Chapter Seven #2
"I'm telling you I don't know for certain yet, but I think that's exactly what this is starting to look like, and I think I owe you the ugliest version of my part in it before you have to piece it together from a spreadsheet instead of from me.
" I made myself keep going, even though every part of me wanted to soften what came next.
"I gave her access to more than I should have, Marisol.
Not deliberately. Not because I was trying to include her in club business.
But I got careless, I let her be in the house when I took calls I shouldn't have taken with anybody else in the room, I let scheduling texts sit open on my phone on the counter while I made dinner.
I don't know exactly what she saw or what she remembered or passed along.
I only know I made it possible, the same careless way I made everything else possible, and I think that's a debt that goes a lot further than what it's already cost you and me personally. "
Marisol was quiet for a long moment, looking at me with an expression I couldn't fully read, something between fury and a kind of grim, exhausted recognition. "She texted you," she finally said. Not a question. "Recently. Something urgent."
I felt my stomach drop. "How do you know that."
"I don't, not for certain. But you have the exact look on your face of a man who just remembered something he ignored that he shouldn't have."
I told her about the text, the two unanswered calls, the single unread urgency of it's not about us, it's important , and watched Marisol's jaw tighten, watched her do the same cold, rapid math I'd just watched Cassidy do over the phone that morning.
"You need to call her back," Marisol said. "Today. Whatever she wanted to tell you, if it's connected to any of this, we need to know it before the Coyotes decide the wall wasn't warning enough."
"I know."
"I mean it, Rourke. Whatever's between the two of us, whatever I still can't stand to be in a room with you long enough to sort through, this is bigger than that right now.
If she's genuinely in over her head with people more dangerous than either of us, sitting on that fear for two weeks because it was easier than answering a phone call isn't just careless anymore.
It's the same exact mistake you made with me, playing out again, just with higher stakes. "
I sat with that longer than I wanted to, because she was right, and because hearing it laid out that plainly, the pattern of my own avoidance stretching out in front of me like a road I kept walking down without meaning to, was its own kind of gut punch, worse in some ways than the flip-flops on the porch had been, because this one I couldn't blame entirely on grief or loneliness.
This one was just cowardice, plain and ordinary, the specific failure of a man who'd rather not know something uncomfortable than face what knowing it might require of him.
"I'll call her tonight," I said.
"Good." Marisol turned back to her computer screen, a clear, deliberate end to the conversation, though I caught, just before I stood to leave, something almost like reluctant respect crossing her face, gone as fast as it appeared.
"That's the first time in two weeks you've told me something before I had to drag it out of the numbers myself. Don't make it the last."
I left her office with more to carry than I'd walked in with, and called Harlow from the parking lot before I could talk myself out of it.
The call went straight to voicemail, no ring at all, the specific dead silence of a phone that's been turned off rather than simply unanswered, and standing there in the fading afternoon light, I understood, with a cold, sinking certainty, that whatever she'd wanted to tell me two weeks ago, it might already be too late to hear it from her directly.
I drove out to her apartment complex anyway, a run-down two-story building on the edge of town where a lot of the younger club-adjacent crowd ended up when they couldn't afford anything better, and knocked on her door for a solid two minutes without any answer.
Her mail was piling up in the box outside, a small stack of what looked like bills and flyers, and her ancient hatchback sat in its usual spot in the lot, dust already settling on the windshield in a way that told me it hadn't moved in days.
An older woman came out of the apartment next door while I was still standing there, arms crossed against the evening chill, eyeing me with the particular wariness small towns reserve for a patched member showing up somewhere he doesn't usually go.
"You looking for Harlow," she said. Not really a question.
"Yes, ma'am. Have you seen her the last few days?"
"Not since about a week back. Heard some raised voices out here one night, men's voices, not hers, and by morning her car hadn't moved but she wasn't answering her door either.
I almost called somebody about it, but people come and go around here, and it wasn't really my business to make a fuss over. "
Something cold settled low in my stomach. "Did you get a look at the men. Anything you remember. Bikes, patches, anything at all."
"Didn't see faces. Did hear one of them mention something about a debt, though.
Owed money, I think, though I couldn't swear to the exact words.
None of my business, like I said." She studied me a moment longer, something softening slightly in her expression.
"She always seemed like a sweet enough girl to me. Lonely, mostly. You family of hers?"
"No, ma'am. Just trying to make sure she's alright."
I gave her my number in case Harlow turned up, and drove home with my hands too tight on the wheel, running through what I'd just heard.
Raised voices. Men. Something about a debt.
It didn't confirm the Iron Coyotes specifically, but it confirmed something I'd been afraid of since the moment I saw that wall, that whatever Harlow had gotten herself tangled in during those two months wasn't a small thing she could walk away from cleanly, and that my own carelessness, my own refusal to ask her a single real question about her life while I was busy using her loneliness to avoid my own, had left her exposed to something dangerous with nobody, including me, paying close enough attention to notice until it was very possibly too late.
I sat in my truck outside the house for a long while once I got home, not ready yet to go inside, running through everything I now knew laid end to end.
A defaced wall. An adjusted camera. A vendor account accessed on nights I should have noticed and didn't. A woman missing five days after raised voices about a debt.
Individually, each piece could still be explained away as coincidence, if a man wanted badly enough to believe it.
Laid out together, in order, they told a story I could no longer pretend not to see, one where my own carelessness hadn't just cost me my marriage in every way but the legal one.
It had potentially cost a young woman her safety, and left the club I was supposed to help protect standing exposed to a rival that had apparently been watching, patient and thorough, for far longer than any of us had realized.
I texted Deacon everything the neighbor had told me before I finally went inside, and sat at the kitchen table a long while after that, staring at the same spot on the counter where Harlow used to leave her keys, and thought, with a clarity that felt less like guilt now and more like resolve, that whatever it took to find her and to close whatever door I'd left open for the Coyotes, I was going to do it, not to earn anything back from Marisol, though I still hoped that might eventually follow, but because it was simply the next right thing standing in front of me, and I'd spent enough months failing to do the next right thing to finally understand what it cost everyone around me when I didn't.