Chapter 4
Bustout had been sitting in the corner booth for three hours when the headlights swept the lot.
Two nights he'd been coming to the Silverline after dark, parking his bike around back with Ratchet and Culver and taking the same corner seat with his back to the wall and his eyes on every angle the room offered.
The chapel had called it club business inside of ten minutes—Jackpot hadn't even finished his cigarette before the vote went through—and Bustout had been put on it the way you put a man on the thing he was built for.
Carla knew he was there. She didn't comment on it. She poured his coffee and ran her floor and pretended the biggest man in the room wasn't watching every door like he was waiting for something to walk through one.
Tonight the something walked through at eleven forty-five.
Four men. Not two. Rusk first—Bustout recognized the boxer's twitch, the knuckle-cracking, the lean hungry look of a man who enjoyed frightening people more than collecting from them.
Behind him came three more, wide through the shoulders, spreading out as they came through the door the way men spread out when they've done this before and know how to fill a room.
The late crowd was thin—Manny in his booth, two drivers at the counter, a young couple splitting a plate of fries. Bri was working the register. Carla was bussing table six.
Bustout set his coffee down and caught Ratchet's eye across the booth. One look. That was all it took.
Rusk didn't sit this time. He walked straight to the center of the floor and stopped, cracking his knuckles, that twitchy energy coming off him like heat from a radiator. His three men fanned out behind him—one toward the counter, one toward Manny's booth, one toward the door.
"Diner's closed," Rusk said. Loud enough for the room.
Carla straightened up from table six with a bus tub on her hip and looked at him the way she looked at a drunk who'd gotten too comfortable. "Diner closes when I say it closes."
"Not tonight." Rusk grinned, and it was the grin of a man who'd been told to make a point and was looking forward to it. He turned to the nearest man. "Show her."
It happened fast. The man by Manny's booth grabbed old Manny Reyes by the collar of his flannel shirt and hauled him out of the seat.
Manny was seventy and had been driving the 395 corridor since before most of these men were born, and the sound he made when the man threw him was the sound of a body that had no business leaving the ground.
Manny went through the front window.
The glass exploded outward in a spray of neon-lit shards, and Manny hit the pavement outside with a wet, heavy sound that Bustout heard through the ringing in his ears. The young couple screamed. Bri screamed. The two counter drivers scrambled off their stools and backed toward the kitchen.
Rusk spread his hands like he was showing off a magic trick. "Now. Anybody want to tell me where—"
Bustout was already moving.
He came out of the booth low and fast, which was not how people expected a man his size to move, and he hit the nearest of Rusk's crew before the man had finished turning around.
The impact drove them both into the booth divider with a crack of splintering plywood, and Bustout put two short punches into the man's ribs that folded him like wet paper.
The room became a fight.
Ratchet vaulted the booth and met the man by the counter with a flying tackle that took out three stools and a coffee station. Culver, the prospect, went for the one blocking the door, and the two of them crashed into the jukebox hard enough to kill whatever song had been playing.
Bustout dropped the first man and turned for Rusk, but Rusk was fast—that boxer's twitch wasn't just a tic, it was training—and he'd already pulled a baton from somewhere and was swinging for Bustout's head.
Bustout caught it on his forearm and felt the bone-deep vibration all the way to his shoulder, and the pain was white and bright and he filed it away the way he filed everything—later, deal with it later—and closed the distance.
Rusk backed up swinging, and they crashed through table four, scattering plates and silverware and ketchup bottles across the linoleum.
A chair shattered against Bustout's back—the second man had gotten up and was trying to rejoin—and Bustout turned and put an elbow into the man's face that sat him down permanently among the wreckage of the dessert case.
Across the room, Carla was moving.
She wasn't running. She wasn't screaming.
She was doing what she'd done every night for eleven years—reading her floor.
Bri was frozen at the register with her hands over her mouth, and Carla grabbed her by the arm and hauled her behind the counter and shoved her toward the kitchen door. "Out the back. Go. Don't stop."
Bri went.
The two counter drivers were pinned against the back wall by the wreckage of the stool Ratchet had used as a weapon. Carla grabbed the nearest one by his jacket and yanked him toward the kitchen. "Move. Both of you. Back door, parking lot, get in your trucks."
They moved.
She turned back to the floor and saw the fourth man—the one Culver had been fighting—break free from the jukebox wreckage and reach for something at the small of his back. Metal caught the overhead light. A gun coming out.
Carla picked up the full pot of coffee from the station behind the counter—twelve cups of Bunn drip brewed twenty minutes ago, still hot enough to steam—and threw it.
She didn't aim for his hand. She aimed for his face.
The pot hit him square and burst, and the man screamed as scalding coffee went into his eyes and his mouth and down the front of his shirt. The gun clattered to the floor and Culver was on him before it stopped spinning, driving him into the ground with both fists.
Rusk saw it happen. Saw the waitress who was supposed to be cowering behind the counter standing in the middle of the wreckage with coffee dripping off her hands and fire in her eyes, and something in his calculation changed—this wasn't the easy example he'd been promised.
He turned to run.
Bustout caught him by the back of the neck.
One hand. That was all it took. Bustout's fingers closed around the base of Rusk's skull and stopped him like a wall, and the collector's momentum carried his feet out from under him while his head stayed exactly where Bustout wanted it.
Bustout slammed him down onto the counter.
The Formica cracked. Rusk's baton skittered away across the floor. He tried to push himself up and Bustout hit him—one short, precise shot to the side of the head that bounced his face off the countertop—and then another, and Rusk's hands stopped pushing.
Bustout turned him over. Held him against the counter by the throat, one-handed, the collector's feet kicking two inches off the ground. Rusk's eyes were wild and bloody and starting to understand something they hadn't understood when he walked through the door.
"You came to her floor," Bustout said. His voice hadn't changed. Same low, unhurried tone he used to order coffee. "You put an old man through her window."
Rusk choked something that might have been a word.
"This is what that costs."
He drove Rusk backward into the counter edge with his full weight behind it. He felt the man's spine give against the Formica, heard the sound a body makes when the architecture of it changes permanently, and Rusk went limp in his hand like a puppet whose strings had been cut.
Bustout held him there for one more second. Then he let go, and Rusk slid to the floor in the ruins of the Silverline Diner and didn't move again.
The room was quiet. The jukebox was dead. Glass crunched under boots as Ratchet and Culver finished securing the rest of Rusk's crew—one unconscious, one blind and screaming, one not getting up on his own.
Bustout stood in the middle of the wreckage with his chest heaving and his forearm throbbing where the baton had landed and Rusk's blood on his knuckles, and he looked across the destroyed room at Carla.
She was standing behind the counter with coffee burns on her hands and glass in her hair and her chest rising and falling like she'd just run a mile.
The clip had come out of her dark hair and it hung around her face, and the gold cross at her throat was spotted with something that might have been ketchup and might have been blood.
She was looking at the dead man on her floor.
Then she was looking at Bustout. And what he saw in her face was not horror and not gratitude.
It was the expression of a woman who had just watched the thing she'd been afraid of walk through her door and get handled, permanently, by a man who didn't raise his voice.
"Manny," she said. First word. Not about the dead man, not about herself. About the regular who'd gone through her window.
"Culver, check the lot," Bustout said without looking away from her. "Get Manny. Call whoever you need to call."
Culver went.
Bustout crossed the wrecked floor toward her. Glass and silverware ground under his boots. He stopped at the counter and stood there the way he'd stood there two nights ago—big and still and reading her—but this time he reached across the Formica and took her hand.
She let him.
Her fingers were shaking. Burns on the palm from the coffee pot, red and angry against her brown skin.
He turned her hand over and looked at it and his jaw tightened and something in his stillness cracked, just a fraction, just enough for her to see the thing underneath it—the fury, the want, the raw possessive need to put himself between her and everything in the world that might touch her.
"We need to go," he said.
"My diner—"
"Is a crime scene. Ratchet handles it. You come with me." His hand tightened around hers. Not a request. "Now."
She looked at the Silverline—the shattered window, the wrecked booths, the dead man on the floor of the room she'd run for eleven years—and she looked at the man holding her hand with blood on his knuckles and that low, certain voice telling her to come with him.
She came.
He walked her out through the kitchen and into the cold desert night, his hand on the small of her back, his body between her and the parking lot, his eyes sweeping the dark the way they swept every room he entered.
The air hit them both like a slap—forty degrees and dropping, that mineral desert cold cutting through the adrenaline like a blade.
She was shaking. Not her hands this time—her whole body, the crash coming hard and fast now that the floor she'd been standing on wasn't under her feet anymore.
Bustout pulled his cut off his shoulders and put it around hers.
The leather was warm from his body and heavy with the smell of him—exhaust and sweat and something underneath that was just skin, just man—and it swallowed her.
She pulled it closed across her chest without thinking, her burnt fingers gripping the leather the way she'd gripped the coffee pot.
His patch on her shoulders. His warmth on her skin. His hand on her back, guiding her toward the bike.
"Hold on to me," he said as he swung a leg over. "Don't let go."
She climbed on behind him and wrapped her arms around his waist and pressed her face into his back, and when the engine kicked to life the vibration went through them both like a shared heartbeat.
They pulled out of the lot and onto 395 heading north, the cold wind tearing at her hair and his cut flapping around her shoulders, and the Silverline shrank in the mirror behind them—broken glass, red and blue lights starting to gather, a dead man on a diner floor who would never squeeze another waitress on this corridor again.
Carla held on. Her arms tightened around Bustout's waist, her burnt hands flat against his stomach, and she could feel his heart pounding through his shirt—steady and hard and alive—and she pressed into him and let the road take them north.