Chapter 12
RYDER
The sealed bin was on my bunk when I came in off the west line, BATHROOM in Eden’s hand across the lid and a strip of red tape over both ends so she would know if I opened it before the prospect left.
I made Colin stand in the doorway while I broke the seal, took out the batteries, and closed it again.
She had required a witness because she believed I would lie about a plastic box after lying about our bed, our money, and where she was going to live. She was right to require one.
“Anything else?” Colin kept his eyes on the door frame.
“Put your name on the delivery sheet and give it to June. If she sends another bin, you follow her instructions. Mine don’t override them.”
He left. I sat on the edge of the mattress and changed the battery in my left ear while the officers’ hall filled and emptied.
The bunk had one drawer, no lock, and four feet of floor.
I had slept in worse and thought nothing of it.
What made this room a punishment was the sightline: from the hall exit I could see the upstairs window of our house across two hundred and forty feet of inner road, and every object arriving here marked a place inside it where my wife had taken me out.
The source came in before dawn with a still that had come back from the ninth: a woman using the false card fueling a car outside St. Louis, three and a half hours west of the gate, forwarded on to Colorado by Dez’s man within the day.
The image was a partial through glass with sun across it.
Nobody comparing it to the Kroger photograph would have called them the same woman, which was why I had built the trail around a card and not a face.
The message ended with the price of the next step.
Silas wanted proof I intended to make a life with the pregnant woman before he moved the rest of his men off the eastern route.
I could end it before the gate rolled. Give Bear the photograph, give Jax the phone, put Mia between Jess and me, and show Eden the whole route before she stepped outside.
The gates were opening under guard. Eden had claimed the house and had no interest in leaving it.
Every reason I had used since the porch was already dead, and I read the update a second time and told myself the smaller risk to her body outranked the certain end of any chance I had to explain myself.
That was the sentence I used. It had the shape of a decision about her.
Bear called church after breakfast. The table room smelled of burned coffee, wet leather, and the insulation the men had pulled out of the north wall.
Gage took the chair opposite me, his cane propped where it would block the door if he needed to be on his feet fast. Jax laid three folders across the wood. Bear waited for the door.
“We open at noon,” he said. “Controlled groups. Medical and families first, then anybody who wants out.”
Jax didn’t look up from the folders. “Silas is active, I can’t name the leak, and I have two bombings with nothing on either of them.”
“I know what I have.” Bear turned the gate notice around.
“This is day six. The county has asked me twice what happened out here and both times I answered with a closed gate. The third time they stop asking me and start asking the state, and then it isn’t a fire inspector standing in my yard.
And I have forty-one civilians on this property who need pharmacies, jobs, and their own beds.
I can hold a gate against a man with a rifle. I can’t hold one against a county.”
“And the statements?” Jax asked.
“Sheriff’s office sends two deputies tomorrow morning for the explosions and the shooting.
June runs the civilian side. Nobody lies to a deputy, nobody guesses, nobody volunteers club business.
If you don’t know, you say you don’t know.
” Bear looked at me. “That includes Eden. She takes a route out whenever she wants one, and you don’t select her driver, her destination, or her escort. ”
“She won’t accept one from me.”
“You weren’t asked what she’ll accept.” He took his glasses off. “When the gate opens, are you out of that house?”
“Eden already put me out.”
“That wasn’t the question.” Bear leaned in.
“You told this table the marriage has been dead for months. You brought a pregnant woman through my gate and called her yours. So why are you watching her windows, changing her filters, and sleeping with your bags shut like she’s going to cool off and call you home? ”
Gage was watching me and not the folders.
His own marriage had nearly ended over conduct he used to call care.
I could have handed him the photograph. I gave the table the answer I had rehearsed for men who needed to believe Jess was my future.
“I’m not moving another woman into that house before Eden and I settle the property.
Jess stays under club protection until Dez can’t reach her. ”
“Until what?” Gage said. “A divorce? A second house? You know the dose on Eden’s inhaler and you’ve got nothing on the life you say you built behind her back.”
I pulled Jess’s request from under the route maps and put it in front of Bear.
Gage waited for his own answer and did not get one.
The form named Dez, the amount he claimed she owed, and his threat to sell access to her if she didn’t pay.
All of it was true. “Jess is pregnant. The child is mine. Dez believes hurting her brings me into the open. I’m asking the club to keep housing her until Mia has a protected address. ”
Gage read the first page and set it down. “Where’s the medical confirmation?”
“She has an appointment.”
“When?”
“Within the week. Stress after the attack may move it.”
Bear didn’t move. “Monday morning I gave you seventy-two hours to put a provider’s name in front of this table. They ran out before you sat down.”
Jax opened the second folder and took out the clinic envelope.
“I’ll save everybody the week. Bear handed me this Monday.
I’ve had the rest of the props since the sweep Wednesday.
” He slid the contents onto the table under the light: two blank intake pages and a card.
“No provider name. No confirmation number. No patient number. A handwritten date. Monday morning.”
I had watched Bear put that envelope in a folder under his arm on Monday and had spent four days working out how to get it back into a drawer. It had gone straight from his hands to the man who numbers things. Jax took a pen, wrote a figure in the corner, and initialed beside it.
“That’s in the security file now,” he said. “Not in a drawer, not in your hand, and not back with her. If it turns out to be a real appointment, I’ll apologize in front of everyone.”
The card had come out of a packet Jess picked up months before I ever spoke to her, and the date was in my writing. I had put Monday on it because Monday gave me the widest window to build the departure, and hearing Bear’s deadline land on the same day felt like the road opening in front of me.
“Monday,” Bear said. “Your card, your date. By Monday you bring me a provider who confirms she is a patient there, a time, and a number a man in this room can dial. If I don’t have it, Jess comes off club protection as your family and goes wherever Mia builds for her, outside this fence, with our obligation ending at the county line.
I am not housing a claim I can’t check while people are firing on my wall. ”
“That punishes her for my paperwork.”
“It ends a fiction I can’t verify.” Bear moved the request into Mia’s folder. “And starting now, Jess speaks to Mia alone. You have no authority over her room, her money, her phone, her movement inside the secure area, or her appointment information. She asks for you, we document it.”
Possessiveness came up before reason did. Separating her from me made the proof harder. I had promised her extraction and money for a performance, not ownership, and the plan now depended on keeping her answers inside lines I drew. “She came to me. Dez’s leverage is aimed at me.”
“She came through this gate,” Bear said. “She’s under club protection, not yours. You don’t get to keep a frightened woman because you were the first man who offered her help.”
That reached farther than Jess. Eden had sat on a porch five years ago apologizing for ruining a ride after a flare, and I had told her nobody would ever make her beg for care again. She had believed it until I used the next threat to remove every option except mine.
“Mia arranges her counsel,” I said. “The club keeps housing her.”
Jax tapped the first vehicle report. “And what do you handle?”
“Roads, perimeter rotation, and the men who hit us.”
“Not Eden?”
Her name out of his mouth made me look at him. “Eden isn’t an assignment.”
“Stop making plans for her like she is.” Jax opened the third folder and turned a photograph toward me. Blond hair through a fuel-station window, sun across the glass, a hand on a pump. “Who is she?”
The transfer to Denver wasn’t complete. He shouldn’t have had the image at all. “A woman traveling west.”
“A woman using a card tied to the dormant account where you parked the joint savings.” He laid the account page beside it. “You moved the money whole, then used the account to lay a trail. Eden thinks you took it for Jess. Why let her?”