Chapter 4
Switchback heard the car before he saw it.
He was standing in the shadow of the Ace High's loading dock with his back against the cinder-block wall and his boots on wet concrete, waiting the way he'd spent a decade waiting on mountain roads for the wreck that was always coming — still, patient, reading the dark.
He'd ridden back from the compound two hours ago, parked his bike three blocks east where the boulevard dead-ended at a fenced lot, and walked in through the alley behind Nora's building because a Harley in the lot was a flare and he wanted the dark.
The chapel had seen her log. Jackpot had read the pages, looked at the plate number, and said two words: Handle it. That was all a Road Captain needed.
Now the car rolled up the boulevard with its headlights off, slow, and turned into the lot.
Not the sedan from the night before. A bigger vehicle — a black SUV, windows tinted, tires crunching gravel in the silence. It nosed into the spot closest to the laundromat's side entrance, the spot where the loading dock threw the deepest shadow, and the engine died.
Three doors opened. Three men got out.
Switchback pressed deeper into the shadow and watched.
The big one in front was Rourke — he recognized the heavyset frame and the clipboard confidence even in the dark.
No clipboard tonight. Rourke had a tire iron hanging from his right hand, the short kind you keep under a truck seat for exactly this purpose, and he was walking toward the Ace High's front door like a man who'd come to close a business permanently.
The other two fanned out behind him. One headed for the side entrance by the loading dock. The other circled toward the back.
Three men. A tire iron. Past midnight on a dead block, coming for a woman they expected to find alone in a dark laundromat.
Switchback's jaw tightened until his teeth ached.
Then the lot lights went out.
All of them. Every sodium lamp in the lot snapped to black at once, and the loading dock and the side yard and the gravel lot went dark as the bottom of a well.
The SUV vanished. The men froze — he could hear their boots stop on the gravel, the sudden disoriented silence of men who'd lost their sight in a place they didn't know.
She'd done it. Nora had killed the lot lights from the breaker panel inside, and she'd done it on her own read, at exactly the right second — the moment they were off the car and spread out and committed to the approach. She'd left them blind in a yard she knew in the dark and they didn't.
Something hot and fierce moved through his chest. Pride. Possession. The word mine forming in the back of his skull like a fist closing.
He moved.
The man headed for the loading dock was ten feet away and couldn't see his own hands.
Switchback closed the distance in four strides, grabbed a fistful of the man's jacket, and slammed him face-first into the cinder-block wall.
The crack was sharp and wet. The man's legs went out and he hit the concrete on his knees, already done, and Switchback put a boot between his shoulder blades and shoved him flat.
From inside the laundromat came the shriek of metal on metal — the roll-down security gate dropping fast, the one Nora used to lock the front bay after closing.
She'd dropped it between Rourke and his backup, split the crew like a blade through a knot.
Rourke was inside. His man was outside. And the man outside was stumbling blind through the dark toward the sound of his buddy hitting the wall.
Switchback stepped off the first man and went for the second.
This one was faster. He heard Switchback coming and got his hands up, swinging wild in the dark, and caught him across the jaw with a fist that snapped his head sideways and lit sparks behind his eyes.
Switchback ate the punch, stepped inside the man's reach, and drove his elbow into the soft space below the man's ribs.
The air went out of him in a rush. Switchback grabbed his head with both hands and brought his knee up into the man's face, and the man went down in the gravel making a sound that wasn't words anymore.
Two down. Both breathing. Both done.
Rourke.
Switchback vaulted the loading dock rail and came around the front of the building at a run.
Through the plate glass he could see the Ace High's interior — half-lit by the emergency exit sign over the back door, the fluorescents killed with the breaker — and Rourke's silhouette moving between the dark machines with the tire iron raised, hunting for the woman he'd come to teach a lesson.
Nora wasn't hiding.
She was standing behind bay twelve with a mop handle in both hands like a bat, and when Rourke came around the row she swung it hard across his forearms. The crack echoed through the laundromat.
Rourke bellowed — surprise more than pain — and the tire iron clattered off the top of a washer.
Nora kicked it under the machines before he could grab it, and it skittered across the tile into the dark.
"Wrong laundromat," she said. Even now. Even in the dark with a man twice her size lunging for her.
Rourke grabbed for her and got a fistful of her sleeve. She twisted free and the fabric tore, and she put a row of machines between them, keeping the heavy steel drums as a wall while Rourke slammed his palms against the housings trying to get around her.
Switchback hit the front door.
The bell chimed. Stupid, cheerful, completely wrong for the moment, and Rourke's head snapped toward the sound.
He saw the patch in the green glow of the exit sign and he knew — Switchback could see it in his face, the calculation crashing, the plan that was supposed to be one woman alone in the dark suddenly two against one with a Wrecker blocking the only door.
Rourke ran for the back.
Switchback went after him. Through the dark machines, boots pounding the wet tile, past the row where Nora stood with the mop handle still in her fists and her chest heaving.
Rourke hit the back door and blew through it into the yard behind the building, the concrete pad where the dryer vents exhaled hot air into the night, and Switchback was three steps behind him.
The pad was wet. Rain from last night still pooled in the low spots, and Rourke's dress shoes slipped on the slick concrete and sent him stumbling.
Switchback didn't slip. He closed the gap in two strides and hit Rourke from behind with everything he had, driving him forward and down onto the concrete.
They went down together. Rourke was big — heavyset, thick through the shoulders, strong the way men are strong who've spent years leaning on people smaller than them — and he twisted under Switchback and got a hand around his throat.
The grip was brutal. Stars popped at the edges of Switchback's vision and his air cut to nothing.
He didn't fight the hand. He drove his forehead straight down into Rourke's nose.
The cartilage went with a wet snap. Rourke's hand flew off his throat and Switchback sucked air and rose up on his knees over the man, and he thought about Old Milt's bruised arm and Nora's flooded floor and the tire iron Rourke had carried into a building where a woman worked alone at midnight, and he hit him again.
And again. His fist against Rourke's jaw, against his temple, against the concrete beside his head when Rourke tried to roll.
Rourke stopped rolling.
Switchback hit him one more time. The sound was flat and final against the wet concrete, and Rourke's body went slack under him, and the man who'd walked into the Ace High with a tire iron and a plan to teach a redhead a lesson didn't walk out.
Switchback stayed on his knees over the body.
His knuckles were split and bleeding. His throat burned where Rourke's hand had been.
His pulse hammered in his ears so loud it drowned out the dryer vents and the distant hum of the boulevard and everything else in the world except the sound of his own breathing.
Footsteps behind him. Light, quick, on the wet concrete.
"Switchback."
Nora's voice. Close. Steady. She was standing at the back door with the mop handle still in one hand and her torn sleeve hanging off her shoulder, and she was looking at the body on the concrete the way she looked at everything — straight on, without flinching.
"The other two?" she asked.
"Down. Not dead." He got to his feet. His legs felt wrong — too much adrenaline, the shakes starting in his thighs. "They'll run."
"They're already running." She jerked her chin toward the side of the building. "I heard them get in the car. One of them was crying."
He looked at her. The emergency light from inside threw a green wash across her face, caught the freckles on her bare shoulder where the sleeve had torn, lit the brassy red hair falling loose from its pile.
Her hands were steady on the mop handle.
Her eyes were wide and dark and alive with something that wasn't fear.
"You killed the lights," he said.
"I know my breaker panel."
"You dropped the gate."
"I know my building." She looked at Rourke's body. Then back at him. "I wasn't going to sit in the back room and wait for you to save me."
There it was. The thing that had been building since she'd handed him a stack of towels at three in the morning like she'd been expecting him — the backbone, the stubbornness, the absolute refusal to be the woman in the dark room waiting for a man to handle it.
She'd read the attack before he had. She'd set the trap.
She'd fought with what she had and made it enough.
He crossed the wet concrete in two steps and put his hand on the side of her neck.
Blood on his knuckles, heat from the fight still pouring off him, and she didn't pull away.
His thumb found the curve where her jaw met her throat and he held her there, not gentle, not rough — claiming.
His hand on her neck and her pulse hammering under his thumb.
"Don't ever do that again," he said. Low. Rough. Meaning every word and knowing she'd ignore every one of them.
"Do what? Fight for my own building?" She tipped her chin up into his hand. Daring him. Even now. "Get used to it."
The adrenaline was screaming through both of them. He could feel it in her pulse, in the heat pouring off her skin, in the way her body leaned into his hand instead of away from it. Her fingers came up and wrapped around his wrist — not pulling him off, holding him there.
Behind them, Dell Rourke lay dead on the wet concrete pad by the dryer vents, the club's first answer to Curtis Vane written in the body of the man he'd sent.
The lot was dark. The block was quiet. Somewhere in the distance, the SUV's engine faded as the two survivors ran for a phone call they didn't want to make.
Switchback stood on the concrete with his bleeding hand on Nora's throat and the adrenaline roaring in his ears and the dead man at his feet, and the only thing louder than any of it was the pulse under his thumb, alive and furious and hers.