Three
He was nine, the night the men came. The February cold pressed at the edges of the windows, came skimming in under the door to the little guest cabin where he and Mama were staying. Uncle Wynn lived way, way out, down the end of a gravel road, in a house made of split logs, with rocking chairs on its deep front porch, and colored shotgun shells littering the front lawn. Uncle Wynn himself smoked like a chimney and spent most of his time out back in the dog kennels, with his prized hounds and Great Danes. He talked to the dogs, talked to them constantly, one-sided conversations, full of questions and exclamations and lavish compliments. He let Michael come with him, to feed them, and he talked to Michael, too, only Michael didn’t figure he had to talk back most of the time. The dogs didn’t, after all.
“Your uncle’s a smart man,” Mama had told him, the day their station wagon had limped down the gravel drive and sputtered to a halt in front of the house. “Listen to him and you’ll learn a thing or two.” She’d patted Michael on the back, between his small, bird-like shoulder blades. “That’s where your wings are,” Mama always told him, smiling, passing her fingertips along the narrow bony ridges. “My little Saint Michael. The archangel.”
Uncle Wynn was Mama’s older brother. He’d taken one look at his little sister, as they’d climbed from the station wagon, and he’d made a face Michael hadn’t understood. A deep frown, a crinkling of his brow, a glimmer like tears in his eyes. “What’s he done this time, Cami?”
Mama had run into his arms and hugged him hard, not caring that his overalls were smeared with muddy pawprints.
Uncle Wynn had crouched down low, so his face was level with Michael’s. “You must be Mike. Pleased to finally meet you, son.”
“Michael,” he corrected. “I don’t go by Mike.”
“Michael,” Uncle Wynn said with a gap-toothed grin, pushing his ball cap back and giving Michael a speculative look. “Michael it is, then. Y’all come in and get some supper.”
Wynn had a guest cabin, very small and old and not well-insulated, but it was a safe place, Mama told him, and so they’d been staying here, at the farm, and Mama was schooling him herself because she said he couldn’t go back to school right now. They needed to be secret. Safe. Hidden away.
“Mama,” Michael said now, as he nibbled on his pencil eraser and stared at the page of multiplication tables in front of him. “When are we going home?”
His mother glanced up from the potato she was peeling, paring knife catching the lamplight in one slender, long-fingered hand. She tipped her head to the side as she regarded him, locks of dark hair, come loose from her ponytail, sliding down her neck, falling on her shoulders.
“I don’t think we can go back, baby,” she said, her smile sad. She had the prettiest face, but so much of the time, it was stamped with sadness. It made Michael sad, too.
“Are we gonna live here?” he asked, thinking that might not be a bad thing. He was starting to like Uncle Wynn, and he’d liked the dogs immediately. The biggest, a black Dane named Caesar, Uncle Wynn’s prize stud dog, slept on the living room sofa in the main house and licked Michael’s hands in greeting every time they met.
“Would that be okay with you, if we did?” Mama asked.
“I think so.”
She smiled. “Your uncle says you can pick a puppy from the next litter if you want. It can be your dog. He’ll teach you how to train it.”
He sat up straighter in his chair, excitement fluttering in his stomach. “Really?”
She nodded. “That’s what he says. Berta’s due to whelp next month.”
Michael smiled. Berta was a sweetie, a huge black and white Dane with silken, floppy ears. She’d been bred to Caesar. The idea of one of Caesar’s puppies to call his own, to train and raise and love – that was wonderful. He’d never had anything so nice, something he’d wanted so badly. He knew not to ask for things – Mama always said, “We can’t afford that, darlin’,” and it made her sad. Again. Always sad, poor Mama.
“I’m sure,” Mama continued, “that you’d have to do some chores around here to cover the cost. If he keeps one, that’s eight-hundred dollars he doesn’t make from selling it.”
“I can do chores,” he hurried to say. “I won’t mind.”
She smiled at him, one of those dreamy smiles that told him she was drifting into her thoughts, staring at him and seeing things that weren’t. “I know you won’t, baby. You’re the best boy.”
They both heard the crunch of feet on gravel at the same time. Both of them sat up tall in their chairs, like marionette strings had pulled them.
“It’s Wynn,” Mama said, but her eyes widened and her nostrils flared at the edges, and her hand tightened on the potato peeler, the potato landing quietly amid the strips of peel on the table.
The steps came closer. If it was Uncle Wynn, he wasn’t walking with his usual hearty strides, his big, swinging walk that he’d developed so he could keep up with his long-legged Danes when they went walking around the farm.
“Stay here,” Mama said, getting to her feet.
Michael went perfectly still, the pencil falling from his hand. Smack, against the table.
Mama wore clothes that Uncle Wynn had pulled from a box in the attic, clothes she’d worn in high school, and that had been boxed up once she moved away from home; her mother had packed them up, before she’d died. White overalls with a red t-shirt beneath, her feet bare, her toenails painted a drugstore red from a bottle she’d bought on their way to the farm, when they’d stopped for snacks and a map. Her dark ponytail swung against her back as she walked to the door, potato peeler held low, down along her thigh.
The footsteps hit the porch stairs, and moved up them. Clomp, clomp across the boards.
“Mama,” Michael whispered.
The knob rattled, but wouldn’t turn.
“Michael, run,” his mother said softly. “Go upstairs, into your bedroom.”
“But, Mama–”
“Run, go now!”
He climbed down from the chair…
And the door exploded. With an awful great crash, it flew back on its hinges, dust and splinters flying.
“Go!” Mama screamed at him, and he went, hot with panic on the inside, boiling with fear.
He bolted from the kitchen, clambered up the stairs two at a time. Behind him he heard a man’s voice, dark with anger. And his mother’s voice, shrill and high.
He paused, at the top of the narrow wooden stair, hand on the rail, chest heaving as he breathed. He should go back. He should help her, protect her.
She’d told him to run, though. And he wanted to do what she’d asked. He wanted to make her happy.
But she wasn’t happy now. She was shrieking. And there were at least two masculine voices, maybe three.
Help her, he should help her. He should throw himself in front of her and defend her.
He hadn’t helped her back at home, though, had he? He’d crawled beneath the bed, like she’d told him to do, and he’d listened to his father come into the room, had listened to the sound of Mama being slapped, the sharp strike of Daddy’s palm against her face. He’d heard the arguing, the cursing, the awful names his father called his mother. And then, as Mama sobbed, the mattress flexed and creaked above his head, and his father panted like a dog and cursed some more.
He hadn’t helped her when Daddy dumped his dinner over her head, because she’d made something he didn’t like. Artichoke hearts in the pasta. Fuck that, Daddy said, and poured the whole plate over Mama’s head. Michael ducked down under the table, at his mother’s urging, and listened to her face take slap after slap.
How many times had John McCall beat his wife? And how many times had Michael hidden and done nothing? Too many times to count.
As he stood at the top of the stairs, Michael felt the beginnings of an awful anger. An anger unlike anything he’d ever felt before. Schoolyard fights, unfair teachers – none of it could touch this, the black rage that started somewhere in the region of his heart and spread outward in cold, staggering flushes. It felt like if he looked at his hands, he’d seen the anger blooming beneath his skin, like bruises. And not just anger, there was hate there too. Blistering hate.
John wasn’t a big man, but Camilla was so very little. “Like a little fairy,” Uncle Wynn had said of her, smile brimming with affection, as his little sister danced across the living room of the main house last night. She was tiny and fragile and soft, and she helped Michael find cool bugs to put in Mason jars for show-and-tell, and she trimmed his hair at a kitchen chair, pads of her fingers light as snowflakes on his scalp. She cooked for him and read him stories and said, “I love you more than anything,” every night when she tucked him into bed.
And John had beat her. Over and over. Her own husband, the father of her child.
Michael didn’t care what kind of sin it was: he hated his father. And he wasn’t going to hide one more time.
He turned and started back down the stairs, toward the tumultuous din of voices below.
Just as his mother started up them.
Mama stumbled into view, clutching for the rail, big-eyed and breathless, pale white with nerves. Her hair had fallen, waving dark sheets across her shoulders, strands clinging to the perspiration on her forehead, the silver cross around her neck swinging.
“Michael!” Her voice was high, frightened, desperate. There were sounds and shouts behind her. She’d escaped, but they were coming after her. “Go, baby, run! Your room, your room!” She ran toward him, stumbling up the steps, flailing for the rail as she came.
The sight of her like that burned into his mind. It terrified him. And so he let the anger and hate shrivel down, and he obeyed her, spinning and running for his room.
There were two tiny bedrooms in the guest cabin, one on either side of the stairs. Michael darted into his, the little closet-sized space with its single bed and writing desk pressed up against the window. He had a view of the farm from up here, all bathed in moonlight, rimmed in frost. Just outside his window was the shingled roof of the front porch. He’d climbed out onto it three days before, and shimmied down the drain pipe to the grass below, just to see if he could.
Mama came in behind him, slammed the door, locked it, and dragged the desk chair over to wedge beneath the knob.
Feet thundered up the stairs. The men were coming.
Mama turned to him, caught him by the narrow shoulders, and leaned down so their faces were level. She had tears in her pretty eyes. Her lips trembled as she spoke. “Michael, listen to me, and listen to me good, okay?”
He nodded, even though her fingers were biting into him, wanting to do anything to please her, give her even that fractional peace.
“I named you after Saint Michael. Do you know what that means? I named you after the archangel. The angel who put the devil in the pit.” Her voice was hurried, the words snapping lightning fast. “I wanted you to have a good, strong name. A name for protecting people. A name against evil.”
Evil – that was John McCall.
“I want you to remember that,” Mama said. “I want you to remember what are you, always. Don’t ever forget it.”
“I won’t, Mama, but–”
“Here.” She let go of him and fumbled at the clasp of her silver cross, finally getting it open. “I want you to take this.” She picked up one of his hands, pressed the cross – warm from her skin – into his palm, closed his fingers around it and squeezed. “I want you to wear it every day, and remember that you’re my archangel. Will you do that for me, baby? Promise me.”
“I promise.” He felt the burn of tears in his eyes and throat. “Mama, why are you saying this?”
“Because your daddy’s coming.”
There was a tremendous bang on the other side of the door. “Camilla!” someone roared. “Open this goddamned door!”
“Michael.” Mama caught him by the face, her smooth hands gentle against his cheeks. Her eyes bored into his. “I love you more than anything. You are the best thing that ever happened to me.”
He didn’t want her to say this. Didn’t want her to seem so final, as the men tried to beat down the door.
“Wherever life takes you, I want you to remember how special you are. Okay? Promise me that, too. That you won’t forget. You are my special, wonderful, angel boy.” She kissed his forehead, and her lips were wet with the tears that streamed down her cheeks. “I love you,” she whispered, and then she released him, stepped back.
“Now, go, baby. Out the window. Go now, please. Go get your Uncle Wynn.”
He started to argue, but she shook her head. She was crying now. There was a loud splintering sound, as the door began to give.
“I won’t let him hurt you. If you love me, all you can do is run, Michael.”
And so he ran. He shoved up the window, rolled out onto the slanted porch roof, his eyes filling with hot tears. The cold night air stung his face, caught in his lungs. On all fours, he scrambled to the corner of the roof, to the gutter and the drain pipe. He’d always been a good climber, and though his fingers were fast going numb in this frigid February air, he took a firm handhold and shimmied down the pipe, thumping down onto the crunchy grass.
He heard Mama yell, up in his bedroom.
Oh, God, Mama…
Uncle Wynn. He had to get to Uncle Wynn.
Warm golden panels of light fell from the house windows onto the frosted lawn. Michael took off at a sprint toward the main house, sucking in huge lungfuls of the bitter chill. Fast, faster, the fastest he’d ever run, gasping, reaching, heart ready to burst.
He tripped going up the porch steps, fell against the door.
“Uncle Wynn!” He beat with both fists against the wooden panel. “Uncle Wynn, help!”
There was a thundering of feet beyond the door, and then the panel swung wide, and there was Uncle Wynn, framed by lamplight, the hulking brute Caesar at his side.
“What’s the matter, boy?”
“Mama!” Michael gasped. “The men…” He couldn’t catch his breath enough to speak. “They’re hurting her–”
Uncle Wynn scowled ferociously and reached to the side, toward the umbrella stand just inside the door, drawing back with a shotgun clenched in one big square hand.
Caesar stepped through the door onto the porch, licked Michael’s face and hands with his giant pink tongue.
“It’s your daddy, isn’t it?” Uncle Wynn said. “It’s John, isn’t it?”
“Him and somebody else.”
Uncle Wynn pulled the door shut, and laid a hand briefly on top of Michael’s head. “You stay right here, little man. You stand right here, and you hold onto Caesar’s collar, like this.” He moved Michael’s hand, placed it on the leather strap around the Dane’s thick neck. “Don’t you step away from him for a second.”
To the dog, he said, “Caesar, stay. Watch.” And then he leapt down off the porch and took off at a dead run for the guest cabin, shotgun swinging as he moved. He was amazingly swift for a man who wore overalls and saggy jeans all the time. He flew across the grass, and his white t-shirt floated up the steps of the other cabin, disappearing through the door like a ghost.
Michael curled his fingers tight around Caesar’s collar, but the dog never moved, just made a high whimpering sound. Michael leaned into his sleek, warm side, feeling like he might faint, breath pluming in the cold night air. He rested his head against the great beast’s face, felt the slickness of the short black coat on his skin.
And then he heard the shotgun go off, ripping explosions of sound that shattered the night.
Michael woke and knew that he’d been dreaming. His eyes snapped open and with a jolt, he felt himself returning from his very worst nightmare – the one that had actually taken place. He lay in his own bed, in his grown man’s body, and the ceiling was dark and grainy above him. He felt the familiar softness of his sheets against his naked skin. Smelled the familiar tang of lemon Pine-Sol.
He hadn’t dreamed of his mother in a long time; it had been years since he’d returned to that awful night in his sleep, reliving the horror in aching detail. Why had he tonight?
He knew the answer, but he wasn’t going to acknowledge it. There was no sense comparing tiny frightened Holly to his long-dead, tiny frightened mother when he didn’t know the whole story there, and wasn’t likely to get it.
Extending an arm through the dark, he found his smokes and lighter on the nightstand, where he always left them. Lit one by feel, the momentary spark of the lighter illuminating the cigarette and his deeply callused hands as he cupped them around the flame. Then it was dark again, and the nicotine was going down into his lungs. It was a nasty habit, smoking, one he hadn’t picked up until he’d joined the MC. There’d been a tremor in his hands, at first, because it hadn’t mattered that he was willing to do certain things; his body betrayed some sort of untouchable inner nerves. He’d turned to cigarettes, and they’d become habit, though the tremors had long since faded into nothingness.
He smoked in the dark, eyes tracing his bedroom from memory. Through the shadows, he knew just where the mirror stood in its floor-length frame, where the lamp was on the desk, the angle of the chair at the desk, the one where he draped his cut every night. He knew both nightstands, one on either side, and the old plate he used as an ash tray – he reached for it now. The shadows were deeper in the places where the en suite bath and closet doors stood open. All the old furniture from the house his parents had shared, the first nine years of his life. The bed where he’d been conceived, not out of love, but out of animal need and marital obligation.
He couldn’t see much sense in buying a whole house full of new furniture when this stuff had been sitting in storage for years, waiting for him to grow up. And so it didn’t matter where he lived; the ghost of his parents awful, wrong life together was a spirit he couldn’t exorcise.
The alarm went off with a screech. Six. Time to start the day. He set the burning cigarette on the edge of the makeshift ashtray and sat up. Maybe if he found out what was bothering Holly, dreams of his mother would stop bothering him.
**
The blinds were open in the chapel at nine a.m., and fresh stripes of sunlight lay like bright ribs across the ornate table, lighting everyone’s face from beneath in a way that made them all look younger. Ghost held a lot of morning church meetings like this, unlike his predecessor, James, who’d preferred late afternoon and evening. Ghost didn’t dick around; he got stuff done.
“Alright,” the Lean Dogs president said, once he’d taken a deep drag off his cigarette, “I’m going to see Collier today. They’re finally letting him have visitors, and there’s things I need to know from him, so we can lay this whole rat thing to rest in a permanent way.”
Across the table from Michael, in the VP chair, Walsh said, “The PD dragged the river,” his light eyes glittering faintly in the sunlight, his features inscrutable as always. The Englishman played his cards tight to the vest, and Michael approved of that. He’d voted “yea” a couple of weeks ago, when it came time to choose a new VP.
“Yeah, well…” Ghost gestured to the air and smiled wryly, an expression reflected by some of the others.
They all knew what the cops had found when they’d dragged the river: nothing. Mason Stephens and Ronnie Archer’s bodies weren’t there, not even in little pieces, because Collier hadn’t been the one to kill them and dump them.
“They haven’t been knocking around here anymore,” Ghost continued, “and that’s a good thing.” He cast a look down the table. “Ratchet, what else have we got?”
The secretary flipped through his notes, tapping a handwritten line with a finger. The sun was blinding where it struck the shiny lotioned sides of his shaved head. “A dealer reached out a couple days ago, called in on the hotline” – the prepaid cellphone Ratchet kept to manage all their drug business – “and wants to move the area. He heard he’d have to set that up with us, so this was just a reaching out. Wants to meet, sometime soon. Thought I’d handle the initial before I bring him to sit down with you,” he offered, helpfully.
Ghost nodded. “That’s fine. When you doing it?”
“Today. This afternoon at two.”
Another nod. “Take Merc for backup.”
At the foot of the table, Ghost’s son-in-law gave a little salute of acknowledgement.
Michael felt his stomach sour just at the sight of the guy. Mercy Lécuyer was a big man, and rather than compensate for that by serving his president with grace and dignity, he allowed himself to become the center of attention. He put his own wants and needs above those of the club – his specific want being Ghost’s twenty-two-year-old daughter. Mercy had stirred up too much drama. He was too cocky. Twice he’d caused his president grief of a variety that Michael would have died before bringing to the club table. He had no discretion, that’s what it was. Mercy liked what he did – the torturing; it was fun for him. He was loud and Cajun and long-haired and just…annoying.
“Anything else?” Ghost asked, and Ratchet shook his head.
“Just the usual maintenance stuff.”
“Okay, then. I’m all about keeping the burden light for right now. The longer we can lay low, the faster the shit will blow over. I don’t want to start anything or stir shit up. Nice and quiet, for the time being. Everybody good with that?”
There were choruses of “yes.”
Ghost nodded, smacking a hand down on the tabletop before he pushed his chair back. “Good. I’ll let everyone know what Collier says.”
As the rest of the Dogs got to their feet, small conversations broke out, mundane little inquiries and bits of gossip. Ghost’s son, Aidan, and his best friend, Tango, dove right back into their pre-church discussion about what to do with a difficult bike they had over at the shop. RJ called something to Mercy that made him laugh. Rottie helped the aging Hound up from his chair with a quick, deft touch under the arm that everyone else probably missed.
The club had gone back to normal. With the war with the Carpathians at a rest, the rats in the ground, and Collier in jail and trying, willingly, to take the fall for four murders to keep the heat off the club, the Dogs were returning to a calmer routine, the energy at a sustainable, everyday level.
And just like normal, there wasn’t any chitchat aimed Michael’s way as church broke up. What did he need any of that for? If he wanted to chew the fat, he’d make a trip out to see Uncle Wynn. It wasn’t in his nature to be talkative. People never really cared what he had to say; so why try? He’d spent too many years learning how to be so perfectly silent, that he wasn’t sure he even knew how to have a conversation anymore.
He left the chapel silently, and went down the hall to the sprawling bar and lounge atmosphere of the common room, catching Ghost alone as he dug a soda from the cooler at the bar. Michael drew up before him and waited, because that was what polite sergeants did, for his president to acknowledge him.
Ghost didn’t startle, but there was a moment when his face blanked over, and Michael knew that a lesser man would have jumped.
“Oh, hey,” Ghost said, popping the tab on his Coke, shaking little droplets off his thumb. “You took care of it?”
He nodded. “Yes. But there was something else.” Quickly, with sparse detail, Michael relayed the murder of Carly the Bell Bar waitress.
“I saw that on the news,” Ghost said, frowning. “Shit, you were there? Why the hell didn’t you bring that up in there?” Gesture toward the chapel.
For the first time since patching into this chapter, Michael felt a shred of doubt. Why hadn’t he brought it up? He wasn’t mute, after all. “It just didn’t seem like club business,” he said with a shrug.
Ghost kept frowning. “Yeah. Probably it’s not.” He made a little face that Michael took to mean that was no excuse, bring that sort of thing up next time. “I’ll talk to Ratchet about it, see if he can find anything out. What were you doing there that late?” When you were dumping bodies and shit, his gaze added.
“I was on my way home, and I saw the ambulance.”
“And the squad cars?” Ghost said. “Damn. Please tell me you’d already gotten rid of the girl.”
“Of course.” But the question stung, worse than he would have expected. Ghost had always relied on him, and never had to second guess anything he’d ever done for the club. To be doubted…when he’d stopped at the bar for personal reasons, no less…that was like getting rapped across the knuckles.
Ghost was staring at him, eyes narrowing, expression contemplative. “You alright? You look tired.”
“I’m fine.”
But Ghost wasn’t buying it. “Things have been crazy around here the last couple of months. If you wanna take some time off, stay home a few days, maybe you ought to.”
Another insult, this one worse than the first. “I don’t need any time off.”
Ghost made a face like he disagreed. “Everybody needs some time off. Take it if you want it. All this killing will kill you.”