Switchback's Fury (Reno Wreckers MC #3)

Chapter 1

The dryer in bay six was trying to die again.

Nora Whitfield had one arm buried to the elbow inside the drum housing, her cheek pressed flat against the warm steel panel, fingers hunting blind for the snap ring she'd dropped into the guts of the machine twenty minutes ago.

The Ace High hummed around her — fourteen washers still cycling, the fluorescents buzzing their flat tune overhead, and somewhere behind her Mrs. Pak's morning load thumping off-balance in bay two like a slow heartbeat nobody had asked for.

"Come on, you stubborn piece of—" Her middle finger caught the ring. She hooked it, dragged it up past a knot of lint the size of a fist, and snapped it back into the roller bracket by feel. The drum gave a low groan and started turning again.

She pulled her arm free, wiped the grease down the thigh of her jeans, and blew a strand of brassy red hair off her face.

Two-fifteen in the morning. The block outside was dead — just the orange wash of the one working streetlight on the boulevard and the faint casino glow riding the clouds south toward downtown Reno.

In here, though, the Ace High was alive. It was always alive.

Old Milt had his usual spot by the front window, dozing upright in the plastic chair with his laundry cart parked beside him like a shopping cart he'd brought to a campfire.

Two stools down, a night-shift waitress from the diner on Prater folded her uniforms into tight squares with the efficiency of a woman who'd been doing it on no sleep for a decade.

A kid Nora didn't recognize sat cross-legged on the floor by the vending machine, earbuds in, waiting on a single load that probably held everything he owned.

This was her congregation. The three-a.m. people.

The ones who worked when the city slept and slept when it didn't, and the only open, lit, warm place on this stretch of Sparks at this hour was the one Nora had rebuilt with her own hands, machine by secondhand machine, until the Ace High ran around the clock and the door never locked.

She loved it the way some women loved houses they'd inherited.

Except she hadn't inherited a damn thing.

She'd scraped and waited tables and tended bar and cleaned motel rooms the same way her mother had, and when she'd finally saved enough to take over a failing coin laundry on a block nobody was fighting over, she'd torn it down to the plumbing and put it back together herself.

Every coin mech. Every water valve. Every dryer drum. Hers.

The bell over the front door chimed.

Nora glanced up from the panel she was bolting back into place. Two men came in out of the cold, and the temperature in the room dropped ten degrees that had nothing to do with the night air.

They wore good coats. That was the first wrong thing.

Nobody who washed at the Ace High at two in the morning wore a coat that cost more than their rent.

The taller one had a clipboard tucked under his arm — an actual clipboard, like he was here to read the gas meter — and the shorter one kept his hands in his pockets and his eyes everywhere, cataloguing the room the way a man does when he's measuring what he might have to break.

Nora set her wrench down on the folding table. Slow. Quiet. She didn't stand up. Not yet.

"Help you?"

The tall one smiled. It was the kind of smile she'd seen on landlords and used-car finance guys and every man who'd ever tried to sell her mother something she couldn't afford.

"Nora Whitfield?"

"That's on the sign out front."

"My name's Dell Rourke." He said it like she should write it down. "I'm here on behalf of a Mr. Curtis Vane. I believe you know the name."

She didn't. But the way he said it — like the name itself was a weight he was setting on her counter — told her everything the name was supposed to mean.

"Never heard of him."

Rourke's smile didn't waver. He pulled a folded document from inside the clipboard and laid it on the counter between them like a card dealer turning a river card.

"Your father, Gerald Whitfield, entered into a private lending agreement with Mr. Vane eighteen months ago.

Sixty-two thousand dollars, plus the accrued interest and penalties outlined on page three. "

Nora looked at the paper. She didn't touch it.

"My father," she said, flat and careful, "hasn't been in this building or this state in four years."

"Mr. Vane is aware of your father's current absence.

" Rourke's voice was patient, rehearsed, a collector's rhythm she recognized the way she recognized a busted bearing — by the ugly sound it made.

"The agreement contains a collateral provision.

In the event of default, Mr. Vane is entitled to pursue recovery against the borrower's tangible assets or those of the borrower's immediate family.

That's you, Ms. Whitfield. And this—" He gestured around the room, taking in the machines, the folding tables, the buzzing lights, Mrs. Pak's thumping washer. "—is the tangible asset."

The waitress had stopped folding. Old Milt's eyes were open. The kid by the vending machine had pulled one earbud out.

Nora stood up.

She was tall — taller than Rourke's partner in his good coat — and she unfolded to her full height the way she did everything, loose-jointed and unhurried, like the room owed her the time.

She picked up the document between two fingers, the way you'd pick up something you found on the floor of a gas station bathroom, and she read it. All three pages. She took her time.

Then she folded it in half, set it back on the counter, and looked at Dell Rourke the way she looked at a jammed coin mech — knowing exactly which part was broken and which part was a bluff.

"This is a piece of paper," she said, "with a name I don't know, a debt I didn't take, and a signature that isn't mine.

My father's a gambling man who owes half the state and hasn't left a forwarding address with any of them.

If your Mr. Vane wants his sixty-two thousand dollars, he can find Gerald Whitfield and have this conversation with him. You're in the wrong laundromat."

Rourke's smile finally cracked at the edges. Just a flicker — the patient mask slipping to show the heavyset, quick-tempered man underneath, the one who'd come in expecting a woman alone at two in the morning to fold the way she folded shirts.

"Ms. Whitfield, I'd encourage you to consider the alternative to—"

"The alternative is you're standing in my place of business past midnight scaring my customers over a debt that has my deadbeat father's name on it and nobody else's.

" Nora picked up her wrench. Not like a weapon.

Like a woman who had work to do and was done with the interruption.

"I've got a dryer to finish and a floor to mop before five. The door's right where you found it."

The shorter one shifted. His hands came halfway out of his pockets, and Nora clocked it — not fists, but the twitch of a man used to people flinching when he moved.

She didn't flinch. She'd thrown grown men out of this building herself when they mouthed off to her night-shift women, and two collectors in good coats weren't going to be the thing that made her back up in her own place.

"We'll be in touch," Rourke said. The rehearsed patience was back, but thinner now, stretched over something that sounded a lot like a man recalculating how much trouble he'd just volunteered for.

They walked out. The bell chimed behind them, cheerful and stupid.

Nora stood behind the counter with the wrench in her hand and watched them through the plate glass.

They crossed the lot, got into a dark sedan parked under the one streetlight, and didn't leave.

The engine turned over. The headlights didn't come on.

They just sat there, idling at the curb across the street, two shapes in a dark car watching the only lit window on the block.

She set the wrench down. Her hands were steady. Her pulse wasn't.

Sixty-two thousand dollars. Her father — the man who'd drifted through her childhood like weather, showing up with presents and promises and vanishing before the rent came due — had finally found a way to cost her something she couldn't replace.

Not money. Money she'd lost before. He'd put a target on the Ace High.

On the building she'd rebuilt with her own hands.

On the three-a.m. people who had nowhere else warm and open.

She walked the floor. Checked on Mrs. Pak, who'd switched her load and was folding towels with the determined focus of a woman who'd decided not to ask questions.

Touched Old Milt's shoulder as she passed; he'd closed his eyes again, but his knobby hand tightened on the arm of his chair in a way that said he'd heard everything.

The kid by the vending machine had both earbuds back in and his eyes on the door, and Nora made a mental note to learn his name before the week was out.

She found Darla, her night woman, restocking the soap dispenser by the back wall.

"Lock the back door," Nora said. "Don't open it for anyone you don't know until I say otherwise."

Darla looked at her — a long, quiet look between two women who'd worked the graveyard together long enough to hear what wasn't being said. Then she nodded and went for the deadbolt.

Nora walked back to the front window. The sedan was still there, still dark, still idling. She could see the cherry glow of a cigarette through the driver's side glass.

They weren't leaving.

She banked the register, counted the coins by feel the way she always did, and set the bag in the floor safe under the counter. Then she pulled a stool up to the window and sat down with a can of soda and her phone, watching the dark car the way it watched her.

She was good at waiting. She'd waited through a childhood of missing fathers and shifting addresses. She'd waited through three towns and a decade of other people's dirt under her fingernails. She'd waited for the Ace High, and when it came, she hadn't blinked.

She wasn't going to blink now.

But sitting in the bright window of the only open place on a dead block at two-thirty in the morning, watching men in an idling car who wanted to take everything she'd built, Nora Whitfield knew one thing with the clean, cold certainty of a woman who fixed her own machines: they'd be back before her shift ended.

And next time, they wouldn't bother with the clipboard.