CHAPTER FOUR #2
I did not go in. I counted four reasons not to, and all four were true, and not one of them was the reason.
A man came up to the glass beside me to see what I was looking at.
“Don’t stand there. She’ll wake up if somebody’s standing there.” I said it without turning around.
He went back to his chair. Nobody asked me what I was doing at that window, and I did not tell them, and that is the first time in eleven years I can put my hand on.
I sat back down. The man across from me was looking at the break in my right eyebrow while he made up his mind, at the clean gap in the hair where it stopped growing, and that is what men do. They find something on a man’s face to look at while they decide what he is worth to them.
“I’ve already decided,” I said. “She stays inside this fence until it’s finished. I could have walked in here and told you that and gone back to work.”
“So tell us.”
“No. Hands.”
“Say the question first,” Marcus said. “Say it so nobody gets to be confused later.”
“The question is whether the Hades Riders stand where they’ve stood since nineteen seventy-four. Knowing it puts Rennick on our street. Knowing it puts Crane’s money against our gate and he has more of it than we have gate.”
“Say what happens to a man who puts his hand down.”
“Nothing happens to him,” I said. “He rides out. Nobody follows him and nobody says his name in this room again.”
“That’s cold.”
“That’s the vote.”
The bar of sun was off the table by then and the room had gotten loud enough that I had to wait it out.
“And if it’s the Forge?”
“Then it’s the Forge. Hands.”
Somebody swore. Somebody else laughed at him for it, and the laugh went nowhere.
Seventeen hands went up. I counted them twice, because a number I want is a number I check.
“Seventeen to two.”
Holt and Sykes stood up. Neither one argued, and I gave them that. One took his cut off the chairback and held it out to me across the table with both hands.
“Then take it.”
“Put it on the table. Don’t hand it to me.”
A cut handed over is a thing between two men, and I would have had to hold it. On the table it belongs to the room, and the room had just voted. The second one went down on top of the first without a word.
“That’s it?” somebody said. “Nobody says anything to them?”
“Everything that needed saying got voted on,” Marcus said.
They went out through the far door, the wrong one, onto the shop floor. The shop floor runs past the couch.
I went to the glass to watch them do it.
Holt slowed at the end of the couch. He looked at her the way a man looks at something he has decided to be angry at, and then he kept looking, longer than a man needs to. He said something sideways to Sykes. Sykes laughed.
At the roll-up door he stopped and turned around and pitched it up at the window so it would carry.
“Hope the witch is worth two cuts,” he said. “She doesn’t look worth one.”
She did not wake up. She had barely slept since Tuesday morning and a man’s voice in a working shop was nothing to her.
There was a growl sitting behind my teeth. I kept it there. I was not going to spend it on a man who was already gone, and I am not going to pretend to you that what moved in my chest while I watched him look at her was about the vote, because it was not.
I wanted him to turn around and say it again. I wanted a reason in front of witnesses. He did not give me one, and I have been sorry about that since, and not the way a president is sorry about a thing.
A pack closes over a hole like water. A club just gets smaller, and every man left can count.
?
The yard is gravel and it holds the heat until nine at night. Two engines started up out there and sat on the throttle longer than they needed to, and then went out the gate and turned left on Rosewood.
Men came out after them and stood around not going back in. Nobody wants to be first through that door after a vote like that one.
Then the van came down the street.
White, clean, Crane Meridian on the side in gray letters small enough to be tasteful. It came down Rosewood at a walking pace, and it ran the whole length of our fence at that pace, and the driver did not look over once, which takes practice.
It did not stop. It did not speed up. It went on down toward the water and the sound of it stayed in the yard after it was gone.
Not one man out there had anything to say about it. That is how I knew every single one of them had seen it.
When the van came past I did not watch the van. I watched the corner of the shop where the couch wall starts, and I timed the white side of it across that corner. Two seconds. That number has no operational use and I have not put it down.
Luca came and stood next to me with his hands hanging and his thumbs hooked in nothing.
“Two men, Adrian. In one afternoon.”
“Then it’s seventeen.”
He did not answer that either. Twice in an afternoon, and I have known him long enough to know what it costs him to hold his mouth shut.
Bex was in the door of the Sable Room with a rag over her shoulder when I came back in. She has a way of getting to a doorway first.
“Seventeen,” she said. “I heard it through the wall.”
“Seventeen.”
“She hasn’t moved since noon. I checked on her twice and then I made myself quit checking.”
Then she put the rag down on the bar and looked at me the way she looks at a man who is about to open a tab he cannot pay.
“She’s asleep on that couch. Don’t go waking her up just to look at her.”
“Bex. Nobody works that end of the floor for the rest of the shift. Anybody wants a reason, the reason’s me. And she doesn’t go out that gate. She asks you for it, you tell her it’s shut and you don’t tell her who shut it.”
She looked at me for a second longer than the order took.
“That’s a hell of a fence you’re building around one couch.”
I did not answer that. I went as far as the end of the bar where the glass starts and I stopped there, sixty feet short, which is a distance I have never once had trouble holding with anybody else in my life.
A man with a parts tray had slowed down at the end of the couch.
“Turn around and go back to work.”
He turned around.
I got as far as the arm of that couch. Her jacket had slipped off her shoulder. I drew it back over her, careful not to brush her skin, and left before she woke and found me watching.
This afternoon I told eighteen men that I keep nothing from my brothers. I meant it. I would stand up and say it again tomorrow with the charter still open on the table behind me.
Here is what I did not put on that table.
Last night she came inside my fence soaked through with her left hand shut, and I knew what she was before anybody in this club said her name out loud to me. Not off the manifest. Not off the file Marcus laid in front of me at two in the morning.
I had scented that exact thing once before, in June, ten feet down the Sable Room bar, and I had stood there with a drink in my hand and let her walk out into the street, and I had not said one word about it then either.