Chapter 6
Carla woke to the smell of stale beer and the gray light of a Northern Nevada morning pushing through a window that needed washing.
For three seconds she didn't know where she was.
Then the weight of the arm across her waist registered—heavy, warm, the forearm bruised purple where a baton had landed—and the night came back in a rush.
The Silverline. The glass. Manny going through the window.
The sound Rusk's body had made against the counter.
She lay still and let it settle.
Bustout was asleep beside her, or close to it—his breathing was slow but she could feel a tension in the arm around her that said he'd surface at the first wrong sound.
The room above the Lucky Cuss looked worse in daylight.
Water stains on the ceiling. A crack running up the wall behind the headboard.
The chair in the corner had his shirt draped over it and her jeans on the seat, and the whole scene had the rumpled, honest look of two people who'd crashed hard and hadn't cared where they landed.
She eased out from under his arm and sat on the edge of the bed.
Her hands hurt. The burns on her right palm had blistered overnight, tight and angry, and she flexed her fingers carefully and thought about the coffee pot and the man's face and the sound he'd made when twelve cups of Bunn drip hit him between the eyes.
She'd do it again. That was the thing she checked first, before guilt or fear or any of the other reactions she was supposed to be having.
Would she do it again? Yes. Without hesitation.
A man was reaching for a gun in her diner and she'd put him down with what she had, and she would do it every time.
The rest of it was harder.
The Silverline was wrecked. She'd seen the damage before they left—the shattered front window, the smashed booths, the blood on the linoleum. Her floor. Eleven years of doubles and tips and training girls and feeding busboys, and now it looked like a bar fight in a movie.
Manny was in the hospital. She didn't know how bad.
And she couldn't go home. That was the part that sat in her stomach like a stone.
Halloran's collector was dead on her diner floor, which meant Halloran knew exactly who'd done it and exactly where she lived, and the apartment above the laundromat on Mill Street where she'd raised two sisters on tips was no longer a place she could sleep.
"Stop thinking so loud." Bustout's voice, rough with sleep. He hadn't opened his eyes.
"I'm making a list."
"Of what?"
"Everything that's broken." She looked over her shoulder at him.
He was on his back with one arm behind his head, and the morning light put the bruises and the ink and the scars into sharp relief, a map of a life lived in rooms where things went wrong.
"Starting with my diner and ending with my apartment. "
He opened his eyes. Looked at her. That same steady, measuring look, except now she'd been underneath him and on top of him and wrapped around him, and the measuring had a different quality to it. Warmer. More certain.
"I'm taking you to the compound," he said.
"I have a—"
"You have an apartment that Halloran can find by lunchtime." He sat up, and the bed creaked under the shift of his weight. "The compound has two-foot block walls and twenty brothers behind them. That's where you're going."
She opened her mouth to argue. Closed it. Because the truth was she'd already done the math—she was a waitress with a dead man's boss looking for her, and the options were the compound or running, and Carla Espinoza had never run from anything in her life.
"I need clothes," she said. "And my phone charger. And if you think I'm going to sit in some back room while your club—"
"Nobody's putting you in a back room." He stood and pulled his shirt off the chair and she watched him dress with the same unhurried efficiency she'd watched him undress, and she tried not to think about how the muscles in his back moved when he reached for his cut.
She failed. "You walk in the front door. Same as everyone."
They rode to the compound on his bike in the cold morning light, and she held onto him the way she had last night—arms tight around his waist, her face tucked against his back, his cut warm against her chest because he'd put it on her again without asking and she'd taken it without arguing.
The city woke up around them as they crossed through downtown, casino signs blinking off in the daylight, the Union Pacific yard clanking and groaning to their left.
The compound sat on a dead-end street east of downtown, an old warehouse between an abandoned freight depot and a closed body shop.
Chain-link fence out front, rusted on purpose.
A steel roll-down gate. The lot held maybe fifteen bikes and a handful of trucks, and the whole place looked like exactly what it was—a building that didn't want visitors and didn't care if you knew it.
Bustout pulled through the gate and killed the engine, and the sudden quiet was enormous.
"Ready?" he said.
"I've walked into harder rooms than this."
He looked at her over his shoulder with something that might have been a smile. "Yeah. You have."
She climbed off the bike and squared her shoulders and walked through the front door of the Reno Wreckers compound wearing yesterday's clothes and a dead man's blood on her sneakers and the Sergeant at Arms's cut over her shoulders.
The great room hit her like a wall of sound and leather.
It was enormous—the full length of the old warehouse, polished concrete floors, a bar built from dark wood that looked like it had been pulled out of a casino remodel.
Mismatched leather couches. A pool table under a ceiling fan.
The morning light came through high windows and caught the dust motes and the chrome of a row of glasses behind the bar.
And the men.
A dozen of them, maybe more, scattered across the room in various states of morning. Some at the bar with coffee. Some on the couches. Two at the pool table running an early rack. Every single one of them turned to look at her when she walked in.
She felt the assessment. The weigh-in. A room full of men in leather deciding what to make of a five-three waitress walking through their door like she owned the floor.
Carla did what she'd done every first night at every job she'd ever worked. She met every pair of eyes that found hers, didn't smile, didn't shrink, didn't rush, and walked straight to the bar like she knew exactly where she was going.
Bustout was behind her. She could feel him there without turning—his size, his heat, the way the room rearranged itself around him the way every room rearranged itself around him.
He put his hand on the small of her back as she reached the bar, and the touch was light but the message was as loud as a bullhorn.
Mine. Don't test it.
A man at the bar—lean, handsome, a slow smile that looked like it had talked its way out of more trouble than it had ever started—glanced at Bustout's hand on her back and raised his coffee mug.
"Sarge. You going to introduce us?"
"Carla," Bustout said. "Slick. VP."
"The woman from the Silverline." Slick's smile widened. "Word got around. Heard you threw a pot of coffee at a man with a gun."
"It was a full pot," Carla said. "And he shouldn't have been reaching."
Slick laughed. Somewhere behind him, a couple of the brothers exchanged looks that Carla filed away—not hostile, not exactly welcoming, but interested. The way men get interested when a woman walks into their space and doesn't immediately try to make herself smaller.
A woman appeared from somewhere behind the bar—dark-haired, direct, moving through the room with the easy confidence of someone who'd been here long enough that no one questioned her right to be.
She looked at Carla, looked at Bustout's hand on Carla's back, and something knowing settled in her expression.
"Dana," she said, extending her hand. "Jackpot's."
Carla shook it. Firm grip. No nonsense. She liked her immediately.
Another woman drifted over—lighter build, flour dusted into the cuffs of her jacket like she'd come straight from work. "Rachel. I'm with Slick."
"Carla." She looked between them. "Is there coffee, or do I need to make it?"
Dana pointed toward a hallway. "Kitchen's back there. Fair warning, nobody's made a decent pot in this building since—"
"Since ever," Rachel said.
Carla found the kitchen in under a minute.
It was exactly what she expected—big, industrial, filthy in the way kitchens get filthy when nobody who uses them actually cares about kitchens.
She found the coffee maker, found the filters, found a bag of grounds that was at least a week past its prime, and started a pot strong enough to strip paint.
It took her four minutes. In those four minutes she also found a clean mug for herself, located the sugar, identified which cabinets held plates versus the ones that held what appeared to be ammunition, and made a mental note about the walk-in cooler that needed its seal replaced.
She carried two mugs back to the great room. Set one in front of Bustout at the bar. Kept one for herself.
He looked at the coffee. Looked at her. His hand found the small of her back again, and this time it stayed.
"She just took over your kitchen," Slick said to no one in particular.
"Took over the whole damn room," someone said from the couches.
Carla sipped her coffee and leaned against the bar and let the room settle around her the way rooms always settled around her—by force of presence and the plain fact that she was not leaving.
Dana caught her eye and gave her a look that said welcome to the machine, and Rachel was already asking her where she'd learned to make coffee like that, and Bustout's hand was warm on her back and steady as a heartbeat.
She pulled out her phone. Three missed calls from Bri. Two from her sister Ana. One from Ray Ochoa, the Silverline's owner.
She called Ray first because the diner was the diner.
"Ray. It's Carla. How bad?"
She listened. The window was gone. Two booths destroyed.
The health department would need to clear it before they could reopen.
Manny was at Renown Regional with a broken collarbone and a laceration that needed twenty stitches, but he was awake and complaining about the food, which meant he was Manny.
"I'll cover his bills," she said. "Out of my own—"
Bustout's hand tightened on her back. She glanced at him.
"Club covers it," he said. Quiet. Final.
She held his eyes for a beat, and something passed between them that wasn't an argument but wasn't quite agreement either. She turned back to the phone. "It's handled, Ray. I'll explain later. Keep the doors locked and don't let anyone in who isn't staff."
She called Ana next. Told her sister to stay home, lock up, keep the girls close. Ana asked questions Carla couldn't answer and Carla told her the truth she could: "I'm safe. I'm with people who can keep me that way. I'll call you tonight."
She hung up and set the phone on the bar and wrapped both hands around her coffee mug and let out a breath that went all the way down to her aching feet.
Bustout hadn't moved. His hand was still on her back. The great room hummed around them—brothers talking, someone racking the pool table, the coffee maker gurgling in the kitchen she'd already claimed.
She was inside the life now. By necessity, not by choice. But necessity and choice had been running on parallel tracks since the moment she'd pulled his mouth down to hers in the room above the Lucky Cuss, and the distance between them was getting smaller by the hour.
"You good?" Bustout asked.
She looked up at him—this enormous, still, quiet man with his hand on her back and his patch on her shoulders and his brothers all around them pretending not to watch.
"I'm good," she said. And meant it.