19. Awakening
AWAKENING
ONE MONTH LATER
CALEB
The alarm went off on the nightstand at half past five, and I knew where I was before I opened my eyes.
For four months I'd woken up reaching for a number.
Now my hand found the phone Ghost had put in it on my second day in this compound, exactly two things on it allowed to make noise, and I killed the alarm with my thumb and lay there in the dark.
The room was cold at the edges. Warm where he was.
He smelled of last night's soap and the sweat under it, and his arm lay across my middle with its whole weight in it, and I let it stay.
Ghost's room. Ghost's bed, the bigger one he'd ordered a week after the raid, built for two men our size, with a foot of floor left on either side of it.
He stirred beside me. A long breath in, then he turned toward me, face-first, blind, until his forehead found my shoulder.
"Time?" Into my skin, thick with sleep.
"Half past five." I didn't move.
"That's a crime." His arm came across me and tightened. "Five more minutes. Tactical."
"You said that about the bed." His cheek moved against my shoulder.
"The bed was tactical." He was already going under again, the words slowing down. "Best call I ever made."
I put my arm around him. His hair was warm under my hand and flat on one side, and I ran my fingers through it slow, and we lay like that while the window went from black to gray.
One month since the empty box on the mezzanine.
We'd come back down those stairs to a floor full of Gravedigger's men on their knees, and Hawk had let them go.
He'd walked the line of them with the shotgun hanging from one hand.
Every one of them had taken the man's offer at some point, he told them, which meant every one of them had a debt that didn't exist anymore, and the man who'd bought it had left them on a concrete floor and gone out through his own roof.
They owed him nothing. So they were going to get up and walk out, and if Hawk ever saw one of those faces near Gravedigger again, he'd put it in the ground.
He was remembering every face. Then the Phoenixes had stepped back, and the men had gone, a few of them running, most of them not able to.
We'd been rolling out of that district before the first siren cleared Henderson. The five prisoners from the parking structure went out our gate the next morning in the same van they'd brought for my brother, with the same warning and the same look from Hawk.
And Tyler had come down off that roof with a camera full of faces, and after the crowd was gone he'd walked the counting room with it. All of it, the faces, the books, the wire that had paid my brother's bill, went to the two people at the Bureau who owed him. Slow, he'd said. But also thorough.
Renzo had lain on that apron until I got down there, and I'd put my hand out, and he'd looked at it for a long time before he took it.
He'd walked out of that warehouse on his own feet with his face in pieces and one arm wrapped around his middle, and he hadn't spoken one word to me, and I hadn't asked.
I still didn't know where he'd gone. I didn't know if his wife was still in that bed, or who was paying for it now.
Harlan hadn't been on that floor either.
I'd looked. He'd said please to me twice, and I still didn't know which side of that door he'd gone out of.
The half-dead man they'd dropped in the ring for me to finish that first night, the one I'd left in a corridor, I never saw again either. I hoped somebody had carried him out.
My car had come home the same night, my keys still in the bag nobody had bothered to move off that back-hall bench. I'd driven it back myself with my throat still purple, and it sat in the compound row alongside the Harleys.
The next day Hawk had stood at the head of the table at Church, half the room in Rosa's tape and Kai's stitches, and told us to go lick our wounds, and to be ready.
He'd had a message from Gravedigger. One that told us we'd all been too late.
That he'd been playing with us that night.
That he was done with the fighting pit anyway, and that he'd let me go.
He'd looked straight at me while he read it out.
The shotgun hung diagonal on the wall behind his chair by then, the one that had put Gravedigger's name on every pellet through that steel door.
"He commends your bravery," Hawk had told me, and his voice hadn't moved at all.
"He says he was amused, the bastard. That he needs to take care of more important things. "
Every patch not still under Rosa's hands had looked at Hawk then, wanting what I wanted, which was for him to read the rest. For now, he told the table, Gravedigger was not a problem for this club. The rest of the note was personal to him, and it stayed with him. Nobody pushed.
I'd looked down the table at Reaper, then Irish, then Tank, then Blade, and the same thing sat behind every face.
Personal. Nolan had told me about Maria over a griddle weeks before that, Hawk's wife, gone two years with their daughters because the dangers kept getting too close, and I'd sat there hoping those girls were somewhere that man's arm couldn't reach.
Ten minutes later my phone had chimed. The bright clean chime I'd left on for the hospital.
Balance updated.
The number I'd carried onto the line and into that warehouse every Thursday for four months was gone.
Where ninety-seven thousand and change had been, it read zero.
Under the zero, in a different color, a credit, enough to cover months of whatever came next.
And in the note field, the same little gray headstone, and four words.
An outstanding performance, Monk.
I'd nearly put the Church table into itself for a second time.
He kept playing with me. The name through the horns, the raid, the floor full of his own men, none of it had touched him. He'd paid off the rest of my brother's bill and called it a tip for a good show.
For a month I hadn't been able to put it down.
Liam in room 217, the tube out of his throat for two weeks now, the sedation coming down a notch at a time, slow, because a man kept under that long doesn't get yanked awake.
Soon, they kept telling me. They wouldn't say when, and every time the nurse used the word, something in my gut came up to meet it and I had to push it back down.
Enough. Fuck Gravedigger. If he wanted to pay, let him pay. If he wanted to leave me and Liam alone, let him. He wasn't getting one more minute of my head. I'd counted everything my whole life, and I was done counting him.
I lay there in the gray and did the other thing instead.
In through the nose. Four. Hold. Out through the mouth, four.
The count had come back sometime in the second week, on its own, and I checked on it most mornings the way I'd check a lock.
It held. The thing that stood up in me on that mat had sat back down.
And I had a club to feed.
I slid out from under his arm an inch at a time.
He made a sound about it, low, and pulled the pillow into the warm spot and kept it.
Short shower. Jeans, and the black hoodie hanging off the back of the door, his, the collar of it smelling of him when I pulled it over my head.
The hallway hit me cold. The desert had turned over in the last three weeks, the sun still warm on the yard by afternoon and the nights gone hard, and the concrete floor handed the cold back through my boots.
The kitchen door swung open under my hand, and the room wasn't empty.
The urns were on, ticking as they heated, and the whole long room smelled of last night's bleach and this morning's coffee.
Irish sat at the end of the long table nearest the counter with Nolan and Declan on either side of him, the three of them on one bench with their backs to me.
Nolan's hair stood up on one side and his glasses sat crooked, and he'd noticed neither.
Declan drank black coffee in slow pulls with his face doing nothing.
Irish heard the door before the other two did, because Irish heard everything.
"Half past five." He announced it to the coffee urns without turning around. "The kitchen opens at five. At some point the treasurer has to ask what the whole club is asking, which is how long Ghost thinks he can keep the usurper in bed before breakfast turns into brunch."
"He was asleep." I came down the length of the table. "I wasn't."
"He was asleep." Irish twisted around on the bench, and the grin was already up, wide and red-cheeked in the cold.
Then it dropped a notch, and his hand came flat onto the wood.
"Listen. Since you're late anyway. The winter one.
The sneaky one with the chili in it. Teach it to me.
I'm not asking for myself, I'm asking for the club. "
"He wants it for himself." Declan didn't lift his eyes from the mug.
"I want it for everyone." Both of Irish's palms came up off the table.
"He's been talking about it for a week." Nolan pushed his glasses straight with one finger, and they went crooked the other way. "In his sleep, once."
I stood at the end of the table and looked at the three of them. A month ago I'd have called them Ghost's people. Somewhere in the last few weeks the word had turned into family, and I felt it land in my chest, warm.
"After service." My face did something I didn't order. "You wash the potatoes."
"I'll wash the potatoes." Irish hit Declan in the arm. "Did you hear? I'm on potatoes."
I went around the counter and put my hand flat on the griddle to feel it come up.
By seven the room was full.