Chapter Five
Whitley
Scorch had his arm along the window ledge and his eyes on the glass and had been more or less quiet since we cleared the loop. That was fine. I wasn't talking either.
I knew this road. I'd grown up on it, driven it a hundred times in both directions, in borrowed cars and buses and once, memorably, a truck that shouldn't have made it past Seguin. I'd stopped driving it three years ago for reasons I wasn't going to think about at eighty miles an hour.
Now I was doing eighty with Scorch's jacket close enough to my right shoulder that I could feel the warmth off him every time he shifted, and the Hill Country was starting the way it always started, quiet and certain, getting into everything before you noticed.
"You know this road," he said.
"I grew up on it." I moved left to pass a slow truck. "Boerne's another forty minutes."
"I know where Boerne is."
"Good. Then you don't need to navigate."
"Wasn't planning to." The corner of his mouth moved. "You've got it handled."
The warmth under my ribs went one degree deeper. I kept my eyes on I-10.
"Rally site's outside Bandera," he said, after a minute.
"I know where Bandera is too."
"Just making conversation."
"Sure you are."
He settled back. Outside, the road kept going west, the sky doing what it always did out here, going tall and too big and very serious about it.
I'd come back to Hill Country. I hadn't planned on it being like this.
Around Seguin the conversation ran out and neither of us replaced it. He'd stopped watching the window and started watching me instead. I could feel it at my temple, the steady accumulated fact of it.
"You doing okay?" he said.
"I'm all right," I said. "What about you?"
"Better every day," he said.
He turned back to the window. He'd left a hand on the console between us. Not reaching. Just there. I drove the next ten miles knowing exactly where it was.
THE RALLY SITE WAS six miles outside Bandera on a cleared section of ranch property: a flat stretch of land backed by live oak and mesquite, a covered pavilion sized for a crowd, and somewhere north of forty motorcycles parked in rows that were either carefully organized or casually perfect.
Hard to tell which. Brisket smoke had been in the air since the turnoff.
By the time I parked, the live music was already running its soundcheck under the shelter and the full bar had a line.
The whole site had a kind of organized chaos that wasn't chaos at all.
Every man moving through it knew exactly where he was supposed to be.
Cricket appeared before I had the engine off.
"You made it." He had a bottle of water in each hand and the expression of a man with excellent news about himself. He handed one to Scorch, looked at me. "You actually showed up."
"Said I would," I said.
He opened his mouth, thought better of it, and closed it again. Real growth.
"Brim's got the route table set up," Cricket said. "Comal Saints rep's been waiting."
Scorch was already moving.
The introductions went fast, eight men in twenty minutes, names and road names arriving in pairs I wasn't going to sort in real time.
The club had clearly been briefed. They were equally clearly pretending they hadn't.
I recognized the theater. Three years on a hospital floor and you knew what it looked like when a whole shift had advance information and was choosing not to display it.
Flint, Sergeant-at-Arms, looked at me a beat longer than the rest. Built like he'd been assembled specifically to end arguments.
"Scorch says you're a trauma nurse," he said.
"That I am."
A pause. "Good to have on-site."
"That's what I keep telling him," I said.
The set of his jaw eased by one degree. Beside him, Burr did the same read and reached the same conclusion. I'd been assessed by worse.
Across the site, Scorch had the route map under his hands and two guest clubs paying attention. The job was running in front of the warm manner now, direct and organized. The pull across my shoulder blades came slow and stayed.
SATURDAY MORNING CAME in loud.
Three clubs and forty-nine riders off the highway by nine, the ride-out staged and run clean, Detour on sweep where Scorch could see him.
I watched them leave from the top of the field, the whole line of it moving as one thing.
The sound got into your chest whether you wanted it to or not.
The Road Captain who'd made it happen was already looking ahead.
The afternoon had gone hot and dry the way Hill Country afternoons did in May, heat coming off the limestone itself, the air tasting of dust and caliche, a hawk riding a thermal high over the south ridge.
The Pecos Devils came back in around half-past noon, twenty men loud off the highway, and the site absorbed them the way it absorbed everything: in volume.
I'd moved around the back of the shelter to find the bathroom trailer, away from the noise and press of bodies, and was cutting back through a narrow corridor of scrub and parked trucks when I nearly walked into him.
I went still. Cold hit the back of my neck. The feeling had a name and the name was danger, and it had found me all the way out here.
Trevor Gaines. Pecos Devils cut on his back, older than I remembered, the same set to his jaw.
"Well, Whitley Stahl." His eyes moved over me, slow and deliberate. "Damn, you look good."
I calculated the distance to the main pavilion. Sixty feet around the truck, maybe seventy.
"Walk away, Trevor," I said. "I'm walking away now."
"Road name's Sidewinder now," he said. "In case you were wondering how things turned out, Peaches." Warm and proprietary, like we were picking up a conversation.
I remembered a lot of things. I didn't say any of them.
"Get out of my way," I said. "I'm walking away."
"No you're not." He stepped left, blocking the gap between the truck and the scrub. "Come on. We're just talking. Old friends."
"We were never friends."
"That's not how I remember it." His voice dropped. "We were better than that." He stepped closer. I held my ground. Stepping back was what he'd always wanted from me, and he wasn't getting it. "Heard you went to Houston. Got yourself a whole career. Good for you, baby. I mean that."
"Don't call me that."
"You used to like it." He glanced past my shoulder toward the pavilion.
"Devil's Backbone? Really? You're going to hook up with another MC and think I'm not going to hear about it?
" A short, ugly laugh. "You always did have a mouth on you.
Always had to push. Always had to see how far you could go before somebody stopped you.
" His eyes came back to mine and the warmth in them was gone. "I stopped you once. Remember that?"
The kitchen floor came back all at once.
The ceiling wrong. Someone's hands on my chest doing compressions, counting out loud, and I couldn't get air and I didn't understand why my hands wouldn't work.
I remembered waking up on that floor with paramedics over me and not knowing, for one long terrible second, whether I was going to make it.
I kept my face level and my feet where they were.
"You're always going to be mine," he said, low and vicious. "Doesn't matter how far you ran. Doesn't matter who you're spreading your legs for out here. You were mine when you left and you're mine right now and I think some part of you knows it."
He grabbed me.
Both hands — one fisting in my hair and one around my arm — and he yanked my face toward his. The pain was sharp and immediate. The world went narrow. I was calculating: his weight, my elbow, the gap.
Scorch came around the truck at a dead run.
He didn't yell. Didn't warn him. He covered the distance in four steps and hit Sidewinder with the full weight of two hundred and forty pounds of former Ranger, drove him off his feet and into the red dirt with the kind of focused violence that didn't waste a single movement.
Sidewinder got one arm free and swung and Scorch took the punch across the jaw without flinching and hit him twice in the body — short, hard, the right side where it counted — and then it was over.
Scorch's knee drove into the center of Sidewinder's back, both wrists caught and wrenched up behind him, and Trevor Gaines was face-down in the Hill Country dust with nowhere left to go.
He was still cursing, still trying to buck free, but his mouth was the only part of him left in the fight.
"Stay down," Scorch said. Low and absolute. The voice he used when he meant it past argument. His jaw was already reddening where the punch had landed. He didn't seem to notice.
I was shaking. I pressed my palms flat against my thighs until it stopped.
The corridor had filled. Cricket and Flint came around the south end of the shelter at a run, two more Devil's Backbone behind them.
From the far end, four Pecos Devils members were moving fast, reading the situation, hands loose at their sides.
The whole site had gone to that specific MC stillness, every man accounted for, every man waiting on the word.
Brim walked through it like it wasn't there.
He came around the truck, looked at Sidewinder face-down in the dirt with Scorch's knee in his spine, and looked at me. One long read, top to bottom. Then he turned to face the Pecos Devils who had stopped six feet away.
Their president was a big man, gray-bearded, the face of a man who'd stopped being surprised by most things. Wade Pruitt. Road name Dozer. He looked at his man on the ground. Looked at Scorch. His jaw was tight.
"Your man put his hands on a woman on Devil's Backbone ground," Brim said.
His voice was conversational and it carried.
"Grabbed her by the hair. Had intentions I watched with my own eyes.
On my property. At my rally." He let that sit for three full seconds.
"That how the Pecos Devils handle themselves when they're guests? "
One of the flanking members started to speak.
"I'm talking to your president," Brim said, without looking at him.
The man went quiet. Above the south ridge a hawk was still circling. The red dirt had settled into the creases of Sidewinder's cut and every man in that corridor was watching the two presidents.
"We'll handle it," he said. The words came out measured, a man conceding what he'd lost.
"You'll handle it now," Brim said. "And your chapter doesn't come back to a Devil's Backbone event until I hear from you personally that it's been handled to my satisfaction. We clear?"
A silence. Shorter this time.
"Clear."
Brim nodded once. He looked at Scorch. "Let him up."
Scorch released Sidewinder's wrists and stood. He didn't step back. He stood exactly where he was as two Pecos Devils reached down and hauled Sidewinder to his feet, and he watched with his arms loose at his sides and the patience of a man who had already won and knew it.
Sidewinder got his feet under him. He shook off his club brothers and looked at me. That last look: all the possession and the fury, and underneath it something raw and new. Then Scorch was between us, his back to Sidewinder.
He looked at the cut on Scorch's back. At Brim's face. At the twelve Devil's Backbone members behind them.
His club brothers had him by the arms. He went.
The noise came back in, voices first, then the band.
Scorch turned around.
The bruise on his jaw had gone dark. I crossed the distance between us and pressed two fingers to the bruising, checking the bone.
He held still.
"It's not broken," I said.
"Good to know," he said.
I dropped my hand. My eyes were wet. That was happening whether I wanted it to or not, and I wasn't going to do anything about it right now.
He opened his arms. I walked into them. His jacket against my face, his arm around my back, and the afternoon going on all around us like nothing had happened.
After a while he said, "Guessing you knew him before."
"Years ago — I spent a long time taking care of people who took what I gave and left, or made me sorry I did. He was the second kind," I said.
He was quiet. He didn't ask for more.
"Nobody puts their hands on you again," he said. "You hear me?"
"I hear you," I said.
I let myself stand there until my shoulders came down.
That night: ribs and chicken and sausage off the grill alongside the brisket, three bands, a bar with no last call. Scorch kept me close and I let him: a hand at the small of my back through the crowd, his shoulder at mine at the bar, none of it requiring explanation.
When the rally wound down we went to the tent at the edge of the field. He unzipped the door and I went in first. In the dark, his warmth was already there. His hands went to my hips and I turned into him. When we finally settled back I fit myself against his side, his arm around me.
Fireflies moved through the dark where the tree line started. Hill Country stars overhead, the night sky I'd grown up under.
I closed my eyes and allowed sleep to come.