CHAPTER TWO
The Back Room
Cade
He stood outside the door for twenty minutes.
He had a reason for being there that had nothing to do with the woman on the other side of it.
He was checking the integrity of the back wall’s insulation, which had been flagging since February.
He was doing a perimeter review. He was being the Sergeant-at-Arms, whose job it was to assess vulnerability, and this room had a vulnerability because it backed up against the east fence and the east fence was the Brotherhood’s softest point.
He was doing none of those things.
He was standing outside a door because Nadia Rivera was on the other side of it with his son and the only thing between them was three inches of wood and fourteen months of damage he had done with his own hands.
His son.
He had known about Knox for fourteen months.
He had done the math the same night Rosa had called him — not to inform him, but to ask if he needed anything, which was Rosa’s specific form of contempt, the offer of help to a man she believed deserved none.
He had done the math and the math was not complicated.
Nadia had been eight weeks when she called him.
Their last time together was the weekend before.
The math resolved cleanly and Rosa had known it would and she had called him anyway so that he would not have the mercy of uncertainty.
He had not gone to Elko.
He had told himself for fourteen months that this was a decision.
That he had decided Nadia’s life was better without the Brotherhood in it, and by extension without him, and that staying away was an act of protection.
He had told himself this with the specific conviction of a man who has built a lie carefully enough that he sometimes forgets it is a lie.
He had seen Knox’s face in the floodlight tonight and the lie had dissolved in the span of a single breath.
Seven months old. Dark hair, like Nadia.
Eyes that were the specific grey-green that Cade had spent his whole life watching in mirrors with mild surprise, as though they belonged to someone else’s face.
His son had his eyes. His son had been alive and looking at the world through his eyes for seven months in a town three hours away where Cade had not gone.
He put his hand flat against the door.
He did not open it.
Down the hall, he could hear the bar. The game.
Dice’s low laugh at something that wasn’t funny, which was Dice’s tell for when he was nervous.
Dice had been at the fire pit when Cade brought her through the gate and had looked at Cade over her head with the specific expression of a man who had approximately forty things to say and was choosing, for the moment, to say none of them.
Dice always chose eventually. He would choose tonight or tomorrow, and when he did Cade would have to listen, because Dice was the one person in the Brotherhood who had never told him a comfortable version of anything.
He heard Knox settle. That specific softening of sound that meant an infant crossing into sleep.
He walked away from the door.
* * *
He went to the garage because the garage was where he thought, had always thought, since he was seventeen years old and his uncle Cal had handed him a wrench and told him that a man who understood engines understood everything else worth understanding.
He did not know if that was true. He knew that the smell of oil and metal had a specific quality of clarity for him, a narrowing of everything extraneous until only the problem in front of him remained.
Tonight there was a ’14 Harley Street Glide with a fuel injection problem that had been sitting on the lift for two weeks.
He had been avoiding it, which was unusual — he didn’t avoid work, work was one of the things he was reliably good at.
But the injector problem was diagnostic, not mechanical, which meant it required sitting still with a diagnostic tool and waiting for the readout, and he had not been capable of sitting still since he did the math on Knox’s birthday.
He pulled the diagnostic unit and plugged in.
The readout scrolled. He watched it without seeing it.
He was thinking about Dani Holt.
He had not thought about Dani in months, which was a form of cowardice he recognized but had practiced anyway.
Thinking about Dani required thinking about the night, and thinking about the night required thinking about the specific sequence of events: Nadia’s call at nine-thirty, the two-minute conversation in which she said I took a test this morning and then waited while he said nothing for a silence that lasted long enough to be its own answer, and then her voice had changed — gone quieter, which for Nadia meant gone harder — and she had said I’ll call you tomorrow and hung up.
He had sat with the phone in his hand for eleven minutes. He had counted.
Then he had walked into the clubhouse bar where Dani was, which was where Dani always was in those days, and he had done the thing that he had spent fourteen months constructing a reason for and had never once found a reason that was true.
The true thing was simpler and more cowardly than any reason.
He had been terrified. Not of Nadia, not of the baby, not of the Brotherhood’s response to a Sergeant-at-Arms with a family outside the compound.
He had been terrified in the specific, pre-verbal way he had been terrified since he was eleven years old and his father didn’t come home from the run because the run had gone wrong in the way that runs sometimes went wrong and that was that, that was the whole of his father, everything that remained was a patch on a wall and a bike in the garage.
He had been terrified of something being his and then being taken.
So he had taken it himself first.
He had destroyed it before it could be destroyed for him.
This was the true thing. He had known it for fourteen months.
He had not said it to anyone, not to Dice, not to Cal, certainly not to himself in any language more direct than a vague sense of self-disgust that he had learned to set aside the way you set aside physical discomfort, through repetition and will.
The diagnostic unit beeped.
Injector three. A fouled injector. Straightforward repair, two hours at most. He set down the unit and picked up a wrench and began, and the work was the specific balm it had always been, and he did not think about the door at the end of the hall or the woman behind it or the seven-month-old with his eyes.
He thought about it anyway.
He thought about Knox’s hand on the collar of Nadia’s jacket. The grip of it. The certainty.
He had the injector out in forty minutes. He cleaned it methodically, slowly, in the way of a man extending a task because the task was keeping him from something he was not prepared for.
The door at the end of the hall stayed closed.
At one in the morning, Dice appeared in the garage doorway with two beers and the expression of a man who had made a decision. He held out one of the beers. Cade took it.
“She’s asleep,” Dice said. “Both of them. I checked.”
“You checked.”
“Someone had to.” Dice leaned in the doorway. He was thirty-three and had the particular looseness of a man who was never fully serious but was always paying full attention. “He’s got your eyes, Wreck.”
Cade set down the wrench.
“I know.”
“Do you?” Dice took a pull of his beer. “Because you’ve been out here for two hours cleaning an injector that took forty minutes and pretending you’re not thinking about what’s at the end of that hall.”
“What’s at the end of that hall is none of the club’s business until the morning,” Cade said. “Calibrate your conversation accordingly.”
“I’m not the club right now. I’m the man who was in this garage fourteen months ago when you came back from that call looking like someone had removed something load-bearing from inside you.
” Dice paused. “I didn’t ask you about it then.
I’m not asking you about it now. I’m just standing in a doorway with a beer. ”
Cade drank his beer.
The garage held its particular nighttime quiet — the smell of oil and cold metal, the distant sound of the desert wind working against the corrugated roof.
“Trey’s on gate,” Cade said finally.
“Yeah.”
“He didn’t meet her eyes.”
“No.”
“Because he’s the one who told her.”
Dice didn’t answer that. It was not a question that needed answering. It was a man saying a true thing out loud for possibly the first time and Dice understanding the specific weight of the moment well enough to leave it its full space.
Cade finished the beer. Set it on the bench. Picked up the wrench.
“I need to finish this injector,” he said.
“Yeah,” said Dice, and left him to it.
He did not finish the injector. He stood at the bench for twenty minutes with the wrench in his hand, and then he walked back down the hall to the back room and stood outside the door again, and this time what he felt was not the abstract weight of what he had done but something specific and located: the shape of fourteen months, and everything that had lived and not lived inside them.
He stood there until the desert started to lighten.
Then he went to find Iron Cal.