Page 128 of Deacon

Ghost caught the practical problem first. “I want the full background before he settles in too deep. How clean is he?”

Garrett was an employee, not club, but Last Rites belonged to us. Anybody working under that roof got close enough to matter. “Clean enough on paper, but here, I’ll send you the details I have on him.”

Ghost’s email pinged. His fingers moved across the keyboard before he answered. “Moves around some. Different shops. Different towns. No obvious debt, no arrests that jump out, no affiliations I can tie cleanly to trouble yet. But I’ll keep diggin’.”

Rook latched onto the only word that mattered. “Yet.”

“Yet,” Ghost agreed.

Priest leaned back. “Shop needs the help. Doesn’t mean we get sloppy.”

“We won’t,” I said. Last Rites had too many club ties for sloppy to be an option.

Priest’s gaze shifted to Ledger. “You read Lena’s journal yet?” The question changed the room faster than anything about Joker had.

Ledger went rigid enough that every man at the table felt it before he answered. “No.”

Priest watched him for a beat. “Where is it?”

Ledger’s mouth flattened. “Right where she left it in the house.”

The journal was more than evidence. It was Lena’s voice waiting in a place Ledger had already had to survive without her. Priest rubbed a hand over his jaw, frustrated with the situation rather than the man.

I stepped in before the silence hardened. “Man,” I said, keeping my eyes on Ledger, “you gotta go get it and read it. We gotta know how much she told them. What exactly we’re workin’ against here.”

Ledger stared at the papers in front of him, jaw locked. Ghost finally tipped his attention away from the laptop. “I’ll go with you.”

Ledger looked up.

Ghost’s voice stayed flat, but the loyalty under it wasn’t. “We wouldn’t leave this shit for you to do alone.”

Ledger dropped his head for a second and dragged a hand over the back of his neck. When he raised it again, the grief was still there, along with the dread of whatever Lena had left behind. “Yeah,” he said, voice rough. “Alright.”

Priest eased off enough to let that be the decision. “I know you don’t wanna touch it. I know it’s gonna be hell. But we need to know what she left us.”

Ledger answered with a small tilt of his chin and went back to the papers. Numbers were easier than memory.

Ghost tipped his laptop screen down. “Got somethin’ on Joker.”

Every man at the table snapped back into the room, and Priest’s voice went flat. “Talk.”

“Not direct movement from Joker himself. But there was Dead Man’s Hand traffic up past Eastwick Hollow. Headed toward the hills.”

Nomad frowned. “What the hell would DMH be doin’ up there?”

Everybody knew the stretch Ghost meant. Dense forest and bad roads cut through older territory lines, ground that belonged to men who noticed who crossed it.

Ghost confirmed the problem. “That’s the problem. Hollow Crown controls the routes up that way. They don’t let just anybody pass through their territory into those hills.”

Rook’s mouth flattened. “So why’d they let DMH?”

Graves looked toward Ghost. “Either they didn’t know,” he said, though none of us believed that was likely, “or they knew exactly who was movin’ through.”

Nomad leaned back. “Doubt Hollow Crown misses bikes they didn’t approve,” he muttered.

“They don’t.” Men like that didn’t overlook unfamiliar colors rolling through their roads.

Priest looked at Ghost. “How many?”