Chapter 32
RYDER
“The complete source history,” Eden said. “Who stopped the courier, what was on the phone, when you learned it, and whether anybody at my bakery has been questioned.”
The photograph lay between us in its sleeve.
The angle out of the vacant service building covered the rear door, the employee spaces, and the lane where the dumpster enclosure used to block the camera.
That enclosure was one of three items she took out of the November security review and paid for herself — a second camera on the south approach, a light over the lot path, the enclosure moved twenty feet so the lane opened to the lens.
Whoever took this picture waited for her to come out with the bag and for June to walk on the road side.
They know the routine as it is now, not as it was in the fall.
I knew the compound’s safest room, which truck could leave without the main gate, and how fast Jax could put armed men around this house. I knew where she kept an overnight bag, because I had watched her carry it in from the hospital. Every answer arrived complete. None of them was mine.
Jax leaned against the counter with his cut still on.
“State trooper stopped Nolan Greer outside Terre Haute for a taillight. Greer ran, they took him behind a farm-supply store, and they found meth, the phone, the photograph, and a map sleeve with Silas’s route marks.
Trooper knew the name off the notice Bear circulated after the summer.
Our attorney got copies through the task force this morning. ”
“Is Greer Silas’s man?” Eden asked, one finger on the source line.
“He carried cash for him twice last year. One photograph of Greer at a Silas property, one witness who puts him on a fuel run. We don’t know whether Silas ordered this picture, saw it, or knows Greer had it.”
“What was on the phone?”
I put the device summary beside the sleeve.
“Pictures of the rear lane, your Civic, June’s truck, the employee exit, and the road between the bakery and the bank.
Nothing from inside the compound. Three messages use codes Silas has used for supply movements.
One says, Widow closes Thursday. South watch first. It came in yesterday afternoon. ”
Her eyes came up at the word widow. I had made that title available to anybody listening the day I claimed Jess in front of my own club.
“Thursday is tomorrow,” she said. “What does closes mean?”
“I don’t know.” I wanted to hand her the worst reading so she’d take the fastest removal, which is the July trick with better manners.
“It may be the bakery’s closing hour. It may be an instruction to close the route.
It may mean Greer meant to stop you. The pictures and the bank road support an intended interception.
They don’t tell us whether the target is you, the deposit, or whoever comes when somebody touches you. ”
“Has anyone contacted Brenda, my employees, the landlord, or the monitoring company?”
“No.” I kept both hands flat beside my phone so she could see I hadn’t started working through it.
“Is anyone outside my bakery?”
“No club team. State police have Greer’s phone. They may put somebody there. We haven’t been told.”
She turned the summary over and read the call log on the back, and stopped.
“You called Aris.”
“Yes.”
“Before you asked whether you could come into my kitchen.”
“Yes.”
“Say why.”
“Because I wanted the medical piece standing up before you had the chance to tell me no.”
Eden set the page down. “Aris isn’t a resource you pre-position. He’s my clinician. Every form in that drawer exists so nobody arranges care around my body while I’m standing on a porch waiting to be told what’s happening.”
There were four ways to make it smaller — he got no details, it took thirty seconds, Bear was already coming — and I could hear every one of them arriving in my mouth. “I broke it. Not the letter of the form. The thing the form is for.”
“When we get him on a screen, you say that to him. Not me.” She wrote a line in her own notebook. “Sit down.”
The kitchen door opened and Bear came in with Mia and Leah behind him. Eden’s permission covered all three. Bear took off his hat and sat in the chair beside Jax rather than the one at the end of the table. The house was hers. There was no head to it for him.
“Jax gave me the short account,” Bear said. “I haven’t issued a route order. What do you need from us?”
For years I had answered that question before a civilian knew it had been asked.
“The Copper Kettle closes now, through the weekend,” Eden said.
“Employees get paid for scheduled hours. Mia notifies the insurer and the landlord once we agree on the wording. Brenda gets a call from me. Nobody tells her I’m leaving town or going to a safehouse.
” She pulled the county map across the table.
“And there are four days of receipts in that safe. My policy doesn’t cover cash left in an unattended building past forty-eight hours, and I’m not putting my manager in that lane to fetch it.
It goes to the bank tomorrow whether anybody is watching the road or not. ”
“Send an empty bag with a hired driver,” I said. “The watcher gets his run. Nothing in the car is worth taking.”
“Then I’ve built a lie and put a stranger inside it.” She didn’t raise her voice. “The run is real and the money is real. The only question on this table is who’s in the car and what road it takes.”
“You’re not staying alone in this house either,” I said, before I could stop the order from leaving me.
Eden turned her head. She didn’t need to reach for a knife anymore. “Try that again.”
I wanted her behind concrete with men at every door, and that want had once been enough to make me lie to her for six days.
“I believe staying alone creates unnecessary risk. The compound has guards and the summer proved the perimeter can be reached. I recommend somebody you choose sleeps in the house or the house next door. I don’t get to assign them. ”
“Leah tonight. June and Tessa after that if it continues. Nobody sleeps in my bedroom, and Ryder doesn’t use their presence to get house information.”
“Agreed.” I wrote it under the others and hated how badly I wanted to say that a woman asleep in a guest room cannot stop a rifle from a tree line. “The north bedroom window is visible from beyond the inner fence. I recommend the rear guest room. You can reject that.”
Eden looked at her own floor plan. “Rear guest room. Blinds closed after dark.”
“I’ll bring my own things,” Leah said. “I won’t move yours.”
“What else?” Bear asked, and left his hat by the chair and his authority out of her answer.
Eden put her finger on the bakery. “They expect Thursday. I want to know who watches when I do exactly what they think I’m going to do.”
“Absolutely fucking not,” I said, and I was halfway over the map before I heard the order in my own voice.
Jax looked at me and said nothing. Mia opened her notebook. Bear waited for Eden.
“Tell me what you think I proposed,” she said.
“You want to put yourself in that lane and wait for Greer’s people to move.”
“I want to be part of a visible group on a road I approve while the task force and the club watch the watchers. I’m not walking into that lane alone with a deposit bag.” She looked at the map, not at me. “Go outside.”
“Eden —”
“One hour. You come back when Mia calls you, and you come back with recommendations and no verbs.”
I stood in her yard for an hour. Cold wind out of the northwest, the bunkhouse behind me and her kitchen window lit in front of me with five people around a table working on my wife’s life.
Gage crossed the road once, looked at me, and kept walking.
The old certainty ran the whole hour: a second vehicle off the county road, the task force losing the tail, a driver panicking and ramming the Civic, Eden coughing and losing the moment she’d need to get her head down.
All of it possible, none of it known. In July I turned exactly that list into the right to take her life apart, and the list hasn’t got any weaker since.
Mia opened the door at ten past four. “Route options. Not your feelings about them.”
The plan took the rest of the afternoon because Eden refused anything that depended on her not knowing.
Jax put the task-force lieutenant on speaker with her in the room.
Greer had refused to talk, the phone had been wiped of older traffic, state police could cover the bakery, the bank road, and the south service approach, and they would not use Eden as an uninformed decoy or authorize the club to stage anything armed.
“One more thing,” the lieutenant said. “Greer gave us his half brother’s name and a Kentucky license at the scene and we’ve held him under it.
He hasn’t been booked as Greer, he hasn’t been arraigned, and nobody has called anybody.
Whoever pays him thinks his phone’s dead and his truck’s in a lot somewhere.
That window shuts when we charge him. Tomorrow afternoon it’s still open. ”
Eden made him say it twice and wrote it down.
She chose June to drive because June knew the route and wouldn’t take an order from me for the sole reason that I’d sworn while giving it.
Leah behind Eden with the kit Eden specified.
Jax in the front seat as the only armed club member in the car.
The Civic would leave in daylight, pull into the rear lane behind a state unit, empty the safe, and run the ordinary bank road with the money in it.
Two state vehicles out of sight, Bear’s truck ahead inside normal traffic, and me far enough back that anyone watching her could commit before he saw me.