Chapter 7
CHAPTER SEVEN
At eight o’clock, the bar had four customers.
Four.
On a Wednesday night in late summer, when the ranchers usually came in after the day’s work and the fishing crowd rolled through on their way back from the lake and the regulars occupied their usual stools with the comfortable certainty of men who had nowhere better to be.
Hill’s Tavern ran a full house on Wednesdays.
It always had, for as long as Regan could remember.
Tonight, she had four customers. The Hendersons in the far corner, nursing one beer each, and two men she didn’t recognize who’d come in off the highway. The door chime jingled as they left after one round. They didn’t even leave a tip.
She wiped down the bar for the third time and tried not to do the math.
Her mother moved quietly through the empty room all evening, restocking things that didn’t need restocking, straightening bar stools, her expression carefully neutral in the way it got when she was worried and didn’t want Regan to see it.
At nine-thirty, she’d pressed a kiss to Regan’s temple and said she was going upstairs to lie down. Her hip was bothering her.
Regan let her go.
CB was at the bar. He’d been there since they’d opened, steady as the foundation and the walls, and sometime in the last hour he’d produced a paperback from somewhere and set it on the bar top in front of him.
He was reading. Or doing a very convincing impression of it.
His eyes moved over the room between paragraphs, often landing on her.
She didn’t call him on it. It was actually a comfort, that particular quality of his attention. The way he could be visibly occupied and completely watchful at the same time.
Don’t get used to it . After they worked out this extortion thing, she’d publish her podcast series on the Outlaws and CB would walk away forever. He’d have every right to. She expected nothing less.
She stood behind the bar for another ten minutes after the Hendersons left, listening to the silence. Then she got her laptop from the office, grabbed a ginger ale, and slid into the back booth. If Ryder Briggs wanted to empty her bar, she could at least use the quiet.
He’d put the word out. She was certain of it.
Not a threat. Not a brick through the window.
Just a quiet conversation, passed from person to person in the way of small towns, the kind of warning that didn’t leave evidence.
You might want to find somewhere else to drink for a while .
The kind of pressure that left no fingerprints and no recourse and worked exactly as intended.
She opened her laptop and pulled up the Season Two folder.
The work steadied her. It always had. She’d built the first season of Cold Circuit out of grief and stubbornness, recording in her kitchen at two in the morning, editing until her eyes burned, publishing episodes no one listened to for the first six weeks.
The work had kept her upright when nothing else would. It would keep her upright now.
She opened the history file and started reading.
An hour passed.
She lost track of CB at some point while she was deep in her notes on the transition period—the late eighties—when she realized her ginger ale was empty, and her back ached from hunching over the screen.
She slid out of the booth.
CB had set the book down and was doing something with his phone. He glanced up when she came to the well.
She refilled her glass without looking at him. The question had been sitting with her for the last hour, building pressure, and she’d been trying to figure out if it was a good idea to ask it.
It probably wasn’t.
“How much do you know,” she said, “about what Ryder’s been building?”
He set down his phone.
She kept her eyes on her glass, turning it slowly on the bar. Casual was hard for her to pull off.
CB no doubt sensed it. “What do you want to know?”
She looked up then. “I want to know if my research is accurate.” A pause. “All of it. Including the history.”
A crease appeared between his brows. “Show me,” he said.
She hesitated for only a second before she nodded.
He came around the bar and followed her to the booth. She slid in first, pulling the laptop toward her, and he settled in beside her. He filled the space. His shoulder was an inch from hers, and the warmth that came off him was immediate and distracting.
She turned the screen toward him and opened the main folder.
He went quiet and scrolled slowly, reading. She watched his face instead of the screen.
His expression went from neutral and unreadable to not. The crease between his brows deepened. A slight tension took hold around his jaw that she guessed meant he’d found something worth noting.
Stop cataloguing the man and let him read.
“Go ahead,” she said. “Tell me where I’m wrong.”
He scrolled to the founding section first. She’d spent more time on those early years than she’d intended, sourcing them carefully.
She’d decided to treat them with the same weight she’d given the criminal history, because the truth of what Ben Briggs had built mattered.
If she was going to burn the Canon Outlaws to the ground with her podcast, she was going to do it honestly.
She was going to show what it had been before she showed what it had become.
She watched CB reread it. His jaw relaxed, and the crease smoothed out.
She’d gotten it right. She could see it before he said a word.
He scrolled further and stopped. “This timeline is off by a few years.” He pointed at the screen. “The cargo route through the Bitterroot didn’t start until ninety-one. Your source has it at eighty-nine.”
She leaned in, frowning at the entry. “The court filing said eighty-nine.”
“The court filing was working from a CI report that had the dates wrong. The route didn’t exist until after Granddad had his first heart attack and stepped back. That mattered to him. He always said it.”
She pulled up a note field and typed: Timeline disputed—primary source places start date 1991, not 1989. Confirm . Then she looked at him. “Anything else?”
He scrolled further. She watched him read through the Ray section—the relationship with local law enforcement, the specific architecture of how the Outlaws had made themselves untouchable in the county for thirty years.
“This part.” He stopped on the internal structure section. “You have it as a flat hierarchy. It’s not. There’s an inner circle—six men, each in charge of a different branch. The illegal ones. Everything goes through them before it gets to Ryder.”
Her head came up. “Do you know who they are?”
“Of course.” A pause. “I can give you names.”
In eight months of research, she’d built the most comprehensive picture of the Canon Outlaws that had ever existed outside of law enforcement files. She had sources, documents, and interviews conducted carefully, obliquely, with people who hadn’t known what they were contributing to.
She had never had anything like this.
“CB.” Her voice came out careful. “You understand what you’re giving me.”
“I understand exactly what I’m giving you.”
A beat of silence.
“Why?”
He looked at the screen for a moment. When he looked back at her, his eyes were steady. “Because you’re going to tell the true story,” he said. “All of it. And someone should.”
She held his gaze. There was nothing in it she could argue with. No angle, no reservation. Just the plain statement of a man who had decided something and wasn’t second-guessing it.
She started another note.
He gave her the names.
They worked for another half hour after that, heads bent over the screen.
She asked questions, and he answered them.
He didn’t embellish, and she stopped being surprised by what he knew.
He’d grown up inside this world. He’d watched it from the inside with those observant green eyes, and he remembered everything.
Now he was handing it to her piece by piece as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
It’s not natural. It’s extraordinary. Don’t forget that .
She scrolled back to the beginning of the history section. There was one part she’d been least sure of—the part she’d spent the most time on, hedged the most carefully, because she hadn’t wanted to get it wrong.
“This is the part I wasn’t sure about,” she said quietly. “Your grandfather. What he actually intended when he started it.” She hesitated. “I didn’t want to get it wrong.”
CB looked at the screen. She’d written it carefully, layered with sources. Ben Briggs had wanted something for men who had nothing. Who had believed in looking out for your own.
She waited.
“You got it right,” he said.
She let out the breath tightening her chest. “Is there anything you’d like to add?”
His head whipped toward her, as if questioning that she was giving him a voice in this.
“I want you to know him as a person. The man who cared about family and his neighbors. He’s more than your facts reveal.
He taught me to ride my first off-road motorcycle.
Gave me my first set of sockets. At the campground, he was the one who showed me how to build a fire, and when I broke my arm, he picked me up and drove me to the ER.
He wanted me to go to college. Told me to make something out of myself. ”
She didn’t type, didn’t move. “He sounds like a good guy.”
CB ran a hand over his face. “He would have hated what the gang has become,” he said. “He died before my dad started dipping into illegal stuff. I used to think that was the worst part.” He paused. “Now I think it might have been a mercy.”
His eyes were darker in the low bar light, and now they were unguarded in a way she hadn’t seen before. He was sharing his personal family experiences with her. Opening up a vulnerable part of himself that she suspected few had ever seen.
Her gaze dropped to his mouth. She forced it back up.
Too late. He’d seen it. He didn’t look away.