely.
I reached across the table. Put my hand over hers. A small thing. The only thing I could give her right now that wasn’t a promise I couldn’t keep or a fight I couldn’t win.
Her fingers were cold. She turned her hand over, laced her fingers through mine, and held on. We sat there in the quiet with Ruby’s breathing soft between us and Buck Hawkins at the motel down the road, waiting with the patience of a man who’d always gotten what he wanted.
The want was still there. Underneath everything, the kiss on the mountain, the heat of her body against mine, the way she’d arched into my hand.
Still there. The threat had sharpened it into something fiercer, something tangled up with the need to protect her, to keep her, to put myself between her and the man downstairs and never move.
The two feelings fed each other, desire and protectiveness braiding together until I couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began.
She looked at me over Ruby’s sleeping head.
Her eyes, red-rimmed, exhausted, afraid.
And underneath the fear, the same heat. Banked, buried under everything that was happening, but alive.
I could see it. The pull between us hadn’t dimmed.
The threat had burned away everything around it and left the wanting exposed, raw, impossible to ignore.
I held her hand. She held mine.
For now, it was enough.