Chapter Five #2
Deb Alvarez had been bartending at the Boneyard for going on two years, a sharp, no-nonsense woman in her early thirties who'd come to Ember Creek from somewhere down south and never fully explained why, and who Marisol had hired specifically because she didn't flirt with the regulars and didn't tolerate anybody who tried to flirt with her either.
She looked up when the door chimed, took one look at my face, and didn't ask a single question about anything, which I appreciated more than I could have said out loud.
"Cassidy's been in twice this week going through the register tapes," she said instead, wiping down the bar top. "Man looks like he hasn't slept."
"None of us have."
"Marisol coming back to look at the books?"
"Friday morning. Before open."
Deb nodded slowly, set the rag down, looked at me with an expression I couldn't quite read, something between sympathy and a warning she'd decided not to fully voice.
"For what it's worth, Rourke, whatever you did, that woman built this place out of nothing.
She'll find whatever's wrong faster than any of us could, and she'll do it clean, because that's who she is.
You'd do well to stay out of her way and let her work. "
"That's the plan."
"Plans have a way of falling apart around you lately," she said, not unkindly, just flat and true enough that I didn't have an answer for it.
Preacher came in a few minutes later, one of the club's older patched members, a broad, quiet man everybody called Preacher because he used to actually be one, some small congregation two counties over before a string of bad decisions in his younger years put him on a different road entirely.
He still carried some of that old cadence in the way he talked, slow and deliberate, like every sentence had been weighed before it left his mouth.
He nodded at me, then looked toward the bar, and something in the set of his shoulders shifted, subtle but unmistakable, the particular way a man's whole posture changes around a woman he's trying not to be too obvious about noticing.
"Deb," he said, settling onto a stool at the far end, like the distance was a deliberate choice and not just where he happened to sit.
"Preacher." She didn't look up from the glass she was polishing, but there was something in her voice, a fraction warmer than the flat, businesslike tone she'd used with me a minute earlier.
"You eat today, or are you planning to run on black coffee and whatever's in that pack of gum in your cut again. "
"Had a sandwich around eleven."
"That's not a real answer."
"It's the one you're getting." A faint smile pulled at the corner of his mouth, gone almost as fast as it appeared, but I caught it, and I watched Deb catch it too, a small, private exchange that had clearly happened a hundred times before and would happen a hundred times again, neither of them quite ready to call it anything.
Preacher glanced my way once, like he was deciding whether to say something about the state of things, and settled instead for something quieter.
"Whole club's been carrying this thing rough this week, Rourke.
You included. Don't let anybody tell you carrying it rough is the same as carrying it wrong.
Man who feels nothing when he's earned this much shame, that's the man I'd worry about.
You clearly aren't him." It was about as close to comfort as Preacher's particular cadence ever offered, weighed and deliberate the way everything he said tended to be, and I found myself grateful for it in a way I didn't fully expect.
I didn't have the bandwidth that week to think much about Deb and Preacher beyond a passing, distant sort of interest, the kind of thing you notice and file away without examining, but I remember thinking, watching them, that whatever that was, it looked like the uncomplicated, easy version of something Marisol and I used to have, before I'd made it complicated enough to cost us both everything.
I left the Boneyard a little before six, drove home to a house that still had boxes of Harlow's remaining things stacked by the back door for pickup, and sat on the porch step in almost the exact spot I'd been sitting the day Marisol's truck came up the road.
Dutch stopped by around seven, unannounced the way he always is, found me still sitting there in the near dark, and lowered himself onto the step beside me without asking if the company was wanted.
We sat quiet for a minute, the way two men who've known each other thirty years can, before he finally spoke.
"Heard you asked Deacon to open a full review on yourself."
"Word travels fast."
"It's a small club in a smaller town, Rourke.
Word's always traveled fast. Question is whether you actually understand what you just signed up for, or whether you did it as some kind of grand gesture you're hoping gets you credit later.
" He wasn't looking at me when he said it, eyes on the darkening road instead, which somehow made the question land harder, more honest.
"I understand it," I said. "I'm not doing it for credit."
"Good. Because some of the brothers are going to make you sit through every ugly detail of this out loud, in front of the whole table, and there won't be a version of that where you get to control how it lands.
Cassidy's going to lay out the numbers. Somebody's going to ask exactly how long Harlow had access to this house, and you're going to have to answer without softening it.
I need to know you can sit through that without flinching, because if you flinch, it reads as a man managing his image instead of a man actually owning what he did. "
"I can sit through it."
Dutch studied me a long moment in the porch light, the particular assessing look he'd been giving me since we were nineteen and he was deciding whether I was actually ready for something or just talking a good game.
"There's a difference," he said finally, "between a man who's sorry he got caught and a man who's sorry for what he actually did.
I've known you long enough to have some faith it's the second one.
But faith isn't proof, Rourke, and this table's going to want proof, not faith, before this is finished.
" He clapped a hand on my shoulder, stood, and said, "Get some sleep, if you can manage it.
Friday's going to be a long day for both you and her, and neither of you is going to do either other any good running on empty. "
I thought about Friday morning after he left, about her walking into that building without me there, about the discipline it was going to take to actually honor Deacon's terms and stay out of her way while she worked.
I thought I was ready for it. I understood by Friday afternoon how wrong I'd been about that.