Swift
Madison at two in the morning looked a hell of a lot different than Madison at two in the afternoon.
During the day, State Street was crowded with students pretending they had somewhere important to be, tourists wandering around with overpriced coffees, and people in dress clothes acting like they were too good for the rest of the city while still needing somewhere to buy lunch.
At night?
It all got stripped down.
The bars emptied.
The sidewalks thinned and the city showed its real face.
I stood at Britta’s living room window with it cracked open just enough to let the cigarette smoke out, watching the last stragglers spill out of the bars down the block.
A group of college kids stumbled down the sidewalk, too loud for the hour, half of them laughing, the other half looking like they were one wrong breath away from puking on someone’s shoes.A couple peeled off toward the parking garage.Two girls in heels that looked more like weapons than footwear linked arms and shuffled toward campus, probably headed back to the dorms or one of the off-campus apartments nearby.
Madison was a college town first and everything else second.
From September to May, the city was overrun with kids trying to figure out who they were while getting blackout drunk on cheap liquor and making bad choices.
Summer probably calmed things down some.
But right now, this place still had a pulse.
And I was staring out at it, trying to figure out who in this city thought the Saint’s Outlaws needed to disappear.
We weren’t here to cause trouble.We came to set up shop.Open the rage room.Plant roots.Make money.Build something.
But apparently, existing had pissed somebody off enough to torch a bar and put a bullet in Britta.
We knew the name.
The Ledger.
That was the shadow hanging over all of it.We just didn’t know much more than that.
The names we had managed to dig up sounded like they belonged on the side of expensive law firms or the donor wall at some snobby private school.Men who’d been handed too much money and too much power and decided that made them kings.
Elias Conover.
Hollis Kettler.
Ezra Calhoun.
Just saying them in my head made me want to grind my teeth.
All three of them sounded like they’d been born in loafers and probably still had ten-foot sticks shoved up their asses.
I took a drag from my cigarette and blew the smoke toward the narrow opening in the window.
“I’m not going to get my deposit back if you keep smoking like that.”
I turned so fast I was surprised I didn’t pull something.
Britta stood a few feet away at the end of the hallway, wearing sleep shorts and a too-big T-shirt, hair loose around her shoulders and slightly mussed from bed.
I hadn’t heard her come out.
