3. Rook
ROOK
Church runs at seven in the morning because Diesel does not believe in doing business at night, which is one of six or seven things he brought east with him that this table is still adjusting to.
The room used to be the dealership's showroom and there is still a rectangle in the concrete where a swather sat for a decade.
Eight of us. Diesel at the head with his forearms on the wood and his beard going grey at the jaw, Harrow down at the far end where a former acting president gets put when he has been left alive on purpose.
Deacon against the wall because Deacon does not sit.
Warden with his hands folded like he is about to say grace and probably is.
The box from the feed store is in the middle of the table.
"Say it plain," Diesel says to me.
"Four years, the carrier authority has had a living officer on it.
His niece, and never Tobias." I put the renewal down and turn it so the signature faces the table.
"She has certified the accuracy of every shipping document this club has produced since the spring Tobias went in the ground. Nine hundred and forty-one loads."
"She knew?"
"She did not know."
"You're sure."
"I sat with her for two hours last night." I keep my hands still. "She is not a plant and she is not a liar. She is a woman who signs what the mail brings."
Down the table, Harrow makes a sound through his nose.
"So the exposure," Diesel says.
"A federal investigator was in her store yesterday at two in the afternoon.
He left a card. He asked her whether she reads manifests.
" I let that sit for a second, because everyone at this table needs to arrive at the next part on their own.
"A man from OIG does not drive four hours to Ferris to talk to a woman about culvert.
Somebody sent him. Which means somebody already has the paper. "
"Who has it."
"Nash Overbeck."
Deacon comes off the wall about an inch.
"Overbeck runs days at Wild Horse," I say.
"He has taken a cut off this club's freight for nine years.
Twelve hundred a month, cash, in an envelope, at a turnout on the Canadian side.
He has kept the original manifests the whole time.
Every load, every year, in a lockbox in a storage unit in Redcliff, Alberta, because he is not stupid and he knows that the only thing standing between a man in his position and a federal indictment is having somebody else to hand over. "
"And now he is bored," Warden says quietly.
"Now he wants something."
Diesel turns his head. "What."
"He has been building a private lane of his own out of the Bakken. He needs a carrier with a legal number and a criminal reputation to hold the liability when it comes apart. He has been circling that for eight months. I have said no four times."
The room understands. This is a table of men who have moved a great many things they should not have, and every one of them knows the difference between cigarettes and what comes off a Bakken lease with a name attached to it.
Harrow leans forward and taps the table twice with a knuckle.
"There's a cheaper solution," he says. "One woman in a feed store on the west end of town. She's got no family and a truck that doesn't run and she drives that county road alone every night at ten."
Nobody says anything.
Seven men look at Harrow Beltz. That is all. None of them speaks. Diesel does not even turn his head, and that is somehow the worst of it, because a president who will not look at you has already finished the conversation.
It goes eight seconds. I count them.
Harrow sits back and puts his hands in his lap.
"WE DO NOT ASK is on that wall," Diesel says, to the room, at a normal volume.
"It never meant what this charter has been using it to mean.
It means we do not ask permission. It has never once meant we do not ask the person it lands on.
" He looks at me. "She's on club paper. That makes her club. Rook. How do we get the manifests."
"We go get them."
I put the map down. I have had it since three in the morning.
"Redcliff is nine hours up, and the storage unit is a Class A commercial facility with a keypad and a camera on the drive lane, which is fine, because I have the gate code.
Overbeck gave it to me himself in 2019 as a courtesy so I could drop his envelope when he was on shift.
He has never changed it because he has never believed I would use it. "
"The problem is the crossing," Deacon says.
"The problem is the crossing." I turn the map.
"A lone male driver in a truck at a rural port gets pulled to secondary about a third of the time.
It is nothing personal. It is the profile.
Same man, same truck, with a wife in the passenger seat and a dog on the floor of the cab, gets waved through almost every single time.
They are looking for a shape and a couple hauling together is the wrong shape.
That is the whole trick. That is the only trick I have ever used. "
Diesel's eyes come up slow.
"A wife," he says.
"A cover. Six days. Two of them on the road and one in Redcliff, and the rest is margin, because margin is the only thing that has ever kept a truck of mine from being memorable."
"Who."
And there is the part where I have to say it, and I have been sitting on it since three in the morning, and I have run every alternative and every one of them ends with a stranger holding this club by the throat.
"It has to be her," I say. "The number on the door of that truck is her number.
If we cross with anybody else in that seat and a supervisory officer runs the authority, the name on the registration and the name on the woman do not match and the whole thing comes apart in the booth.
She is the only person on earth who can sit in that seat. "
"I'll do it."
Every head in the room comes around.
She is in the doorway. She has been in the doorway.
She slept four hours on the couch in the front room because it was two in the morning by the time we finished and Diesel is not a man who sends a woman out onto a county road at one in the morning, and I did not know she was awake, and I am the man in this club whose entire function is knowing where people are.
She has the seed cap off. Her hair is doing whatever it wants. She has her arms crossed and her chin is up and she is looking at Diesel, not at me.
"I'll do it," she says again. "It's my name. It's been my name for four years and nobody asked me then, so I'd like to be the one who asks me now."
I have prepared arguments for six different objections and she has taken every one of them off the table before I finished the sentence, and it lands on me sideways, and I find that I would honestly have preferred a fight.
"Sit down, Miss Cobb," Diesel says.
She sits. In this room. At this table. With eight outlaws around it and a stain in the concrete she has not asked about.
Warden gets up and goes to the back and comes out with a cut. A property cut, black, the elk skull small on the left front, and across the back in burnt orange, PROPERTY OF ROOK.
"This is a costume," he tells her, and he says it kindly, and he is the most dangerous man in this building on his worst days.
"It buys you a specific kind of looking away between here and the line.
It does not make you ours and it does not make you his, and when this is finished you hand it back and no man at this table will say one word about it. "
She takes it. She holds it in her lap with both hands like something warm.
The table breaks up. I am rolling the map when Diesel puts his hand on the wood in front of me, which is how he asks for a minute.
We stand out by the fence. The flare stack is going pale because the sun is coming, and the wind is out of the north and there is nothing between us and Saskatchewan to slow it down.
"Eighteen years," he says.
"Eighteen years."
"How many civilians on that route in eighteen years."
"None."
"That's what I thought." He gets a cigarette going with his back to the wind. "You know what I'm going to say."
"You are going to tell me what happens to me if she comes back with a mark on her."
"No." Smoke goes sideways out of him and disappears.
"You already know that. Every man out here knows that.
" He looks at me for a while. "I'm going to tell you the other thing.
You are going to spend six days in a truck with a woman who is decent to people for no reason, and you have been standing in the cold since 2019 telling yourself you like it out there.
That is going to hurt worse than anything Overbeck can do to you and you are going to be alone in the cab with it. "
I do not answer him.
"Bring her back," Diesel says. "And Rook. Bring yourself back too. I've got a use for you."
He goes inside.
I stand at the fence with the wind coming and think about a woman putting a gold star on an invoice, and I do the only thing I have ever known how to do with a variable I cannot control, which is put it in a column and refuse to look at the column.