CHAPTER ONE #3
That got under his skin worse than the wanting, if he was honest, and he worked hard at not being.
How they kept her. Bishop loved that girl more than he loved breathing, and he'd built her a beautiful cell and called it protection, and Knox couldn't even hold it against him, because given half a reason Knox would have built her a stronger one.
That was the truth he kept underneath the other truths.
He didn't only want her; he wanted to be the wall between her and every bad thing in the world, and a man who wanted to be a woman's wall was just a softer word for a man who wanted to decide where she got to stand.
He knew what he came from, and kept it close so he'd never forget.
Doc was at his workbench in the back, reading glasses down his nose, sorting receipts into the accordion file he kept like the club's whole legal future lived in it, which it more or less did.
Forty-four, going gray and soft in a manner that made men trust him, the kind of face you wanted leaning over you at two in the morning.
He took the bag without looking up and weighed it in his palm.
"Light," he said.
"Heard there's a frame guy gettin' robbed out front," Knox said. "Two grand."
Doc huffed. "She catch the weld?"
"From the desk. Didn't stand up."
"That girl." He shook his head, fond, and tucked the bag into the safe and spun the dial.
There was a tattoo on his forearm Knox had seen a hundred times and never once thought about, a name in plain block letters — JONAS — the ink still raised and new against the older work.
Doc caught him not-looking at it and rubbed his thumb over it like he didn't know he was doing it.
"My boy," he said, soft, like the word cost him.
"Nadège did it for me a few weeks back. Good hand on that one. "
"She does good work," Knox agreed, and thought no more about it than he thought about the sunrise, and went off to find something to do with his hands before he went back out front and did something with them he couldn't undo.
He found it under the doctor's bike, up on the lift, brakes half done. He rolled beneath it and let the work take him, because the work was the one place his hands were only ever good.
That was the thing he never said out loud, because there was nobody to say it to. His hands frightened him.
They were good at two things. They were good at building — he could take an engine down to a coffee can of parts and bring it back to life, and there was a clean joy in that, the only clean thing he owned.
And they were good at the other. He'd learned the other young, watching, before he ever did it himself.
Wayne Lennox had hands like Knox's, big and quick, and Knox had spent the first six years of his life watching those hands do the only thing they were ever any good for — on his mother, on the walls, on him.
Then Wayne had taken his hands and gone, and the single mercy of Knox's childhood was that the man left.
Knox had sworn it then, total and forever, not really understanding the weight of the words. He would never be that. He would never be a man whose hands were a thing the people who loved him had to watch.
And then he'd grown up and found the only family that would have him, and the family had looked at him and seen what he was for.
The enforcer. He was good at it. That was the part he couldn't tell a living soul, the part that sat in him like swallowed glass — that some animal piece of him went quiet and satisfied in the middle of it, that the clean economy of it felt like the one job in the world he'd been built to do.
His father had probably felt that too. That thought woke him at three in the morning and stayed till dawn.
So he kept his hands on engines when he could. And he kept them off the things he wanted, because a man who couldn't trust his own hands had no business reaching for anything soft.
That was the bargain he'd struck with himself to keep living in his own skin.
Build with the good hand. Hurt only what the club pointed him at, only men who had it coming, never anything that couldn't hit back.
Keep the rest of it locked somewhere it couldn't be used against him or by him, the want and the softness and the boy who used to flinch at a raised voice.
It had held eleven years. It was a narrow life, but it was clean, and clean was more than the men he'd come up with ever got.
The trouble standing in his doorway tonight was that Coral City didn't fight anything that could hit back either.
That was their whole shape. They'd come up the coast out of Miami selling the one thing no code on earth could forgive, and the Saints lived by a code, and a year back the two had finally run into each other hard.
The club had bloodied them in September and Knox had let himself think, for a few good weeks, that it might be finished.
It was never the kind of thing that got to be finished. He'd known that even while he hoped it.
Tiny ducked under the bay's low beam with two beers nobody had asked him for and set one on Knox's chest where he lay back under the lift, which was the prospect's way of keeping a man company without having to dig up words for it.
The kid was twenty-three and built like a grain silo and scared of exactly one thing on this earth, which was letting people down, and Knox had a soft spot for him he'd have denied under torture.
"Bishop's got that look," Tiny said, low.
"The bad one. Somethin' comin'?" "Somethin's always comin'.
" "Yeah." Tiny picked at the label on his bottle.
"Just—if it does. I'm ready. I want you to know I'm ready.
" He said it like a boy asking to be picked for a team, and Knox looked up at that earnest enormous face and felt the old useless tenderness turn over in him, the same one Padre's crayon sun had stirred, the one he kept bolted down because in a man like him a soft spot was only ever one more place the world could make him bleed.
"I know you are," Knox said, and meant it, and prayed the boy never had to prove it.
Boots came across the floor and stopped by the lift. He knew them by the heel. He rolled out.
Bishop stood over him with a cup of the burnt clubhouse coffee, looking down, and there was a weight on the old man's face that hadn't been there this morning.
"Walk with me," he said.
They went out the back into the smell of the marsh coming up cool with the dark — pluff mud and salt and the green rot that meant low tide and meant home to everybody who'd grown up breathing it.
Bishop didn't talk right off. He looked out at the water past the chain-link like the creek was a man he was thinking about fighting.
"You did good in Walterboro," he said finally.
"Wasn't much to it."
"There's about to be." He drank his coffee.
"Coral City's back in the city. Two of ours clocked them this week.
Down by the container yard, then again on East Bay, sittin' on nothing, watching.
" He let it land. "After what we did to their port operation in September, I figured they'd lick their wounds a year.
They didn't. And they're not here for the port this time. "
Knox waited. Bishop got there in his own time. He always did.
"They can't hit us head-on," Bishop said.
"We hurt 'em too bad for that. So they'll do what cowards do.
They'll find the soft thing a man loves and put a hand on it where he can watch.
" He turned, and the look on his face had nothing to do with the club president and everything to do with the man underneath.
"I've got a bad feeling, Knox. The kind I had the winter before the worst year this club ever saw.
I need my people sharp. I need eyes I trust on the things that matter, and I'm gonna be leaning on you harder than I have in a while. "
"Whatever you need."
"I know." Bishop clapped him on the shoulder, and his hand stayed there a beat, heavy and warm.
"You're the best I got. You know that. Eleven years and you never once made me sorry I pulled a half-dead nineteen-year-old out of a bad situation and gave him a cut.
" He said it plain, no weight on it, and it landed on Knox like a building anyway, because it was the truest sentence anybody had ever said to him and the old man tossed it off like loose change.
"Get some sleep. Tomorrow we figure out how big this is. "
He went back inside. Knox stayed in the marsh dark a while, letting the cold come up off the water.
He'd been nineteen the first time he stood in dark like this and let Bishop decide his life for him.
He remembered it whole: the gas-station bathroom, the blood that hadn't all been his, the cold flat certainty that he'd run out the short road his father set him on.
Bishop had found him because Bishop found everything that happened on his stretch of coast, and instead of finishing what somebody else started, he'd bought the half-feral kid a plate of eggs and asked him one question.
You tired of being what they made you? He'd let the eggs go cold waiting on an answer Knox took twenty minutes to give.
Eleven years gone and Knox still got up every morning trying to be worth those eggs.
That was the debt, and it had no number on it; there was no figure you could put on the morning a man decided you were worth more than where you came from.
And it was that debt, that exact debt, that turned the one thing he wanted most in the world the one thing he could never let himself take.