Chapter Ten
ROAM
The USB drive sits on the edge of the table between Janie’s coffee and a crescent wrench Reaper left three days ago. Nobody moves either one. It’s small, plastic casing, a standard issue, the kind you pick up at a gas station checkout. Nothing about it looks like anything.
She set it down this morning without ceremony, held between two fingers. Divorce files, maybe. Property records, perhaps. Something he wanted to keep. Her voice is careful the way it gets when she’s deciding whether what she’s saying matters.
The thing she’s saying matters.
Winchester is at the counter with a second cup of coffee. He looks at the drive the way he looks at everything that lands uninvited on a table—patient, assessing, a man running numbers before he speaks.
“Where’d she get it?”
“His office. Emergency inhaler for Rose was in his desk.”
He picks up the drive. Turns it once, then pockets it.
“Give me a few hours.” He moves toward the workshop and stops at the door without turning around. “Get Fingers.”
Fingers is out back on the plastic chair he dragged to the patch of shade behind the workshop six months ago and claimed as his own.
Laptop open, coffee going cold on the ground beside him, Nerd cross-legged in the grass next to him, reading something on her phone.
Neither of them looks up when I round the corner.
Fingers operates on his own timeline, acknowledging interruptions when he’s ready to.
“Winchester needs you,” I say.
He looks up, reads something in my face, and closes the laptop.
“Now?”
“Now.”
Nerd stands without being asked, brushing grass off her jeans. She goes where he goes when there’s work involved. They’ve functioned as a unit since before most of the brothers were patched in. Nobody asks questions. Fingers doesn’t require context to work, only a power outlet and to be left alone.
He gets both.
The compound runs its morning around that closed door. Bikes in the workshop, tools, low voices, Scout arguing with someone about a sprocket. Gerald in his strip of sun near the gate. Ordinary sounds, the kind that fill up the space between things.
Rose is in the yard with Nerd, who materialized from Winchester’s office somewhere around the two-hour mark and has spent the time since teaching Rose a clapping game.
Nerd is patient about it, restarting the sequence each time Rose demands it, which is four times now and counting. Rose is a rigorous student.
Janie is in the kitchen.
She’s been there most of the morning, moving between the coffee maker and the window that looks out on the yard. Not anxious exactly. Watchful. The way she gets when something is in motion, and the direction isn’t clear yet.
Janie handed over the drive without hesitation, which speaks volumes.
Six months of having an emergency bag, taking the USB at the last minute because something made her take it.
Trusting it to this clubhouse the way she’s been trusting everything to this house.
Not blindly or easily, but one careful step at a time.
The morning moves around us while the door stays closed.
Winchester finds me at noon.
Not in the workshop. He walks out to the side yard where the Softail is parked, stands at the edge of the shade with his hands in his pockets, and wears the expression he wears when the information he’s carrying is heavier than the container.
“Church,” he says. No elaboration.
Five minutes later, the door closes behind us.
Creed is already at the head of the table, which means Winchester went to him before he came to me.
The look Creed gives me when I sit down isn’t surprise, but the one he uses when something he suspected has been confirmed, and the confirmation is worse than the suspicion.
Reaper is to his left, arms crossed, jaw set.
Scout comes through the door last, reads the room, and stops talking.
Fingers sets his laptop on the table. His glasses are slightly crooked, the particular focused stillness of a man who’s been in a room with a problem for three hours and taken apart its components.
“Two directories on the drive,” he says. “The first is what she thought… property records, purchase agreements, and financial statements for Dawson Real Estate Holdings. Nothing unusual, nothing worth hiding.”
He pauses, and it has weight. “The second directory was password-protected.” He opens the laptop and turns it toward the table. “Took me a while.”
The room waits.
“Pure Ventures LLC.” Fingers pulls up the spreadsheet with columns dense with dates, figures, and reference codes.
“Registered in Delaware. Craig Dawson listed as controller. On paper, it looks like a real estate investment vehicle, property acquisitions and development loans. Standard front architecture.”
Winchester says, “Rock called a few months back. Needed a Florida gun buyer vetted. Buyer’s name was Pure Ventures LLC.”
The room shifts, not with a sound but a pressure change, where the particular quality of a space when everyone in it arrives at the same point simultaneously.
Reaper’s hands come off the table.
“We traced Pure Ventures at the time,” Winchester continues. “Couldn’t get past the Delaware registration. Fingers couldn’t get into the accounts without more.” He nods toward the laptop. “Now we have more.”
Fingers pulls up a second file, a transaction ledger, two years deep.
“Pure Ventures has been moving money for a gun operation running through Jacksonville. Same operation the Rivet Knights were providing muscle for. Same distribution routes, same cartel disbursements.” He looks up over his glasses.
“Craig Dawson has been laundering the payments.”
“Hector’s operation,” Creed says.
“Was Hector’s operation.” Fingers nods once. “The structure’s the same, same ledger, effectively, Dawson’s name on the cover instead of Hector’s. When Hector went down, somebody kept the machine running.” He closes that file, opens another. “Axel Vane.”
Scout says something under his breath.
“The Rivet Knights didn’t dissolve after Hector died,” Fingers says.
“Vane took over the financial side. Pure Ventures was already in place, already clean, already moving money. Dawson didn’t know what he’d built before Hector had a new owner.
Or if he knew, he didn’t ask questions.” A beat.
“Either way, he’s been running the books for Vane’s operation for at least four months. ”
“And Vane knows about the ledger,” Reaper says.
“Has to.” Winchester pushes off the wall.
“Craig knows she took a drive. He’s been working his contacts trying to find her.
She doesn’t know what’s on it, thinks it’s divorce material and property records she could use against him.
But Vane would have told him what to keep locked.
When Craig reports the drive missing, Vane will put it together. ”
“Rock needs to hear this,” Winchester says. “He asked us to vet Pure Ventures. He’s going to want to know what his buyer was running.” A pause. “I’ll make the call after Church.”
“So Vane isn’t just coming for us over Hector,” Creed says. “He’s coming for the ledger.”
“They converge on the same point,” Winchester says.
“Craig wants her back because control is everything to him, and Janie walked out with something. Vane wants the ledger because it’s evidence connecting him to two years of illegal operation.
Neither knows the other is looking, but both trails end here. ”
The silence at the table is a different kind of silence than before.
Fingers closes the laptop and folds his hands on top of it. He has done his part. The rest is above his pay grade, and Fingers has always known the difference between the technical and the tactical.
“She has no idea what she’s carrying,” Scout says.
“No.” Winchester’s voice is flat. “Thought it was financial records for a divorce case. Something that might help her lawyer.”
“It’ll do more than help a lawyer,” Reaper says. “That ledger puts Vane away. Puts Dawson away. Puts three of their distribution contacts away.” He looks at Creed. “It also connects back to the Rock call, which connects back to us.”
“Which is why it doesn’t go to law enforcement.” Creed’s statement is not a discussion.
Reaper nods. “Our cop handles it quietly. The ledger dismantles Dawson’s world without a war, divorce proceedings, fraud charges, or accounts seized.” A pause. “Vane is a separate problem.”
“Vane was already a separate problem,” Winchester says.
The table sits with that. The wood grain is worn at the edges. Years of hands resting there, decisions made, the weight of the club pressing down decade after decade. My seat at this table is newer than most. The road gave me a lot of things, and this is one of them.
Twenty feet down the hall, there’s a woman who packed an emergency bag over six months ago with everything she couldn’t replace.
She built herself an exit with the patience of someone who had learned to move carefully inside a house that wasn’t safe—grabbed the drive at the last minute on instinct.
Didn’t know what was on it. Walked out of that office carrying the one piece of evidence capable of burning Craig Dawson and Axel Vane to the ground.
Creed’s eyes are already on me when I look up.
He reads it the way Creed reads things, without asking, without performing the act of reading. Been doing it since I was twenty-five and still learning what this table means. The look he gives me now is the one he reserves for moments when what I haven’t said yet is already visible.
“She gets told,” he says. “Tonight.” Not a request. “She has a right to know what she’s carrying.”
There is no softness in it. No heat either. Creed is seldom wrong about what people are owed. The code is the code, and a person doesn’t get protected from the truth about what’s putting them in danger. Not in this house.
“Yeah,” I say.
Creed nods.
Winchester reaches across and slides the laptop toward me.
“You’ll want her to see it herself. She’ll recognize the property names in the first directory.
Once she’s oriented, she’ll read the second one faster than you think.
” He pauses. “She’s been living inside his system for years. She’ll know what she’s looking at.”
“Janie will have questions,” I say.
“Very specific questions,” Reaper says. Not unkindly. “Let her ask them.”
Fingers glances at Winchester, gets a nod, and stands.
“Good work,” Creed says.
Fingers pushes up his glasses. “There’s always more in the second directory.” Matter-of-fact, no ceremony, then he walks out.
As the door closes behind him, Creed stands.
The others follow, chairs scrape back, the room shifting from Church’s particular stillness into the ordinary motion of men with work to do.
Reaper is already thinking perimeter. Winchester is calculating the cop on payroll and how to use the ledger without blowback.
Scout is thinking about whatever Scout always thinks about, which is never quite what you’d expect.
Creed stops at the door, his hand on the frame, looking back.
Not the president, the other one. The man who watched me ride away from this compound for seventeen years and never asked me to stop. Asking me to stop would have been asking me to disappear. Creed has always understood the difference between what a man needs and what you want him to need.
Jacksonville has always been more home than anywhere else. Age does things to a man’s priorities.
“There’s a room for you upstairs if you want it.” The corner of his mouth lifts. “Better than the one downstairs you’ve been using.”
His way of saying there’s a permanent space here if I want it.
The table is empty now. The laptop sits open in front of me, the spreadsheet still on the screen.
Through the kitchen door, Rose’s voice rises the way it does at the end of something she considers important. Janie’s response comes back, steady, dry, and warm. The voice Craig tried to take but couldn’t quite finish taking.
Something in my chest registers it before my head does, and I leave it alone.
Tonight, I tell her what she’s been carrying.