Chapter Nine
Rourke
Church was called for Thursday evening, full table, no exceptions, and Deacon made it plain in the group text that went out Tuesday morning that this wasn't going to be a short meeting.
I spent the two days between that text and the actual gathering doing the kind of preparation I'd never had to do before in my life, not for a business pitch, not for a negotiation with a rival club, nothing.
I wrote out, longhand, on a legal pad not unlike the one Marisol had been carrying around for two weeks, every single fact I intended to lay in front of the table, in order, without softening a single one of them.
I practiced saying it out loud, alone in the house, more than once, which felt absurd even as I did it, a grown man rehearsing his own confession in an empty kitchen like a nervous kid preparing for a job interview.
But I'd watched enough men in this club over the years try to talk their way through a hard truth without preparation, watched the words come out messier and more self-serving than they meant them to, watched good intentions curdle into something that sounded like excuse-making the second real pressure hit.
I wasn't going to let that happen to me, not because I was worried about how it would look, but because Marisol deserved a version of this told plainly, and the only way I knew to guarantee that was to make sure I'd already found the plainest possible words before I ever had to say them under the full weight of that table's attention.
Harlow still hadn't turned her phone back on.
I'd tried four more times since the voicemail, tried her apartment too, an address I only had because I'd once dropped her off there at two in the morning and hadn't had the decency, at the time, to ask myself what that said about where things had gone.
Her landlord told me she hadn't been seen in five days.
I passed that information to Deacon immediately, who passed it to a couple of prospects with connections outside Ember Creek proper, and by Thursday afternoon we still had nothing, which sat in my chest like a stone I couldn't set down.
The clubhouse was fuller than I'd ever seen it for a Thursday church, every patched member present, which told me word of Cassidy's revised numbers and the wall out at the Boneyard had traveled through the whole membership by now, exactly the way these things always do in a town this size.
I walked in at quarter to seven, found my usual seat at the table, and felt every set of eyes in that room land on me at once, the specific, heavy weight of an entire brotherhood waiting to hear a man explain himself.
Deacon called the meeting to order without any preamble, which was its own kind of mercy, not making me sit through small talk before the reckoning actually started.
"We're here for two related pieces of business," he said, looking around the table.
"Cassidy's going to walk us through the financial situation in full.
Then Rourke's going to tell this table exactly what happened over the two months his Old Lady was gone, without me or anybody else softening it for him first. After that, we vote on the review he asked for.
I want to be plain that this isn't a formality.
This table can vote to strip a man's rank tonight if that's what the facts support, and I expect every one of you to vote your conscience instead of your loyalty to a family name. "
Cassidy stood and laid it out clean, the way only a man who's spent thirty years balancing books for people who don't always want the truth can manage.
Eighty-one thousand, four hundred dollars, give or take, diverted across the Boneyard's operating account and the club's contingency fund over roughly nine weeks, including a small, recent wire transfer that suggested whoever had been skimming the money had, at the end, been moving it under pressure rather than for simple profit.
Access patterns that showed detailed knowledge of patrol schedules, delivery windows, and camera blind spots.
A defaced wall bearing Iron Coyotes markings, with evidence the responsible camera had been deliberately repositioned weeks in advance.
He didn't speculate beyond what he could support with actual records, which made the numbers land harder, not softer, the specific, unglamorous weight of verified fact instead of rumor.
A few members shifted uncomfortably as he spoke, and I caught more than one glance toward the door, toward the parking lot, toward the direction of Harlow's apartment on the other side of town, as if the room itself understood that the numbers on that page represented a person who might, at that very moment, be paying a much steeper price for this than any of us sitting comfortably at that table.
When he finished, every eye at that table turned to me, and I stood, because some things a man needs to say on his feet.
"I'm not going to make this easier to hear than it actually is," I said, and made myself hold eye contact around the table instead of looking down at my notes, though I'd need them soon enough.
"While Marisol was gone burying her mother, I let a hang-around named Harlow move into the house I share with my Old Lady.
Not all at once. One careless choice at a time, over six weeks, until by the time Marisol came home, this woman had a drawer in our bedroom, had been seated at church twice, and had, apparently, enough comfort and access in my life that some of you started treating her like she was already my next old lady before Marisol's truck ever came back up that road. "
Somebody at the far end of the table shifted audibly. I kept going.
"I gave her my access code to the Boneyard's side door on a day I didn't think twice about, because it was convenient, and I've since learned that day happened to be Marisol's mother's birthday, the day she was sitting in hospice watching that same mother die.
I don't offer that detail to make myself look worse for effect.
I offer it because it's the truest, ugliest measure I have of exactly how careless I let myself become, and because Marisol deserves this table to understand the full weight of it, not a version I've trimmed down to something easier to sit through. "
I told them about the vendor account, about the scheduling information, about the possibility, not yet confirmed but impossible to ignore, that whatever Harlow had access to in my carelessness had made its way, deliberately or otherwise, to the Iron Coyotes.
I told them she'd tried to reach me two weeks ago, urgent, and that I'd let the call go to voicemail because dealing with her felt harder than avoiding her, and that she'd since gone dark entirely, phone off, landlord reporting no sign of her in five days, and that whatever was happening to her now might be, at least in part, a consequence of choices I'd made and then failed to reckon with in time.
I made myself say all of it in order, the way I'd practiced, and did not once let my voice soften into something that sounded like I was asking the table for sympathy instead of simply handing them the facts.
The room was quiet for a long moment after I finished.
Reyes, the old-timer who'd ridden with my father, finally spoke, his voice heavy.
"Your father sat at the head of this table for twenty-six years, and in all that time, I never once had cause to wonder whether his word was good.
I'm not going to pretend that doesn't matter to how I hear what you just told us.
But I'll say this. A man who stands up and lays out his own failure this plain, without once trying to make himself the victim of it, that's not nothing either.
Your father would've respected that part, even hating the rest of it the way I know he would have. "
Tiny, the younger patched member who'd looked away from me back at that first church meeting, spoke up next, hesitant, clearly working up the nerve.
"I want to say something, and I know it doesn't make anything better, but I sat there and watched Harlow at church those two Sundays and didn't say a word to anybody, including Marisol, when I saw her back in town.
That's on me too, not just on Rourke. I think this whole table owes Marisol an apology for what we let happen in front of us, not just what Rourke did in private. "
A murmur went around the table at that, uncomfortable, a few heads nodding, a few staying very still, and Deacon let it settle before he spoke again.
"Tiny's right. I'll be having a separate conversation with this table about that failure specifically, because Rourke isn't the only man in this room who let Marisol down these past two months.
But tonight is about Rourke's standing, so let's keep it there for now. "
Dutch spoke next, steady, the way he always is.
"I've known this man his whole life. What he did to Marisol was wrong, and I'm not going to sit here and soften that for anybody.
But I watched him ask for this review himself, before Cassidy's numbers ever came to light, before there was any chance he'd be forced into it.
That tells me something about which direction he's actually trying to walk now, even if it doesn't undo a single thing that already happened. "