Chapter 11
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Doom
The phone rings just before two in the morning.
I pick up before the second ring. My mother's voice doesn't surprise me, but the hour does.
"Mijo."
I sit up. Nova doesn't stir beside me. She's curled on her stomach, one hand under her cheek, breathing slow.
"What's wrong?" I keep my voice low.
"Step outside. I don't want to scare your girl."
Mom calls every Sunday. We talk about everything, from how I’m doing, to what Nova’s up to.
I'm out of the bed and into the hallway before she finishes the sentence.
The clubhouse has settled into its night sounds—the hum of the fridge and the cycling air conditioner, somebody's snore from Razor's room.
I close my bedroom door behind me and head for the rooftop ladder.
The desert is cold at this hour. The compound is silent.
The bikes are dark shapes along the south wall, the city beyond the walls a low orange glow.
"Talk to me," I tell her, sitting in the beat-up lawn chair I keep up here.
"He came to the hospital tonight."
The cold doesn't matter. My right hand finds the chain at my neck and grips it without my asking it to.
"Curtis?"
"Yes."
"Tell me everything."
She does. Calm, steady, the way she's always done.
My mother spent thirty years in trauma units and she doesn't rattle.
She came out of the parking garage at the end of her shift, twelve-fifteen at night, and there was a man sitting on a Harley by her car. Black and chrome. Kodiak cut. She knew him before she saw his face.
He didn't move. He just waited until she was close enough to hear him.
"He said, 'Eres más hermosa de lo que recuerdo, Carmen.' Like that. Like we'd seen each other yesterday. Then he told me you'd grown up nice. He used your name."
My jaw is tight. I make it relax.
"What else?"
"He said he was passing through town and hoped I was doing well. Said if I ever needed anything, his number hadn't changed in twenty years." She pauses. "Then he asked me how Wren was."
The chain bites into my palm. I let go.
"What did you say?"
"I told him to get the fuck off hospital property before I called security."
"And?"
"He laughed. He laughed, mijo. Like I was charming him. Then he started the bike and rode off."
I'm standing now. I didn't notice myself standing.
"Did you get a plate?"
"No. He had it covered." A pause. "He wasn't there to threaten me. He was there to say hello. That's what makes it bad."
She's right. That's what makes it bad.
"Mom."
"I'm okay, Emiliano. I'm at the house. Locked up. I waited for the neighbor to pull in before I came inside. Took a shower and relaxed, then called you. I'm not stupid, mijo."
"I know you're not."
I sit back down. The cold is leaking through my shirt. I don't feel it the way I should.
"I need Wren's number."
She's quiet on the other end. I count three breaths before she answers.
"Why now?"
"He's been visiting her in Canada. Using her to pressure me into the Kodiak MC. I want to warn her."
Another pause. Longer.
"She gave me her number on the condition that I never give it to you."
"I know."
"And you're asking me to break that promise."
"I'm asking you to help me keep her safe."
The silence stretches. I let it. My mother doesn't make decisions under pressure, and I'm not going to push her.
"Hold on," she says.
I hear her moving. A cabinet opening. The rustle of paper.
She comes back and reads me the number.
I write them down on the back of an envelope I pulled out of my cargo pocket the second she said hold on.
"There's something I never told you," she says.
I wait.
"When I left him, I was four months pregnant with you. I packed a bag and went to a friend's place in South Dakota. He didn't follow me. He didn't call. There was nothing for two weeks."
She breathes out.
"Then he started showing up. Not at the door. Across the street. At the diner where I was waiting tables. At the gas station where I filled up the car. He never said a word to me. Just smiled and tipped his head when our eyes crossed."
The pieces start fitting.
"I lasted three months before I called my brother in Cartagena and asked him to come get me. I stayed there until you were a year old. I came back when my brother said it was safe. Curtis had moved on to someone else."
A pause.
"At least that's what I thought."
The cold leaches back into my chest.
"He found me again two years later. At a hospital benefit in Rapid City. I went with a friend. I had two drinks and I lost track of one of them. I woke up in a motel room the next afternoon with Curtis sitting in a chair across from me. Watching me sleep."
I'm standing again. I don't remember standing.
"He told me he'd been patient long enough. Then he left."
She breathes out.
"Three weeks later I knew I was pregnant with your sister."
The chain is hot in my palm.
"Mom."
"He came to the hospital the day I delivered her and signed the birth certificate before I could stop him.
He'd called ahead. By the time I was strong enough to fight it, his name was on it, and he had a lawyer in Sturgis by the end of the week.
He took her on weekends starting when she was eight months old.
By four she was living with him more than with me.
I went to court three times and lost every one. "
"You never told me any of this."
"You were a kid. And then you were a young man who would have done something that would have put you in prison, or in the ground. I made a choice. I'm not sure it was the right one anymore."
She breathes again.
"He didn't just stalk me, mijo. He drugged me and put your sister in me.
Then he took her from me. That's the man at her apartment.
That's what he is. Curtis doesn't break things—he stalks them.
He doesn't punch you in the face. He sits across the street until your nerves give out.
That's what he's doing to your sister now.
That's what you have to make your club understand. "
I sit with that. The chain is back in my palm and I don't remember reaching for it again.
"I'll handle it."
"I know you will." A breath. "And mijo. If he comes back to this hospital, I'm pressing charges. I'm not running anymore."
"Good."
"I love you."
"I love you too."
I end the call.
The phone sits in my palm. The desert sits in front of me.
I look at the ten digits I wrote on the envelope.
The number for the sister who doesn't want to be my sister, but will talk to our psychotic biological father.
I fold the envelope twice and put it in my pocket.
Then I go wake the president.
Amara and Dante’s room is upstairs, so I head up the stairwell and knock on the door.
A light comes on inside.
Dante's voice comes through the door, rough with sleep. "What the fuck?" He opens it and sees it’s me. “Doom?”
"I need her."
A pause. "Hold on."
Amara opens the door two minutes later in pajama pants and one of Dante's t-shirts, the same flat, alert expression she wears in church. The Glock she sleeps with is in her right hand, pointed at the ground.
"Talk."
I tell her. The visit to my mother and the Wren message. Then the pattern Mom described, Curtis Brown's playbook, thirty years old and still being run. The fact that Hatchet now has Vegas territory in play and my mother in his line of sight.
Amara listens without interrupting. When I'm done, she nods once, and we head downstairs into the kitchen.
Dante starts a fresh pot of coffee and once it’s done, he’s pouring coffee into a thermos.
He hands it to me without asking and goes back upstairs to bed. Dante and I don't speak much, but he knows the difference between business and a social call and treats both with the same economy.
Amara already has her phone in her hand.
"Damon. Wake up." She crosses into the living room. I hear her voice low and tight, the clipped exchange of presidents in the middle of the night when something has shifted.
She comes back five minutes later.
"Vegas had a Kodiak member parked across from your mother's house yesterday afternoon. One of Damon's prospects clocked the plates. They were going to call us in the morning. He's putting a watch on her place tonight."
I nod.
"Ramiro will be at the gate inside an hour. Alejandro's contacts have been picking up chatter on Kodiak inquiries to a couple of local crews. We'll have it laid out by morning."
"Church?"
"Six a.m. Pull everyone in. You're going to walk the brothers through what you know."
I look at her.
"All of it?"
"All of it, Doom. The pattern. What your mother just told you about how Curtis operates. The Kodiaks are coming for this charter, and you're the only one in this clubhouse who's lived inside their head." She pauses. "Your bloodline stops being a liability tonight. Use it."
Church convenes at six.
Everyone shows. Patched members in cuts. Prospects on the back wall, which Amara doesn’t typically allow, but this is a different type of situation.
Ramiro and Ismael are even here on the side wall, watching and observing, showing our cartel alliance is ironclad.
Nova is in the kitchen with Lashes, Mei, Ruby, and Rosa. I see her through the door before I step into the meeting room and pull it closed behind me.
Amara is at the head of the table.
The map of Chihuahua on the far wall has been turned over.
The one underneath is bigger.
Mexico, the U.S. Southwest, the whole zone of operation.
There are red marks on it now.
Vegas. Aldama. A spot south of Chihuahua I don't recognize. A line of black up through New Mexico.
She doesn't waste time.