Page 7 of Rogue
Conversation died off around the room in uneven pieces.
“Outside.Now.”The shorter one nodded twice and set his stick down on the rail, and the taller one didn’t look at me again, and they went out the front.The screen door wheezed.
Brick watched them go.Then he came back to me.
“The fiancé.”
“Yeah.”Didn’t surprise me they’d already run something on the news.
He pulled in a long breath through his nose and let it back out, then picked up his bottle and took a swallow he didn’t want, set the bottle back down.
“Beast had a call about three hours ago.Friend of ours up in Nashville.Said a man from out east had been making calls to half the businesses on the strip looking for a girl who matched the description on the eight o’clock news.Mentioned the man’s name was Stewart.The man’s family had bought a U.S.senator in ‘19 and was working on a second one in the off-year.Supposedly, the senator they already owned had picked up the phone for them at ten p.m., which tells you something about how that family makes a phone call.”
“Yeah,” I said.“It does.”
“He’s not local money.He’s the kind…”
The label of the bottle in my hand was a thin paper thing pasted on with glue that was meant to come off in an ice bucket, and I felt it give under my thumb before I knew I was working at it.By the time Brick finished his sentence I’d torn it clean down the side, a long, ragged strip of it curling against my knuckle.
I set the bottle on the bar.
“Church,” I said.
“Tomorrow morning,” Brick said.“Beast’s already called it.”
I nodded once and pushed off the bar.
Chapter Three
Lennox
I was shown to a chair against the wall, three feet back from the table -- not part of the circle.I folded my hands in my lap -- a posture I knew from a lifetime of being told to be quiet while men decided things.
I counted the men.Seven wearing name patches on the front of their vests.Two wearing vests that said PROSPECT standing at the back wall behind me -- I could hear the closer one breathing through his nose.The door to the church room was shut.A small brass plate above it read SANCTUARY in letters that had been polished by a lot of thumbs over a lot of years.
The one apparently called Brick had the floor.He sat across from me, two seats down from Rogue’s place at the head of the table.With his arms crossed over his cut and one boot on a chair rung, he spoke like a man who had said this before and expected to be heard.
“Three senators,” he was saying.He held up three fingers, counting them down with a jab of his thumb.“Tennessee, Kentucky, North Carolina.The Stewart family writes checks every cycle and the checks clear on time.There are two federal judges in the Southeast he had a hand in seating in the last ten years.That’s not rumor.That’s the public record if you know where to look.”
Beast sat to Rogue’s right.I noticed under his name it saidPresident.He was older than the others -- silver in the beard, a faded run of ink down the back of his hand that disappeared up under his cuff -- and he was not looking at Brick while Brick talked.His gaze was on the table.When Brick finished, Beast tapped the wood twice with two fingers.
“This isn’t a bar fight.A man comes for his old lady, we put him in the ground, that’s the end of it.This isn’t that.This is the kind of man who picks up a phone and a federal agent shows up at our gate searching for a girl matching her description in a missing-person report her own daddy filed.Then it’s not a club problem.Then it’s a federal problem parked on our front gravel.”
He didn’t look at me when he saidher.He didn’t have to.I felt the word touch my collarbone and sit there.
For some reason, one of the men in a Prospect vest sat at the far end of the table with his hands laced on the wood in front of him and his gaze on Rogue.He hadn’t said a word so far.The Prospect by the door -- I could see the edge of him at the corner of my eye -- kept shifting his weight from one boot to the other, and every few seconds his glance came over to me and went away again, with the cadence of a boy who had been told the room contained a snake and instructed not to look at it.
Rogue let them finish.
He stood steady at the head of the table, silent through the whole exchange.Rogue waited one breath, then lifted his eyes from the table.
He looked at each of them.He took his time.
“We don’t hand women back to men who put bruises on them,” he said.“That’s the whole of it.There isn’t a second sentence.”
The room didn’t move.
“Anybody at this table thinks the politics of a Connecticut family outweigh that, speak up now.Either you put your patch on the wood right now and walk out, or I will.”His hands stayed flat.“I’ll wait.”
