“Almost certainly. Given the El Pasos’ investigation and the Blood Brothers’ visit, they put it together. They know something’s being planned.”
I stand in that hallway for a long moment, thinking about Sam Reeves on the news broadcast, the composed, measured authority of a man who ran things from the top and left nothing to chance.
“Can they hear what we’re planning?”
“Not yet. But if we keep operating the way we have been, they will.”
So, we change everything—burner phones rotate every week, meetings are in person only, nothing digital, nothing that can be intercepted or traced. Routes are planned on paper and destroyed afterward. No footprint is anywhere a surveillance team can follow.
We’re going to disappear off every grid they have eyes on.
And when we reappear, we will be in Mexico.
Cable is working on the how, not just the hacienda intelligence, but the movement itself. How to get two motorcycle clubs across a border without triggering a single flag. How to be gone before anyone realizes we’ve moved.
Not yet, I tell myself every morning.
But soon.
***
The call from Quill comes on a Thursday.
Out on the back deck with my coffee, Memphis is stretched at my feet in the morning sun, the desert doing what it always does at this hour. The mountains are sharp and still against a sky that hasn’t decided what color it’s going to be yet.
The burner buzzes.
“Brother.” Quill’s voice is measured and controlled in the way it gets when he is managing something underneath it. “We need to talk.”
“Talk.”
A pause. “Rhyder is losing it.” Simple. Without drama, the way you state a fact that doesn’t need elaborating. “I’ve been holding him for a month. Telling him we’re close, telling him to trust the plan, telling him one more week.” Another pause. “I’m running out of one more weeks, Tate.”
The desert stretches out ahead.
“Cable’s still working the movement. We can’t go while we’re being watched. If we move, and the FBI tracks us, we blow everything before we’ve even crossed the border.”
“I understand that,” Quill says. “And Rhyder understands that intellectually.” A beat. “But Lawrence is alive, Tate. Every day that man wakes up somewhere in that hacienda is another day he’s breathing when Lexi is…” he stops and starts again. “Rhyder made his peace with waiting when he thought it was a matter of two weeks. It’s been a month.”
The weight of that settles over me.
Thinking about Rhyder in that church room, his chair going back, his hands flat on the table,that motherfucker, and the promise made in the heat afterward.
You’ll be there. I promise you that.
“I know what I promised him.”
“I know you do,” Quill says. And then quieter, “I promised him too. In that room. I told him Lawrence doesn’t walk out.” A pause that carries the full weight of a president who has made a promise he is struggling to keep. “Give me something to tell him, Tate. A date, a plan… anything concrete.”
The coffee has gone cold in my hand. “One more week. Cable will have the movement plan ready. One more week, and I’ll have something concrete for both of you.”
Silence on the other end.
Then, “One week, Tate.” His voice drops to a quiet, absolute tone. “Then I can’t hold him.”
“One week. I promise.”
The line goes quiet.
