Seven
Present Day
“Your dad owns all of this?”
“The club does, collectively. The Lean Dogs operate as a fully legitimate business, like UPS or Publix. They have a bank account, assets, stock options, the works.”
“Hmm.”
Ronnie was anything but interested – he was being polite at this point – but walking across the grounds, putting some distance between herself and the shameful moment in the clubhouse, talking about technical things, was helping to clear her head and cool her steaming skin. The party raged behind them, ambient light throwing a vivid impression of the Northern Lights across the surrounding buildings, but ahead was a gentle breeze and a whole maze of family history for her to explain.
Ava hadn’t been sure how guilty she looked when she burst from the clubhouse, but Ronnie’s quiet concern had told her that, more than anything, she looked panicked. He hadn’t asked any questions, just suggested they take a walk, for which she was immensely glad.
He shoved his hands in his pockets and looked out across the Dartmoor lot. The wind tugged gently at his hair, as if caressing it. “I thought the whole point of all these biker ga…” A darted glance her way. “Clubs,” he corrected, “was that they didn’t mind breaking the law.”
Ava bit back a grin. Without tipping her hand, she said, “That’s great in theory, but a man can’t make a living on rebellion. Each chapter of the club has respectable business dealings. Little mini corporations set up to keep the members in cash.”
“That sounds like a collective.”
“It’s a family.” When her hair brushed across her face, and she inhaled, she could smell Mercy. “A fucked up family, sometimes, I’ll give you that.”
He snorted. “Well, I wasn’t going to say anything…”
“You’re smart like that.”
Set a few hundred feet in front of the bike shop, the building that had long ago been decided as the ugliest on the property, Bonita had insisted on a garden. “With a bench for me to sit on,” she’d decreed. “And a shade tree.” James had agreed immediately. Then he’d realized that the inches-thick asphalt paving the lot would be impossible to tear up in orderly chunks for the planting of Bonita’s garden. Raised beds had been built instead; two-foot walls of masonry stone supported trucked-in black earth and potting soil. A long rectangular garden was accessed via carved stone stairs, and beneath a short canopy of gnarled apple tree limbs, a stepping stone path weaved between perennials in Bonita’s favorite shades: purple salvia; lilac catmint; white Shasta daisies; yellow coreopsis; lush apricot Easy Does It roses, their thorny stems tangling in the shade of heaps of butterfly bush. There was a bench, as Bonita had wanted, and even a thin, trickling stream and burbling waterfall. It was a gorgeous oasis amongst the harsh planes and angles of the industrial complex.
Ava recognized the shy fragrance of the butterfly bushes and the perfume of the roses, herby tang of the catmint.
Ronnie said, “It’s not as great as you thought it’d be, is it?”
Her stomach clenched in a painful way. She folded her arms across her middle. “What isn’t?”
“Being back here.” His tone was gentle, knowing. Like he felt sorry for her.
She chewed at the inside of her cheek, hating the sudden tears that burned her eyes.
“That’s normal,” he continued. “It’s true what they say, you know. That you can’t go home. You’re not the same person you were when you lived here, Ava. It’s normal to be underwhelmed with what you left behind.”
Red misted her vision. Before she could catch herself, remind herself that she was a soon-to-be grad student and not a biker chick anymore, she said, “That’s the dumbest phrase in the English language. ‘You can’t go home.’ ”
Ronnie said. “Um, what it means–”
“I know what it means!” she snapped. “It means every educated person it supposed to put their hands on a Pat Conroy novel and sob about how awful their childhood was and how much their parents warped them, and how far beyond that they’ve grown. Right?” She turned blazing eyes to him. She might have snarled. “Well I am not warped, Ronnie. I’m not basking in Prince of Tides hometown shame right now. You got that?”
His brows were fused to his hairline, his eyes horrified saucers. “I – I got it.” In the moon and the lamplight, he waxed pale, each line at the corners of his mouth a harsh cut against his white skin.
“Oh,” Ava said. She put her hand to her mouth and turned away from him, facing the garden and its dancing apple branches. “I shouldn’t have – . God, I’m sorry.” She faced him again, vision swimming as the tears came. “Ronnie, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to snap at you like that.”
He pushed a hand through his hair and regained some of his composure. “I think you did, actually. That’s all you’ve done since we got here.”
“No, I–”
“You don’t want me here.” He flashed her a grim, tight smile. “Do you?”
She swallowed hard. “I never said that.”
“You didn’t have to. It’s how you’re acting that counts.”
Ava bit down hard on her lower lip, watching the twisted limbs of the apple trees sway in the breeze. Yes, she was acting that way, but not because she wanted to. She couldn’t seem to grab hold of the turbulent emotions boiling inside her, and she didn’t trust herself to explain it with any amount of elegance. She couldn’t tell Ronnie about Mercy, not when the whole world wanted to pretend nothing had ever happened between them. She couldn’t express one fraction of the pain it had caused to feel his touch again and then walk away.
But she couldn’t be kind, either.
Is this what it felt like, that contamination her grandmother had always warned her about? “When you lie down with dogs, you get fleas,” Grammie Lowe had said once before. Maybe the club had poisoned her against regular, normal, decent people. Her fleas were cruel, secretive, and unforgiving.
She turned, not sure what she’d say to Ronnie, only that it would be idiotic…
And saw someone bolting toward them, a ghostly white figure flailing against the darkness, a banner of shimmering pale hair trailing over slender shoulders. It was a woman in a denim miniskirt and knee-high boots running toward them, her strides uneven, lurching, panicked. Her bright orange tank top was like a warning flag in the shadows.
“What the hell?” Ronnie asked as the woman rushed closer.
Ava stepped into the pool of light afforded by the security lamppost. “Hey,” she called. “Are you okay? What’s wrong?”
The woman emitted a high, thin scream and stumbled against Ava, catching at her shoulders with shaking hands. Ava staggered and then grabbed hold of the woman’s arms.
“Andre!” she gasped. Tears tracked down her face, her mascara in black rivulets down her cheeks. “Oh God, Andre!”
“What about him?” Ava felt her pulse kick up a notch but kept her voice even, trying to hold the woman back and keep her from collapsing completely.
“He – he – he–” A sob contorted her face, bent her almost in half. “I think he’s dead!”
“Dead? He overdosed?”
“He got stabbed!” Then she sank to her knees and dissolved into ugly tears, hiccupping and snuffling.
“Hey, wait.” Ava tugged at her arms. “Where is he? Hey, listen a sec. Where’s Andre?”
She mumbled something through the sobbing.
“Shit,” Ronnie said. “What kind of party is this?”
“It has nothing to do with the party,” Ava said. She gave the woman another shake. “Where’s Andre now?”
“D-d-down by the water.”
There were two kinds of suspicion: the vague kind, and the certain kind. Growing up within the MC, Ava had grown accustomed to the certain kind, the kind where she just knew that something truly awful was happening.
She released the woman’s arms and turned to Ronnie. “Take her inside, and tell my mom that Andre’s hurt. Tell her to send the boys.”
Ronnie gaped at her, horrified. “Why me?”
“Because I’m going to find Andre.”
She didn’t wait for him to protest. Instinct kicked in, adrenaline flooded her, and gone was the college grad, back was the biker girl in full force. She took off at a jog, her sandals slapping the pavement. Two hangarounds were lugging fresh cases of beer toward the clubhouse and she put thumb and forefinger in her mouth and whistled. Both snapped around to look at her. “I need you to come with me,” she said. “A member’s hurt.”
They glanced at each other.
“Come on!” she snapped. “If you wanna patch this club someday, learn to take orders from the boss’s daughter!”
She heard their footfalls behind her as she took off, navigating the wedge heels of her shoes like a pro, the river-scented air funneling down into her lungs.
If Andre was stabbed, then that meant there was someone on the property who shouldn’t have been. And while it was always a possibility that someone had slipped in the main gate and mingled amongst the revelers, Ava had a feeling it was the back gate that had been accessed. The back gate: a place where a high, horny Andre might have taken his groupie for a moment’s peace.
Ava ran along the bike shop, across its back parking lot full of parts and half-bikes, and headed for the gate that penetrated the nine-foot, barbed-wire-topped fence at the back of the Dartmoor property. The river loomed shapeless, a wide alley of shadow, a terrifying void in the night. The security lamps painted half-moons of shine across the black water. The gate, Ava saw as she neared it, was ajar, its Master lock hanging disengaged from the chain.
Only then did she slow down and evaluate the utter stupidity of her plan. She was in sandals and a frilly skirt, without so much as a ballpoint pen to defend herself, with two hangarounds she didn’t know from Adam as backup. She should have gone to the clubhouse herself, sought out her father or brother, any of the guys, and allowed them to handle this dangerous situation.
But she was Maggie’s daughter, and she pushed through the open gate without slowing, heading down the short grass slope to the shore…and the dark figure sprawled with his face in the water.
“Andre,” she called, then realized it was useless.
Andre – and she recognized him by the neon blue shirt she’d seen him wearing beneath his cut earlier – was unconscious, at the mercy of the lapping water. The grass gave way to gravelly sand…and then Andre’s boots, his jeans, his torso shifting with the tiny waves that nibbled at the shore.
“Andre.” Ava waded in; the water was cold against her ankles, her calves. She felt the suede footbeds of her sandals grow slick. She stepped through squishy muck and kept going, until the water almost reached her knees, and she grabbed at the back of Andre’s cut. “Andre. Andre!”
She glanced up at the hangarounds, the two of them staring slack-jawed from the shore.
“Pull him on shore,” she ordered. “Hurry! Before he drowns.”
They rushed to comply, slogging through the water, taking Andre under the arms and dragging him face-up onto dry loud.
His face was waxen; the skin was pale, fleshy, and corpse-like already, the lips blue, the eyes closed and mouth gaping. A black blossom of blood stained his belly where he’d been stabbed.
Ava felt for a pulse and felt only a flutter in his throat. “Shit, Andre,” she muttered.
One of the hangarounds handed her his flannel overshirt and she pressed it to the wound. The bleeding had slowed, which wasn’t a good thing, in her mind. It meant he’d already lost so much, there was no strength left to feed the flow.
Then the shouting reached her ears, and her head lifted.
Barreling toward them were at least two chapters’ worth of bikers. She realized the tableau she made: hovering in her skirt and ruined sandals over a stabbed Dog, vulnerable, unarmed, at risk.
Her dad reached her first, and Ghost hauled her up without ceremony, shoving her toward Aidan. Her brother caught her around the waist and began to tow her away as the Dogs converged on their fallen member, shouting orders to one another, asking Andre if he could hear them, swearing.
“Come on,” Aidan said in her ear. “You don’t need to be down here.”
As she was hustled away, Ava’s gaze roved wildly over the crowd, and landed on Mercy. His expression was dark and tight, his eyes black as they touched hers and then moved away. She felt the rage in him, even from this distance. That rage that lived under the surface and plagued him like a curse. It was the fury that had earned him such notoriety in the club. The anger that had saved her life more than once.
She’d never loved him because of the rage, but it was a part of him she’d never pretended didn’t exist. Her first childhood impression of him had been that of a Doberman: dangerous, intractable, loyal to a fault to those he loved. It had been a correct impression.
Sometimes, she thought she’d understood him better when she was still just a girl. Sex had changed – had ruined – everything.
“Ava,” her brother said, and she realized she’d ground to a halt.
She fell into step beneath Aidan’s arm, and let herself be taken back to the clubhouse.
The revolving red lights of the ambulance cast a hellish pallor across the faces of all those gathered in the parking lot, reflecting in mad circles across the corrugated sides of the Dartmoor buildings.
Bonita crossed herself and muttered a prayer in Spanish as the gurney was loaded into the back.
Ava didn’t care that she was twenty-two and a college grad, she was grateful for her mother’s arm across her shoulders. On her other side, Leah shivered visibly, her arms banded across her middle.
“That’s it,” Leah said. “This is the last of these damn parties I come to.”
“Is he still alive?” Ronnie asked.
The back doors of the ambulance closed and the paramedic not attending Andre rushed around to climb behind the wheel. The sirens cut on as the engine started.
“Yes,” Maggie answered him. “Barely.”
“Inside,” Ghost said in a low growl that carried across the crowd. “Now.”
“I’ll go to the hospital,” a suckup hangaround offered. “I’ll call when I know something.”
“I should go too,” Collier said, and Ava felt her throat constrict. Andre had been Collier’s prospect, back before he’d been patched.
Ghost sighed, but nodded. He still wore his VP patch; they hadn’t had a chance to vote him in as president yet.
“Welcome home, Ava,” Maggie said, squeezing her shoulders.
“He…he just disappeared! I don’t know where he w-went. He just…just stabbed Andre, and then he was gone!”
Ghost sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. “How did you not see the guy?”
The blonde with the boots who’d been hand-jobbing Andre pre-stabbing was on a sofa in the common room, another groupie hovering over her, rubbing her back, murmuring soothing clichés and offering her sips of beer. “It was dark!” she protested. “And he was so fast.”
“And you were so drunk,” Ghost muttered. He turned to Hound, who stood beside his protégé. “See if there’s a trail. Take the dog.” He twitched a humorless smile and gestured toward Ares, who stood alert and curious. “The real one.”
Rottie whistled and the shepherd went to him, allowing his leather leash to be clipped into place.
“I’ll go,” Michael said. He slid his two favored guns – matte black Glocks – into his shoulder holster, under his cut, his face expressionless and somehow wicked.
Mercy waited, wondering…and then Ghost turned to him. “Want me to tag along?” he asked.
Ghost, already acting like a president, even if they hadn’t had the chance for the vote yet, nodded, as James stood to the side and let it happen. “Yeah. They may need some muscle.”
Mercy’s Colt M1911 was already at his hip, tucked inside his jeans. It had been on him in the dorm earlier when he’d had his hands on Ava. It was with him always, a fixture, like the Ruger 10/22 had been all those years ago in the swamp. “Right.” He nodded, and turned to Hound, swamped with a heavy sense of déjà vu. “Ready when you are.”
The four of them returned to the scene of the crime. At the water’s edge, in the place where Andre’s body had left drag marks in the silt, Rottie snapped his fingers as he squatted down, drawing Ares’s attention to the ground.
“Smell anything?” he encouraged. “Come on, buddy.”
Hound produced a flashlight and scanned the ground. “No tracks. Whoever it was stayed in the grass.”
Ares snuffled a long moment at Andre’s blood on the sand, then began to move, sniffing in wide arcs back and forth. He wasn’t a tracking dog, but he knew his people, and was fiercely territorial when it came to strangers.
Suddenly, the shepherd growled. He lifted his head, inhaled deeply, and strained at his leash, wanting to go down the riverbank.
Rottie followed, his grip on the leash bringing out the veins and tendons in his wrist, and they all followed the dog. Ares went a hundred yards downriver, then went rigid, staring off across the water; he let out a trio of sharp, angry barks, and Rottie patted him on the head. “Good boy.”
“A boat,” Hound said, passing the flashlight’s beam over the shoreline. “Something small.” They could all see where its narrow prow had been run aground. Two deep boot impressions marked the place where the assailant had leapt back in and shoved away from land.
Michael pulled out his cellphone. “Bring the boat down,” he said to whoever answered, and hung up again.
Mercy set off at a walk, paralleling the water, eyes trained on the opposite bank, for all that he could see of the vast stretch of black night and deep shadows, the soft glinting of the river.
“Hey, wait for the boat,” Michael called to his back.
Mercy put on his best, brightest grin, knowing how the moonlight struck his teeth, as he turned and regarded the man over his shoulder. “That’s just genius, Mike. We can troll the river all night, and our stabber friend can listen to the motor coming, echoing off all that water, and I’m sure he’ll just jump out and offer himself up to us.”
Michael stared at him with what could have been hatred…or total indifference. You could never tell with the guy.
“I grew up on the water. Trust me. The last thing you want is to get in it right now and make yourself a target. Cancel the boat. I’m going on foot.”
He’d taken a dozen strides when Rottie caught up with him, minus Ares.
“I sent the old man back,” Rottie explained. “He’d never admit it, but he doesn’t get around too good anymore.”
“Did he have to put the leash on Michael to get him to move?”
Rottie snorted a laugh. “You can’t afford to hate him if you’re patching back in. He might be dull as bathwater, but he’s useful.”
“Yeah,” Mercy said noncommittally. “Alright, let’s shut our traps. Can’t sneak up on anyone running your mouth.”
They lapsed into amiable silence, two hunters in the dark. The water gave off that almost imperceptible water sound, the way it breathed and shifted and worked to hide the secrets of its depths.
Mercy guessed them to be about a mile from Dartmoor when they found the boat. A small bass boat with a dinky outdated outboard had been run aground and abandoned. Rottie found a set of boot prints that disappeared into the long grass. Mercy searched the boat, but found nothing aside from water droplets and a caking of mud from the boot soles. Without the forensic magic of the less-than-Dog-sympathetic police force, there was no way to know who’d been in the craft, or where he’d gone after.
“Had to be the Carpathians,” Rottie said, hands at his waist, surveying his lost trail with a scowl. “Fuckers are back and getting bold.”
“Ghost filled me in,” Mercy said, nodding. “They’re my guess too.”
“If that’s who we’re dealing with, I’m glad you’re back in town,” Rottie said.
Mercy nodded again, gaze going out across the river. He didn’t say so, but he’d been thinking the exact opposite. If this was the Carpathians, his presence would prove more of a hindrance than a help.
He thought that all the long walk back to the clubhouse.