The bike has been sitting on the second floor of my bar for weeks and if there's a tracker on it, Ron Jackson has known where Stormy is since the day he arrived.
"I need to look at that bike," Mickey says. His voice has shifted. Not cop voice exactly. But close. The voice of a man who's trained to assess threats. "Tonight. After I'm off shift. I'll come by and go through it. Frame, fairings, under the seat, the whole thing. If there's a tracker, I'll find it."
"What do I do with the bike? It's stolen property sitting in my bar. I can't leave it there."
"One thing at a time. Let me look at the bike first. We figure out the tracker situation, then we talk about what comes next with the bike itself. There are options. None of them are simple, but there are options."
I pick up the sandwich and take a bite. I need to do something besides sit in a deli booth calculating how fast I can drive from Panama City Beach to a salvage yard in Alabama.
"The tag," I say, gesturing at the phone still on the table. "Hypothetically, if someone with a computer were to run that plate, they might find out some useful information about the registered owner."
Mickey looks at the phone again. He picks up his sweet tea and takes a very long sip.
"Hypothetically," he says, "if I happened to run a plate for personal reasons, completely unrelated to any official investigation, the information I found would be my business and nobody else's. I'll see what comes up." He picks up his own sandwich. "Out of my own personal curiosity."
We eat and talk about other things for a while. The bar, the bikers coming in on Saturday, Mickey's dating life which he describes as "a crime scene without evidence." Normal things. Friend things. The things that remind you that the world has more in it than monsters and stolen motorcycles and the desire to hurt someone so badly your hands ache with it.
"I went on a date last week," Mickey says. "Met a guy from an app. Drove forty-five minutes to Destin because I've exhausted every available man in Bay County and I'm not exaggerating. I have literally dated every gay man in this zip code. All four of them. One is now my dentist, which makes cleanings awkward. One moved to Atlanta. One turned out to be straight and 'just curious,' which is getting old because I'm not a theme park ride you take for a spin to see if you like it."
"What happened with the Destin guy?"
"He asked me what I did for a living. I said law enforcement. He said, 'Oh, like a security guard?' I said no, like a police officer. He said, 'In Bay County?' with this look on his face like I'd said I was a shark dentist. Like the job was so improbable it couldn't be real. Then he spent the rest of dinnerexplaining crypto to me. I couldn't get out of there fast enough. I paid for my own pasta and drove forty-five minutes home. I need to get a cat to keep me company."
"No, you don't. Forget the cat. It can't be that bad."
"I'm getting one," Mickey says. "The cat will be less disappointing than the dating pool in the Florida Panhandle. The cat won't explain Bitcoin to me and talk about crypto bros. The cat won't ask me if I'm 'the man or the woman' in my relationships. The cat will just sit there and judge me quietly, which is an improvement over every date I've had this calendar year."
"Mickey, you are a decorated police officer, you are objectively good-looking, and you make the best peach cobbler in Bay County. If the gay men of the Florida Panhandle cannot appreciate that combination, the men of the Florida Panhandle are wrong."
"That's what I tell myself. Every night. Alone. While eating the cobbler by myself."
"Your time is coming, Mickey. Just keep the faith."
When we're done, I pay the check. We walk out into the parking lot. The heat wraps around us like a blanket.
"Tex," Mickey says. "Is the kid okay? How's he doing?"
I think about Stormy. Standing in the parking lot this morning, leaning against my arm, face tipped up toward the sun. Supply list in his hand. The smile that transforms his face when he lets it happen.
"He's getting there," I say.
Mickey nods and slides his sunglasses on. "I'll be by tonight after I get off work. Tell Sheila to save me a plate. And Tex? For what it's worth? I'm glad you've got someone.Even if that someone arrived on a stolen motorcycle during a hurricane."
"See you tonight. Appreciate it, brother."
I sit in my truck for a minute with the engine running and the AC blasting. The law can't touch Ron Jackson. Not easily. Not cleanly. Not in a way that doesn't put Stormy on a witness stand and make him say every word of that letter out loud in front of strangers while a defense attorney tries to tear him apart.
I won't do that to him. I won't put him through that.
But I also won't let Ron Jackson exist in the world unpunished. I don't know how yet. I don't know what vengeance looks like. But there will be a reckoning. There will be a moment when that man understands that what he did has consequences, and those consequences have a name.
Big Tex is that name and I've been waiting for him since the morning I saw bruises on my little Stormy's body.
First things first. The tracker. The bike. Mickey at eight.
I put the truck in drive. I head home to Stormy.
On the drive back, my phone buzzes.
