Ghost put his boots back where they didn’t belong. “I hate the Lords,” he said conversationally. “They don’t even have good jokes.”
“They’ve got a watcher who keeps his voice level,” Doc said. “I heard him on the farm feed last week. American accent trained out of cruelty. That kind of cadence makes men make choices they regret slow.”
“Then we talk faster,” I said.
We rolled a little, slow enough for the gravel to think it had imagined us. The berm fell away, and the county highway took over like a bad song in a good bar. No lights behind us that didn’t belong. The drone had given up or gone to be dumb over someone else’s sins.
“You going to call it in?” Ghost asked. He meant Amanda. He meant the table. He meant waking the room with the bad coffee and the folding chairs where we break bread and decide who we're this week.
“Not yet,” I said. “She knows we’re out. She told me not to bring home strays. I told her not to mistake me for a man who listens when she’s being reasonable.”
Doc made a sound that meant he’d be on her side as soon as I wasn’t in the room to argue.
“You remember the first time Cap took us out to the pit?” Ranger asked no one. He always gets nostalgic when the dark gets close. “Vic had just gotten the new press. We were in those stiff cuts that scraped your neck when you turned. Cap said, ‘If you fall in, you drown quiet, and if you get tired, you rest when it’s over.’ I couldn’t tell if he was joking.”
“He wasn’t,” Ghost said. “He never jokes about water.”
We hit the turn that would take us back behind the self-storage and the pawn shop with the pianos no one wanted. The town held its breath the way the basement had in Cap’s story the night before, light over nothing, a door waiting to open the wrong way.
“Dawn’s not our friend,” I said, because the night was trying to make me poetic and I hate when it does that to me. “We move before it.”
“Who?” Ghost said. He meant head count.
“Us four,” I said. “Brutus on outer road to turn anything with a Vandal rocker. Flash on the rail spur with a thermos and that stupid baseball Cap he thinks makes him invisible. No patches. Soft vests under denim. Long guns stay home unless the world decides we need to make a point.”
Doc nodded like a man writing a prescription for rest and water and a promise. “Locals on the ridge will call in shots if we fire them. Sheriff’s been hungry.”
“I’ll feed him later,” I said. “Tonight, he can eat his own boredom.”
Ranger glanced at me, then at the empty road. “And if it’s him?”
“Then he’ll read what we left,” I said. “He’ll take the culvert and keep his civilians’ feet cold so he doesn’t leave me footsteps the Lords can count. He’ll see the chain and smile because I still hate cheap locks. He’ll see the reflector and tell himself not to be eleven years old and go digging. He’ll hear the bottle sigh andknow we were here ten minutes and care about him twice that. He’ll know we heard the knock.”
“And if it’s bait?” Doc asked again, not because he doubted but because the question makes the answer harder and men like us need the answer to stay hard.
“Then we sprang it crooked,” I said. “And we get to be early to the party for once.”
Ghost snorted. “You and your parties.”
I drove us into town by the back roads that keep secrets. The clubhouse sat where it always sits, half a block off respectable and across from a muffler shop that’s been closing for five years. The Battalion crest on the door had been repainted last month and still smelled faintly like patience. Inside, the coffee was whatever happens to coffee when it’s brewed at midnight and ignored until the day forgets its own name. Brutus had a chair tilted back and a knee bouncing, hands wrapped around a mug that got refilled every time he set it down. Flash slept with his mouth open like the kid he insists he isn’t.
Amanda wasn't in the war room, which meant I got five minutes to get my head in order before I had to justify it. I like five-minute head starts. They’re my favorite lie.
“Call them,” I told Ghost, jerking my chin at Brutus and Flash. “Tell them to put on clean denim that can get dirty and leave the jokes at home. We keep this small, and we keep it mean. If the Lords show us the wrong patch at the wrong hour, they get to learn about ditches.”
He didn’t salute. We don’t do that. He finished my coffee because he’s a thief and went to wake the boys.
Doc touched my shoulder with the back of his fingers, doctor habit he doesn’t lose even when we're pretending, we're only wolves. “If it's him,” he said, “and he’s not alone, you’ll be ready to carry the extra weight?”
“I’ll be ready to take it off him,” I said. “He’s been carrying it long enough.”
The clubhouse hummed under our boots, the way buildings do when they’ve held too many oaths and not enough apologies. I pulled the map off the cork board and marked the quarry with a push pin I’d stolen from a city council flyer six months ago. That felt right.
Outside, the sky had that bruise it gets an hour before it admits it’s morning. I hate that color. It makes men honest. I don’t like being honest before breakfast.
Ghost came back with Brutus awake and Flash pretending his ribs didn’t hurt. He didn’t even look at me when he said, “We’re rolling.”
“Guns low,” I reminded. “Eyes high. If you see a drone, you don’t wave.”
