2. The Kid Who Burns the Paper
THE KID WHO BURNS THE PAPER
Grim says we roll at noon, which in Hell's Reckoning time means two, which means I got the morning to babysit the runaway and try not to think about how completely, cosmically, biblically fucked I am.
The Wagon Wheel is ours the way everything out here is ours — the owner pays, the cops eat free, the lot's full of chrome and the jukebox has been playing the same forty songs since before I was born.
The whole place smells like bacon grease and bar bleach and thirty years of Marlboro smoke that soaked into the paneling back when that was legal and stayed on after out of loyalty.
Eleven bikes, the crash truck, the war wagon.
Tallboy's passed out in the war wagon with his boots hanging out the back door like something the truck is in the middle of swallowing.
Somebody's fighting somebody by the propane tank, friendly, meaning only one of them's bleeding.
And there's Shep, sitting at the end of the bar with both hands around a coffee he isn't drinking, looking like a golden retriever somebody left at a wolf sanctuary.
"You gotta eat something," I tell him.
"I'm good."
"You're not good, you look like a hostage video. Eat the eggs, man. Darla made 'em special, and by special I mean she washed the pan first, which around here is a sacrament."
He does the almost-smile, the one that got me into this because the dude smiles like he's asking permission.
Fourteen months I prospected for the meanest charter in the Ozarks and not one man in it ever asked permission for anything, including the stuff you should legally have to ask twice for.
Then I met this Ghostline stray at a Fernley swap meet trying to buy a carburetor with exact change.
He had the money counted in a sandwich bag, ones and quarters, and apologized to the seller for the quarters.
It wasn't kindness that got me, not exactly.
It was the sight of a person the world hadn't reached yet.
I hadn't seen one up close in years, and I wanted to keep him that way, which tells you everything about how smart I am, because look where keeping him got us.
"They keep asking me things," Shep says, quiet, eyes on the coffee. "Grim does. About the club. Routes and safehouses and — I haven't. Micah, I swear I haven't said anything real."
"Hey. Look at me. You don't say anything, real or otherwise, you let me handle Grim."
"You can't handle Grim."
"I have been handling Grim since I was nine years old, I handled Grim before you had pubes, do not tell me my business."
That's mostly true, is the sad part. My mom followed this club up and down the state highways of Missouri my whole childhood — hangaround girlfriend of a hangaround, then old lady to a patch who left, then just a fixture, the woman who'd sew your rocker back on and hold your beer and your secrets both.
I did homework on clubhouse pool tables.
I fell asleep under bars while wakes went on over my head.
The clubhouse on the mountain is the closest thing I've got to a hometown.
I learned to ride in that gravel lot. I learned other stuff there too.
When I turned twenty-two and Grim Martinez himself handed me a prospect cut, half the charter cried actual tears, big men, sobbing, called me son of the club, and I stood there grinning with the denim on my shoulders feeling like it was cut from a car hood.
Fourteen months later I know what I am. I'm the kid who burns the paper.
That's a real job. Somebody has to feed the barrel out back — receipts, manifests, the spiral notebooks where Ledger-fearing men would use encryption and Hell's Reckoning uses handwriting bad enough to qualify.
And the thing about the kid who burns the paper is everybody forgets he can read.
I've read things going into that barrel that live behind my eyes now, permanent residents, paying no rent.
Names. Amounts. One name in particular, on more paper than any name has a right to be on, a name that isn't a person — HELLREACH HOLDINGS, LLC — moving money in directions that make no sense unless you stop assuming the two meanest clubs west of the Mississippi hate each other as much as advertised.
I asked exactly one question about it, one time, to exactly the wrong person, and a week later Grim had me dig a hole in the pine flats and stand there while Bones filled it, and Grim put his arm around my neck after, warm as an uncle, and said, Curiosity's a coyote, little man.
Cute right up till it's in the chicken house.
Bones comes through the bar door and the room adjusts around him the way rooms do.
HR's enforcer is six-six and keeps his beard in two braids and has a laugh you can hear across a fairground, and everything about him reads carnival until you've seen the mudflats work, which I have, once, standing at the edge of a hole I dug.
"Cricket." He puts a hand the size of a stop sign on my shoulder. "Grim wants your legs. Fuel run when we roll. You and the crash truck, top off at Wells, meet the pack at the Utah line."
"On it."
"And feed the stray." He grins at Shep with all the teeth. "Skinny hostages are bad advertising."
He goes. Shep's white as the coffee mug. And me — I do the thing I do, I laugh, loud, at nothing, because Cricket never shuts up and never stops chirping and that's how the club likes its mascot, noisy and harmless. Nobody watches the mouthy one. The mouthy one is furniture with a sound effect.
Out the window, across the lot, at the far pumps, there's a charcoal pickup with a trailered bike that was at the Giggle Springs outside Sparks yesterday evening. Same truck. Different plate.
I look at it one second too long before I force my eyes away and say nothing. If you want the exact shape of how fucked I am, it is this: a strange truck is following the pack, and before fear or sense gets a vote, I wonder whether it might be the door.
We roll at two, like I said we would, and rolling out with Hell's Reckoning is a parade even when it's a retreat.
Eleven bikes staged loud and staggered, the war wagon behind them with Shep's face a pale smudge in the middle bench window, and Grim out front on the bagger with his gray hair loose because helmets are for states that can make him.
People come out of the diner to watch. They always do.
That's the point of us. Somewhere behind the pack there's a box with Tallboy-sized boots at the bottom of my worry list and a runaway at the top, and I peel off solo in the crash truck with eleven empty jerry cans rattling in the bed like a wind chime built by an idiot.
Three hundred miles of basin between Sparks and Wells, and I spend them the way I spend everything: out loud.
Narrating. Radio preacher for an audience of jerry cans.
I tell the cans about Shep's sandwich-bag money.
I tell them about Grim's face doing math over Shep's head at breakfast, that soft fond arithmetic that means an asset just got appraised.
I do not tell them about the charcoal truck, because it isn't in my mirrors, and I checked fourteen times, and something about it not being there is worse.
The Flying J at Wells at nine p.m. is empty enough to hear the interstate breathe.
Tallboy's supposed to run fuel duty with me but Tallboy is horizontal in the war wagon dreaming of whatever guys like Tallboy dream of, cage fights and cheeseburgers, so it's me and the crash truck and eleven jerry cans, and I'm at the far diesel island with the pump handle in my hand, chirping at nobody, narrating my own life like I do when it's too quiet — and the nozzle clicks off, and I turn around to rack it, and there's a man standing at the tailgate.
I never heard him. The lot is gravel. Nobody crosses gravel without a sound.
He's just there, like he condensed out of the dark between the sodium lights, big through the shoulders, black jacket, and the first thing I actually register isn't the size or the silence, it's the eyes.
He's looking straight at me the way nobody looks at anybody — no sizing up, no down-glance, no flinch.
Level. Like a scale weighing you and not caring what you weigh.
Ghostline. Nobody has to tell me. Every kid raised around Hell's Reckoning knows the stories — the club that doesn't fight because it doesn't need to, the ones the cartels pay, the ones who took a whole crew off the earth in Barstow in one night and the cops never even opened a file.
My club is the boogeyman of the Ozarks. These are the guys my boogeymen check under the bed for.
"Micah Lowe," he says. Flat. Not a question.
And I know. Right then, whole picture, one frame: Shep, the truck at the Giggle Springs, the truck at the Wagon Wheel, this. They didn't send someone for Shep. They sent someone for Shep and me, and the me part of that sentence only ends one way, and my mouth — my stupid, undefeated mouth — says:
"Depends, man, you from the scholarship committee?"
Something happens in his face. Not a smile. A single degree of temperature, gone before I can price it.
"Hands on the bed rail. You're leaving with me."
"See, that's a really flattering offer?—"
"Now."
And here's the humiliating thing, the thing I'll have time to turn over later: my hands are already moving to the rail.
Not because of the gun I haven't seen yet.
Because of the voice. Fourteen months of Grim's carnival-barker menace and Bones's grin, and none of it ever moved me like four flat words from a stranger, and my body's like, oh, him, we do what he says, cool, and my brain is three steps behind screaming about the pine flats.
Zip ties. Fast, cinched, professional, in front of my body which even I know is a mercy. He's turning me toward the charcoal truck when the sideways part happens.
"CRICKET!"
Tallboy. Awake, thirty feet off, coming around the pumps with a bag of gas-station donuts in one fist and his other hand already going behind his hip, roaring — because that's us, that's Hell's Reckoning, you sound the horn, you make it big, you bring the noise —
The man beside me doesn't make any noise at all.
I don't even see the draw. There is one flat crack, small in all that open dark, and Tallboy sits down against pump six with the donuts still in his fist and a black hole over his left eyebrow.
He slides sideways while the wind worries the plastic bag.
That is the entire fight: three hundred pounds of the loudest man I know, and the sound he makes leaving the world is a grocery bag in the wind.
I throw up a little, onto the gravel, hunched over my zip-tied hands.
The man takes my elbow without hurting me, and that restraint breaks something loose.
He handles me like a package marked FRAGILE, as if Tallboy were the task and I were freight, then belts the freight into the charcoal truck while Tallboy cools against pump six under lights that make everything the color of old fat.
He gets in. Pulls out slow, signals and everything, merges east.
"You killed Tallboy," I hear myself say.
My voice is doing something I don't authorize.
"He had donuts, man. He was— they're gonna find him in like ten minutes, the pack's ten minutes behind me, you know that, right?
You know what you just did? That's a patched Hell's Reckoning member dead on the ground, they will burn the whole?—"
"I know what it is," he says.
And the way he says it — even, tired somewhere way underneath, a man reading his own bill — shuts me up better than a hand over my mouth.
Tallboy taught me to back a trailer when I was fifteen.
I'm sitting in a stranger's truck with my hands tied thinking about that, of all things — Tallboy in a lawn chair yelling left, your OTHER left, cricket — and the thought's got nowhere to land, because the man who just deleted him is signaling a lane change like a driving instructor, and the two facts refuse to live in the same skull, and mine's the only skull they've got.
We drive east into the dark. Ten minutes later, way back, I hear the pack find him. You can hear Hell's Reckoning grieve from a long way off. It sounds exactly like Hell's Reckoning happy, just longer.
The man beside me lays his right hand open on the console and studies the palm as if it has told him something. Then he closes it and drives.