CHAPTER 6
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Curtis Banning had never been a brave man, which was, he'd come to understand over the last six weeks, a significant design flaw in a person who now owed the Vultures MC eleven thousand dollars he did not have and had no plausible route to acquiring.
The meeting happened in the back lot of a bar two towns over, a place with a name that had been painted out and never repainted, gravel and weeds and a dumpster that smelled like it hadn't been emptied since summer.
Curtis had chosen it because it felt anonymous, and immediately regretted the choice the second he saw the two men waiting for him, because anonymous, it turned out, just meant nobody would hear anything if this went badly.
"You said you had something for us." The one doing the talking was younger than Curtis expected, wiry, a Vultures patch that hadn't gone faded yet, the hungry energy of a man still trying to prove something to people above him.
His name, Curtis had learned over the last month of increasingly unpleasant phone calls, was Deke, and Deke reported to a man named Ortiz, who Curtis had met exactly once and had no interest in meeting again, a meeting that had ended with Curtis understanding, in vivid and specific terms, what eleven thousand dollars of unpaid debt actually cost a person in a world that didn't send collection letters.
"I've got something." Curtis's voice came out steadier than he felt, which was its own small victory, the kind of victory a scared man learns to take where he can find them. "Info. Good info. Worth more than what I owe, probably."
"Probably doesn't buy you anything." Deke leaned against the hood of a car Curtis didn't recognize, unhurried, enjoying this in a way that made Curtis's stomach turn. "What is it."
"My ex. Lexie." Saying her name out loud in this parking lot felt like a betrayal of something he couldn't name, a debt owed to a version of himself that had once, briefly, actually cared about her, before caring about things had started to feel like a luxury he couldn't afford.
"She's a nurse. Works at a clinic in Cedar Falls, but she does off-book work for the Ironclad Saints.
Patches up their guys so they don't have to sit in an ER explaining themselves. "
Deke's expression didn't change, but something in his posture did, a small recalibration that told Curtis he'd said something worth saying. "The Saints' medical arrangement. That's the info?"
"That's part of it." Curtis pushed on, because stopping now meant he'd said the first half for nothing, and the first half was the part that could get him hurt worse if it wasn't followed by the part that got him out of debt.
"She's got a key to her apartment under a fake rock by the door, dumbest hiding spot I've ever seen, she's had it there for years.
And she's tight with the club — real tight, from what I've been hearing around town.
Somebody wanted eyes on the Saints, wanted a way in that didn't look like anything, she's it.
Clinic vulnerabilities, patient records on half the patch members, personal address, no security to speak of. It's all just sitting there."
Deke was quiet for a moment, considering, and Curtis made himself hold still under the scrutiny of a man deciding whether an offering was worth the trouble of accepting it.
"You understand what happens to her if this goes somewhere you don't like," Deke said finally, not a question, an observation delivered flat, and something in it made Curtis's carefully constructed justification — I'm not hurting her, I'm just giving information, information isn't a weapon — feel far thinner than it had in his head on the drive over.
"I'm not — that's not my problem. I just owe money.
" The words came out fast, defensive, and even as he said them Curtis heard how small they sounded against the actual size of what he was doing.
He thought, briefly and with a flinch he didn't let show, of the last conversation he'd had with Lexie in person — the not quite what I pictured, long-term conversation, delivered in a tone he'd genuinely believed at the time was kind, and knew now, a year and a half and one very bad debt later, that he had never been half the man he'd told himself he was back then either. "Look, are we square or not?"
"You're square." Deke pushed off the car, held out a hand, and Curtis realized with a lurch that he was supposed to produce something physical, not just words. "The key. You said fake rock. You get us a copy or you get us the actual key, your choice, but words aren't collateral."
Curtis hadn't planned on this part. He'd imagined the information itself would be enough — a tip, a rumor, something he could deliver verbally and walk away from with his conscience marginally more intact.
But Deke's hand stayed out, patient, and Curtis recognized that patience, in this transaction, was its own kind of threat.
He'd made a copy three days ago. He hadn't let himself think too hard about why he'd already made it before this conversation had even happened, what that said about a decision he'd apparently made before admitting to himself he'd made it.
He handed it over.
"Good man." Deke's smile had nothing warm in it. "Ortiz'll be pleased. He's had half an eye on the Saints for a while now — this just makes it easier."
The name landed in Curtis's chest like something cold, though he couldn't have said exactly why, except that it made the whole transaction feel suddenly larger than the eleven thousand dollars it had started as, like he'd handed over something he didn't fully understand the size of in exchange for something he needed badly enough not to ask.
He drove home with the radio too loud, trying to drown out the small persistent voice reminding him that Lexie Holloway had once looked at him like he was worth something, and that whatever he'd just done had traded on the exact kindness in her that he'd once claimed not to want enough of.
~ ~ ~
Forty miles away, Tank was doing nothing more dramatic than fixing a carburetor problem on Ronin's bike, hands black with grease, a Saturday afternoon that had nothing to do with Curtis Banning or Vultures enforcers or debts changing hands in a parking lot two towns over.
But something in him — some low-grade static he couldn't name, a feeling he'd learned a long time ago not to dismiss just because it didn't come with evidence attached — had been sitting under his sternum since Wednesday, since a Saints patch named Coyote had come back from a supply run through Vultures-adjacent territory and mentioned, offhand, that he'd seen more traffic through those two towns than usual.
More cars. More faces he didn't recognize idling in places that didn't need idling.
"Probably nothing," Coyote had said, the same way most men said things they didn't fully believe themselves.
Tank had filed it. He filed most things that came with a probably attached, because in his experience probably nothing was the phrase most often followed, weeks or months later, by actually, it was something.
He tightened the last bolt on Ronin's carburetor, wiped his hands on a rag that had given up being useful for that purpose years ago, and let his mind do the thing it had started doing more often lately — drift, unbidden, to a clinic on the other side of town and a woman with a handwriting he'd already memorized.
He hadn't told her about the car in the parking lot Thursday.
He'd told himself that was because there was nothing concrete to tell, no actual threat, just an unmarked car and an instinct honed by two decades of learning to trust instincts before evidence caught up to them.
He was aware, distantly, that he was already organizing a piece of his attention around her safety in a way that had nothing to do with club business and everything to do with something he still hadn't put a name to, not fully, not out loud.
"You're doing the thing again," Ronin said, appearing at his elbow with the unhelpful timing of a man who'd been watching for exactly this. "Staring at nothing like it owes you money."
"Wasn't staring at nothing."
"No, you were staring at the middle distance thinking about the nurse, which honestly at this point might as well count as staring at nothing, since you're clearly not gonna do anything useful about it besides drive past her work and lurk.
" Ronin took a pull off his unlit cigarette, watching Tank's face with the patient amusement of a man who'd earned the right to needle him.
"You gonna claim her, or just keep orbiting? "
"Wasn't aware there was a timeline."
"There's always a timeline, brother. You're forty-seven.
You've been running the same rule for six years — don't get close, don't need anybody, extraction not staying, whatever version of that speech you tell yourself at 3 a.m. — and then a woman stitches up a prospect's arm and suddenly you're inventing reasons to drive past a clinic four times a week.
" Ronin's voice lost some of its usual sideways humor, went a half-degree more serious.
"I'm not saying rush it. I'm saying don't let the rule cost you something you'd actually want, just because wanting it scares you more than losing it does. "
Tank didn't answer that, not directly, because Ronin wasn't wrong and there wasn't much dignity in arguing with a true thing just because it was inconvenient to hear. He wiped his hands again, unnecessary at this point, a stalling motion more than a practical one.
"Coyote said there's more Vultures traffic through the county line," he said instead, redirecting toward the thing that was actually, tactically, his job to think about, which felt safer than the thing Ronin had just named. "More than usual."
"Yeah, I heard that too." Ronin's expression sharpened, the needling gone, replaced by the older, steadier attention of a man who'd been in this life long enough to take shifting weather seriously. "You think it's something?"
"I think probably nothing usually isn't." Tank looked toward the clubhouse, toward the flag stirring faint in the afternoon breeze, and felt the low-grade static under his sternum tighten by one small degree, though he couldn't yet have said why.
"Keep an ear out. I want to know if it gets closer than the county line. "
He didn't know, standing in that garage with grease on his hands and an unnamed feeling sitting heavy in his chest, that closer than the county line was no longer a hypothetical.
By the time the sun went down that evening, a copied key was already in Deke's pocket, already on its way to a man named Ortiz who had, as Deke put it, been keeping half an eye on the Saints for a while now — and the woman whose safety Tank had spent all week quietly, deliberately organizing his attention around had just become, without either of them knowing it yet, the easiest way in.