Hold
Ortiz
Rook comes through the door fast and doesn’t have to say it. I’m already off the stool.
Torque gets to the door first. He puts a hand flat on my chest without looking at me and goes out ahead. Mess comes down the hall from the office with his hand behind his back. Steel is already at the window.
The bike sits at the edge of the gravel with its light on. One man on it. His cut has a skull on the back with the jaw hanging open. The rocker under it says LOS MUERTOS.
He isn’t hiding either one.
He’s got his helmet off and his arms folded, looking at the building the way you’d look at a house you were thinking about buying.
Torque walks halfway across the lot and stops. I stop beside him.
“Bar’s closed,” Torque says.
“Wasn’t looking to drink.” The man’s voice carries fine. He wants it to. “Santo sends his regards. He says you’ve got a thing that belongs to him, and he’d appreciate it back before it turns into a problem.”
“Nothing in this building belongs to Santo.”
“See, he thought you’d say that.” The man smiles. His eyes leave Torque and come to me, and they stay. “You’re him. Ortiz. She said your name a lot.”
I’m moving before I decide to. Torque’s arm comes up across my chest and holds, and it’s the only thing in the world that stops me, because Torque doesn’t hold a man unless he’s overriding bad judgment.
“Ortiz,” he says, quiet.
I stand there. The man on the bike watches me stand there. He’s enjoying it. I’d like to break his jaw.
“Tell Santo the answer’s no,” Torque says. “Tell him if he wants to discuss it, he knows where I am. And tell him the next man he sends to sit on my lot at closing doesn’t ride home.”
The man puts his helmet on. “He’ll be in touch.”
He turns the bike around slow so we can all hear it then heads back down the strip. Torque’s arm doesn’t come off my chest until the sound is gone.
Then he looks at me. “Church,” he says. “Now.”
Five of us around the table. Mess at Torque’s right. Steel across from me with his arms crossed. Nash at the end with nothing in front of him, because Nash never brings anything to church but the vote.
Torque doesn’t sit. “They know she’s here. Santo’s younger brother, Cristo, runs his street crew, and that was one of their men. He came to look at the building and see who came out of it.”
“He said my name.”
“He said it to see what you’d do. You showed him.”
I don’t have an answer for that. I’ve got the man’s face and the way he smiled. I’ve got her upstairs behind a bolt. I’ve got my stomach twisted into a knot. Those things don’t fit in the same building.
“It’s already a war,” Steel says. He doesn’t raise his voice. “We can call it something else for a while if that makes everybody feel better. She walked out of their house. We kept her. That’s the whole thing, and Santo knows it. Doesn’t matter that he took her first.”
“It’s a war when I say it is,” Torque says.
“Then say it.”
“Not yet.” Torque puts both hands on the table.
“Here’s what we do. Nobody goes off this property without telling me where.
Rook on the lot around the clock, and I want a second body with him at night.
Nash, the basement door stays locked and you keep the key on you.
Mess, put the word out that we’re closed to strangers after dark.
We harden this building, and we wait for Santo to make the next move, because the next move tells me what he wants. ”
“He wants her,” I say. “He can’t have what’s mine.”
“He wants to know what she costs. That’s a different thing.” He looks down the table at me. “You want to say it, say it.”
“I want to go to their house tonight.”
Nobody laughs. Steel looks at me for the first time all night.
“I know where they drink,” I say. “Everybody does. Give me a couple of brothers and I’ll bring Santo an answer he’ll understand.”
“No.”
“Torque.”
“No. Not tonight, not this week, and not you.” He says it flat. “You go to that house and you make her the reason this club is at war, and every man at this table pays for your recklessness. That’s not yours to spend. Nash.”
“Hold,” Nash says. “Harden. Wait for the next move. It’s the right call. I don’t like it either. But just because I don’t like it doesn’t make it wrong.”
“Mess.”
“Hold.” Mess doesn’t look at me. “Sorry, brother.”
“Steel.”
Steel keeps his arms crossed. “Hold. For now. And for the record, he’s not wrong that it ends at their door. If a fucking woman abuser ever darkens this door, that’s the day I walk out of here and never look back. Brothers or no brothers.”
“Noted.” Torque straightens up. “Ortiz. You’re on a parts run in the morning. Real one. Bay’s got an order waiting across the county. You drive there, you drive back, because if you sit in this building tomorrow you’re going to do something I have to answer for.”
I don’t say anything. That’s how I say hold.
The run is a run. A warehouse, a clipboard, a crate in the back of the truck.
I drive there thinking about her. I load the crate thinking about her. I drive back with the radio off so I can think about her some more.
I think about her feet on Doc’s stool. I think about the man on the bike saying she said my name a lot. I think about how her voice probably sounded when she said it to them. I have to pull over on the causeway and sit with my hands on the wheel until I can drive again.
And the one thing I don’t allow myself to think about is the one thing I want to think about most.
I’ve never once needed to pull over. But I do today.
It’s afternoon when I get back. Rook is on the lot, and Steel’s bike is parked where he can watch the strip from the window. The front door’s locked in daylight, which it never is. Mess lets me in.
She’s sitting on the bottom stair.
Her hair is dry. That’s the first thing.
It’s down and dark, and I’ve never seen it that way.
The last time I saw it she was seven and it was in two braids.
Every time since, it’s been stuck to her head with sweat and worse.
She’s wearing Beth’s jeans rolled at the ankle and a plain shirt. She looks up when the door opens.
She looks like a woman who’s been waiting on a man, and I stop in the doorway longer than I should.
I know she’s not seven. I’ve known it since I saw her standing on the step. Knowing it and seeing it aren’t the same thing.
She’s beautiful.
The thought comes hard and fast enough that I try to kill it before the next one gets through. It gets through anyway.
Her mouth. Her hair. The shape of her in Beth’s jeans. Things I haven’t let myself look at because she’s Pluma and she’s hurt and she came here looking for me.
None of that changes what my eyes are telling me. She’s a woman. A beautiful one. And for the first time since she walked back into my life, something that has nothing to do with protecting her sinks its teeth into me.
I don’t like the timing. I don’t like myself much for noticing.
“They were here last night,” she says. “The bike.”
“Yeah.”
“For me.”
“For a look. They got one.”
She doesn’t ask what happened at the table. I don’t tell her Torque had to hold me on the gravel. She turns the phone Beth gave her over in her hands.
“I want to go outside,” she says.
Everything in me says no. Torque said hold. Steel is at a window for a reason. The last time she went outside a building she ended up in a truck.
“Not far,” she says, before I can say any of it. “The end of the block. I want to stand somewhere that isn’t in here. In the fresh air.”
I look at her hair. I look at her hands on the phone. She’s not asking me. She’s telling me, and waiting to see if I’m going to be one more man who says no.
“Tomorrow,” I say. “The end of the block. I walk with you.”
“You walk next to me.”
“Next to you.”
She nods once. She looks at the door behind me, at the lock on it, then back at me.
“I’ll decide how far,” she says.