Page 10 of Duke's Rescue
I walked in. The bell jangled. He looked up.
Forties. Clean-cut. Warm eyes, easy smile. Everything Trixie had described on the mountain, sitting in front of me, making friends with my town in the most manipulative way.
“Morning,” he said. The smile reached his eyes in a way that was technically perfect and totally false. “You local? I’m Buck Hawkins. I’m looking for my wife, Trixie, and my daughter, Ruby. They’ve been gone two weeks and I’ve been driving every town between here and home.” He shook his head, the picture of exhausted concern. “I just want to know they’re safe.”
The room was watching. Hank at his table, Dean at the counter, two other regulars by the window. They were watching the way people watch when a story is playing out and they’ve already picked a side. The worried husband. The good father. The man in the nice suit who’d driven hundreds of miles to find his family.
I could feel the weight of their sympathy. It was aimed at him.
“She’s safe,” I said.
“Thank God.” He put his hand over his heart. The gesture was smooth, practiced, the physical punctuation of a man who knew how to perform and it couldn’t have been more false. “Can I see her? Can I see Ruby?”
“No.”
The word landed in the diner like a stone in water. Dean shifted on his stool. Hank’s newspaper came down. I could feel the room adjusting, recalibrating, trying to figure out why the biker in the leather cut was telling the worried father he couldn’t see his kid.
Buck’s smile thinned. Just a fraction. If I hadn’t been looking for it, I’d have missed it. The warmth in his eyes cooled by a single degree, and the man underneath the performance looked out at me for half a second before the mask settled back into place.
“I understand,” he said. Gentle, reasonable, a man making allowances for an obstacle he hadn’t expected. “She’s probably scared. She left in a hurry, wasn’t thinking clearly. I just want to talk to her. Let her know I’m not angry.”
Not angry. The way he said it. Like anger was his to give or withhold, like Trixie’s leaving was an offence that required his forgiveness, and the generosity of withholding that anger was supposed to be the thing that brought her back.
I’d heard this language before. In interrogations, in the quiet, careful speech of men who controlled people without ever raising their voice. The words were reasonable. The architecture underneath them was rotten to the core.
“She doesn’t want to see you,” I said. “That’s all you need to know.”
He looked at me. Held my gaze for a beat longer than a worried husband would, and the warmth in his face was still there but it had changed temperature. Colder now. Assessing. A man figuring out what kind of problem I was and how to solve me. Anyone else might not have seen it. But anyone else isn’t me, and I see it for what it is.
“I don’t think I caught your name,” he said.
“I didn’t offer it.”
I turned and walked out. The bell jangled behind me. I could feel the room watching me leave, could feel the sympathy in the air bending toward the man at the counter, and I knew exactly how this was going to play. Concerned father, turned away by a rough-looking biker. The story wrote itself.
I called church.
The brothers were at the table within the hour. Angel at the head, Ghost on his right, me on his left. Hawk, Doc, Rook, Razor, Priest filling in around. I laid it out. The man at Rosie’s, the wife and daughter hiding upstairs, the performance I’d watched him give to a room full of people who were already on his side.
“What do we know about him?” Angel asked.
“He’s a county commissioner,” Rook said. He’d already been digging because I’d asked him to, I’d known this was coming. “Buck Hawkins. Elected twice, runs clean on paper. Well-liked, well-connected, active in the community. Coaches little league. Sits on three charity boards.”
“Record?”
“Nothing. Not even a parking ticket.”
Silence around the table. I could feel the weight of it, the calculation happening behind seven pairs of eyes. A man with no record, a public profile, community standing. A man who looked good on paper and looked even better in person.
“Duke.” Angel, watching me. “What’s your read?”
“Trixie told me he controlled every part of her life for six years. What she wore, where she went, who she talked to. He isolated her financially, kept her dependent, and eroded her sense of self until she didn’t trust her own judgment. She left with four hundred dollars and a five-year-old and no plan because staying was worse than having nothing.”
“She tell you anything physical?”
“Not yet. But she flinches when people move too fast near her. Rosie noticed that she jumps at sudden noises.”
“That’s not evidence,” Doc said. Carefully. “That’s instinct.”
