Page 73

Sutures. Packed gauze. The ketamine protocol Dread wrote out for me on a folded index card, on the fourth Tuesday, after I got the airway sequence right twice running and he decided I’d earned something with a needle in it. His handwriting was small and precise. Dosages. Contraindications. The arithmetic of a drug I had carried for twenty years and had never administered because carrying was safe and administering meant the next one died and it was on me.

The card had been in the kit for months. I’d read it seventeen times. Hadn’t used it. Hadn’t needed to. Maren’s flank was sutured. Freak’s shoulder was healed. The club had been quiet in the way that clubs were quiet after something loud happened and everyone was still listening for the echo.

I restocked without thinking about it. Sutures from Dread’s clinic. Gauze from the same supply cabinet where Maren had pulled Freak’s dressing months ago. My hands moved through the contents by feel. Didn’t look down. Didn’t need to.

There was one item in that kit that had no clinical function.

It had been in there eleven days, in a small box wedged between the pressure bandage and the roll of tape, and I had put it there instead of in my cut because my cut comes off and that kit doesn’t. I had checked it was still there four times, which is four more times than I have ever checked anything I was certain about.

The zipper closed. The saddlebag sat against the Harley’s frame where it lived. Ready, the way it had always been ready. The difference was that ready no longer felt like prevention. It felt like preparation, and preparation is what you do for things you expect to use.

I knew where Maren was. Had always known. The east townhome until three weeks ago. Then the member house two doors down from Dread’s, because Fox had made the offer and I hadn’t declined it.

She was at the edge of the firelight now. Sitting on an upturned cooler with an empty beer can beside her. Ruth’s transport had been arranged six hours ago. The facility aide had called my phone to confirm. I had given them my full name. Lincoln Roarke. The name I used for paperwork and cops and the intimacies that required something heavier than a road name.

The visit was still on Maren’s face. Not sadness exactly.

I crossed the gravel. She didn’t look up. Didn’t need to. She knew my footfall the way I knew a headcount.

I sat down next to her without asking if she wanted company. The cooler complained under me. Old plastic, sat on at enough of these that it sagged where everybody sat.

Stitch was on the red one at our feet. He opened one eye, established that I was nobody, and closed it again. Three months on this compound and that animal had already worked out which of us mattered, and it wasn’t me.

I pulled two bottles. Handed her one. She took it. Didn’t thank me. The cap twisted off. The sound was satisfying in the way that small mechanical sounds were satisfying when everything else was quiet.

We sat without talking.

The fire pit was low. Embers glowed. Someone had thrown fresh wood on twenty minutes ago and it hadn’t caught yet. The party was still audible behind us. Freak’s voice carrying from somewhere near the grill. Tessa’s louder narration overlapping someone else’s laugh. The soundtrack of a gathering that had hours left and wasn’t in any hurry to end it.

Maren’s shoulder was warm against mine. The scar on her flank was three months old. Two inches below the left ribs. Clean.

I took her hand in the dark.

My scarred, steady, inventory-keeping hand found hers. The long fingers. The chapped knuckles. The topography of a woman who had spent six years lifting sedated eighty-pound dogs onto tables and had stopped noticing what her hands looked like because noticing required energy she spent elsewhere. I held it. Certain of exactly where it was. The way I was certain of headcounts and rotation schedules and the distance from the gate to the clubhouse steps.

She was mine.

I had decided that the night she opened the clinic door. Had decided it before I had any right to. Had carried the decision for months silently. Silent, operational, filed in the column where things that were true lived whether I named them or not.

She turned her hand in mine. Palm up. Her fingers laced through mine. Not holding. Testing. The curiosity of somebody who had counted every hour of the last six years and never once counted the ones that came after.

The fire popped. Fresh wood catching. The flame climbed. Orange light reached us and retreated. Her pulse was steady under my fingers. One-oh-two. I counted it without meaning to.

For the first time in twenty years, I was counting something I wanted to keep counting.

So I got up, went to the bike, and came back with the box.

She watched me the whole way across the gravel and the whole way back.

I didn’t get on a knee. My knee has opinions and this was not the night to consult it.

“I had a speech,” I said.

“You did not.”

“I had four sentences. I’ve been working on them for eleven days and they’re not any good, so I’m going to say the true one instead.” I put the box in her hand and left my palm under it. “I’ve known where every man on this compound was, every hour, for all these years. I could tell you where Brazil is right now without turning around. It’s the only thing I’ve ever been sure I was good at. It has never once been the thing I wanted.”

“Patch.”