CHAPTER 2
Dog Tags
°°°
The clinic card sat on Tank's kitchen counter for three days before he admitted to himself that he was avoiding throwing it out because throwing it out would've meant deciding something.
He hadn't called her. He told himself that was the point — get the number in case the club needed it, keep it in a drawer like every other piece of practical information he collected and rarely used, the same drawer that held spare keys to three different clubhouse vehicles and a laminated card with the number for the one lawyer in Cedar Falls who didn't ask questions he didn't want answered.
Except he hadn't put it in that drawer. It was still on the counter, propped against the coffee maker, where he saw it every morning and every night, her handwriting neat and slightly forward-leaning, Lexie Holloway, LVN , and a string of digits he'd already memorized without meaning to.
That was the part that bothered him. He didn't memorize things by accident.
Twenty years of training had made damn sure of that — you memorized what you decided to memorize, deliberately, because memory was a tool like any other and you didn't waste it on things that didn't serve the mission.
He hadn't decided to memorize her number.
It had just happened, the way her voice saying that's just Tuesday had just happened to be the first thing he thought of most mornings since, replacing, for the length of a few seconds anyway, the usual nine-second math.
He didn't examine that too closely. Examining it meant admitting there was something to examine.
Church started at ten, which gave him time to walk the property first — a habit from a different life that had never fully left him, checking the clubhouse perimeter the way another man might check the mail, more ritual than necessity at this point, since nothing had actually threatened the Ironclad Saints' territory in longer than Tank cared to count.
He liked the walk anyway. It was quiet in a way that didn't ask anything of him, gravel lot still holding the night's cool, the flag out front stirring faint in a breeze that hadn't picked up its nerve yet, three bikes lined up at angles that would've made a drill sergeant weep, exactly the kind of low-stakes disorder that told him, more than any report could, that things were fine.
Ronin was already at the clubhouse door when Tank came around the corner, coffee in one hand, cigarette he wasn't smoking in the other, a habit he'd never actually kicked so much as relocated to his fingers instead of his mouth.
"You look like a man who didn't sleep." Ronin said it the way he said most things — sideways, testing for a reaction, forty years of being the club's oldest active patch having taught him exactly how much he could get away with. "Which is new. You usually sleep like the dead."
"Slept fine."
"Uh-huh." Ronin took a pull off the unlit cigarette, which accomplished nothing except giving him something to do with his mouth while he studied Tank's face with the unhurried attention of a man who'd known him fifteen years and had stopped pretending he couldn't read him a decade ago.
"You went and got that prospect stitched up at the clinic Tuesday.
Heard you carried the conversation a while. "
"Heard from who."
"Dobbs. Kid can't keep his mouth shut about anything, including apparently the fact that our VP spent twenty minutes flirting with the nurse instead of hauling his ass back here."
"Wasn't flirting." Tank pushed past him into the clubhouse, which wasn't a denial so much as a tactical retreat, and Ronin, wisely, let it go for now — a mercy Tank recognized and didn't thank him for, because thanking him for it would've meant admitting there was something worth being merciful about.
Church that morning was routine business.
Eleven men around a scarred table that had outlasted three clubhouses and two Prez tenures before this one, coffee going cold in mismatched mugs, the unhurried rhythm of a club with nothing on fire.
A supplier dispute with the garage that handled overflow bike work — Ruiz wanted to switch vendors over a parts-cost disagreement, and Tank listened to both sides of it for four minutes before making the call to stay put for another quarter and revisit it, a decision nobody argued with because arguing with Tank's calls had stopped being a productive use of anyone's Sunday morning around year two of his patch.
A prospect's patch-in date, tentatively set, pending the kind of unofficial vetting that happened over months of watching a man show up on time and keep his mouth shut, not on any calendar anyone wrote down.
A brief and mostly ceremonial discussion of whether the clubhouse roof needed patching before winter, which everyone already knew the answer to and which existed mostly as an excuse for Ronin to complain about the cost of shingles for six minutes uninterrupted.
Tank ran it the way he ran everything, efficient and unsentimental, the gavel work of a man who knew most conflicts resolved themselves faster when nobody was allowed to enjoy having them.
President Callahan mostly let him run it these days, which had less to do with age and more to do with the exhaustion of a man who'd been Prez for eighteen years and had started, in the last few, letting Tank do more of the actual governing while he did more of the actual presiding — a transfer of weight neither of them had ever formally discussed, the way the best arrangements in the club never got discussed so much as simply arrived at.
It was near the end, business mostly wrapped, when Callahan brought up the thing that put a small burr under Tank's collar that he didn't examine too closely either.
"Heard the Vultures moved a shipment through the county line last week," Callahan said, not looking up from the papers he was shuffling, the offhand tone he used for things he considered important enough to mention but not yet important enough to formally discuss.
"Two towns over. Nothing on our turf. Just noting it. "
"Noted," Tank said, and meant it the way a man means something he intends to actually think about later, alone, without an audience.
The Vultures weren't new information — every MC in the region kept half an eye on every other MC, the way you kept half an eye on weather that hadn't decided yet whether it was going to be a problem — but something about the timing of the mention, two towns over, which happened to be roughly the same direction as the clinic, if a man were inclined to draw a line on a map he had no business drawing, sat differently than it would have a week ago.
He didn't say any of that out loud. He filed it, the way he filed everything, in the part of his brain that had spent two decades treating information as inventory — catalog it, don't react to it, wait until it either mattered or didn't.
"You good?" Callahan asked, not looking up, but asking it in the tone that meant he'd noticed something anyway — thirty years of running a club had given the man a low-grade radar for the moments his VP went somewhere else behind his own eyes.
"Good." Tank meant it as much as a man ever meant that word in church, which was to say it closed the subject without answering the question underneath it, and Callahan, who'd known him long enough to recognize the difference and long enough to respect it, let the gavel fall on the meeting instead of pressing.
Church broke. Men drifted toward the garage, toward the kitchen, toward the Saturday-morning laziness of a club with nothing urgent on its plate.
Tank went back to his apartment above the garage, made coffee he didn't finish, and found himself, for the second time in three days, looking at a card propped against the coffee maker like it might do something interesting if he stared at it long enough.
You built a rule for a reason, he told himself, which was true, and which had worked fine for six years, four months, and change, right up until a woman in a back room had looked at a twenty-two-year-old's bandaged arm and then at him, unhurried, unimpressed by his size or his patch or anything else that usually did the talking for him in rooms like that, and asked him a question that wasn't really about bandages at all.
If we've got more of these, who do I call.
That had been a lie, or close enough to one that it made no difference.
He hadn't asked for a number in case the club needed a nurse.
He'd asked because some part of him — the part that hadn't run the six-year math in three days, he realized, an absence he hadn't clocked until just now — had wanted a reason to have her number that neither of them would have to name out loud.
He picked up his phone. Put it down. Picked it up again, which was, he was aware, an exceptionally undignified amount of hesitation for a man who'd once made a call-it-or-don't decision under fire in under four seconds.
In the end he didn't call. He typed, deleted, typed again, settled on four words that felt like the least he could get away with and still call it deliberate: This is Tank. Testing.
Her reply came back faster than he expected, and it undid something in his chest he wasn't prepared for it to undo.
Testing successful. Dobbs's arm status: healing. Your status: unclear.
He looked at that longer than the message warranted. Then, because the alternative was sitting with how much he'd wanted her to answer, he typed back: My status is fine.
That's not what I asked, she wrote, and he felt something in his own chest do the loosening thing he'd watched happen on her face three days ago, the ghost of a smile he wasn't in the habit of letting stay.
He didn't answer that one. He set the phone face-down on the counter, next to the card he still hadn't thrown out, and made himself walk away from it, back out to the garage, back to the version of the day that had a checklist and a clear objective and none of this kind of arithmetic in it.
It didn't work especially well. He thought about her card all afternoon.