Chapter 3
CHAPTER THREE
Rooster
Nobody's said a word in ten seconds, and I've counted every one of them.
Amara's hand is off the truck door.
The wind's back and it's pushing that plastic bag along the fence.
Mila's standing in the road with her chin up and her hand still in the air from the three she counted off, and she's told the president of this charter what Amara needs to do.
Amara looks at her, then she laughs.
It comes out through her nose, one breath, and she puts her hands in her back pockets and rocks up onto her toes and comes back down.
She's smiling now, and the hair on my arms goes up.
"Okay." She rolls her neck. "Let's go through that one more time."
Mila doesn't move.
"You walked onto my ground. Uninvited. Through a gate my prospect had no authority to open." Amara takes three steps and doesn't hurry about it, and stops close enough that she has to look up. "And then you told me. Told me. What my club's going to do."
"Yes."
"Yes." Amara nods. "You know who I am?"
"You're the president."
"Mm." She tips her head. "You know what that means here? Or you know the patch?"
"It means it's your call."
"It means it's my call." Amara pulls one hand out of her pocket and taps two fingers against her own chest. "So let me make one. You want to know what happens to people who come to my gate and give me instructions?"
"You put them back on the road."
"I put them back on the road." She's still smiling.
"You got that part right. You walked in here thinking you had leverage, and you played the only card you had inside ninety seconds.
Now you're standing on my road in a jacket that isn't warm enough with nothing left in your hand. " She lets it sit. "Was that the plan?"
Mila doesn't answer.
"From where I'm standing it looks like you were counting on me being sentimental about a woman who's had a hard time.
" Amara's voice doesn't move an inch. "I'm not.
I've got four of them inside that building right now and every one of them earned their place in it.
You haven't earned a glass of fucking water. "
I open my mouth.
"Don't." Amara doesn't look at me. "You don't get to talk yet. You're going to want to and you're not going to."
Mila's hand comes down slowly.
She's looking at Amara and she's doing what she's done since the second I put eyes on her, which is nothing.
I used to know every look she had. I don't know this one.
"You're right," Mila says.
"I know."
"I played it early." One corner of her mouth pulls and it's gone before I can be sure it happened. "I'd do it again. You were going to put me back on the road at hello, and now you're standing in the cold talking to me."
The wind goes through the fence.
Amara looks at her for a long time.
Then she walks back to the truck and puts her hand on the door, and she's not smiling anymore.
I don't know which one of them won.
"Get in," she says. "Both of you."
"I said I'd walk."
"You did." Amara pulls the door open. "You were also right about one thing, and I don't say that a lot, so get in the damn truck before I remember I'm annoyed."
Mila walks past me and gets in the back.
Marco's still standing outside the hut with his hands half up like nobody's told him he can put them down.
Amara points at the front seat. I take it.
Nobody talks on the drive.
I've got my hands on my knees, dried blood down my forearm, and I can see her in the side mirror the whole way.
She's not looking at the buildings.
She's looking at the ground. The run of the road, where it turns, the break in the fence line for the second gate, the culvert, the gap between the garage and the wall.
Her eyes go over all of it in a pattern and her head barely moves.
I know what that is.
I did that for two years in three states before I crossed the river and it's still in me, and I'm sitting in a truck watching her do it out the back window of my own club.
Somebody taught her that.
Somebody made her learn it.
Amara pulls up in front of the clubhouse and cuts the engine.
"Razor. Dante." She says it to the windshield. "Nobody else."
"Prez—"
"Rooster." She turns her head and looks at me for the first time since the gate. "Six years I've known you. You've never once given me a reason."
"No, ma'am."
"So you're going to walk into my office and give me all of it." She opens her door. "All of it. Because I'm about to sit across from a woman with your real name in her mouth, and I'd rather hear it from you than find out I was the last one in the room to know."
She gets out.
I sit there with my hands on my knees.
I've done it before.
Truck door, road, gone, and nothing behind me but a paid-up rent and a shirt on a hanger.
Took me nine minutes once. It's the easiest thing I know how to do.
I get out of the truck.
* * *
Amara's office has a window to the courtyard, a desk that came out of a school, a couple of armchairs, and a couch nobody sits on.
Dante's against the wall by the door with his arms crossed.
He won't say anything unless she wants him to.
Every time I've been in this room he's been standing right there.
Razor's in the chair by the window with one boot up on his knee and a bottle of water he's not drinking.
Mila's on the couch with the backpack on her lap and both hands on it.
Amara sits on the front edge of the desk, one foot on the floor. "Go."
The heater's running. There's a fly on the inside of the window that's been dead since summer and nobody's moved it.
"My name's Finn Kincaid."
"Keep going."
There's a plate in my mother's wrist.
That's what comes up. Her wrist. The pin scars she covers with her sleeve when she's out, and the way she switched hands for her coffee cup and never switched back.
"They ran her off the road," I say.
Razor's boot comes off his knee. "Who did?"
"My mother. She was—" My hand comes up and does something in the air and I put it back down. "Forty minutes. Upside down."
Razor looks at Amara.
Amara hasn't moved. "Rooster."
"Yeah."
"Come back." She says it the way you'd talk to a horse. "Start somewhere I can follow."
"I don't—" The blood on my forearm's gone dry and tight and I can feel it pull when I move. "It doesn't go in a line. It's not a line, Prez, it's all in there in a pile and I haven't said any of it out loud in ten years."
Dante shifts against the wall.
"Then don't give me a line." Amara leans back on her palms. "Give me whatever's on top."
"My mother's half Mexican."
Dante's arms come uncrossed.
"Her mother. My grandmother, I never met her.
" I'm looking at the fly. "My mother, Marie, never knew her either.
Raised on her father's name, her father's whole world.
She doesn't even speak one word of Spanish. She's never been to the town her mother is from and there's nothing of it in her. She presents as white. You’d never know she was Latina. Now, she’s not ashamed of her heritage, but it’s important to say for her whole life, nobody knew. "
"Somebody found out," Amara says.
"Somebody went looking." My hands are going and I let them. "That's what I need— that's the part. It wasn't an accident. A man in that fucked up organization went and pulled her records because he wanted to know."
"What organization?" Razor asks.
"Ironwood."
Razor sets the water bottle on the floor.
"Southern Arizona. They started inside and came out." My voice is coming out somewhere over my own head. "Guns, mostly. Whatever else paid. My father worked for them for nineteen years."
"Your father?"
"Oliver Kincaid. Ollie." Something's wrong with my throat. "He wasn't a believer. I know how that sounds in this room, and I'm telling you anyway. He was a working man who took work, and by the time he understood what he'd taken he was in it, and you don't just quit a job like that."
"How old were you?" Amara asks.
"When?" My hands are back on my knees and I don't remember putting them there.
She doesn't blink. "When he brought you in."
The heater ticks.
"Sixteen."
"Chingado." Dante's arms come apart and he pushes off the wall, one step, and then he stops himself and leans back into it. He hasn't said a word since I walked in.
"Loading. Driving. Standing where he told me to stand and not asking." My eyes are burning, and I don't do anything about it. "By eighteen I could've put nine men in prison, and I didn't know that yet, I didn't know what I had, I was a kid on a job site."
"And then they found out about your mother," Amara says.
"It was a brick through the front window first." I'm going too fast now and I can't slow it down.
"Then they got my dad in a parking lot in Douglas.
Four of them. Men he'd worked beside for years, one of them was at my confirmation, one of them taught me to drive a forklift.
Then it was the house. Then it was me, at school, in the lot. Then—"
I stop.
There's nothing coming through my throat and I stand there with my mouth open like a fish.
"Then," Amara says.
"Ninety-two. Outside Hereford." It comes out in pieces and I can't do anything about the pieces. "They put her into the ditch, and she rolled it, and she was upside down in that car for forty minutes before a rancher found her. Forty minutes. Hanging in the belt."
Razor's not looking at me anymore. He's looking at the floor.
"There was nothing to give them."
Amara's head comes up.
"You understand? There's nothing. If it's money you pay it, if it's a debt you work it off—there's nothing.
It's her blood. It's what she is." My voice comes apart in the middle of it and I keep going through the hole.
"She was born wrong in their eyes. There's nothing to hand across a table, and there’s no way they’ll ever stop. "
The heater cuts off and the room's so loud I can hear Razor breathing.
"So we went in."
"Both of you," Amara says.
"Federal building in Tucson on a random Monday." I've got my hand over my mouth and I take it down. "We gave them everything. Names, routes, buyers, three bodies they hadn't found, years of my father's life. I was twenty-five."
Nobody says anything.
"Wendell Trask got thirty-eight years. He's the head of Ironwood. He's still in, and he'll die in."
"And after," Amara says.
"My father's in protective custody. Federal.
Ten years, and he'll be in it till they bury him.
" My hands won't stop. "My mother divorced him.
She found out what he'd been doing all those years, what he'd signed her up for and never asked, and that was it.
She hasn't said his name since. Not once, not to me. "
"And you?"
"I ran. They gave me the program. I took it for eight months and walked out, because the marshals wanted me in Ohio and I'm not—I wasn't going to Ohio.
And because Trask's people found the first place they put me inside a year.
" I make myself look at her. "So I did it myself.
I went where they wouldn't look. Finn Kincaid died in a federal building in Tucson. I've been Rooster ever since."
Razor speaks for the first time. "You ratted them out?"
There it is.
"I did what I had to to protect my family."
"You sat in a federal building and gave them names."
"Yes."
Razor looks at Amara and doesn't say anything else.
He doesn't have to. It's in the room now and it's not going anywhere.
I've known it would be in this room since the day I rode up to that gate and told them I was Rooster.
"Say the rest," Amara says.
I look at her.
"You want to explain it." She turns her hand over. "Go ahead. This is the one time you get to."
"No."
Razor's chin comes up. "No?"
"There's nothing to explain." My voice is level now. It came back from wherever it went and I don't trust it. "You want me to tell you I'm sorry so you can put me somewhere. I'm not doing that."
"Rooster—"
"My mother nearly died." I look right at him. "I'd do it again tomorrow, I'd do it again if you were in that room and I had to walk past you to get to the door, and I'd be sick about it every day for the rest of my life, and I'd still do it."
Razor doesn't say anything.
"That's all of it," I tell him. "There isn't any more."
The heater kicks back on.
Amara hasn't moved off the desk. Arms crossed, head tipped, looking at me the way she looks at a bike she's thinking about buying.
"Six years," she says.
"Yes, ma'am."
"You prospected for me for six years and never pushed. Never asked me about the patch once." She taps two fingers on her arm. "I had a bet with Zorro about you."
"Prez—"
"He said you were running from a wife." Her face doesn't change. "I said it was worse than that. He owes me a bottle of something. Something strong at that."
Razor makes a sound that isn't a laugh.
"Here's what I've got." Amara pushes off the desk.
"A prospect who lied about his name, which I already knew, because every man in this building lied about something to get through the door, and I don't really give a shit.
And a prospect who talked to the feds, which I do care about, and which I'm going to think about, and it isn't getting settled in this room today. "
"Prez." Razor stands up. "Church."
"Yeah. There'll be church." Amara doesn't turn around. "I'm not doing this behind a shut door like it's a secret. Every brother gets to look at him and say his piece, and then I'll make the call, and that's the end of it."
My stomach's gone somewhere south of the floor.
"Till then." She comes around in front of me. "Bike stays where it is. You stay on the property. You don't go past that gate, you don't touch a phone that isn't in my hand, and if you're smart, you'll do all of it without me saying it twice."
"Yes, ma'am."
"And Rooster."
I look up.
"I'm not angry with you." She stops close enough that I have to drop my chin to see her.
"I want you to hear it, because you're standing there braced like I'm going to hit you and I'm not going to hit you.
I've had you on my gate and in my garage and in my kitchen for years.
I know what you are. One word out of a woman's mouth doesn't undo years of watching a man’s hard work. "
My eyes go and I can't stop them.
I stand there in front of my president and let it happen because there's nothing left in me to fight it with.
She lets me have it. She doesn't say a word about it.
"But I'm not the club," Amara says. "And you know that better than I do."
"Yes, ma'am."
"Good." She looks past my shoulder. "Now. Ms. Bacani."
I'd forgotten she was there.
That's a lie. I've felt her on that couch behind me through every word like a hand on the back of my neck and I haven't turned around once.
Amara walks past me.
"He gave me his whole life in four minutes," she says. "Your turn."
So, I turn around.
She's got both hands on that backpack and she hasn't opened it.
Her face is exactly where it was at the gate, exactly, not one thing has moved on it in the last ten minutes.
She's not surprised.
She hasn't been surprised once.