Chapter 12 Nitro
Nitro
The war room smelled of old thermite and skin oil.
Every surface was polished concrete or steel, designed to erase warmth, to keep the ghosts at bay.
I walked in on Damron St. James bent over a scatter map of Los Alamos, his beard a shadow line under the baleful buzz of the overhead fluorescents.
It was dawn, but inside, you couldn’t tell if it was noon or midnight or the moment before an airstrike.
I set my coffee—black, no pretense—on the concrete, careful not to slosh it on the territory lines he’d drawn in Sharpie.
He didn’t glance up, just kept tracing the path of Trinity Drive with the tip of a ballpoint, eyes eating up the block numbers and the shaded areas he’d marked “soft.” There were two handguns on the table, one gloved, one naked.
I didn’t know which was for business and which for pleasure.
He finally said, “You got something?”
“Yeah.” My throat was still raw from the cigarettes, and my voice scraped out flat.
“Russian ops are in town. Real ones, not the strip-mall variety. Saw black vehicles doing slow rolls past the lab perimeter, and there were two men casing the utility van near Canyon Road. No obvious patch, but the way they moved, I’d bet money on private ex-mil, not federal. ”
He tapped the map, still not looking at me. “Pattern?”
“They’re floating, not sticking to a schedule. Dots are random but always loop back to the east gate. Last night, they used a local burner—cloned, but the tower handshake gave away the drop. I cross-checked against last week’s weird traffic and got three more hits.”
He nodded once. His hands were steady, even when he switched between the pen and the whiskey glass that always hovered nearby. “You run the plates?”
I felt my jaw grind. “All government rentals. Same front company, but the address in ABQ is a shell. I got Seneca’s guy looking for the registration pool.”
This got a reaction. Damron’s face tightened, lips going to that thin line you only see on men who have held a child and a corpse in the same hour.
He looked up finally, eyes red-edged and so fucking awake it hurt.
“This brings heat we don’t need, Chemist. Feds are already on our ass for the Zuni job, and now you’re telling me the Russkies are about to light up our backyard? ”
I shrugged, but it wasn’t casual. “Not our problem. Unless they make it our problem.”
He let the silence go radioactive, then picked up the whiskey and sipped, not for the taste but the ritual. “You see the girl?”
I hesitated just long enough for him to notice. “No. She’s gone off-grid, or someone’s moved her. Either way, she’s not home. If they want her, they’ll have to smoke her out.”
He grunted. “Or you.”
I let the coffee go cold under my hand. “I can take care of myself.”
He stared at me, hard. “I know you can. I just wish you’d pick fights we can win.”
The door to the war room opened, and in came Seneca Wallace, the Sadist himself. He was in full regalia—scythe patch, boots polished, jaw scarred and gleaming under the bad light. He moved with the grace of a man who’d spent his youth in cages, and liked it.
He nodded to Damron, then gave me a look that was half-respect, half-threat. “Morning, boys,” he said, voice sanded down to the grain. He leaned against the wall, arms folded. “I hear we’ve got visitors.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Real friendly.”
He grinned, all teeth. “We could use it.”
Damron raised a brow. “How’s that?”
Seneca looked at the map, then at Damron, then at me.
“Senator Carly is on the Intelligence Committee. She’s been looking for a reason to give us a handshake deal ever since the pipeline mess.
If we play this right—keep the girl alive, keep the lab off the news, maybe do a little favor for the Bureau—we can get some heat off our own ops. She owes us, but she needs an excuse.”
Damron looked back at the map, but I knew he was running the numbers. “You want us to run bodyguard for a government stiff?”
Seneca shrugged. “Better than running body count for the feds. Besides, who else can handle this? State cops? They’ll get eaten alive.”
I felt the tension in my hands, the old scar on my trigger finger throbbing. “You’re talking about a war on our own street.”
Damron smiled, but it was the kind of smile you get before a firing squad. “We’ve always liked a good war.”
I watched the two of them, the way they could turn a bloodbath into a profit margin, the way they never lost the thread of the game even when their own necks were in the vise. I didn’t trust either of them, but I respected the calculus.
Damron finished his whiskey and slammed the glass down, letting the sound bounce off the steel.
“All right. We upshift to red. No patch on the streets unless you’re armed and ready.
Pull everyone off the pipeline job and get them in town.
Augustine runs the perimeter. You—” He looked at me.
“You’re on comms. Get me everything you can on the Russian movement.
If you see the girl, you bring her in. Safehouse only. ”
Seneca grinned, and the scar on his jaw danced. “You want her alive or just breathing?”
“Alive,” Damron said. “And unbroken. She’s the key.”
I watched Seneca watch me, and I knew he was thinking about leverage, about the way people crack under just the right amount of fear and pleasure. I knew because I’d done it, too.
I nodded. “Copy.”
They moved on to other business, the way people talk about funerals they haven’t scheduled yet. I let my mind drift, staring at the ledger book in the center of the table, stamped with the club’s blood-red scythe. I wondered how many names were in there, and how many had been crossed out for good.
Damron looked at me, softer now. “Anything else?”
I shook my head, but the answer burned a hole in my tongue.
I left the war room with the sense that I’d just signed up for a thing I couldn’t unsign. The sky outside was the color of a bruise, and the air tasted like the start of something irreversible.
I walked to the garage, hands still shaking, and thought about what it meant to protect someone who didn’t want protection.
The garage was a tomb for broken gods. Every bike inside wore the marks of old disasters: bent fenders, solder scars, patches of primer where the world had taken a chunk and never said sorry.
I liked working at night. The silence was denser, the darkness softer.
I crouched over my Harley with the patience of a funeral director, tuning the carb by touch and by memory.
Grease caked my knuckles, getting into the cracks where the burn scars never really healed.
When the phone buzzed in my pocket, it was like a rifle shot. I wiped my hands on the nearest rag, but it did nothing for the grime. The screen lit up my face with a colorless glow, and the message waiting for me was exactly the one I’d been avoiding.
Thank you for the other night.
No signature, just the raw fact of her. I stood there with the wrench still in my left hand, the phone in my right, caught between two completely different kinds of loyalty. My heartbeat stuttered, then picked up speed, like the last seconds before a race.
I put the wrench down. The sound was sharp, like a tooth breaking. My thumb hovered over the keyboard. I wanted to tell her to run, to vanish, to never trust a man with a face like mine. I wanted to tell her that I’d kill for her, but that was a language she’d already learned to fear.
Instead, I typed, Stay safe.
I let it hang there for a while, unsent. Then I hit send.
For a minute, I stared at the reply icon, waiting for the three little dots that meant she was thinking of me.
Nothing. The world had already moved on.
I dropped the phone into my pocket, picked up the wrench, and went back to the bike.
The engine block was still warm from my last failed attempt to fix it.
“You in love with her?” Damron asked as he entered the garage. He’d come in to talk.
“You know I don’t know what the fuck that is.”
Daron grabbed a beer from the garage fridge. He tossed me one. “Don’t be an asshole, Nitro. It’s just a question.”
I opened the beer and sat on one of the Harleys. “She’s got me so fucking confused, brother.”
“I’m just giving you shit, Nitro. If she’s a good woman, hang on to that shit. The club will deal with the bow back.” He was being fatherly.
I took a couple of long drinks before speaking. “As fucked up as it sounds, with her, it feels right.” I shrugged.
Damron finished his beer and started toward the door. “Do what you got to do, brother. We got your back.”
Damron left the garage, leaving me questioning where I thought my life was heading unexpectedly.