Chapter Six
Wyatt
Silas has me at the clubhouse most of the following afternoon, working through everything Deuce has managed to pull together on Dax Cole in the two days since church, a thin folder that amounts to less than any of us would like.
Two known addresses, one in Clearview and one that might be an old girlfriend's place outside Bandera.
A handful of photos from a charity run eighteen months back where Dax shows up in the background of somebody's picture, colors visible, unremarkable at the time.
Nothing that tells us what he actually wants beyond the obvious, which is leverage, and nothing that tells us how far he's willing to go to get it.
The office smells like burnt coffee and the particular staleness of a room that doesn't see daylight until somebody remembers to open the blinds, and I've spent enough hours in it over the years to know every water stain on the ceiling tile above Silas's desk by heart.
It's strange, doing this kind of work again, the careful, patient cross-referencing I used to be decent at before I traded it for a road name and a reason to be anywhere but here.
I'd forgotten how much I missed having a problem I could actually solve with my hands and a legal pad instead of just carrying around.
"We reach out to Denise again?" I ask, spreading the photos out across the table in the back office, Silas across from me with a coffee he's let go cold twice already.
"Already did. She's calling back within the hour, said she needed to make sure she wasn't overheard first." Silas checks his watch, and right on cue his phone buzzes against the table fifteen minutes later, Denise's name on the screen.
He puts it on speaker, keeps his voice low. "You're good to talk?"
"For a minute." Denise's voice comes through thin and careful, the particular carefulness of a woman used to watching what she says around clubhouse walls that have more ears than doors.
"I don't like doing this over the phone, Silas, but I don't like what I'm hearing out of Dax Cole's mouth even less, so here it is fast. He's been telling people around here that the Reapers used his sister and threw her away once she wasn't useful anymore.
Says Reina lost her bar job at the clubhouse the week the affair came out, lost her apartment two months after that because she couldn't make rent without it, and nobody from this charter lifted a finger to help her account for any of it, even though half of them knew what was happening the whole time it was happening. "
I sit with that a moment, something cold settling low in my gut that has nothing to do with Blackthorn's threat and everything to do with a debt I hadn't fully counted before now.
"That true?" Silas asks, though I can hear in his voice he already suspects the answer.
"Some of it. She did lose the bar job, that part's accurate, our old road captain didn't want the reminder walking around behind the bar every night, which I understand even if I don't love how it looks from the outside.
Whether anybody helped her land on her feet after, I honestly don't know.
I wasn't paying much attention to Reina Cole once the dust settled here.
Maybe that's on me too." A pause, papers shuffling somewhere on her end.
"Point is, Dax isn't wrong that somebody used his sister and left her worse off than they found her.
He's just aiming that anger at the wrong half of the equation, focusing on the club instead of the man who actually made the choices that put her in that position to begin with. "
She doesn't say my name. She doesn't have to.
"Thank you, Denise," Silas says. "We'll handle it careful from here."
"See that you do. And Wyatt." Her voice sharpens, aimed straight through the speaker at me even though she can't see my face.
"Whatever you owe Rowan, and it's plenty, you owe Reina something too, even if it's not the same thing.
She made her own choices. But she didn't make the choice to get discarded once she was inconvenient, and near as I can tell, nobody's accounted for that part yet. "
The call ends, and Silas sets the phone down slow, watching me absorb it.
"That change anything?" he asks.
"It means there's more than one person this mess did damage to that I haven't fully reckoned with yet.
" I rub a hand over my face, feeling the weight of it settle somewhere new.
"I figured Reina for the villain in this as much as I've figured myself for one.
Hadn't stopped to think about what happened to her after I got on a bike and rode home to face what I did, while she stayed down there facing whatever was left. "
Silas sets his cup down, studies me across the table with the particular patience of a man who's spent nine years learning not to let his own temper get ahead of the facts. "Which means however this shakes out, part of what Dax thinks he's owed has your name on it directly, not just the club's."
"I figured as much."
"I'm not telling you that to make you feel worse.
I'm telling you because you need to understand it before this goes any further.
Whatever Dax does next, there's a real chance it's personal in a way that's got nothing to do with territory or supply routes.
" He leans back, arms crossed. "You good to keep sitting on that shop tonight with that hanging over it? "
"I'm good."
"That's not really what I asked."
I look up at that, and Silas holds my eyes steady, waiting, the way he does at church when he wants a real answer instead of the fast one.
"No," I say, finally. "I'm not good. I put that woman in danger with my own hands, and now I'm the one standing between her and whatever's coming for it, and there's a part of me that thinks that's exactly the kind of justice I've got coming.
Doesn't mean I'm not going to do the job right.
Just means good isn't the word for how I feel doing it. "
Silas doesn't say anything to that for a moment, just nods slow, like that answer satisfies something the first one didn't, and goes back to the folder in front of him.
"One more thing before you head out," he says, sliding a printed map across the table, Larkspur's Main Street corridor marked up with three small red circles, one of them sitting right on top of Marked.
"I want eyes on the shop from more than one angle going forward.
You're good at what you do, but you're one man, and I'm not interested in finding out the hard way that one man wasn't enough.
Deuce is going to start running a second shift on the alley side starting tomorrow, staggered so it's never obvious to anybody watching that there's a pattern to it. "
"Rowan's not going to love more people knowing her business."
"Rowan's not going to love a lot of things about the next few weeks, and most of them beat the alternative." Silas taps the map once, decisive. "You tell her tonight. Don't let her hear it from Deuce showing up unannounced. That much courtesy, at least, you can still give her."
We work another hour without much conversation beyond the case itself, cross-referencing names, mapping what little we know against what Amarillo's willing to share.
I think about Denise's words the whole ride into town, turning them over the way I've been turning over most things lately, looking for the angle that lets me off easier and not finding one.
I owe Rowan a debt I've spent eight months trying to pay down one honest day at a time.
I hadn't stopped to think there might be a second ledger running somewhere else, a woman six hundred miles away who made her own bad choices and still ended up worse off than she started, discarded by a charter that decided she was easier to forget than to help.
I don't know yet what I owe Reina Cole. I know it's something, and I know pretending otherwise would just be one more version of the same convenient blindness that got me here in the first place.
I get to Marked a little after six, earlier than my usual post, and I find Rowan in the back going through invoices at the little desk she's had since before we married, reading glasses pushed up into her hair, a coffee she's clearly forgotten about going cold at her elbow.
She glances up when I knock on the door frame, and something in her face has softened just slightly from where it was three days ago, not warmth exactly, but the particular ease of a person who's stopped bracing quite so hard for the other shoe to drop.
"You're early," she says.
"Couple things. Practical one first." I stay in the doorway, giving her space.
"Silas wants a second set of eyes on the shop, staggered shifts so there's no obvious pattern anybody watching could pick up on.
Deuce is going to start covering the alley side starting tomorrow.
Young guy, prospect patch, he'll introduce himself before he's back there so it doesn't spook you finding a stranger in the dark. "
"More people knowing my business."
"I know. I told Silas the same thing. He wasn't wrong that the alternative's worse, though." I let that sit a second. "Wanted you to hear it from me instead of just finding Deuce back there unannounced tomorrow night."
She studies me a moment, then nods, filing it away with the particular efficiency I remember from years of watching her run this place. "Fine. Tell him not to touch anything back there. And tell him I don't do small talk before nine a.m., so he shouldn't take it personal."
"I'll pass it along."
"Wanted to talk to you about something else too, before Deb gets back from her run. Figured better to do it now than have an audience."
She sets the invoices down, gives me her full attention, wary but not closed off, and I take that as the opening it is.