Chapter 19
ROGUE
The Rot is quiet when we get back, the corridors emptied out, the Rot done for the day.
I go straight to my room, lie down, stare at the ceiling, and wait to get tired. But it doesn't happen. Too much shit swirling around in my head.
Voss Property Group. Shell companies. The machine that burned my father's shop and gutted Rothwell and buried Vi's father.
The fuckers who left town, leaving the rest of us to deal with their destruction.
I've been angry about this for too many years.
Low-grade, background angry, the kind that eventually stops being anger and just becomes part of how you move through the world.
You forget it's there until something puts it in front of your face, and every now and then you remember how pissed you are. But then you go about your day anyway.
Until you get smacked in the face with it again like I was today. The old anger and frustration? It’s back.
I drag myself out of bed around midnight and hit the corridors like I always do when I can’t sleep.
I walk the whole fucking place—east corridors, west corridors, the service passages, dead ends.
When I first started doing this, the place freaked me the fuck out.
It was so dark and dingy and felt like a place no human being should be.
But I eventually found the nighttime quiet to be soothing and am no longer bothered by busted-out storefronts, limbless mannequins, broken escalators, and other shit like that.
Instead, it’s kind of sad, like someone died.
I wander for a while before I end up in the stairwell on the east side, the one with a window that looks out over a loading dock. This is my spot, more or less, where I tend to end up when I need to think or when I've already thought too much and need a fucking break.
But tonight, my brain won’t settle down.
I think back to the look on my father’s face the week after the fire when he told me about the man who’d suggested he sell.
I’d always wondered why Dad hadn’t put two and two together, or maybe he hadn’t wanted to, that maybe the request was linked to the fire.
He just didn’t think that way because he wasn’t that way.
An honest man expects other men to be honest, too.
See how that worked out, Dad?
After the fire, I expected him to be angry.
To rage. Or something like that, but no.
Said Rothwell was over, and there weren’t enough motorcycles in town to sustain the shop anyway.
My dad, who’d spent his whole life building something, decided overnight it was no longer worth a damn. Rebuilding? Nah, no thanks.
I think about Vi's father making a different but equally tragic choice. Building his case, keeping going, refusing to let it go even when everything else was closing in.
I’m thinking about what I would have done in their shoes, when footsteps on the stairs below snap me out of my daydream with their light, unhurried tread. I’d know those steps anywhere.
She appears on the landing below me, looks up, and stops. “Here you are,” she says.
I can’t help but smile at her bedhead. And remember how, just a few hours ago, I had to lower her to the floor after she’d come so hard she couldn’t stand.
"Hey there. Why are you up?” I ask.
"Couldn't sleep."
"Me neither."
She climbs the last few stairs to take a seat beside me on the cold concrete steps, and we look out the window at the dark loading area for a while.
"I keep thinking about your father’s story," she says finally.
"Yeah. Really something, huh?"
"And he just left? Threw in the towel?”
I shrug. I’ve never understood it but on the other hand, I don’t blame the decisions he made. Who knows how I would have reacted in the same situation. "Said he was tired. I think he meant he was done. Not tired-tired. Just done."
Vi’s quiet for a moment. "My father didn't reach that point, although maybe it would have been better if he had," she says. "Maybe he’d still be around."
"Different kind of loss I guess."
"Yeah." She pulls her knees up to her chest. "At least you know where your dad is."
After a while, she says: "Do you think we'll find them? Voss and whoever's above them, the people who screwed over Rothwell?"
I think for a moment. A few days ago, I would have doubted it. But after today, things look different. "Yes. I do."
"You sound confident."
"I am confident."
She looks at me. "Why?"
I think about it. "Because we have something they don't."
"What's that?"
"Anger. It’s one of the best motivators."
Vi leans her head against my shoulder, which she's never done before, just leans it there, and the connection lightens my load. A lot.
I don't move. I need this and don’t want it to stop.