Chapter 11
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Spur
The cigarette butt is on my kitchen counter in a sandwich bag, and it’s been nagging at me since yesterday.
I'm up before the sun rises.
Dakota's in my bed, hair loose on my pillow, one of her hands curled near her face the way she sleeps.
I haven't slept much. Three hours, maybe four.
The patrol shift I took at midnight didn't end clean—Banshee's check-in came through at two, mine at four, and somewhere in between I lay on my side watching her breathe and thinking about a man who was in the hayloft yesterday afternoon.
I get up without waking her. Coffee in my kitchen. The morning light coming gray through the window over the sink.
I pick up the sandwich bag.
The cigarette butt under the kitchen light is the same Camel Wide Banshee bagged in the loft yesterday—filter ring brown and black, the burn taken down close to the paper, the way a man smokes when he's been waiting on something.
Phantom recognized the brand. Said it was the same kind his brother smoked.
He pocketed the bag yesterday in the office and gave it back to me last night because he wanted me thinking about it.
I'm thinking about it.
Something about the burn pattern. The way the filter is creased on one side. I have seen this somewhere before.
Not the brand—the way the man smokes it.
Two long drags, then a hold, then a third drag taken right down to the filter.
A specific rhythm. A specific man.
I can't place him yet, but I will.
I set the bag back down and drink my coffee at the kitchen counter, watching the light come up through the oaks behind my cabin. After a while I shower, dress, lock up the cabin, and walk out to the round pen.
The mustang is grazing in the center of the pen.
He's been doing this for a few days now. The wild thing has stopped being wild.
I'm going to call Phantom this week and tell him the horse is ready to start saddle work, which means it's ready to be assigned to a brother who needs a project.
I've already done my work with him. He's not mine to keep.
Banshee comes up the path with two coffees as the sun clears the eastern fence. "Spur."
"Banshee."
He hands me the second coffee without asking.
Black, the way Banshee drinks it, the way I've stopped drinking it because Marlena has been making me drink hers with cream and two sugars at the clubhouse since she’s been around and I've grown soft about it.
I drink it black anyway because it's Banshee's and because we don't say no to each other's coffee.
He leans on the rail next to me, looks at the horse, and doesn't speak for a minute. "Quiet on the perimeter last night," he says.
"Yeah."
"Nothing. Dogs slept the whole shift."
"Yeah."
"Tracks at the north fence—none. Tracks at the access road—none. He's not coming back here, Spur. Not before Friday. He's saving it."
"I know."
"He's waiting for Abilene."
"How you holdin' up at the cabin?"
"We're holdin'."
"Phantom asked me yesterday if he should bring her over to the main house with the rest of them."
I look at him. "What'd you tell him?"
"Told him she's safer with you than with him. Cabin's closer to the gate. You're running point. He's running the family."
"He took it?"
"He took it."
We stand there for a while. The sun comes the rest of the way up.
The mustang shifts position in the center of the pen. He moves from grazing to standing, head low, ears soft.
He's listening to us the way a horse listens to two men he's decided are safe.
Banshee, after a while: "You get any sleep?"
"Some."
"You should get more. You look like shit." He cracks a smile.
"I know."
"All jokes aside, I'm serious, Spur. Friday's going to be a long day. I need you sharp."
"I'll be sharp."
He looks at me sideways. Banshee's read me for ten years, and he knows what I look like when I'm not telling him everything. "What's eating at you?"
"The cigarette."
"Yeah?"
"Something about the burn pattern. I've seen it before."
"Where?"
"That's the part I can't figure out."
He nods and looks back at the horse.
"It'll come."
"Yeah."
"Sometimes you have to stop trying to remember and let the memory come back to you."
I look at him. "That's not one of your originals."
"It's a Bex line. She says it about lost horses."
We finish our coffee at the rail.
Banshee leaves before I do. I stand at the rail another while with the empty coffee cup in my hand and the cigarette still working at the back of my head. When I finally walk back to the main house, the sun is high enough that the mid-morning patrol's already changed shifts.
The property is what Phantom wants it to be by mid-morning.
Every brother accounted for. Every two-hour check-in landing on the group thread.
Every door of the main house locked from the inside with two patched men in the kitchen at any given time.
Marlena and Grace are both there now.
They had some of the prospects move over some things for Grace, Shadow, and Waylon yesterday.
Waylon's walking better now and has started this little jog sort of thing.
He’s running through the kitchen on legs that haven't quite figured out the corner where the hardwood meets the rug, and every time he hits that corner he goes down on his hands and laughs about it.
Marlena and Grace laugh too.
Cal's on a quilt on the living room floor with a stuffed cow under his cheek, asleep through the noise the way babies sleep through anything that isn't food or pain.
Phantom's at the kitchen table when I come in, coffee in hand. "Spur."
"Prez."
"She up?"
"Not yet."
"Good. Let her sleep. Ford and Miller will escort her over once she’s ready."
I nod and walk through to the back of the house and out the door to the practice pen, where Rogue is already at the rail with his laptop on a folding chair beside him.
He doesn't look up when I come over. "Anything?"
"Nothing on her phone since the photo," he says. "He sent it from a burner. The tower it pinged was a quarter mile off the access road. He was that close, Spur. Half a mile from the gate."
"Yeah."
"I cloned her line. The next time he sends one, I see it before she does."
"How do you know there'll be a next one?"
He looks up at me.
Rogue's got ice-blue eyes that don't blink much and a face that doesn't move when he's thinking.
"Because he sent the photo. Men who send photos send other things. He's escalating. He's going to try something at Abilene. He's not patient enough to wait for OKC."
"You sure?"
"Yeah."
"All right."
He looks back at his screen and types something I can't see.
"Spur?"
"Yeah?"
"Mark her."
I look at him. "What?"
"You heard me. Whatever you're going to do—and we both know you're going to do something—do it before Friday. Mark her. Tattoo her. Send him a picture of it if you want. Tell him he doesn't get her."
The morning breeze moves through the pen, and Jaeger flicks an ear at the gate. "How the fuck do you know I've been thinking about that?"
"Because I've known you for ten years, Spur, and you're a man who marks his territory. You marked your bunk in the prospect house. You marked the round pen post the day Phantom gave it to you. So mark her. Stop circling it."
I don't answer and he doesn't push.
Eventually Dakota comes up the path from my cabin with a coffee in one hand and her hair in a long loose braid down her back, two prospects tailing her.
She walks across the yard to the practice pen, and Rogue and I both stop talking.
She climbs the rail beside me, looks at Jaeger. "You boys gonna stand at this fence the whole time I'm in Texas?"
"That's the plan," Rogue says.
She walks Jaeger out of the gate and into her practice pattern, I watch her work, and I think about what Rogue just told me.
I've been thinking about it for two days.
I'm going to do it.
* * *
It’s like I blinked and now it’s Thursday morning.
I'm up before her in the dark.
Coffee. The cigarette in its bag where I left it on the counter.
I go to the kitchen drawer next to the stove and pull out the kit from behind the matchbooks and the spare keys.
Small black case. Hard plastic. Worn at the corners from a decade of moving—Laredo to Sharp, the bunkhouse to my first cabin to this one.
I haven't opened it in two years.
I've put ink on four brothers in this club.
Banshee's Saints across the back of his shoulders the night before he got patched.
Bullseye's wife's name on his bicep.
Thunder's daughter's birthdate on his wrist.
Longhorn's mother's name on his collarbone the year she died.
I open it on my kitchen table. Tattoo gun. Power supply.
Three needle cartridges sealed. Two bottles of black ink.
Green soap. Gauze, tape, gloves. A travel-size razor.
Ernesto sold me this kit out of a duffle bag in a parking lot in Laredo eleven years ago for two hundred dollars I didn't have, and he taught me to use it sitting in the back room of a bar he ran in his cousin's name.
He taught me line work first. Then shading. Then how to clean a wound when you've cut too deep. I put my own name on my left forearm in his back room the night before I drove out of Laredo for good.
Phantom doesn't know about the kit. Or maybe he does. Phantom knows a lot of things he doesn't say.
I lay everything out and sit down to wait.
Dakota comes out of my bedroom around six-thirty in one of my shirts and her sleep shorts with her hair loose down her back, and she stops in the doorway.
"What's that?"
"Tattoo kit."
"Yours?"
"Mine."
"You tattoo?"
"I do. Brothers, mostly."
She looks at the kit on the table for a long moment, then she looks at me.
She walks to me, sits in my lap.
The shirt rides up on her thigh and I put my hand on her bare skin without thinking about it.
"You want to put something on me?"
"Yeah."
"What?"
"My name. On the inside of your wrist where the world can see it."
She closes her eyes for a second. "You've been thinking about this."
"For a while."
"How long?"
"Does it matter?"
She opens her eyes and looks at me. "You sure, Spur?"
"I've never been more sure of anything in my life, Dakota."