Chapter 4
ANGEL
The walk from the bike to the clubhouse door is forty feet, and I spend all of it working a problem I already know the answer to.
The driver saw my cut. Up close, in the clinch, eyes crawling over the patches while we traded.
Thunder Bastards. Seattle. VP. He’s awake by now, and men like him report before they see a doctor.
Whoever owns the fat man in the suit is going to hear that a Thunder Bastard put his boy down and rode off with Hale’s girl, and that news travels one direction. Toward us.
So I’m not walking into church to ask permission. I’m walking in to report a war I already started.
Doll keeps pace beside me through a yard full of staring men, garbage in her hair, my flannel swallowing her whole.
Phoenix meets us at the door. I put Doll’s hand in hers.
“Get her warm. Feed her.” Then, louder, for the porch and everyone on it. “Nobody asks her anything until I’m back. Not one question.”
Sloane looks at me. I get it, she doesn’t like people deciding her life for her. But that’s not what I’m doing. I give her the only answer I’ve got.
“Tell it once,” I say. “That’s still the deal.”
Phoenix takes her inside.
Church smells like every argument this table has ever had. Bishop sits at the head with the gavel untouched in front of him, which is worse than if he were pounding it. Smoke is on his right, arms crossed. Cash has a legal pad out. Cash takes notes on disasters.
I stand. I give it to them straight, all of it, in order.
The stand-down I ignored. My solo eyes on Hale’s building.
The gloves in my pocket and what they were for.
The girl, the suit, the driver, the alley, the patches he read off my chest while I put him down.
Nobody interrupts. That’s the club’s oldest courtesy: you get to finish confessing before they take you apart.
Smoke goes first, and Smoke goes exactly where I’d go in his chair.
“Friday the easements landed. Hale’s dead in the water.
Today his own niece, who works in his office, comes running into the arms of the club that killed his project.
” He lets it sit. “So far, everything the man tried failed. Tell me a pretty Trojan horse wasn’t his next move, Angel.
Tell me you didn’t carry it through our gate on your own bike. ”
I’m not angry. His version fits all the intel he has. It only breaks against the facts I have. I saw a girl reading a sidewalk in one second flat and running with nothing, no phone, no bag, no plan, into a dead end. Nobody plants an asset that badly.
“An asset gets a backstory and a burner and a soft landing,” I say. “She got a dumpster she had to rig herself so the lid wouldn’t slam. Victor Hale doesn’t send his niece in garbage-wet. He’d send her polished. That’s the only language he speaks.”
“Then she’s worse than a plant,” Cash says, not looking up from the pad.
“She’s a liability with no upside. A kidnapping allegation with your face on it.
Our VP assaulting private security in a downtown alley.
” He looks up now. “We won this war Friday, brother. You restarted it today. For a civilian.”
“For a witness,” I say.
That lands. I make it count before anyone can reload.
“We talked about this before. You agreed with me. Hale didn’t have the funds to build this deal on his own. Someone else floated him. I want that someone as badly as I want Victor. She can give us the name of the man he owes or at least describe him. We need her.”
It’s all true. It’s also a suit I’m dressing the truth in, and some part of me knows it. I was never leaving her in that dumpster. The strategy came after the hand.
Bishop speaks. His voice is flat as the table.
“She stays inside the fence until her story checks. Tomorrow she tells her story with all officers present. Cash, tonight, everything on her. If there’s anything you can’t find, reach out to Glitch.
I want it all. Money, school, phone records, speeding tickets.
If she’s got a bank account in the Caymans, I want it by breakfast.” The gavel comes down once, quiet. “Church is over. Angel. Yard.”
Nobody meets my eyes on the way out.
My brothers are wise men, clearing the blast radius.
Bishop doesn’t talk until we’re past the bikes, out by the fence line where the floodlight quits. Then he stands with his hands in his pockets looking at the wall. I let him, because I’ve known this man twenty years and the silence is part of the sentence.
“A direct order,” he says finally. “Not a suggestion. Not a policy memo. I stood at that table and said we stand down. But then the fucking next day my VP nodded at me and went and sat on Hale’s building with gloves in his pocket.”
“Yes.”
“Don’t do that. Don’t give me clean little yeses like we’re in church. It’s you and me out here.” He turns. Twenty years, and I can count on one hand the times he’s looked at me like this. “If it was anyone else, I’d have his patch on the table today. You know what it costs me that it’s you.”
“I know.”
“Do you?” He steps closer. “You think you’re the only one who sat in that hallway.
You think I don’t lie awake pricing that man’s bones.
I wanted him bleeding too, Jericho. The difference is I’m the president, so I don’t get to want out loud.
I get to keep my men out of prison and a family off the news.
I gave the one order that does that, and you, Brother, treated it like a suggestion. ”
The first name is the knife. He hasn’t used it in years.
“You’re right,” I say. “I was going to go beat the shit out of him and get the name of his partners. But then I saw her run and I saw that goon run after her … I forgot all about it.”
He nods and says, “Here’s how it rides. Your sentence is deferred.
If the girl is what Smoke thinks, you’re in the shit house.
If she’s what you think, then you and I still have a bill to settle about you lying to my face, and we’ll settle it when we know.
Either way, it’s not free. You don’t get to be right your way out of this one. ”
“Understood.”
“And the girl.” He’s already walking. “You brought her in, so she’s yours. Whatever she costs, it comes out of your hide first. Feed her, guard her, get her story straight. And Angel.” He stops at the edge of the light. “Get some ice on that lip. You look like a prospect.”
She’s in a corner room Phoenix set up. She’s sitting on the bed with her knees up, facing the door.
“You’re supposed to be sleeping.”
“You’re supposed to knock,” she says.
“And you could have locked the door. Anyway, bathroom’s across the hall. Nobody in this building will touch you or ask you anything, and if anyone forgets, they answer to me.” I put a bottle of water on the dresser. “You rest, tomorrow we talk.”
I pull the door shut, stand in the hallway, and let the day total itself up. A deferred sentence hanging off my patch. My Prez’s order I ignored. A professional somewhere in this city reporting my colors to who knows who.
I brought Victor Hale’s niece home.
What the fuck is wrong with me?