Chapter 17
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Rogue
The five of us ride out toward the south gate hard.
Phantom in the lead with his hat low and his hand wide open on the throttle.
Holt to his right. Roan behind. Blaze and me bringing up the back.
The gravel of the front drive turns to the county road under my tires.
The black Explorer comes into sight a hundred yards out.
Parked sideways across the access road. The driver's door open. A man standing in the gravel between his vehicle and our gate.
Hunting rifle in one hand.
Bottle in the other.
Todd.
His shirt is half-untucked. His hair is every direction at once. He's been driving since the middle of the night and it shows on him.
We pull our bikes into a line fifty feet from him. Engines cut.
The cicadas are loud in the heat. The sun is high enough now to come down hard.
Todd turns and sees the five of us. The rifle comes up to his shoulder, but it's wavering. He's drunk enough that the barrel can't hold still.
"Hadley!" His voice cracks. "Hadley, you come out here and talk to me right now!"
Phantom steps off his bike with his hands open at his sides. He walks five paces forward of the gate and stops.
His voice carries across the gravel. "Boy. Put the rifle down. We don't want to shoot you."
Todd's barrel jerks toward Phantom's chest. "Where's Hadley!"
Phantom keeps his hands open. "She's not comin' out here, son."
Todd takes a step forward. The rifle is shaking against his shoulder. "She has to come out here. I drove all the way from Houston. She owes me—"
Phantom's voice goes quieter. "She doesn't owe you a goddamn thing."
I start to step forward off my bike.
Phantom doesn't turn his head but his hand comes up flat against the air between us, palm out. "Stay back, brother. This one's mine."
I stay back.
Phantom takes two more paces toward Todd. He's twenty feet from the man now. The rifle is still up, but Phantom's coming on slow enough that Todd's drunk brain can't decide whether to fire.
His hands stay open at his sides. "Son. Listen to me."
Todd's eyes are too wide. The bottle in his other hand sloshes. "Garrett was my best friend. I have a right to talk to her—"
Phantom doesn't break stride. "Garrett told his mama to keep you away from her. Did you forget Mama Cross told Hadley? We all know now. We know what you were to Garrett. We know what you wanted from his wife."
"That's a lie." Todd's chest is heaving now. "Mama Cross has been confused since Garrett—"
Phantom's eyes don't waver. "She isn't confused."
Todd sways. The rifle barrel dips and comes back up.
Phantom drops his voice another notch. "Son. You got a phone call yesterday after you got fired. Or a text. Somebody told you Hadley was at the ranch. Somebody told you to come up here today. Didn't they?"
Why didn't I think of this?
Todd is an idiot, sure, but Hartley isn't.
Todd is nothing more than a fucking pawn.
Todd's face changes. The drunk haze breaks across his eyes for one moment and underneath it there's something that looks like confusion. The hand holding the bottle drops six inches. "How do you—"
Phantom doesn't move. The patience of a man who has already won.
"Because we got a man on our property who knows the work you've been doin', knows you've been runnin' fraud through Bell Insurance for six years.
He's the man who turned you in to your boss.
Your job's gone because of him. And the person who texted you last night to come up here today wasn't on your side.
He was usin' the fact you'd just been fired. He knew you'd come straight here."
Todd's mouth works around nothing. "He said Hadley—"
Phantom's voice goes the soft kind that's worse than yelling. "He used you, son."
Todd stares at Phantom across the twenty feet of gravel.
His jaw opens and closes once.
The rifle wavers.
His face does the small awful thing of a man putting it together. The man who texted him. The man who said come get Hadley. The reason that man wanted Todd at this gate today. The reason any of this was happening at all.
Then his face goes hard.
He doesn't have anywhere else to put it.
The rifle comes up to his shoulder one more time.
Three shots from our line, and I don't know whose. Maybe all of ours. Maybe none of mine. My hand is on my sidearm but I don't remember drawing it.
Todd's chest opens.
He goes down on his knees first. The rifle drops out of his hand into the gravel. The bottle goes after it and breaks. The smell of cheap whiskey comes up off the road.
Then he goes the rest of the way down on his side.
Phantom crosses the gravel to him.
The rest of us follow—Holt and Roan to the flanks, Blaze on the rifle, me at Phantom's right hand.
Phantom drops to one knee next to Todd.
The boy is breathing wet. The wound in his chest is doing what those wounds do.
Phantom puts his hand against the side of Todd's face. The way a man would put his hand against the face of a friend's son.
"Son. You got somebody to bury you?"
Todd's eyes find Phantom's. The drunk is mostly gone out of him now. The thing left in his eyes is the boy he used to be before any of this. "My mom. She's back home in Garrison."
Phantom's thumb moves once across Todd's cheekbone. "What's her name?"
"Linda."
Phantom nods. "We'll call her. We'll tell her you died on the road. We won't tell her how."
Todd nods. The nod is small but Phantom catches it.
His mouth moves. Phantom bends his head closer.
"I just… I just wanted her to know…"
Phantom's hand stays on the side of Todd's face. "She already knows, son. She's known since the day her husband died. You go on now."
Todd's eyes go up to the Hill Country sky. His hand twitches once at his side. Then it doesn't move again.
Phantom kneels next to him a moment longer with his hand on the side of Todd's face. Then he stands up.
He doesn't look at us.
He walks back toward the gate.
The radio on his hip crackles. Banshee's voice, fast and torn. "Lubbock! Lubbock! Three operators at the back fence."
That's the code word.
The blood goes out of my hands.
I'm already running back to my bike before the rest of the brothers turn their heads.
* * *
The ride from the south gate to the bunkhouse is about sixty seconds.
The longest sixty seconds of my fucking life.
My hand is wide open on the throttle. The engine is screaming. The gravel under my tires is going by in a streak that the corner of my eye can't track.
The radio is silent. Then Phantom yelling, then nothing, then silence.
My teeth are locked. My knuckles on the throttle are white. The wind is in my eyes and I'm not blinking.
I left her there.
I left her in a building with women and kids and one man on the porch, and now Banshee said three operators at the back fence.
That means they're already through. Motherfucker!
The bunkhouse comes up around the bend.
The front door is off its hinges.
Phantom is off his bike before I get mine stopped. Up the porch steps in three strides. Through the doorframe.
I'm one step behind him.
Phantom's voice from inside. "Roan. Get on Banshee. Now."
Roan's voice from outside on the porch, already with Banshee. "Already on him, Prez. He's breathin'."
I come through the broken doorway.
The kitchen.
I've seen kitchens like this. Not in this country.
The smell hits first.
Gunpowder, hot copper, the sour edge of fear. A plastic horse is broken on the floor by the table.
Marlena on the floor with Dakota over her, both hands pressed into her step-mother's chest.
Dakota's face is wet. Marlena's sundress is red under her cardigan.
Thunder on the kitchen floor against the table. Bex on her knees over him with her pregnant belly pressed against the side of his thigh and her hands buried in his lower abdomen. The blood is coming up through her fingers.
Diesel under Grace's hands by the rug.
Grace has Cal and Waylon on the rug next to her and she's working the dog one-handed while Cal cries into Waylon's shoulder.
And Hadley.
Hadley on the floor next to Marlena.
Blood in her hair on the left side. Blood across the front of my t-shirt where she's been pressing into Marlena. Her hands red to the wrists.
The ring on her finger dim with it.
Phantom crosses the kitchen to Marlena, his knees hitting the tile, his hand finding her face. "Babe."
She doesn't answer.
He puts his forehead against hers.
He's gone still in a way that I have seen on this man one time in ten years.
I cross the kitchen.
I crouch behind Hadley. My hands come up under her arms. I lift her up off the floor without taking her hands off Marlena's chest until Dakota's hands are pressing where Hadley's were.
I turn her around.
My hands are on her face. "Where is he?"
Her mouth opens. Nothing comes out. "Hadley. Baby. Where's Nash?"
She can't speak.
My hands tighten on her face. The blood on the side of her head is fresh enough that some of it transfers to my fingers. "Hadley!"
The words come out of her wrong. "He took him. Hartley took him. He came in. He shot Marlena. He shot Diesel. Thunder came through the back and tackled him and Hartley shot Thunder and he told me he wanted him, then the next thing I know I was on the floor—"
I pull her against my chest hard.
My hand goes up into her hair on the left side and finds the place where the blood is and stays still there.
I don't breathe right for a moment. "You did right, baby. You did everything you could."
She nods into my chest. She's shaking now. She wasn't shaking when I came in. Now that she's in my arms she's shaking.
My mouth stays at the top of her head. "Did he say anything?"
She pulls her face back to look at me. "Six hours. He said tell you six hours."
My eyes go past her to Phantom on the floor with his forehead against Marlena's.
His head comes up. His eyes find mine across the kitchen.
He swallows. "Brother, go get your boy."
I look down at Hadley. My hand tightens at the back of her neck. "Baby. I gotta go."