Chapter 7
RYDER
Bear cleared movement at nine forty. I picked the jacket up off the bench where Jess had left it and walked her from the equipment building to the center hall, keeping the concrete between her and the county road while I watched the sightlines I couldn’t close.
The split seam under the left sleeve ran past my thumb the whole way.
Eden had sewn it at our kitchen table in a temper about cheap leather and expensive idiots while I held the lamp for her, then collected payment for the repair on the kitchen floor with flour still on her hands.
I had put all of that around a stranger’s shoulders in front of my wife, and the room had believed every part of it.
Jess stopped short of the door. “Don’t do that again. I was frightened. I’d have taken a blanket off anybody in that room.”
“Anybody wouldn’t hold.” I folded the jacket over my arm and hated how fast I reached for the plan whenever she named the woman paying for it. “Dez has to hear you’re under my protection. If there’s a leak inside this fence, that man needs to see it too.”
“Let him hear it, then. Stop making her watch.” She stayed out in the corridor and let me go in alone. “You said she’d be gone. She isn’t. Every time you come near me she looks like you’ve found a new way to tell her she was stupid for believing you.”
Through the common-room doorway I could see Eden at the interior wall with Leah, June and Tessa, eating nothing. Her purse sat against her thigh. The knife had gone back inside it and I knew to the inch where her hand would go.
“The Denver trail hasn’t cleared,” I said. “Silas’s people need to chase a woman who ran west after finding out her husband had a second family. If I stop performing now they look back here before the road opens.”
“You’re talking about her like she left. She’s sitting right there.”
“She was supposed to leave.” The sentence sounded like nothing at all with Eden across the room.
“She was supposed to believe everything you said, drive until she was too angry to turn around, and stay safe with nobody she trusted anywhere near her.” Jess’s fingers went white on her purse strap.
She had taken my money after seeing what Dez did to her brother, and she had never mistaken the payment for evidence I was a good man.
“Tell her what the picture showed. Let her help you build the next trail.”
I could see it complete: Eden holding the photograph, recognizing herself outside Kroger with her keys between her teeth and the red dot centered on her chest, the time stamp in the corner.
Fear would hit her first. Then she would want the range, the sightline, the name of the man my source had paid for the file, and a map.
“If she has it, she gets to refuse the route.”
Jess stared at me. “That’s why you won’t tell her.”
“That’s why I didn’t.” I corrected the tense while building another day out of the same reason.
Six days, I told myself. A confirmed pickup in Denver, a locked room with Bear and Mia, the photograph on the table, and Eden would follow the logic, because she had married a man who built routes and she had always understood the difference between a lie and a wall holding weight.
Jax called me to the table before I could get back outside.
The county map had gained grease-pencil marks along the west route, and eleven phones sat in numbered evidence bags at the far end.
Bear stood at the window watching prospects unload bottled water.
Gage had his cane hooked over the chair beside him, which was Leah’s chair, and Leah was in the common room at my wife’s table.
Jax held out a phone and didn’t let go of it.
“One of Dez’s boys asked a bartender on Forty-One whether anybody had seen a blond pregnant woman traveling with an Iron Brotherhood cut.
Story going around is you’ve got a kid coming and the wife ran.
You want to tell me why Silas’s debt collector knows your domestic business before this table does? ”
The confirmation should have been worth something.
Dez believed Jess had attached herself to me and somebody in his network believed Eden was gone, which was the whole arrangement.
The speed was wrong. Dez could have pushed it himself.
Somebody could have watched Jess come through the gate before the attack.
Whoever was feeding Silas could have stood in the tree line Sunday morning and reported which woman went back into the house.
Or my own trail had run farther than I built it to run: I gave my source one line about a wife heading west on the sixth and told him to spend it slowly, and a bartender on Forty-One is not slowly.
I set that fourth one down. A paid man who oversells gets people killed, and Dez had reasons of his own to talk.
“Jess was afraid Dez would come after her,” I said. “She may have told somebody before she came here.”
“She may have.” Jax laid the phone on the map. “You’ve got a pregnant woman under our roof, shooters on our gate, and no idea who she called.”
“I know who she called.” The burner in Eden’s purse held nothing but messages I wrote. Jess’s real phone was wiped and locked with her relocation papers, and saying so would end everything. “Dez knew about us before yesterday.”
Bear turned from the window. He had believed I was fucking Jess for months and appeared to find my sloppiness more insulting than the affair. “You brought an active line to Dez onto club property during a fundraiser and didn’t have Jax clear her.”
“She came before I expected her.”
“The woman says you told her Sunday,” Gage said.
He shifted his bad leg with both hands, temper tightening his face while the rest of him stayed put.
“Leah heard her on the porch. Eden heard her. Half the east row heard her. And we’re supposed to believe she picked the morning and you just happened to have every answer ready. ”
Gage had spent a year learning what fear does to a marriage when a man treats his wife’s pain as a thing he can repair later. If I told him the truth he would be at Eden’s table before I finished the sentence.
“I knew she might force it. I didn’t know she’d pick the fundraiser.”
Jax picked up the phone and moved for the door. “I’m questioning her.”
I stepped into his path before I could pretend the choice had anything to do with Dez.
Alone with Jax she might give up the rented room, the money, the whole arrangement she had been trying to end since Sunday.
“She’s frightened, pregnant, and locked inside a building that took rounds yesterday. I’ll be there.”
“You compromised the witness before she crossed the gate. You’ll be where Bear puts you.”
“Jess talks to Jax and June. No Ryder.” Bear came between us with room enough that neither of us could claim he had taken a side.
“She wants counsel, we call Mia.” Then he put both hands on the back of his chair and kept them there.
“And before anybody moves. This club has a woman in the infirmary hall eating our food, sleeping behind our wall, and pulling two men a shift off the line to watch her door. The only reason for any of it is a pregnancy I have on your word.”
“She’s four days off a bus from a man who was going to sell access to her.”
“It costs her nothing to prove the rest.” Bear’s voice didn’t rise.
That was the part I disliked. “Aris examines her, or she puts a doctor’s paper in my hand.
Seventy-two hours. After that she’s still a woman under threat and this club still helps her, but she comes out of protected housing, and she stops being your kid’s mother in every conversation held in this building. ”
Aris would need less time than Bear had given us. I nodded anyway and went out counting down a clock I hadn’t built.
A prospect started shouting from the mechanical corridor before I reached the yard.
He had found cut wire behind the ventilation housing.
Gage came with me, slower on the leg and too useful to leave behind, and we found the damage where the exterior unit met the common-room intake.
The wire had been cut before the attack and tucked back behind the housing, which left the system running while it killed one alarm.
Sabotage, bad maintenance, or a prospect covering a mistake.
I photographed it, carried it to Bear, and Bear ordered the intake closed until an electrician cleared it. I shut it down myself and hung the tag.
Smoke off the tree line had already darkened the filter. I had the radio in my hand and my thumb over Leah’s channel before I noticed doing it.
Gage watched the thumb. “Who are you calling?”
“Leah. The intake pulled road smoke toward the common room.” Saying it out loud made it sound like an order I intended to route through another man’s wife.
“Call Bear. Let Aris check everybody who was exposed.” He shifted the cane so it sat between me and the handset. “Eden told you to stay off her medicine. That include sending orders through my wife?”
“If she has an attack while every one of us is busy proving I respect a boundary, are you explaining that to her?”
“No. Aris explains the building exposure, Leah stands beside her, Eden picks what she needs. You’ll hate every part of it you don’t control.” Gage put his weight forward on the cane. “Is Jess really carrying your kid?”
The truth came up against my teeth. He wanted to know whether a child existed before he decided how much of my conduct had a reason under it.
“Yes.” I put another one on the pile waiting for my wife.
“So take care of the baby without making Eden watch you practice being a husband to its mother. Responsibility isn’t a license to humiliate her.”
“The marriage is over.” I needed him to believe that more than anyone else at that table.