Page 49 of Handful
Glitch sat back. “Yesterday afternoon while you were out on the job.” He looked at me. “They walked into an open room, took their time, walked out.” He stood. “Come on. Let’s go see what’s worth half an hour in your room.”
We went up. He stood in the middle of my room and turned a slow circle, taking inventory, hunting the piece that didn’t fit. His eyes went to the vent in the top corner.
I grunted.
“What?” he said.
“Sarah looked up there on her way out.”
He dragged a chair over, stood on it, and got a thumbnail under the trim. It came away too easy. Tucked in the gap behind it was a small black camera — one of those cheap nanny-cam things, barely bigger than a thumb drive, adhesive strip on the back.
He held it up between two fingers and looked at it like it had let him down personally.
“Consumer junk,” he said. “Two hundred bucks, motion-triggered, stores to a card. Plant it, come back later, pull the card.” He turned it so the lens caught the light. “Aimed at the bed.”
I knew what it was for before he said it.
“It’s not for blackmail. There’s no money in you, brother, no offense. You don’t put a camera over a man’s bed to rob him. You do it to get a picture of who’s in the bed.” He stepped down off the chair. “And then you send the picture to somebody.”
He didn’t say her name. He didn’t need to. The whole club knew by the time I’d dragged myself back from Velvet last night that Austen had thrown me out again. But Tanya and Sarah had put that camera in my room yesterday afternoon — before any of that.
“Can you pull what’s on it?”
Glitch raised an eyebrow.
I held my hands up. “Nothing happened. I’m practically hitched, brother. Austen and me hit a kink in the road, that’s all — she’s it for me, that part’s decided. But it wouldn’t hurt to see what that bitch got up to while I was asleep. I want to know what her play was.”
He looked at me for a second, then nodded and pocketed the camera. I followed him back down to ops.
He pulled a laptop from a drawer and popped the card. I looked at him.
“Air-gapped,” he said.
I nodded and left it at that.
The little camera had done exactly what it was built for. There was a clip, motion-stamped, two-forty-seven — Sarah coming in the door, crossing to the bed, arranging herself on top of the blanket beside a man flat on his back in his boots with the TV still going, a man who did not move, did not wake, did not so much as turn his head, for the ten minutes she lay there before she gave it up and went to sleep.
I’d known nothing happened. Now I had proof — because my word wasn’t worth a damn right now, not with Austen, not after everything, and I knew it. But there it was on the screen. I just lay there, dead to the world.
“Copy it for me,” I said.
Glitch looked at me.
“Insurance.”
He copied it without another word and handed me the drive. I pocketed it.
I knew what came next. You don’t sit on a planted camera in the clubhouse. That’s not a him-and-her thing, that’s a club thing — somebody reached into Venom’s house and put eyes in it. So we took it to Dutch.
He made one call to Colt. “Bring them both in.”
I’d watched Dutch work before. I’d been the one standing at the wall with my arms crossed while he did it — and I’d seen grown men come apart in that chair. Not because he hit them. Because he sat across from them with that look and let the silence do the work. They sat there and their brain filled in everything he hadn’t said yet. What he knew. What came next.
Men who’d held out for an hour would give it all up in sixty seconds once Dutch decided it was time. I’d seen it happen. I knew what it looked like. So that part wasn’t what unsettled me.
What was new was that it was two women, and Venom doesn’t put hands on women. Not unless they deserved it. There’s exactly one woman in the history of this club who earned what she got. Nobody in this clubhouse says her name but everyone knew.
Watching Dutch and Colt turn that quiet on Tanya and Sarah in the cleared common room was different than watching it land on some asshole who deserved it.
