13. The Hands That Dont Tremble
Chapter thirteen
The Hands That Don't Tremble
Diego
The compound at dusk had its own grammar.
I pulled into the lot at six and sat in the truck for a minute before going in. The lights were on in the kitchen — Mama Joy or someone she'd conscripted. Colt's bike was gone. Bishop's car was there. The chapel windows were dark.
Nova's window was lit.
She had started doing that — the light on late, the laptop open, the documents spread across the desk.
I had looked at that window from the parking lot more times in the past two weeks than I wanted to count.
It wasn't surveillance. It wasn't what Bishop did, the systematic monitoring he'd admitted to and which still sat in my chest like a cold stone. It was just looking.
Just checking that the light was on.
I got out of the truck.
Brick was at the side of the building, sitting on a cooler with his phone, waiting for me.
Brick Kovac was twenty-four and Czech-American by heritage but had grown up in East Dallas and spoke two languages without thinking about it.
I'd pulled him into the club three years ago after he'd done two years as a prospect in a way that made me think he understood what the MC was supposed to be.
He was loyal — not blindly, but actually, which was the kind of loyalty that counted.
"Saunders was at the gym again," I said.
"I heard." He put his phone away. "Storage corridor?"
"Yeah. I've changed the lock twice. He gets the new combination each time."
Brick thought about this. "From inside."
"Has to be."
"Vance."
"Or someone Vance is using." I put my back against the building.
The cold had come in hard this afternoon — a late February front dropping the temperature fifteen degrees in an hour.
The Dallas sky was the particular bruised gray of a cold that hadn't decided whether it was going to snow.
"The gym is running product and I can't shut it down without tipping Vance that I know. "
"But the kids—"
"I've been moving the kids. The classes he runs through are the ones I keep empty.
" I had been doing this for three weeks.
Rescheduling the early morning class, moving the after-school group, finding reasons to lock the storage corridor on the days I'd worked out the delivery pattern. "It can't run indefinitely."
Brick was quiet for a moment. "What do you want to do?"
"What I want to do and what I can do right now aren't the same thing."
Brick nodded. He was young enough to still find this principle frustrating; old enough to have accepted it.
"Keep watching the corridor," I said. "Don't engage him. Don't let him know we're on it. Just watch."
Brick went inside.
I stood in the cold for another minute looking at the lit windows.
I had been letting myself want her.
I had been aware of this the way you're aware of a tide — not a decision, not a project, just a condition of the environment.
She had walked into The Rusty Cage five weeks ago and the decade since I'd last seen her had folded in on itself and become nothing, and I had spent three weeks pretending that I was managing it and knowing that I wasn't.
The storage room. The gym this morning. Her hands in the wrap at the gym on Friday, the weight of her hips under my palms, her focused face going still over the bag.
The way she'd looked at Jovani without knowing I was watching her look at him.
The way she'd looked at that photograph at Carmen's with one hand on the frame and her face open in the rare way her face was open when she forgot to manage it.
I wanted to keep her safe.
I wanted to keep her here.
I wanted things I did not have the right to name because she had not given me the right and I would not take what wasn't given.
That was the whole ledger, in the end. Diego Moreno did not take what wasn't offered.
He had been offered things in his life that he had refused because the price was someone else's — a kid on a street corner, the wrong girl at the wrong bar, a deal that would have paid well and cost someone he didn't know something they needed.
He kept a careful ledger of those refusals.
It didn't make him a good man. It made him a man who could look at himself straight.
I drove to Carmen's.
She was at the table when I came in, not surprised.
She had the rosary in her hands — not praying, just holding it, the way she'd always held it when she was thinking about something hard.
"Mijo," she said.
I sat down. She didn't say anything for a minute. I got up and looked in the refrigerator and found the tamales from two days ago, still wrapped, and ate them cold standing at the counter because I didn't have the patience for the microwave.
"She stayed two hours," Carmen said. "After you left."
I looked at her.
"She helped me with the dishes," Carmen continued, in the tone of a woman reporting something significant through the frame of something small. "She didn't say much. Just — she was here. Present." A pause. "She has his hands. Did you notice? The knuckles. Eduardo had that same wide knuckle line."
I looked at my own hands.
"Carmen."
"I know, I know." She set the rosary down. "I'm not going to tell you to be careful. You already know to be careful."
"Tell me something useful then."
She looked at me over her coffee. Carmen Moreno had seen me through my mother's death and a bloody nose from my first real fight and my patch-in ceremony and three years of a bad time and coming out the other side of it and she had never once given me advice that turned out to be wrong.
She had also never given me advice I wanted to hear.
"She is yours and not yours," Carmen said. "You knew that before you started."
"She's nobody's."
"Sí. Exactly." Carmen picked up the rosary again. "That is what I mean."
I finished the tamales.
She is yours and not yours.
I turned the phrase over while I drove back to the compound.
It was the most precisely accurate thing anyone had said about this situation.
Nova had come back and the three of us had — in different ways, at different speeds, in different registers, each started moving toward her, and she was moving toward us, and none of it was ownership.
None of it was possession. She was a woman who had grown up in the orbit of the MC and left it and come back and was deciding what she wanted it to mean, and whatever she decided, she decided.
Eduardo had raised her to decide. That was the thing.
He'd raised a child who asked questions and refused comfortable answers and was still asking the right questions at twenty-two, in the compound where he'd been killed, with the evidence of who killed him spread across his old desk.
He'd built that. You couldn't raise a person like that and then expect that person to arrive back in your world and do anything other than exactly what she was doing.
He'd have been proud.
He'd have been terrified for her.
He'd have been standing in the compound parking lot at dusk looking up at her lit window, same as I was.
I turned the headlights off before I pulled into the lot.
Old habit, compound protocol after nine PM, so the light sweep didn't wake anyone in the north dormitory.
The habit came from Eduardo. He'd made the rule in 2008 after Colt had woken a sleeping member's wife for the third time with the lights sweeping through the window, and the rule had stuck, and I'd been following it without thinking ever since.
Forty-three small habits in this compound that came from Eduardo Santos.
I'd counted them once, not deliberately but over the course of a sleepless week when everything felt like inventory.
Forty-three things I did without thinking because he'd built them into the structure of the place and I'd absorbed them at fourteen and never let them go.
The headlights. The way I checked the side door before going in.
The two-knock compound greeting. The specific silence I held when the president was speaking, even now when the president was Vance and the silence cost me something to maintain.
The hands don't tremble. But forty-three habits were not the same as forgetting.
The hands that don't tremble.
My father used to say that about fighters who were ready, the difference between a prospect who still shook at first blood and a man who had learned to be afraid without being stopped by fear. The hands that don't tremble meant something had been integrated, resolved, taken all the way through.
I was not there yet with her.
I was in the resolution. The through.
I would confront Saunders. Not tomorrow. Not this week. But soon.
My hands did not tremble on the steering wheel.
I turned into the compound lot. Nova's window was still lit.
I did not look at it.
I looked at it.
Her window. Still lit at eleven PM. The particular quality of light that meant she was working, laptop light, warm and steady, the light of someone who organized themselves through intellectual labor the way I organized myself through physical labor.
She was in there doing what she did when she needed to process something: running it through the academic frame, making it legible, constructing the argument that would let her stand in relation to it rather than being submerged by it.
Forty-three habits. I had just driven the route my hands knew from the compound to the storage facility and back, a route that didn't require conscious navigation, a route that existed in me the way all the things Eduardo had built into me existed: in the body, below the level of decision, running without instruction.
Nova's window.
I had driven my hands' routes for ten years. She had come back and her window was lit at eleven PM and I was standing in the parking lot looking at it like the fourteen-year-old I had been when Eduardo first put his hand on my shoulder and said: you have a home now.
I went inside.