8
WRECKER
The burner kissed a tower at 2:11 a. m. and cut out like it was embarrassed to be seen. Not a call. Not a text. Just a handshake on the quarry’s edge, I’m here, then nothing.
I let the numbers on the screen settle into something I could smell. Wet limestone. Old diesel. Rust from a gate no one greased because no one wanted to admit they used it. County used to dump broken sidewalk out here. We dumped other things. The pit yawned black and wide, and the wind ran its fingers over it like a man checking pockets he already knows are empty.
Ghost kept his boots on my dashboard like he paid for the truck. He didn’t. He did pay for the night; he’d been up on the overpass since midnight, watching for the wrong kind of headlights. “Say it,” he told me, because he likes to make truth walk in under its own power.
“It’s him,” I said.
Doc leaned forward from the back, forearms on his knees, still in scrubs from the clinic he sometimes worked when the county remembered poor folks had teeth. His voice stayed soft, so no one got startled. “Or bait.”
Ranger drummed two fingers on the center console. The habit drove Ghost crazy, which meant Ranger did it on purpose. “If it’s bait, it’s on our turf,” he said. “Quarry’s ours since before the patch.”
He wasn’t wrong. The Iron Battalion had been using the pit since back when the patch still had the old border stitching and Vic was president instead of ground under a cross. The dirt knew us. Cops knew enough to drive by with the windows up.
I cut the headlights and let the night flood back in. The gravel changed its voice when we slowed, whisper instead of gossip. Trees thickened up on the rim like bad teeth around a smile you didn’t trust. One way in if you loved your paint, three if you were willing to explain dents to a woman who’d notice. I eased the truck along the berm until we could look down into the mouth without the mouth looking back.
“Kill it,” Ghost said.
I killed the engine and listened to the nothing under the something. East, the highway hummed like a promise you didn’t believe. North, a generator grumbled, lazy and full of itself. Water hissed somewhere, a culvert vomiting the last of the rain. No voices carried up. No cigarette tip winked where it didn’t belong. The pit breathed cold. Crushed limestone holds night the way a bad memory does.
We got out all at once because leaving someone in the cab feels like a dare. Boots scuffed dust. The air had teeth. I tasted iron on my tongue, and it wasn’t from anything inside me.
Ghost pointed with his chin, the way he always does when he’s right. “Up there,” he said. “Third pine past the ‘NO DUMPING’ sign.”
Boot prints scalloped the shoulder in a neat offset. Big feet, deep bite. Left heel dragged a hair, like old scar tissue arguing with new weather. I knew that gait. Everybody in the Battalion knew that gait. Afghanistan took a piece of Cap that never grewback. He learned to walk on it anyway. Men who love him learned to hear it.
“Could still be bait,” Doc said, because he was the spine we borrowed when we ran out.
“Yeah,” I said. “But it’s his stride.”
I put my palm to the trunk of the pine and felt sap stick like a handshake. The lowest branch sat heavy with needles, weighed down a little more by a neat wrap of black tape tucked where moonlight didn’t bother to go. I peeled it with my nail and a SIM card winked at me. Clean cut, folded neat, tucked away. Cap’s subtlety. Most men hide things they want to keep. He hides things he wants found by the right eyes.
“Pinged it once.” Doc had the card in his gloved fingers and didn’t need to taste it to know. “Long enough for a tower to say yes. Then killed it. Breadcrumb for people who listen.”
Ranger had gone to a knee with his flashlight cradled against his forearm so the beam wouldn’t give him away to things that didn’t deserve to see. “Tracks,” he said. “Box truck backed in, turned mean, pulled out. Recent. See the fines? Haven’t settled. Same tread pattern as the past two days. Missing lug on the outer left. She’s limping.”
“Vandal Lords,” Ghost said. His mouth made the name like it needed rinsing. “New Oak charter.”
They’d been sniffing at our edges for months, trying not to look like they wanted to claim neighborhood and failing. Boneyard black cuts, wrench laurels riding a skull on their backs, patch pride with no discipline under it. They liked box trucks. They liked girls. I didn’t think much of men who liked either the way the Lords did.
A dull red light blinked on the far side of the pit, then another, higher and lazier. Not cigarettes. Not a squad car. A drone. Civilian body with a night rig duct-taped on, fat withbatteries, flown by somebody too confident to remember the sky can be a hunting ground too.
“They’ve got eyes,” I said.
“On their own bait,” Ranger said.
“Or on him,” Doc added.
He didn’t need to say Cap’s name. The air had it already.
We were four tonight because I wanted quiet. We’d left Brutus at the clubhouse babysitting a temper and Flash on a couch with a bag of ice and two cracked ribs because he started a conversation with a bumper and lost. Sergeant-at-arms job says you keep the powder dry until it’s time to light, and it wasn’t time. Not for the boys. Maybe for me.
I slid the SIM back in the tape and put it where I’d found it. If it was Cap, he’d know we knew. If it was bait, it could go on pretending. The pine branch settled like a dog went back to sleep.
“Gate,” I said.
