Page 16 of Dread

I nodded. “Yes. Thank you.”

“Ellie?”

“Fine. She’s…” I glanced over my shoulder. Ellie had looked up from her drawing, her pencil paused above the paper, watching Dread with the open, unguarded focus she’d given him since the highway. “She’s good.”

He nodded once. Sharp. Decisive. “Good. Holler if anything comes up.”

Then he was gone. He took the porch steps and headed up the compound lane, clinic bag at his side. Apparently, showing up at my door, quietly rearranging pieces of my life, and leaving before I figured out what to say was simply how Dread operated.

I stood at the closed screen door with my fingers resting on the latch. The evening had settled fully now -- dark beyond the porch light, the cicadas at full volume in the trees beyond the fence, the compound reduced to pools of amber light and the distant murmur of voices from the direction of the clubhouse. Ellie’s pencil scratched behind me. The juice box sat on the table with its straw bent at the angle she’d left it, a small monument to a feeling I still didn’t know what to do with.

My fingers didn’t move from the latch. I stood there. Counting breaths. Waiting for the other shoe -- generosity always crystallized into obligation eventually. Running from my ex, twice now, had taught me many things, but never how to believe otherwise.

The shape didn’t come. The door stayed closed. I stood there long after I should have walked away, waiting for the knock that would prove I’d been right about Dread.

It never came.

Chapter Six

Dread

The bike had carried the day’s heat up through the engine block and into my legs for the last four miles home, and I was still peeling off my jacket when I ducked through the clubhouse door, the noise and the smell of fryer grease hitting me before my eyes adjusted to the dimmer light inside.

The clubhouse held heat like a cast-iron skillet -- steady, radiating, the kind that sits on your skin hours after you’ve left the room. I’d taken a stool at the far end of the bar, my back to the wall out of habit more than necessity and nursed a beer I didn’t want but had accepted because turning down a drink in a room full of bikers carried its own friction. The bottle was cold against my palm. Everything else was warm.

Men filled the space in clusters. Some still in their cuts, vests hanging open over T-shirts dark with sweat from the afternoon ride. Others had shed the leather, stripped down to bare arms and the particular looseness that comes after hours on a bike -- shoulders dropped, voices carrying at a volume calibrated for wind noise they’d left behind on the highway. The jukebox played an old song, loud enough to cover most conversations without anyone having to raise their voice. Nobody was listening to the lyrics.

Hornet spotted me from across the room. I saw it happen in real time -- his head turning, his gaze finding mine with the focus of a man who’d been waiting for a target to materialize. He was three beers in, maybe four. Not drunk. Hornet didn’t get drunk like other men did. He got louder, sharper, his already considerable volume dialed up to a setting that made the room feel smaller. He pushed off the pool table and crossed the floor in six strides, his boots heavy on the worn boards, and planted himself at the bar two stools down.

“Well, well.” His voice carried. Not shouting. Hornet never shouted when a conversational bellow would do the job. “If it isn’t the club babysitter. How’s the daycare business treating you, Doc?”

A few heads turned. Not all of them. Hornet looked my way and grinned.

I knew that grin. Nothing useful ever followed it.

“Got a call today,” he continued, leaning one elbow on the bar. “Wife says, ‘Hornet, you seen Dread lately?’ I says, ‘Can’t say I have.’ She says, ‘That’s funny, because he’s been at the townhomes three times this week and I’m starting to think he’s running a summer camp over there.’”

Patch laughed from somewhere near the pool table. A short, sharp sound that fed Hornet’s energy like oxygen. Hornet’s grin widened. He had the particular gift of a man who could turn an audience of one into a stadium show through sheer force of personality.

“Tell me, Doc. You learn how to braid hair yet? Because I’m thinking that’s the next skill on your resume. Right after ‘changes tires’ and ‘stocks juice boxes.’”

More laughter. Not malicious. The kind that comes from men who recognize a good performance when they see one and have no particular investment in whether the target deserves it. Cotton caught my eye from across the room, his expression caught between amusement and a look closer to sympathy. He lifted his beer in a small, half-apologetic gesture that said, You’re on your own with this one.

I took a sip of my beer. Set the bottle down. “Hair’s not my specialty. You’d have better luck with Kitty.”

Hornet barked a laugh. “There it is! The famous Dread deflection. Doesn’t rise, doesn’t engage, just slides right past you like water off a…” He stopped, his gaze narrowing with the delight of a man who’d just found a better angle. “Wait a minute. You didn’t deny the juice boxes.”

“I don’t stock what I don’t use.”

“Holy shit.” Hornet turned to address the room at large, his arms spreading. “He admits it! The man’s got a pantry full of child-sized snacks and he’s standing there with a straight face telling me it’s for personal consumption. Doc, you’re six-foot-three and fifty-two years old. Unless you’ve developed a sudden craving for juice boxes and animal crackers, I’m calling bullshit.”

The room laughed. I let them. Hornet was enjoying himself, and experience had taught me that discouraging him only made him more determined.

“Next he’s gonna tell us he bought those coloring books for himself,” someone called from near the jukebox. I didn’t turn to see who.

Hornet’s eyes lit up. “Coloring books? This keeps getting better. What’s in there, Doc? Princesses? Dinosaurs? Give us the theme, we’re dying here.”

“Anatomy,” I said.