Chapter Eighteen
DEVIL’S OFFICE WAS the one room in that clubhouse where nobody ever lied, and I walked into it knowing I was going to try.
Not about the man. About why I’d noticed him.
He was at the desk with the ledgers open, but he wasn’t in them.
He had Raina’s picture in his hand. His wife, gone a long time now, and that picture has sat on the corner of that desk every day since, and he was just looking at her.
He caught me catching him, and he set her back in her place, careful, squared to the desk the way he squares everything, and took one look at my face and closed the book.
“Sit.”
“I’ll stand.”
“Then talk.”
So I laid it out, flat and clean, the way you bring a thing to a president.
Amy’s radiator, and the hole in it, and Gearhead not being able to swear either way but not liking it.
The parking garage, and her going down on the concrete over something down a row of pillars that none of the rest of us could see.
And then Sawyer coming across a parking lot to tell me there was a man on that campus.
Two days running. Watching her come out of class.
Following them to the coffee shop and standing across the street.
Fifties. Thick through the shoulders. Weathered. Buzzed gray hair.
And the ink on his throat.
Devil hadn’t moved through any of it. That’s his way. He goes still and he lets a thing get all the way said before he touches it.
“Describe the tattoo again,” he said.
“Kid said an animal. Snake, maybe a lizard, it had legs so he couldn’t tell. Dark. Blurred out. He said it looked like somebody did it in a garage with a pen.”
Something went across Devil’s face.
“That’s not a garage,” he said.
“No. It’s not.”
“That’s a cell.” He sat back. “Prison ink, on the neck, where every cop in the county can read it. That’s a man who did long enough that he quit worrying about how he looks to the world outside.
” He tapped one finger, once, on the desk.
“That’s not a kid. That’s not some campus creep who liked her hair.
That’s a hard man, Rune, out recent, and he’s standing on a college campus in the middle of the day where he does not belong, watching a nineteen-year-old girl. ”
“That’s how I read it.”
“That’s how it is.” He got up and went to the window with his hands behind his back and looked out at the yard, at the men on the walls, at all of it.
And I stood there and let him think, because you don’t rush him, and because I knew what was coming and I’d already decided I wasn’t going to like it.
“It’s not Drago,” he said.
I’d known he’d say it. It had still put a stone in my gut.
“Walk it with me,” Devil said, turning around, and he wasn’t being dismissive.
He was doing the thing that makes him what he is, laying it out to see if it broke.
“Drago wants Zeynep. That’s what our man inside heard, and he’s paying somebody outside to take her.
Now what in the hell would a man Drago’s paying want with Amy?
She’s not in the club. She’s not connected to any of it.
She’s somebody Brenda brought here who goes to school across the river, and wouldn’t know Drago if the bastard walked up and introduced himself. ”
“I agree, and it makes no fucking sense.”
“You’re getting paid to take Mystic’s pregnant woman off a compound full of armed men, you don’t spend two days learning the schedule of some other nineteen-year-old girl at the College of Charleston.
Doesn’t get you closer to Zeynep. Doesn’t get you through the gate. Doesn’t do a damn thing for the job.”
“You thinking what I’m thinking?”
“It’s her.” Devil’s said, and something dark came into it.
“It’s whatever she came out of. Rune, she walked into this compound a year ago half starved with marks on her, and Brenda has never told a soul on this property one word about where she came from, and I never made her, because it wasn’t a threat.
” He shook his head slow. “Girls don’t just run.
Somebody’s been out there all this time.
And now somebody with prison ink on his throat is standing near her at school looking at her like, how’d the boy put it? ”
“Like she belonged to him.”
“Like she belonged to him.” Devil let that sit in the room. “That’s not a contract, brother. That’s a man who’s come to collect.”
I felt the floor of it. He was right about that too, and it was worse than being wrong.
“So here’s how we’re playing it.” He came back to the desk.
“The wall around Zeynep doesn’t move. Not one man.
Drago’s still Drago, that’s still coming and I’m not thinning that for anything on this earth.
Mystic’d take my head off, and he’d be right to.
But you.” He pointed at me. “You stay on her. Just you. You don’t leave her, you don’t hand her off, you don’t let her out of your sight from the second she walks out that gate to the second she’s back through it, and if she so much as goes to the mailbox you’re behind her. ”
“I don’t plan on letting her out of my sight.”
“Other thing.” He sat down and pulled a pad toward him. “I’m putting Mystic on her history.”
“How much?”
“All of it.”
My eyes came up.
“Birth records. School. Addresses. Family. Anybody who’s ever had legal claim to her, anybody who lived under the same roof. If there’s a man out there who thinks that girl belongs to him, I want a name before he gets another chance to stand across a street from her.”
He wrote something down.
“Won’t be quick. Dawson’s common, and we never ran her when Brenda brought her in. She gave us a name and that was enough because Brenda said it was enough.”
“Still is.”
Devil looked up at me.
“I’m not digging through her life for sport,” I said. “We’re looking for him.”
Something in Devil’s face shifted. Approval, maybe. Gone before I could call it.
“That’s exactly what we’re looking for. Mystic starts with what we’ve got and works backward. School enrollment may give him enough to get a thread. Birth record if he can narrow it. Parents, addresses, whatever comes with it. Once he’s got one real piece, he’ll build from there.”
“How long.”
“Long as it takes.” He looked up. “Days. Maybe a week or more, depending on what he has to reach into. It’s not fast, Rune, and I know you want it fast.”
“I want it yesterday.”
It came out of me hard. Too hard. And I heard it, and Devil heard it, and something in the room changed temperature.
He set the pen down.
“Sit down,” he said.
“I’m fine standing.”
“Rune.” Not loud. He never has to be. “Sit down.”
I sat.
He looked at me for a long moment across that desk, this man who’d taken a rotten club and cleaned it out with his bare hands, who my father hated enough to leave over, who’d stood at my mother’s grave when I couldn’t stand up straight.
He’d known me a long time. There’s not a thing I’ve ever gotten past him and I don’t know why I keep trying.
“How long,” he said, “have you been in love with that girl?”
There it was.
I thought about lying. I’ll be honest about that. I got about half a breath into building one before I understood there was no version of it that would live longer than the time it took to say, not in that room, not to him.
“A while,” I said.
“A while.” He almost laughed. Almost. “Rune. I’ve watched you drift around this property for months looking like a man carrying his own coffin.
You don’t sleep worth a damn. Josie puts food in front of you, half the time you don’t touch it.
You sit out at that cabin every damn night acting like misery’s your job, and I let it alone because your private shit is yours.
” He leaned forward. “Stops being private when it fucks with club business.”
I didn’t say anything.
“So I’m asking once. Can you do this? Not want to. Not mean to. Can you keep that girl alive without getting so wrapped up in her you miss what’s coming from the side?” He held my eyes. “Because if the answer’s no, I put Chain on her tonight. You can hate me till one of us dies.”
And I sat there, and I thought about the parking lot and the hole in the radiator, and about how a man with jailhouse ink on his throat had stood out on that campus easy as you please, close enough I should have made him, and didn’t, because for three weeks I’d kept my eyes on her and not on the ground around her.
Devil was already right. I’d felt how right down in my gut back in that garage, before he ever put a word to it. I’d just been too busy hating myself to name it.
“I’ve already fucked up once,” I said. “Was watching her instead of what was around her. Somebody got to the car. Never saw it.”
Devil didn’t blink. “And?”
“Not happening twice.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“Yeah, it is.” I met his eyes and let him have it, because there wasn’t much left worth hiding.
“You put Chain on her, he’ll do the job.
Not saying he won’t. But Amy knows me. She’s used to me behind her.
Used to where I sit, how close I get, what my bike sounds like when it’s coming up behind her.
Put somebody new on her now and she’ll feel watched every second of the day, and she’ll start watching him instead of living her life. ”
Devil’s eyes narrowed.
“I know where I fucked up,” I said. “Won’t do it again. And there’s not another man on this property knows her tells the way I do.”
“That last part’s exactly what worries me.”
“Shouldn’t.”
“Bullshit.” Devil picked up the pen and turned it once between his fingers. “Don’t dress this up like loving her makes you better at the job. Love makes men stupid. Seen more good men destroyed by that than whiskey.”
Devil watched me another long second. “One chance.”
“That’s all I need.”
He nodded once and looked back down at the pad. “Church tomorrow, after Mystic’s had a night with it. You bring Sawyer’s description to the table. We put that face and that neck in every man’s head on this property.”
“Yeah.”
“One more thing.” Something in his voice made me wait. “You keep your hands to yourself until this shit is settled.”
I said nothing.
“She’s scared. Somebody may be hunting her, and I just ordered you to stay close enough she can’t take a piss without you knowing which building she’s in. That puts you somewhere she didn’t choose to put you.”
My jaw tightened.
“So whatever’s between the two of you, leave it where it is. No pushing. No using this to get close again. And if she reaches for you because she’s scared, you damn well know that’s not the same as her reaching for you because she wants you.”
That one went straight through me.
Devil knew it had. “Understand?”
“Yeah.”
“Good.”
Hearing Devil say it without all the shit I’d piled around it made the difference hard to miss. Giving Amy room to choose wasn’t the same as making the choice for her. I’d been calling those two things the same because it made what I did easier to live with.
“And after?” Came out before I could stop it.
Devil looked up. Something changed in his face then, not soft exactly, because Devil didn’t have much soft in him, but close enough that I knew he understood what I was really asking.
“After, she’s grown and it’s her damn business who she wants.” He opened the ledger again, which meant I was done in that room. “You just make sure she gets an after.”
* * *
I found Brenda in her room. She took one look at me in the doorway and went stiff.
“Brenda.”
“Don’t.” She turned away before I could get another word out. “Whatever you come in here to ask me, Rune, don’t.”
“Somebody’s watching her.”
She stopped. Didn’t turn around. Didn’t move at all.
“Man’s been on her campus two days running. Fifties, maybe. Knows how to stay out of sight. Knows where I am and how to keep where I can’t see him.” I waited, but she still didn’t turn. “Got bad ink on his throat. From the description, Devil and me both think it might be prison work.”
Her hand closed around the edge of the dresser.
“He followed her from class. Followed her and Sawyer to the coffee shop. Watched her the whole time.”
Nothing.
“Brenda.”
“I heard you.”
“There’s more.”
Her shoulders came up.
“Radiator might not’ve been an accident. Then there was that garage, and whatever Amy saw down that row put her on the floor. Now we know there’s a man following her who’s been careful enough to stay out of my sight while he does it.”
Brenda finally turned. I hated what I saw in her face. Not surprise. Fear.
“Devil’s got Mystic digging into her history now,” I said. “But he’s starting with a name. That’s about all we’ve got, and Dawson’s not exactly rare.”
“I promised her.” Barely above a whisper now.
“Lord, Rune, I promised that baby. That first night, when she finally told me enough to let me help her, I looked her right in the face and told her she would never have to tell it again. Not Devil. Not the club. Not anybody she didn’t choose herself.
” She pressed a hand to her mouth, got herself back together, then dropped it.
“I have kept that promise against every man in this clubhouse for a year. Devil included.”
“I know.”
“It’s the one thing she asked of me.” Her voice broke again. “One thing, Rune.”
Brenda stared at me for a long time, before putting both hands over her face. “Oh, sweet Jesus,” she whispered.