Page 20 of Deacon

DEACON

She walked across the lot and straight into me, and I caught her.

For a long minute the only sound was the wind pushing grit across the gravel. Then she spoke into my chest.

“He told me it was just business. Can you believe that?”

I had nothing worth saying to that, so I held on tighter.

Havoc was on the clubhouse steps. Lock was in the doorway behind him. Two prospects by the garage had stopped pretending to work. Every one of them saw her come across that lot to me, and I let them look.

I took her inside, past the bar and down the back hall to my room, and half the club watched us go. Somebody at the pool table whistled low. Somebody else hit him.

Preacher was coming out of church as we passed. He stopped, and for a second I couldn’t tell which way it would go.

“Miss Laine,” he said. “Holly’s still talking about that birthday cake you made her.”

Chelsea blinked at him. Then she laughed, a small cracked sound, the first one since the shop. Preacher gave me the almost-smile and kept walking.

My room was a bed, a dresser, a window onto the yard and a shelf of paperbacks I’d been meaning to read for a decade. Chelsea sat down on the mattress and took in all of it like she was learning a language.

“You never told me anything about you,” she said. “Not one real thing.”

So I sat down beside her and told her one thing.

“South valley, Albuquerque. My old man drove trucks and drank what he made. My mother left when I was nine.” I studied my hands. “At seventeen I was sleeping in my car behind the club garage. The old president found me there one morning. Instead of running me off, he put me to work hauling wrecks off the interstate. Eventually I patched in, and this club became my family.”

She was quiet for a while. Then she leaned her head on my shoulder.

“My mother left too.”

“I know. You told me.”

“I know I did.” She breathed out. “I just wanted to say it to somebody who’d get it.”

We sat like that until the light went orange outside the window. She stayed dry-eyed. I think she was past crying, out somewhere on the far side of it where things go flat and clear.

“This isn’t over,” she said eventually. “Is it?”

“No. It isn’t. The cartel still thinks the law in this town is weak and they can make it their own.”

“Okay.” She nodded slowly, like she was stacking it with the rest of what she’d learned that day, and then she lay back on my bed with her boots still on and fell asleep in about a minute.

I pulled a blanket over her. She curled into it and took up more of my bed than seemed physically possible for a woman her size, one hand fisted in my pillow. I stood in the doorway longer than I needed to. Four years of wanting and she’d finally ended up here, asleep in her boots, and it had taken her father’s shitty deal with the cartel to get her through my door.

I’d make sure it was the last thing he ever cost her.

Then I went to church.

“Tomas pulled out of the ice house in the dark,” Preacher said. “That doesn’t mean he’s done with Laine. He’ll want another of his buildings, or he’ll want Laine to find him one.”

I laid out Harry’s buildings from memory, because I’d been learning his business for a year and his daughter had filled the gaps over a week of late coffee. The ice house. A fenced lot out past the rail spur with a new gate. Two units in the storage block behind the fuel station. A barn on the scrub acres that had been sitting empty since before I patched in, until lately.

“Not just those,” Preacher said. “Every building Laine owns. Every lot, every storefront, every shed on those scrub acres. We don’t touch any of it. It’s his. But we look at all of it, and we do it in daylight, with our colors on.” He tapped the table once. “Laine sees us, he knows we’re watching him. Tomas’s people drive past and see a patch outside every door Laine’s got, they know the whole portfolio’s ours to watch. That’s a message to both of them.”

“And Laine?” Gage asked.

“Laine gets told.” Preacher’s gaze moved to me. “You’ll come. And you’ll keep your hands where I can see them. Don’t get stupid,” he warned.