The Job
Ortiz
The shark’s got road on it. There’s grit in the seam of its stupid mouth and a black smear down one side where a tire went by it. I’m standing in the middle of the strip holding it in both hands, and the sound of that bike is gone.
I paid for this thing until she couldn’t breathe from laughing. She slept with it on the pillow between us. She took it with her when she walked out of my building, because she wasn’t leaving it. That’s what she took. Her bag and the shark. That’s what she thought was hers.
The one thing I gave her.
And I couldn’t protect her.
“Ortiz.”
Torque’s hand is on my shoulder. Not gentle. He’s turning me around.
“Inside. Now. Every one of you.”
Rook is standing on the sidewalk with his hands still open from reaching for her. He’s white. He looks at me and then he can’t.
“She waited for me,” he says.
“What?”
“She waited till I went around back. She knew I’d go around back.
” He’s putting it together while he says it.
“She came out of the back hall before that. Fast. Going up. She was crying, I saw her, I thought she’d had a fight with you and I stayed out of it.
” He looks at Torque. “She came out of the hall by the office. Right after you all went in. Do you think she heard you?”
“Heard what?” Torque says.
Steel says, “Fuck.”
Everybody looks at him.
“She heard me.” He’s gray. I’ve never seen Steel any color but Steel.
“I was telling Torque we stop holding. We go through Santo before he uses her to pull this club apart. She heard me call her the problem and left before I said what I wanted us to do about it.” He puts a hand over his mouth and takes it away.
“I told her I had her back, and then I made her sound like the thing we needed protecting from.”
Nobody says it isn’t his fault. It isn’t. It doesn’t matter. He wouldn’t hear it.
“We can hate ourselves after we get her back,” Torque says. “Inside.”
I go inside because he said it. I put the shark on the bar. I stand there looking at it and everything comes up at once.
She came to this country for me. She walked up to the wrong man and said my name, and that’s how they got her the first time.
She heard men she trusts say she’s the reason this building has a bike across the street, and she believed it, because nobody in her whole life taught her she was worth the trouble.
So she took the trouble with her out the front door. And Cristo Vega was on the corner, because I’d just put three of his men on the pavement and Santo doesn’t wait until morning. Now what’s mine is across a tank going back to the house where they kept her instead of bringing her to me.
I know what’s in that house. I know what he did to her there. I’m not going to think it. I’m going to go.
“I’m going.”
“No.” Torque’s already got the notebook out of the office, Rook’s notebook, open on the bar next to the shark. “We’re going. We go as one brotherhood or not at all.”
I look at him.
“You want to ride out of here alone and hit that building with nothing but your hands, and be dead in the yard before you get to her. You want to put that on her too? Or you can stand here long enough for me to tell you how we do it, and then you go get her with your whole club behind you.” He doesn’t raise his voice. “That’s the price, Ortiz. Pay it.”
I stand there. Every part of me is on the bike already. I stay on the floor.
“Talk.”
He puts his finger on the notebook. “Cristo went south on the strip. Every plate Rook logged goes south. It’s the clubhouse, not the bar, because Santo wants her where he sleeps.
We know the building. Mess and I sat on it back when they first started coming north.
” He looks around the bar. “Front’s a steel door with a man behind it.
Side’s the bike yard, chain-link, one gate.
Back’s the kitchen, and the kitchen’s never locked, because they’re lazy and they think nobody’s coming.
Just because they wouldn’t go to war over a woman, they think no one will. ”
“Somebody’s coming,” Mess says.
“Mess, you’re with me. We go through the gate loud. Everybody in that building comes to the yard, because that’s where the noise is. Nash is on the truck across the street with the long gun and he doesn’t get out of it. Rook.”
Rook’s head comes up.
“You’re on the truck with Nash. You keep the engine running and you keep the back open, because when she comes out, she comes out into that truck and nothing else, and you drive. Nobody else touches that job. You hear me?”
“Yeah.”
“Steel, Ortiz. You’re the kitchen. When the yard goes up, you go through the back, and you don’t stop for anybody who isn’t her.” He looks at me. “Your job is Maribel. Not Cristo, not Santo, not one man in that building who isn’t standing between you and her. She’s the job.”
“She’s the job.”
“Say it again.”
“She’s the job.”
“Then get your cut on.”
Hendrix is at the top of the stairs with his hand on the rail and his leg under him wrong. He can’t ride. He knows it. He throws me down my cut and I catch it.
“Bring her back,” he says. “I’ll make the eggs. I’ll burn ’em just the way she likes it.”
Steel is already moving. “Armory.”
He keys open the steel door behind the office and the rest of us follow. Long guns rack the wall. Ammo cans underneath. Steel starts handing out rifles like he’s dealing cards.
“Two flashbangs each,” Torque says. “Nobody throws one unless you know where Ortiz is. We don’t know where she’s being held.”
Steel puts an AR in my hands, checks the chamber before he lets go, then shoves two magazines into my vest.
“Sidearm?”
I pull my cut back far enough to show him.
“Good.”
“Rook and Nash?”
“Long gun’s already in the truck.”
Torque looks around at us. “Nobody sprays that building. She’s inside it. You see your target before you pull the trigger.”
“Got it.”
Steel slams the armory door shut behind us. “Let’s go get her.”
We roll out of the lot together, Torque in front, and I’m not in front.
That’s new. I’ve never once ridden behind another man toward a fight.
I ride behind him now, with Steel on my right and Mess on my left.
The sound of us going down the strip is the sound she heard outside a window every night for days. Tonight it’s coming for her.
The clubhouse is a low block building with a yard of bikes behind a fence and a light over the door. Torque puts us in the dark at the back where the kitchen is. I stand there with my hand flat on the cinder block, and I can feel her in it. I don’t know how. I feel her.
Then the gate goes.
Mess cuts the chain, Torque puts a round through the light over the door, and that’s the loud he promised.
The yard fills with men coming out of the front and the side with guns in their hands.
Torque and Mess start shooting from the fence line.
Nash’s long gun cracks from across the street and a man in the yard goes down.
“Now,” Steel says.
The kitchen door isn’t locked. He was right. It comes open under my boot and we’re in, a stove and a sink and a table with beer on it. A man comes through the far doorway with a pistol and never gets it up, because Steel puts him through the wall.
The hall is past him. Doors on both sides. A locked one at the end.
She stood up off a floor in one of these and asked for a door.
Black Flag’s coming through it.
“PLUMA!”