7. Chapter 7 #2
I have been sitting here bleeding rage quiet for an hour, and it is Byte’s words that finally show me the true shape of the thing, and the shape is worse than I let myself see on that concrete floor.
This is not a woman taken. To this table, it is an extinction.
Shadow is not only mine to lose. She is the pin holding the whole club over the drop, and Renner has his hand on her, and some of these men, good men, brothers, are going to start doing math about a book and a girl and which one the club can survive losing.
I feel that math start. I feel it come into the room like cold air under a door.
“No.” I say it before anyone has said the other thing, and every head at the table turns toward me.
“I hear it. I hear every one of you starting to weigh her against the book. Don’t.
” I put both hands flat on the wood. “Anybody at this table decides she is a risk we clean up instead of a sister we get back, you are going to have a problem with me you will not survive.” I look around the table. “Try me.”
Stryker’s jaw goes tight. “Watch yourself, cleaner. That is the second time today you have drawn a line through your own club over a woman who is not even patched. She is a bookkeeper. A stray Loco fed. And you are about to fracture this table over her.”
“Enough.” Loco does not shout it. He stands, and the founding skull on his shoulder catches the light, and the room settles the way a dog settles.
“Nobody is cleaning up anybody. Get it out of your heads, all of you. Forty years this club’s rule has been no brother left behind, and I will be damned to whatever hell is waiting for men like us before I let that rule die because the missing one wears a smaller cut.
” His eyes go around the table, slow, landing on each man like a hand on a shoulder.
“She keeps our sins. That makes her ours. That makes her the most us of any of us. We get her back. We get the book back. And the man who took her, we put in one of our own coffins, and we do not build it kind.”
“Eye for an eye,” Mercy says quiet, from the end.
“Eye for an eye,” the table answers, low, and the cold air under the door pulls back, and I can breathe.
Then Byte makes a sound. The closet-breathing sound.
“Got the number,” he says. “The one that called her in that room. It’s a burner, dead now, but it pinged three towers on the way to going dark, and the last one—” He turns the laptop.
A map, a red dot, a spur of road running up into nothing.
“The last one is not Darkwater. It is the old fish cannery, north end, past the flats. Been closed since the nineties. Renner has been paying the power bill on it for eight months under a shell.” He looks up.
“That is where the call came from. That is where he was sitting when he made her listen.”
“That is where she is,” I say.
“Maybe,” Byte is careful. “Maybe was. He is smart, he will move her—”
“She is there.” I am already standing. I do not know how I know, but the pull in my chest hits hard enough to steal a breath. North. Toward the flats. The same thing I’ve felt every damn time she walked into the crematory, the thing I kept blaming on the furnace. “She is there. We go now.”
“We go smart,” Loco says. “Not now. Now gets men killed and gets her killed with them.” He points at me. “Nightfall. We plan it, we scout it, we hit it right. You get me?”
I do not get him. Every cell in my body wants to be on the road already. But I have buried enough brothers who moved fast and stupid. I make myself nod, once, and it is the hardest thing I have done since I put my hand down at her jaw and walked away.
“One thing first,” I say. “Before nightfall. Byte, who signs the power bills on that cannery? The shell. Somebody local pays the man who pays the bill. Somebody in Darkwater set that room up for him, bought the chair, hung the door on one hinge so it would read abandoned.” I pick the burner up off the table.
“I want that name. I want it before dark. And I want thirty minutes alone with him first.”
The name is Denny Cofield, and he runs a bait shop on the Darkwater flats, and he will not run it anymore by the time I am done.
Grim stood at the door the whole time and did not stop me once, and Grim has stopped me before.
What matters is what Cofield gives up, at the end, when there is nothing left to hold onto and he would tell me the color of God’s eyes if he thought it bought him a breath.
“The book,” he sobs. “I thought it was about the book, man, I swear, that is what everybody thought—”
“But.”
“But he does not care about the book.” Blood in his teeth, his words coming loose.
“Renner. I heard him on the phone with his own people, they did not think I was listening. One of them asked did they get the ledger, and Renner laughed. He said—” Cofield pants, each breath scraping his throat.
“He said the ledger was never the job. He said the ledger was the string he pulled to make the girl walk to him.”
The cold room goes very quiet inside me.
The ledger was bait. Not the prize. Renner knew exactly which string to pull because somebody close enough to Shadow told him where it was tied.
For Renner to reach into that book and bend a line of it into a hook, he needed a hand on the inside.
A hand close to her. Close enough to touch the one thing she guards better than her own life, and quiet enough that she never felt it happen.
Somebody in our house did this. Somebody she would have poured a drink for. Somebody who stood in our hall, watched her walk by and smiled while he sold her to the dark.
I do not have a name yet. I will. And when I do, no coffin we build is going to be kind enough.
“He wanted her,” I say. “Not the book. Her.”
“Yeah. Yeah, man, her, only her, he has wanted her—” And here Cofield does the thing that stops my heart.
He looks up at me through the ruin of his own face and says it as if it is nothing, as if it is not the end of my whole world.
“He has wanted her for twenty years. Kept saying it into the phone like a prayer. Said he finally found her. Said—” A wet cough. “Said he finally found Maren’s girl.”
The floor drops out from under me.
Because there is one person alive who knows that name and its weight. One man who was in that burning doorway, who carried a soot-black five-year-old out into the dark, buried what was left of her mother and never told a living soul any of it.
Me. Only me.
And now a bait-shop errand boy is choking it up at me off a concrete floor in Darkwater. It is not only me anymore. Sy Renner knows what I did. He knows who she is, and he has had her alone and afraid since dawn.