Chapter 5
RYDER
Eden had put my clothes on her porch while the compound was under fire, and the shape of them through the clubhouse window kept pulling my attention off the men who could get us killed.
Bear stood over the county map with one hand near the southern boundary.
Jax worked two phones. Gage sat with his bad leg stretched under the table.
The first strike had come in on the south route, where a man can make noise from cover and never get within two hundred yards of concrete.
They were timing our response, not taking ground.
The prospect assigned to the service road still wasn’t answering, and that was the part I didn’t like.
I had been standing since four in the morning and my knees had begun filing complaints.
Thirty-eight years old, six foot two, two hundred and forty pounds, and the gut I keep just short of soft pressed the table edge when I leaned over the sheet.
The drag-mark down the point of my left shoulder had gone tight the way it does ahead of weather.
I kept my right side turned into the room, because with the aid in my left ear a room this loud arrives as pressure instead of words, and I needed every word.
Eden told me once that my eyes were the exact brown of the river below Terre Haute and that it had not been a compliment.
She used to put her thumb on the white scar by my mouth when she wanted me to stop talking.
Bear didn’t look up. “Leah. June. Tessa. Hall or the clubhouse floor, I don’t care which. Civilians don’t stand at this table during a breach.”
“I’m not a civilian. I’m Gage’s wife and I was in that house forty minutes ago.” Leah didn’t move. She had flour on one sleeve from Eden’s kitchen.
June set her clipboard on the corner of the county sheet, squared it, and folded her hands on it. Tessa put her back against the wall by the door, which was as far toward compliance as she was willing to travel.
Bear looked at the three of them for about two seconds, weighed the cost of removing them against the cost of letting them listen, and went back to the map. That decision is why every word I said in the next four minutes reached my wife before dark.
“Eden couldn’t finish a sentence on that porch,” Leah said. “You let her load her own car in this heat, and now your shit is outside her door. Tell me what happened before I hear it from a prospect.”
I gave Bear the cover story I had built for the club.
Nothing in the room matched the plan. Eden was supposed to be past the gate by now, on the highway and gone.
Jess was supposed to confirm the story to Dez, leave by the east route, and come apart into a new name.
The club was supposed to see a dead marriage and a pregnant woman I had picked, and hand Eden enough anger to keep her away when I couldn’t follow.
Instead my wife was in our house, Jess was stuck at the old garage, and everybody who loved Eden was standing close enough to watch the lie work.
“The marriage has been fucked for months. I should’ve told the table before it got here. ”
Gage leaned in without moving the leg that never healed right. “Got here how?”
“There’s someone else. She’s pregnant.” I kept my eyes on Gage, because Leah’s face made the words harder and they had to sound like a confession out of a faithless husband. “Eden found out this morning.”
Tessa came off the wall. “The blond girl you had sitting by the garage.”
“Her name’s Jess.”
“The blond girl you had sitting by the garage is carrying your baby.”
“Yes.” The lie had been easier when Jess and I rehearsed it in a rented room off 41 with the door propped open and a bus timetable on the bed between us.
I had planned Eden’s questions, Jess’s fear, the unlocked burner, the balance she would find.
I had not planned to stand in Bear’s clubhouse and hear Tessa call the invented child mine while my wife sat by herself in the house I had told her she didn’t own.
June put both hands on the back of an empty chair. She doesn’t raise her voice when anger hands her facts to collect. “You told Bear your marriage was failing before Eden knew there was a problem. When did you decide everybody else deserved time to adjust to her divorce before she did?”
“She knew we had problems.” It belonged to the Eden I had spent a week inventing for the people who loved her.
Leah came around the corner of the table before Gage caught her wrist. He didn’t tell her to calm down.
He only kept her from reaching me while she stared out the window at the house.
“She defended you yesterday. She stood in that kitchen and told us you’d say so if the Silas trouble touched her, and you let her believe it while you waited on your pregnant girlfriend to knock. ”
“Jess isn’t my girlfriend.” It was out before I could put it back.
Tessa took a step. “Then what the fuck is she?”
Jax laid one phone facedown on the map, his attention on the message coming into the other. “Movement outside the south fence, the gate controls took a hit, and one of ours isn’t answering his radio. Park the domestic shit.”
Men cleared after him. Bear didn’t. He looked at me for as long as it takes a man to read a road sign, and then he said it to the map. “We’ll come back to that sentence.”
Nobody at that table knew about the photograph.
It came in on the fifth of July, to a secured phone whose number nobody in this club has, from a man I pay who drinks with people who work for Dez.
Eden outside the Kroger on Forty-One in a black shirt, one paper bag against her hip and her keys in her teeth, her head turned toward somebody who had said her name behind her.
A red dot on her chest, four inches below the collarbone, dead center, steady enough to sit still for the shutter.
Not a threat somebody made. A demonstration somebody mailed to me.
The print is in a locked case in the officers’ hall and it has never been anywhere else, and no man in this building has seen it.
I could have put it on the counter in front of her.
That’s the first thing. Eden with flour to the wrist, the photograph turned around so she could read it herself, and me saying somebody has been aiming at you for a week.
She’d have gone white and then she’d have gone hard.
She’d have asked how many days, how many cameras, whether the man had been inside the store behind her.
She’d have called Mia before dinner and had something in writing by Tuesday.
Bear closes the compound. Leah keeps the medication where no man can move it.
Aris prepares for more than the drive I had already planned for my wife.
Every one of those roads ends with Eden holding the facts and choosing, and she would have chosen the compound, the women, and me.
Every path. She stays. Staying is the thing that kills her.
So I took the choosing away from her, and I would take it again, and inside a month she is going to understand what I was looking at.
Jess was easy to find because Dez had already made her desperate.
Twenty-two, a debt that grew every time she paid it, and a threat he’d stopped bothering to dress up: work for him however he chose, or he sells the debt and her with it.
Dez collects for Silas. Anything Dez believes reaches Silas inside a day, and that one fact is the whole reason a frightened girl outside Terre Haute was worth fifty thousand dollars of my own money.
I first offered to pull her out in June.
She said no after Dez sent photographs of her brother’s apartment.
When the Kroger picture came, I went back with the fifty from my lockbox, club protection, relocation papers, and a name.
All I wanted was for her to let Dez believe I’d been in her bed for months and that she was carrying.
She understood Eden would be hurt. I understood it better than she did.
I picked the baby because Eden will fight another woman for a husband she loves and she will not make a child the reason its father didn’t come home.
She told me that herself, sitting on a tailgate after one of her cousins used the kids in a divorce.
I remembered it and I used it, and she did what I said she would do, down to the hour.
Being right about a woman that far out is what knowing her looks like.
The burner took four days. Months of messages, meeting times, ordinary questions, a motel history, a pregnancy that lined up with the weeks I’d been out late.
I used our words — stay where I put you, I’ll come get you — because Eden believes what hurts her most, and I needed her to believe it inside of one morning.
The ninety-four thousand sat untouched in a dormant account she’d get back with interest. I serviced her car, filled the tank, put the refill and the papers in the glove box, and arranged for Dez to hear that Eden had run west talking about Denver.
Jess goes east under a new name. Silas’s people spend a week chasing two women who don’t exist while my wife is somewhere nobody can walk me to.
I had built her a road, a full tank, and a hundred and twelve dollars.
No destination. I told myself that was the clean part, because a destination is something that can be taken out of a person, and not knowing where she went was the safest thing I had to give.
Eden has been getting herself across this state since she was nineteen. She would find a room by dark.
Bear dragged a finger along the service road. “Gate stays shut until we know whether that prospect sold us or got taken. East row holds, same as I called it when I closed the gate. Everybody near the garage comes into the clubhouse. No vehicle leaves without my order and an armed route.”