Chapter 5
FIVE
LEXIE
He didn't want to leave.
I could see it in how he stood by his bike, helmet in his hand, his eyes on me instead of the road. The threats from the Jackal whilst he was still here was still fresh in both our heads, and leaving me alone at the stop felt like setting down a weapon in the middle of a fight.
“I’ve got church," he said. "I have to bring this to Angel. What happened with the Jackals changes things. We knew they were moving closer to this territory, and the club needs to move on this, and they can't move on something I haven't told them."
"I know."
"I'll be two hours. Three at most. I'll have my phone. Anything feels wrong, you call me."
"I've been here alone every day for four years, Rook."
"I know you have." He looked at me with those dark, steady eyes that saw everything, and the thing in them was fear. Controlled, managed, run through whatever analytical filter he used to process the world, but fear all the same. He was afraid to leave me here. "Two hours."
He kissed me. Quick, hard, his hand on the back of my neck, and I held onto his shirt for a second longer than I needed to because the part of me that had spent five days learning what it felt like to not be alone didn't want to relearn the alternative.
He rode out. The sound of his engine faded down the highway and the quiet came back and the stop was just me alone again.
I unlocked the door, and started the fryers.
A couple of truckers came through, long-haulers who'd been on the road since before dawn.
I poured coffee, took orders, ran the register.
The routine of it was a comfort, the muscle memory of a thousand identical mornings smoothing over the anxiety that was sitting in my chest.
Billy came in at ten. Sat at the counter, ordered his usual. We talked about the weather, about the highway construction up near Kalispell, about nothing at all, and the normalcy of it was so thin I could feel the breeze through it.
I kept looking at the lot. Every engine, every vehicle that slowed on the highway, every flash of movement in the corner of my eye.
The plywood was still over the window. I'd been meaning to get it replaced, been meaning to call the glazier again, and I hadn't because some part of me knew there was no point fixing a window that was going to get broken again.
Billy left and a family came in, ate burgers, the kids running around the way kids do when they've been in a car too long. They paid and left. The lot emptied. By late afternoon I was alone and the stop was quiet in a way that felt deliberate, like the world was holding its breath.
My phone was on the counter. I checked it. No messages from Rook. He'd said two hours, maybe three. It had been three and a half. Church ran long sometimes he told me, I knew that. Club business didn't operate on a schedule.
I wiped the counter, restocked the sugar. Ran a rag over the pie case. The things I always did, the rhythm I always fell into, and underneath it the anxiety was growing teeth.
But then the bikes came.
Not one. Not two. The sound of half a dozen engines on the highway, heavy, throated, slowing as they approached the turnoff.
The sound built in the quiet the way a storm builds on a clear horizon, distant, then closer, then undeniable, and by the time the first bike turned into the lot I was standing behind the counter with my hand on the baseball bat I kept beneath the register.
Six of them, it was the Iron Jackals. They pulled into the lot and lined up their bikes, cut their engines in unison, and the silence after was worse than the noise.
They dismounted, in a deliberate and unhurried was.
The gray-bearded one was with them, the older Jackal, the one who'd told me he'd burn the place down.
He walked toward the door and the others followed.
I stood behind my counter with my bat, my grandfather's building around me and I thought, very clearly, two hours, Rook.
You said two hours, why aren't you here.
The bell rang when they came in.
They spread out. Two by the door, two along the far wall, one by the kitchen entrance. He walked to the counter and sat down on a stool and looked at me the way he always looked at me. Like I was furniture and something of no consequence to him.
"We gave you time to get used to this," he said. Conversational. Almost bored. "We gave you a warning. We even gave you a chance to get your boyfriend to back off. And instead you went and fucked an Angel. Now we're past the point where this ends nice."
"Get out of here now, you aren’t welcome at my truck stop.”
"Your stop?” He smiled. A cold, empty thing that existed on his mouth and nowhere else. "That's cute. This hasn't been your stop since the first time we sat down in that booth. You just didn't know it yet."
He nodded to the man by the kitchen.
The sound of breaking glass came from the back.
Not the window, something deeper inside, the kitchen, the storage room.
More breaking. The crash of shelving, the heavy thud of equipment hitting the floor.
One of them was in my kitchen, tearing it apart, and the sound of it went through me like a blade because that kitchen was where my grandmother had taught me to make pie and they were destroying it.
I moved and I didn't think about it whether it was a good idea before I did it.
I came around the counter with the bat in both hands, swung at him, and the impact caught him across the shoulder as he threw himself sideways off the stool.
He hit the floor, the stool crashed over, and for one perfect second I was standing over him with the bat raised and the fury of several generations of Lanes in my arms.
One of the men by the door grabbed me from behind.
Arms around my chest, lifting me off my feet, the bat jerked out of my hands.
I kicked, connected with his shin, heard him swear.
The other one came in from the side, got hold of my arm, and between them they had me, my feet off the ground, my arms pinned, the bat clattering away across the floor.
The older Jackal got up. Rubbed his shoulder. Looked at me with an expression that had shifted from boredom to something colder.
"That," he said, "was stupid."
He walked past me toward the jukebox. My grandmother's jukebox, the one she'd loaded with songs all those years ago, the one that still played Patsy Cline, Johnny Cash, and all the music she'd loved. He looked at it for a second. Then he put his boot through the front of it.
The glass shattered. The machine screamed, a distorted wail of damaged electronics, then went silent. He kicked it again, harder, and the whole unit rocked backward, crashed against the wall, and something inside it broke with a sound that was final.
I screamed at him. Words I don't remember, fury I couldn't contain, fighting against the arms that held me. The man holding my right arm twisted it, pain shot up to my shoulder, I gasped, and he twisted harder and I stopped fighting because if he went further something was going to break.
"Hold her there," he said.
He walked through the stop. Methodically, room by room, and he was destroying it.
The pie case, the stools, the shelves behind the counter.
The photographs on the wall, my grandparents at the opening in 1974, my grandfather shaking hands with the first trucker who'd ever pulled in.
Glass breaking, wood splintering, the systematic dismantling of everything I owned.
The two men holding me didn't speak. They held me in the middle of the room while the sounds came from every direction and I stood there and listened to my life being torn apart. The rage was so hot, so huge, it was almost calm. A white-hot stillness at the center of something enormous.
The man from the kitchen came back through.
His knuckles were bleeding, his boots wet.
He'd broken the pipes. Water was running, the hiss of it spraying across the kitchen floor, and the fryer oil would be spreading with it I was sure, the whole back of the building turning into a slick, ruined mess that would take weeks to clean if it could be cleaned at all.
The gray-bearded Jackal came back to the main room. He stood in front of me, close, his face level with mine.
"This is what happens," he said. "Not the window. Not a warning. This. And the next time, it won't be the building."
He put his hand on my face. He held my jaw, his fingers digging into my cheeks, forcing me to look at him, and the intimacy of the grip was a violation that went deeper than pain.
He held me there, those dead eyes on mine, and said, "The Angel can't protect you.
His club can't protect you. You are alone in this building on the far side of nowhere.
We can come here anytime we want, do anything we want and no one is coming to save you. Do you understand?"
I spat in his face.
He didn't flinch. Wiped his cheek with the back of his hand. Looked at what was on it. Looked at me.
"Burn it," he said, without breaking eye contact with me
One of the men moved toward the kitchen.
I heard the click of a lighter and the terror hit me so hard my vision went gray because they were going to do it, they were actually going to do it, the oil on the floor, the gas line to the cooker, my grandparents' building, fifty years of Lane's on the highway.
I fought. Harder than before, harder than I knew I could. I wrenched my arm free from one of them, swung my elbow into his face, felt the crunch of cartilage. He staggered back, blood pouring from his nose, and I was free for one second, two, lunging for the bat on the floor.
The other one tackled me. I hit the ground hard, the air driven out of my lungs, his weight on my back, my face against the floor of my truck stop, and smoke was in the air.
Faint, chemical, the first breath of something catching in the kitchen, and the man's knee was in my spine, my hands were pinned, I couldn't move, and the smoke was getting stronger.
I knew, this was it. This was how it all ended, and there was nothing I could do about it.