Chapter 14
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Mila
Blinking a few times, I rub my eyes and look at the clock next to the bed.
Finn's gone—up before dawn the way he always is, but he left the lamp off so it wouldn't wake me.
He even folded his side of the blanket back over me so I'd keep the warmness of it.
There's a coffee on the crate by the bed gone cold hours ago because he made it and wouldn't wake me to drink it.
I lie there and look at the cold coffee for a long time.
For years I woke up every day already braced, already counting the exits before my feet hit the floor.
This morning I woke up slowly, in a warm bed, in a locked room, with a cold cup of coffee a man made me and then loved me enough to go get.
I press my face into his pillow. It smells like him.
I give myself ten more minutes of it, and then I get up, because I've never been a woman who lies in bed, and there's work that needs to be done.
There's a mirror over the little sink attached to his room, and I catch myself in it while I'm pulling my shirt on.
I stop.
I couldn't stand a mirror before.
Marie took hers down inside a week.
And I stand in Finn's room in the morning light and look at my own face on purpose, and it's still gaunt and there's still gray coming out from under my eyes—but my jaw isn't set.
My shoulders have come down off my ears.
There's a looseness through my mouth that wasn't in that face at the gate, and it takes me a second to place it, because I haven't worn it in so long.
It's a face that slept.
It's a face that got held all night by a man who didn't take one thing she didn't hand him.
I don't know that woman in the glass.
But I don't hate her, and that's new, and I carry it out the door with me like a coal in two cupped hands, careful, because I've learned not to trust good things to last and I want this one to last as far as it'll go.
Imani's at the corner table in the main room when I come out, the whole operation spread around her the way she keeps it.
The ledger. The legal pad. Her laptop, and beside it a stack of printed pages I haven't seen before, thick, stapled in sections, a federal seal on the cover sheet.
"Deposition came in," she says, not looking up. "First tranche. Rooster's father talked for six hours."
My chest pulls tight at that. Ollie. A man in a cell, talking six hours into a recorder so we can walk into that place knowing where the bodies sleep.
"You look like you slept," Imani says.
"I did."
"I can tell." She glances up, and there's a knowing at the corner of her mouth she's kind enough to leave there. "Sit down. I could use you. You know these initials better than anybody breathing, and now I've got names to hang on them."
I sit down next to her.
And for a while it's good. The same work we did before, except it goes somewhere now—she reads a name off the deposition, I find it in the ledger.
She reads a set of initials I've had memorized for eight months, I give her every date they appear, and she matches them to a name Ollie gave up.
The clean set builds itself out of the two halves, his knowledge and mine, the way the map did, and I'm fast at this.
There's a small ugly satisfaction in turning the book that held me into a noose for the men who did it.
"CR," Imani says.
"Third week of every month. Twice, some months. Goes back four years."
"Carl Reese." She writes it. "In Ollie's list. Ironwood, Tucson chapter, did five for aggravated assault." She keeps going. "DK."
"First weekends. Only ever first weekends."
"Dwight Koenig." She writes it. "Ironwood too. Ran a towing yard in Benson that Ollie says moved guns in the beds." She taps the page. "You see how they cluster? Same men, same weekends, year after year. This isn't a business that took all comers. This is a club that shared a toy."
A club that shared a toy.
I keep my face flat and I keep reading her the dates, because the alternative is to think about what she just said.
I was the toy, that I was a thing men passed between them on a schedule the way you'd pass around a cabin or a boat.
I’ve known that for years and I’ve never once heard it said out loud in a warm room by a woman with a pen, and it's different out loud.
Everything's different out loud.
"You okay?" Imani says.
"Keep going."
She keeps going.
Name after name, and every single one comes back to Ironwood.
A chapter, a sentence served, a front business with a real business running under it.
It fills in the way a photograph comes up in a developing tray—slow, and then all at once.
One organization, top to bottom. Comped at the top, paying below, every man in it a believer.
The men who put a brick through Marie's window.
The ones who ran her off Highway 92.
The same ones who came for Finn's address and killed my parents in a kitchen to get it and didn't.
They owned the place they kept me.
They didn't stumble into it, they didn't buy a night from strangers, they built it, and they filled it, and they came back on their scheduled weekends for years.
I sat in a hole under their feet and thought the men upstairs were nobody, were random, were a different evil than the one that touched Finn's life.
My hand goes still on the page.
I'm hearing it now, what I'm saying and what she's saying, and it comes up in me slowly, the way cold water comes up in a boat you didn't know had a hole.
"Imani."
"Mm?"
"These names. The regulars." My mouth's gone dry. "They're all—"
"Ironwood." She says it plainly, and she doesn't look at me while she says it, because she's kind. "The eleven regulars are all Trask's men. It's his place, Mila. His people. Deep down, I think you knew that."
"I know." And I do. But knowing a place belongs to Ironwood is one thing, and names are another, names are men, and there's a pull at the back of my skull now, a date.
A date I know in my body, and I don't want to look at it and I look at it anyway.
"The last full weekend in April. What names are on it? "
She goes still.
I watch her go still.
Imani, who reads a bad room before she reads a word. She stops writing, and she doesn't turn the page, and she looks at me instead of the ledger.
"Mila?"
"Turn the page."
"Why that weekend?" She sets the pen down."Why do you want that one?"
I can't say it, because saying it out loud makes it real, so I only look at her, and she looks back.
It moves between us without a word, because she was merchandise once too.
She knows there are dates a woman carries in her body that she'd never put on paper.
"Please," I say. "Turn the page."
She turns the page.
And there it is.
Last full weekend in April, and I don't need her to read it, because I can see it—my handwriting's nowhere on it, but the night is.
The night written down in a dead man's shorthand as a line item, a room and a length of time, and a dollar figure and a set of initials.
I know that room.
I know that length of time, because I lived every minute of it with a man's hand closing on my throat and his voice going flat while he told me he was going to kill me.
The initials next to it are RH.
"RH," I say. My voice doesn't sound like mine. "Who's RH?"
Imani doesn't want to tell me.
She doesn't want to tell me. But she's not going to be one more person who decides what I can handle.
She looks at the deposition.
"Roy Hoyt," she reads, low. "Ironwood. Trask's second cousin. He was a captain." She stops, and her jaw works before she makes herself go on. "Ollie's got a whole section on him. He's on the list of men Ollie puts at your parents' house. The night they died."
I don't hear whatever comes after that.
The floor of me drops out and everything goes through it at once.
The man who choked me until the room went gray.
The one whose face I opened in four lines with my nails.
The one they hauled me above the ground to whip, which put me outside a bunker for the first time in months and handed me the single night I could run.
Ironwood.
Trask's own blood, and he stood in my mother's kitchen.
He was there when they killed my parents. And years later, when they had me in a hole on their own property, he knew.
He knew exactly who I was.
I was never a random body to Roy Hoyt.
He'd stood in my mother's kitchen.
He knew my face, knew whose girl I was, knew what the Kincaids had cost his people and what his people had spent hunting me—and then one day the girl they never found turned up as merchandise on Trask's own ranch, and he recognized me, and he paid four hundred dollars for a night to finish what the kitchen started.
That's what the whipping was. That's what his hand on my throat was. It was never a client losing control. It was a man closing the oldest open account his organization had.
And I got away from him anyway.
I was never anything to them but a body in a room.
Even that, they took.
For years I told myself the two halves of my life were separate, that what Finn did and what happened to me were two tragedies that only happened to land on the same woman.
I said it to his face in the sunroom.
I looked at him and told him it wasn't them, nobody was sending him a message, I was just a woman with groceries.
I was wrong.
It was them. It was always them, the whole time, both halves, one organization, some of them the same actual men—and there isn't one inch of my life these last ten years that Ironwood didn't put its hands on.
And I stood in a cold sunroom and gave Finn absolution for it. I told him it wasn't his fault because it wasn't them.
It was them.
Now I have to go tell him that too.
"Mila." Imani's got a hand out, close to me, not touching. "Mila, breathe. You're not breathing."
I'm on my feet.
I don't remember standing.
The chair's gone over behind me, there's blood roaring in my ears, Imani's saying my name and I can't answer, I can't do one thing except the thing my body's already chosen, which is get to Finn, because I can't hold this by myself, because for the first time in ten years I don't want to.
"Where's Finn?" I ask, and my voice comes out in pieces.
"The garage. Mila, sit down one second, let me—"
I'm already gone.
He's under a truck when I come through the door and he's out from under it the second he hears me, because he knows my walk now the way I know everyone's.
He takes one look at my face and he's up off the creeper and across the floor with his hands already coming up.
"What is it? What happened?"
I stop in front of him.
And every word I ran across the club carrying is gone, all of it, and I stand in a cold garage in front of the man I've spent ten years hating and loving in the same breath.
"I was wrong," I say.
"Wrong about what?"
"In the sunroom. I told you it wasn't them." The tears come hot and fast and I don't fight them, I let him watch all of it. "I told you to set it down. That the men who took me weren't Ironwood. That it had nothing to do with you."
His face is changing. He's beginning to understand.
"It was them, Finn." My voice tears straight through. "The man I fought the night I got out, the reason I got out at all—he was Ironwood. Trask's blood. He was in my mother's kitchen the night they died, and he paid to spend a night with me. It was them the whole time. And I told you it wasn't."
I can't finish.
I came here and gave it back to him—the guilt, the whole rotten weight of it he'd finally started to put down—because I couldn't hold it by myself for one more second.
I watched it hit him, and I'm sick that I'm the one who put it there.
And I'd do it again anyway, because he's the only person alive I want to fall apart next to.