Chapter 14
RYDER
The secured phone went off at five past six on Monday morning with the demand I had been waiting nine days for.
I read it twice on the bunkhouse steps with the screen tilted out of the sun.
Silas’s contact believed the decoy had reached Colorado, but somebody in Indiana had reported that Jess was still under Iron Brotherhood housing while I slept alone in a bunk.
They wanted proof I intended to build a life with the pregnant woman before the rest of the men came off the eastern route.
The source asked for no medical record. He wanted Jess in my vehicle, my jacket visible, and a club convoy treating her child as mine.
Across the inner road Eden opened her kitchen curtains two hundred and forty feet away.
She was in a pale shirt I had seen her sleep in and had twisted her hair up off her neck, and she reached above the sink and coughed once and was gone before I could tell whether she went for the rescue inhaler.
She had spent the weekend using every part of this compound I expected her to abandon.
Saturday she ran two prospects through the common kitchen from the doorway in a mask, then walked into the statements, gave a deputy her account, and came out again.
Sunday she sat on her porch with Leah while bikes crossed the road twelve feet from her steps.
She wore my ring the whole two days and never once stepped onto my right side.
If I came near her she moved, or she made me turn.
When men asked me where she was, I said I didn’t know, and every one of them heard the answer as what it was.
Leah’s car had been out since dawn. I didn’t know whether June was inside with her or whether she was alone in that house.
The ignorance wasn’t danger. It was the consequence she had chosen for me, and I sat on the steps with the phone in my hand and didn’t cross the road.
I could still end it. The photograph was in a locked compartment under the bunk behind me, ten steps away.
The account statements, Jess’s agreement, and the burner history could be on Mia’s table before noon.
Eden would learn there was no baby before she watched another woman get into my truck.
Silas might swing part of his search back toward Indiana, but the compound wasn’t sitting behind one attack line anymore.
Eden had a lawyer, a signed order, and four women who did what she told them.
Truth had become safer for her than my plan.
Bear’s seventy-two hours had died on Friday, and he had replaced them with a date off my own card: nine forty this morning.
Without a verified appointment, Jess came off club protection as my family and went to whatever Mia could build for her outside the fence, with the club’s obligation ending at the county line.
Dez had people in three counties. Twenty-two years old, no money she hadn’t taken from me, and a debt with a man who had already priced her out to other men.
I told myself I was moving to keep a frightened woman inside a fence.
That was the reason I used, and it had the advantage of being partly true, and I have never been able to decide whether I would have gone if it hadn’t been.
Bear reviewed the route at church with Jax, Gage, and the two officers assigned to the convoy.
I gave it to them as Jess’s prenatal appointment and named the transfer property as the practice’s secure intake.
The lead SUV out the main gate. My Silverado second with Jess.
Jax trailing. Twenty-two miles southwest to the transfer property, thirty-five minutes on county roads, then a van with no rear glass for Jess, home after dark on the east side of the county, while I ran another eighteen miles to the decoy building, an empty farm-implement dealership on the state road short of Terre Haute.
Bear held the map next to the order I had filed after the attack. “Why did the clinic move from the north route to west?”
“Security request.”
“From who?”
“The practice uses a rear intake for protected patients.”
Jax had the clinic envelope out of the security file, his initials on the corner where he numbered it Friday. He laid the card in the light. “Suite two-fourteen and a town. No provider. No confirmation number. No patient number. A date in handwriting.”
Mia looked at me across the table. She had arranged counsel for Jess, not approved the story I was hanging on the route. “I reviewed the threat and the need for protected transport. I have never verified a medical appointment.”
“Verify it before the vehicle moves,” Bear said.
“There’s nothing on the card to call,” Jax said.
“I have the intake line.” I said it before I had finished deciding to. “It came off her paperwork.”
Gage leaned back and looked at the ceiling as though patience were stored up there. “Let Jax dial it.”
“Jess hasn’t authorized this club to discuss her care with anybody. Jax calls, they hang up, and we’re where we started with a woman who has to be in a vehicle in ninety minutes.” I stood with the phone. “I’ll do it in front of you.”
I went as far as the corridor, where the whole table could see me through the open door and none of them could hear a word.
I put the phone to my right ear and dialed a number in Missouri that belonged to a man who had never seen a clinic in his life, and let it ring eleven times, and said nothing into it, and watched Bear watch me through the doorway.
Somewhere in the middle of that I understood I had crossed from concealing a thing to manufacturing one, and I finished the call anyway.
“Confirmed,” I said, coming back in. “Patient of record. Nine forty. They take her through the rear intake off the service lot, no lobby, and they won’t discuss anything further without the patient present.”
The room let it go, because I was Road Captain and had never in nine years put a false verification into a route file. Jax wrote it in the log, and beside it he wrote my name, which is what a log is for.
Bear sent for Jess. She came in with her lawyer, a woman up from Indianapolis that morning, two hours north, who looked at each of us like a separate hourly rate. Jess stood far enough from me that nobody could call the distance accidental.
“You can refuse this,” Bear told her. “Your housing and your protection don’t depend on it. Those are the club’s to give, not his.”
“I agreed to the trip.” She didn’t look at me. “My lawyer knows every vehicle and every stop. Ryder doesn’t come inside with me.”
“He doesn’t,” her lawyer said, pulling the route sheet across. “I ride with Jax and stay with Jess at the transfer. Any change requires her agreement.”
I had built this route around witnesses whose whole function was to stop me changing it. Jess had learned how to fence me in, and she had learned it by watching my wife. “Agreed.”
Bear signed. “Jax photographs the departure for the security file and sends the convoy notice on the usual channel. No medical details. If the destination changes, the vehicles come home.”
The usual channel went to contractors, friendly departments, and anybody watching Iron Brotherhood movement. It would hand the source what he had asked for, and Jax would never know why the picture mattered.
Gage stayed behind and put his cane across my path with the tip braced on the floor. “Does Eden know you’re taking Jess out?”
“The route doesn’t concern her.”
“You’re leaving her house in the truck she watched you load for five years, driving a pregnant woman out an open gate, and calling it a doctor’s appointment.
” He shifted his weight when the bad leg complained and refused to sit while I stood over him.
“Leah says Eden hasn’t slept more than three hours since the hospital.
She wakes up reaching for you and then remembers. ”
I wanted every detail he had. The greed of it took my eyes off him. “Why are you telling me?”
“Because you keep behaving like you can’t see her from wherever you’ve put yourself.
” He lifted the cane and touched the rubber tip to the center of my cut.
“I know what it costs to sit outside your own house. I also know what a man looks like when he’s using his own suffering as a place to rest while his wife does the bleeding.
Don’t make that bunk into a penance and think it buys you anything. ”
“It doesn’t buy anything.”
He moved aside and pointed the cane at the door. “Then tell her the truth before you leave.”
He knew no truth beyond the affair, and the demand still found the part of me that had a photograph locked under a bunk forty yards away. “Jess needs the appointment.”
“Jess needs protection. You need the appointment.” He stopped in the doorway. “Bear’s putting a prospect on the east row tonight with orders to log anybody standing in it after midnight. I asked him to. If you want to be a man in a bunk, be one.”
The Silverado hadn’t moved since the attack except to clear the ambulance route.
Eden’s sunglasses were still in the console, one arm bent from the day she sat on them in the church lot and blamed the Indiana heat for softening plastic.
A paper sack under the passenger seat held the fundraiser receipts, every one of them creased into thirds the way she creased everything before it went in a bag.
Her spare hair tie was around the gear lever, where it had been since March.
I had looked past all of it for months with her sitting on top of it.
With Jess due in that seat, I either took her things out or let another woman sit in the middle of them.
I put the sunglasses, the receipts, and the hair tie into a clean evidence envelope, wrote Eden’s name on the front, and carried it to June outside the civilian office.
“I’ll give it to her if she wants it.” June held the envelope away from her folder. “You don’t get to use me as a delivery service every time you find something of hers.”