Wrecker
The clubhouse had a sound when it was doing what it was supposed to do.
Ranger had a laptop open at the corner booth and wasn't looking at it. He was watching the door, which he always did in any room, the same way some men watched the game or the clock. Ranger watched doors.
Ghost was in the corner. That was where Ghost went when he didn't have anything specific to do, which was different from having nothing to do. Ghost always had something going on. You just couldn't see it.
I had the second stool from the end, which was my stool. Nobody sat there when I wasn't there. Nobody sat there when I was there either, because it was mine and the club knew the difference between a rule and a preference and treated mine accordingly.
It was a Tuesday. Nothing was wrong with Tuesday.
Scout was sweeping near the back hallway when he wasn't managing the jukebox, moving a broom around in the general direction of the floor without committing to a plan.
He was twenty-two and still in the part of his prospect year where he wanted to look useful rather than be it.
I'd told him three times that those were different things. He'd nodded and kept being twenty-two.
"Scout," I called out. "If I hear that song one more time I'm pulling the plug."
"It's a classic," Scout said, without looking up.
"It's a cry for help," Brutus said. First thing he'd said in an hour. He picked up his beer and put it down in a different spot, like the change in location might help it become something he wanted.
Scout leaned his broom against the wall and immediately forgot where he'd put it.
The night was doing nothing. The night was exactly what it was supposed to be.
I had a cup of coffee that had given up on being hot and a to-do list that had given up on being short, and the clubhouse around me was the sound I'd learned a long time ago to call good.
Not safe. You didn't call it safe. But good.
The kind of good that had work in it and brotherhood underneath and a door that knew how to stay closed when it needed to.
My phone lit up on the bar.
Cap's name. Mass text. Nine forty-two PM.
911. Church service. B-town. 8:30, mark.
The sound changed.
Brutus set down his beer. Ranger closed the laptop. Scout's jukebox kept going for one more beat before Ghost crossed the room and pulled the plug without a word.
Scout looked around at all of us, still learning what a shift in the air meant.
I pocketed my phone and stood up.
"Leave the jokes at home," I said. "We're rolling."
"Where the hell are ya, Cap?"
I hung up my cell phone for the third time and tossed it onto the counter in front of me. I felt Ghost before I saw him. The man had a way of hovering that would have made most people edgy. Not me. I was used to it.
"It's not gonna work," I said. "We need to get out there and look for him."
Ghost grumbled something behind me and reached past my shoulder, swiping the burner off the counter. Worth a shot, I guessed.
I picked my head up and looked around his bar.
It was a good bar. The kind of place that felt lived-in without feeling dirty, and Ghost kept it that way on purpose.
Normally, on a night like this, there'd be people piled into every corner.
But church had cleared everybody out, which was already weird enough on its own.
We didn't do church meetings in town. We did them at the compound.
Always. Cap didn't deviate from that without a damn good reason.
Something was wrong. I knew it the second that mass text came in.
"Goddamn it," Ghost muttered and tossed the burner back onto the counter.
"Told you," I said, swiping it up and pocketing it.
"When was the last time you heard from him, Wrecker?" Doc asked from somewhere behind me.
I shrugged and looked around at the crew. Every one of them in leather, every one of them looking to me for answers I didn't have. "When he called church. Same as the rest of you. We all got the same text, right?"
A sea of heads nodded.
I chewed the inside of my cheek. Cap wouldn't be late to his own emergency meeting. That wasn't him. Cap was the first one through the door and the last one out, always. The fact that we were standing around in his absence didn't sit right with me at all.
"Ranger," I said.
"Already on it," he called back from one of the booths, the sound of his fingers flying across a keyboard filling the quiet bar.
"I'll go hover," Ghost said, already drifting in that direction, mask and all. I knew why he wore it. Didn't make it any less unnerving when you were trying to get a read on him.
"All of you got the text that it was urgent?" I asked, sweeping my gaze across the room one more time.
Every head bobbed again.
I pulled out my phone and looked at the text again, even though I had it memorized by now.
Cap Prez, 9:42 PM: 911. Church service. B-town. 8:30, mark.
Emergency meeting. In town. Right now. And no Cap.
Fucking hell.
"We should figure out if the locals saw anything," Brutus said.
Brutus didn't talk much. He existed in corners and shadows and preferred it that way. So when his voice filled the room, everybody heard it, and everybody paid attention. Including me.
"Ranger?" I called out.
"Checking cameras," he called back. "Give me a minute."
I chewed on my cheek some more and stared at the bar top.
The club was looking to me. I was second-in-command, which meant I was the one who was supposed to keep things moving when Cap wasn't around.
But I didn't have anything to move them toward yet, and that was the part that was eating at me.
I didn't know what the emergency was. Hadn't known for a week.
And Cap not showing up to explain it was the worst possible outcome I could have imagined.
"God damn it," I muttered, and my fist came down on the bar before I could stop it.
"Uh… Wrecker?" Scout's voice cut through the room. "Someone's coming up on the bar."
I barely got my head up before someone hit the locked front doors hard enough to rattle them in their frame. I opened my mouth to tell whoever it was that we were closed, but—
"Help me!" The voice was muffled through the door, but the desperation in it was crystal clear. "My sister needs help! Please! I know you're in there!"
Ghost moved before anybody else did. He crossed the bar in a few long strides and wrenched the doors open without waiting on a word from me. None of us had a habit of turning away a woman screaming for help. That wasn't something any of us were built for.
"Oh my god, thank you, thank you—"
I recognized that voice. Once it wasn't so frantic, anyway.
"Amanda?" I called out.
She spun toward me, chest heaving, hair half out of the bun she'd put it up in.
Pin-straight red hair, the kind that caught the light even when she looked like she'd sprinted across town to get here, which, now that I was looking at her, she might have.
Sweat clung to her forehead. Her glasses were slightly crooked on her face.
What was strange was that she was alone.
Amanda didn't go a lot of places without her sister.
That was just the way of things with them.
Ariel was the social one, the one who dragged her along to things.
Amanda was more of a homebody, the kind of woman who could spend a whole weekend inside without breaking a sweat over it.
Not that I paid attention to that kind of thing.
I mean. I noticed. It was just an observation.
"Wrecker." She pushed her way through the wall of leather and muscle like she'd done it a hundred times, making a beeline straight for me at the bar. "Something's wrong. Ariel's missing."
I shoved Cap out of my head for the moment. He was a trained Navy captain. The best I knew at keeping himself alive in a bad situation. Wherever he was, I had to believe he was okay. Ariel was a kindergarten teacher.
"Talk to me," I said, and leaned my forearms on the bar to get myself level with her. "What happened?"
She took a breath, wiped her forehead with the back of her hand, and tried to pull herself together.
"She didn't come home from work last night.
I was already at her place, cooking. We do a weekly dinner.
Whoever hosts cooks, whoever visits brings wine.
It was her turn to host, so I was in her kitchen and she just...
never came home. I went to the school. They said she left fine.
I checked their security footage myself and watched her get into her car.
" She stopped. "But then she just disappeared. "
She set her purse on the bar and pulled out a laptop, opening it to a screen covered in tabs. A map stared back at all of us, dotted with red pins.
Ranger's head came up slowly from his booth. "Did you... run those yourself?"
"I traced her plates through three blocks of traffic cameras before the feed cut out," Amanda said, clicking through to a grainy intersection shot. "Somebody wiped it. The next camera in the sequence is just gone."
I studied her face for a second. Then I looked at the screen. "You did all of this since last night?"
"I drove around for hours," she said, and the steadiness in her voice slipped just a little.
"I stayed at her apartment in case she walked in in the middle of the night.
She didn't. Her place was empty this morning.
Ariel doesn't do this, Wrecker. She doesn't stay out.
She doesn't miss our dinners." Her jaw tightened. "She's been taken. I know it."
"Getting the police chief on the phone," Doc muttered and slipped away from the group.
"The regular police already told me to wait twenty-four hours," Amanda said quickly, shaking her head. "I don't think she has twenty-four hours."
"Doc's got pull," I said, and covered her hand with mine without really thinking about it. "Give him a minute."
She went still under my hand. Then she looked down at where I was touching her and back up at me, and for just a second, the panic behind her eyes gave way to something else. Something smaller and quieter.
She clutched her laptop to her chest. "She's okay though, right?"
"Done with the south side," Ranger called from his booth. "Nothing yet."
"Focus on the school," I said, not looking away from Amanda. "Work backwards from there, every major road out."
"I know her usual route," Amanda said quickly. "She takes Marmot to DeVine, then down 432, left into downtown. It's the long way. She always takes the long way home from school. Said it helped her decompress."
"Range, you get that?"
"On it, Wreck."
Ghost set a mug of coffee down near Amanda's elbow without a word. She picked it up and wrapped both hands around it, and I watched some of the tension leave her shoulders. Just a little. Just enough.
I kept my thumb moving across her hand without thinking too much about it.
Doc came back. "Chief's on his way."
"Oh, thank fuck," Amanda breathed.
"We're going to find your sister," I told her, and I meant every word of it. "But I need you to be straight with me right now."
"Anything," she said.
I needed to know if Ariel's disappearance had anything to do with why Cap had gone dark. "Is your sister seeing anyone? Even casually?"
The shift in Amanda's face was instant. Her eyes went from wide and watery to sharp, and something locked behind them that made my stomach drop.
"Is Reid missing too?" she asked.
The whole room got very quiet.
Since when did Amanda Whoever-She-Was know Cap's first name? We didn't call him by his first name. Even us. I looked over at Ranger, who looked right back at me with the same question written all over his face.
I tilted my head. "Answer my question first. What do you know about your sister and Cap?"
Her chin came up. "What do you know?"