She pulled out the chair across from him and glanced at the map, briefly, before giving him her full attention. The simple, single-bulb chandelier painted dark valleys in his sun-battered face, drawing lines and cracks, shining against the worn leather along his cheekbones. They were not smooth men, the bikers in her life, not fine, or well-loved by Mother Nature. The life – the wind, the sun, the drink, the sin, the violence – it took their soft layers away like sandpaper, over time, until there was a certain stark pride in their wrinkles and dark patches. Ghost was still wickedly handsome, but he looked his fifty years, and projected it with vicious grace.
Ava folded her arms against the edge of the map on the table. And waited.
He cleared his throat and looked downright awkward. “You went by the school today?”
She nodded. “I got my schedule for the semester all finalized.”
“Good.” He looked down at the map; there were locations circled in red, places marked with black stars. “That’s good.”
“I think so.”
“Yeah.”
Ava let a beat pass, then said, “Dad–”
Just as Ghost said, “Look.”
They paused a moment, staring at one another, feeling out the energy. Ava tipped her head a fraction in deference, because she did, under the low-level hurt, respect the hell out of the man.
“Look,” he repeated, sighing. “I know I’ve given you hassle about bringing your little…boyfriend” – he pronounced the word as if it was a variety of toenail fungus – “home with you. But I am glad you’re home.” He offered a smile. “Your mother’s not the only one who misses you, you know.”
“I know.” She smiled back, surprised and glad to hear it.
“And it’s good you’re…” It looked like he blushed, a suspicious heightening of color in his cheeks. “Moving forward,” he said, glancing away over her shoulder. “With school and…that boy…or whatever the hell.”
“You mean, you’re glad I’m not pregnant or miscarrying or depressed.”
His eyes widened in surprise.
It had been a bold thing for her to say, given their father/daughter history. So maybe the whiskey hadn’t left her system after all.
His mouth pulled hard to the side in a non-smile. “Well, yeah, that too.” Disgruntled face that she dipped her head to avoid. Then his voice gentled. “You’re finding your way. Your way, and it has nothing to do with the club, or me...” He frowned savagely. “Or people who ought to know better.” Read: Mercy. He snorted, then the softening came again, such a rare and valuable thing, that Ava hated that she hated what he said next. “I’m proud of you.”
Her smile was thin, but she couldn’t seem to help it. “You wanted me to be different.” From the rest of you, she left unsaid.
“I wanted you to be better,” Ghost corrected. “And you are.”
The backs of her eyes burned. She blinked and stared at her hands.
“I just…” Ghost took a troubled breath. “I wanted you to know that. That you’re doing a good job and I’m proud.”
That was probably her cue to leave, because she wasn’t going to get bigger praise than that. But she felt unsteady. It had been a very long time, she suddenly realized, since she’d sought shelter in the arms and leather-covered chests of any of the Lean Dogs in her life. She missed that. She was rabidly nostalgic for that, and wanted to dive across the table and into her father’s lap so he could tuck her under his chin and promise to put bullets in all her fears.
But she wasn’t a little girl anymore – not that club-attached girl she’d been growing up – and he was proud of that.
“You okay?”
“Fine.” She shoved to her feet so fast her hip caught the edge of the table, and she bit down on a yelp.
Maggie would have called her back, forced her to sit down again and talk about whatever was putting the stricken expression on her face. But Ghost didn’t – he never did – and he let her go.
Thirty
The next morning she woke to the sound of Ghost yelling, “Why the hell’s some guy trying to drop a Lexus in my driveway?”
“That’s Ronnie’s!” Ava called, fumbling down the hall as she tugged her sandal straps into place. She paused to prop a hand against the wall and get the left shoe secured, and heard Dad barking orders at the flatbed driver from the open front door. “Dad! Don’t turn him away! I gotta sign for that!”
“Do you not hear her?” Maggie chimed in. “That’s Ronnie’s.”
“I don’t want some prick car sitting in front of my house,” Ghost said.
Ava heaved a sigh. Morning with the Teagues. Just like old times.
After Ronnie got out of the shower, the car business had been sorted, and offers of breakfast were politely declined, Ava slid into the passenger seat of the Lexus and sighed with relief.
“Sorry about all that,” she said as Ronnie started the engine. “Dad…well, he’s just Dad.”
“I’m figuring that out,” Ronnie said with a wry half-smile. “So where to first?”
“Stella’s for breakfast,” Ava said, buckling her belt, feeling something like excitement at the idea of the day that lay ahead of them. They’d decided to spend some normal quality time, kicking over rocks in town, window shopping, finalizing the details of Ronnie’s apartment. “Then the book store.”
“I should have guessed that, bookworm.”
“Yes, you should.”
As he backed out of the drive, Ava glanced up in the rearview and caught Littlejohn pulling out behind them. He’d been waiting in the drive at first light, steaming paper cup of coffee in one hand, listening to his iPod, unhurried and patient.
Ava shook her head and rolled her eyes. Normal was a negotiable word, after all.
**
High school had treated a select handful like kings, and all the rest had been churned up in the machine, spat back out with an impressive collection of bruises and scars. Aidan had known one way of life, and because of it, he’d never been one of the kings. He’d had girls, and he’d had his share of notoriety, but his fame was the kind granted to drop-outs, back-talkers, bathroom-smokers, and class-skippers. He hadn’t ever hated school, it was just that it had always felt like such a massive waste of time. Men were dying, his father’s men, in a war of outlaw against outlaw, and kids two desks over had been having meltdowns about who to ask to homecoming. Stupid, all of it. He’d known from the second he was old enough to say the word “bike” that he would be a Dog, like his father. Why the hell had he been spinning his wheels at Knoxville High?
He hadn’t finished, something Maggie had clapped him over the head with a wooden spoon about. But he hadn’t, and still didn’t care. He’d learned enough. He’d learned, on the fringes of a gym class locker room scuffle he’d eventually broken up, that Greg Hoffman was sensitive about his small frame and narrow features.
Greg hadn’t changed much, since that day in the locker room. Still small, his shiny new Carpathians cut swallowed him whole, leaving deep shadows where his shoulders should have filled out the leather. His hair was thin, that blonde that was almost translucent, buzzed close to his head. He hadn’t outgrown his knobby elbows or the faint scattering of pimples along his jaw. He looked about fifteen, and in the back corner booth at Stella’s, he looked scared to death.
Aidan spotted him straight off. First thing in the morning, on a late summer day like this, the patio was crowded and all the window tables were taken, customers waiting out on the sidewalk for a place to open up. Those three back booths by the kitchen weren’t anything to write home about, but that’s where Greg had chosen to sit, his back to the wall, facing the door. Conspicuous. Flying his colors like an idiot.
“Hey.” Tango’s elbow in his ribs drew Aidan’s attention. “Ava.”
Through the open glass door that led out onto the patio, he saw his sister sitting across from her little wimp-ass boyfriend.
“We’ll make it fast,” Aidan said. The last thing he neede
d was some country club shithead getting too curious about this meeting.
“Top of the morning, Gregory,” he said, just a hair too loud, as he slid in across from the Carpathian.
Greg jumped like he’d been electrocuted.
“How you been, man?” Aidan asked.
Tango spun a spare chair away from the wall, and straddled it at the edge of the table, effectively blocking Greg in place. He folded his arms over the chair back and cracked his gum, looking bored with the whole situation. “S’up?”
Greg glanced between the two of them, rattled, unsure of how to handle things.
Aidan leaned back against the booth, braced his hands in a casual way on the table, and said, “We’re old friends with Julian and Stella. No one’s gonna bug us in here. We can talk.”
“Just us,” Tango said, and plucked at his blue check flannel shirt, highlighting his lack of a cut. “No colors.”
Greg twitched, but he didn’t shed his cut. He dampened his lips, a movement that made him look extra ferret-faced. “My president knows I’m here.”
Aidan grinned – nice and big, lots of teeth showing – and glanced over at Tango to get a matching one in return. They’d played this scenario out so many times over the years – he might not be his father’s go-to guy, no, but he and Tango could circle like boxers with the best of them. Maybe, one of these days, Ghost would take note of that.
“So does mine,” he told Greg. “He says ‘hi’ by the way. Wants to know if you want to come to Sunday dinner. His old lady makes a mean pot roast.”
Greg coughed on a swift inhale. He didn’t like this jocular approach; he’d been all geared up for a fight.
“And the mashed potatoes,” Tango added. “Shit, if she wasn’t married to your old man, I’d get down on one knee over those potatoes.”
“Hey, that’s my stepmom you’re talking about.” Aidan kicked the side of his boot and earned a chuckle.
Greg had had enough. “What the hell do you guys want?”
Bingo. Thanks for joining the game, Greggy.
“A few things,” Aidan said, evasively, as a waitress appeared behind Tango. She was a redhead, about his sister’s age and she was taking note; her eyes skipped all over him and he thought she might have turned a little pink beneath the cute scattering of freckles on her nose. Oh, yeah, she saw him. “Coffee, cream and two sugars, sweetheart,” he said. “Him too.” Nod to Tango. “And, like, all the fresh muffins Stella’s got back there.”
She blushed and dimpled and walked away with one last glance.
Aidan let his grin linger as he faced Greg again. See how relaxed I am? I’m at home here. This is my place, my people. You don’t have any friends here. “First thing. Back in high school, you remember how we had Bio together?”
Greg’s face blanked a moment, some of the heated color bleeding away. Disarmed for the moment. “Yeah. You sat by the window and tapped on it and…”
“Told Ms. Schneider it was a bird,” they finished in unison.
Greg looked like he almost smiled. “That one day, right at the end of the semester…”
“The pigeon with the broken wing?” Aidan said.
“Yeah.”
“Oh, you didn’t have that class with me,” Aidan said to Tango. He explained the story, with all the embellishments and the old teenage excitement, of the afternoon when he’d clapped his palm against the window and exclaimed that a pigeon had flown into the glass, and lay injured on the sidewalk. Ms. Schneider had bolted out the side door, and shouting through the window, Aidan had directed her after the hobbling, crippled bird. She’d chased a non-existent pigeon around the green for thirty minutes, to the applause of his classmates who weren’t prepared for their pop quiz, and the days of detention had been worth it.
Greg was truly smiling by the time he finished the story, charmed again, like back in the day, and then the waitress was setting down thick ceramic mugs and heaping plates of steaming muffins: blueberry, cinnamon raisin, oatmeal, banana nut.
“It’s too early for anything pumpkin,” Tango lamented, reaching for a blueberry. “I could OD on pumpkin.”
Aidan was chewing a bite of chocolate chip muffin and reaching for his coffee when he said, “Greg, dude, you were a nice guy. How’d you end up with these losers?” He gestured to the Carpathians cut with his mug before he took a slug of coffee.
Greg looked like it hurt to swallow. He set his banana nut down on the plate and brushed the crumbs off his fingers.
“No, you should eat,” Aidan said. “I can afford to buy you breakfast and you look hungry.”
Greg’s expression was tortured as he reached for the muffin again, broke a crumble off with thumb and forefinger and studied it in the steam-curled morning light. “You guys” – fast dart of his pale eyes between them from half-lowered lids – “were the coolest guys in that whole school.”
Tango snorted. “I’m not sure about that.”
“We did alright,” Aidan said with a shrug. “Never got to be homecoming king or anything, but we got by.”
Greg shook his head and set the muffin bite down, eyes coming straight up to Aidan’s. “No, not like that. That’s just popular. I mean cool. Like, people were a little bit afraid, and you didn’t give a shit, and when Toby Smalls said you fucked Ms. Appleton in the teacher’s lounge, I believed him, because you were just…cool.”
Aidan chuckled. “I won’t confirm or deny that.”
“See?” Greg made a helpless gesture toward him. “You were just…are just…”
“Cool?”
“And the thing was,” Greg continued, “it wasn’t an act like it is with some guys, you know? The Lean Dogs – you were a part of them. A part of something that I…” He glanced away and shook his head, throat working as he swallowed.
“Greg, is this you saying you always wanted to be a Dog?”
He picked up a rolled packet of silverware and withdrew the fork, used it to maim his banana nut muffin. Quietly, he said, “I always wondered what it would be like to be a part of something bigger than I was.”
Aidan felt a small tug of sympathy for the guy. Small, plain, meek, Greg had been the butt of a hundred jokes, the target of so much bullying. He’d had to wonder something that Aidan had always known as fact: what was it like to have a family of brothers who always had your back? What did it mean to have that guaranteed love and support, that fraternal bond?
“You could have become a hangaround,” Aidan said. “Useful hangarounds get to prospect, loyal prospects get to patch in.”
Greg was shaking his head.
“It’s not about being cool or being big or any of that. It’s a brotherhood. It’s about loyalty.”
But Greg looked miserable, and said, “I couldn’t afford that. I had to get a job, I had to…well, it doesn’t matter now, because the rec center closed.”
“Old Man Milford’s,” Aidan said, comprehension dawning. He shared a glance with Tango and got a nod. “You worked at the pool hall.”
Small nod from Greg.
“And when the Carpathians took it over, they offered to let you join–”
The defensiveness came back full-force, crackling through Greg’s small arms, jerking him upright and firing in his eyes. He aimed his fork at Aidan, muffin crumbs scattering across the table. “I earned my place in the club.”
“Of course you did,” Tango said, soothingly.
But Aidan said, “Did they prospect you?”
Silence, which meant no, they hadn’t.
“Greg, nobody with half a brain just drops a patch on somebody’s back and expects him to stick around unless he can be assured of his loyalty. And, smart guy like you, I’m thinking that if someone strong-armed you out of a job, you’d find another job, not join up with them.”
Greg’s jaw clenched tight.
Aidan leaned over the table, dropping his voice. “What sort of leverage does Larsen have on you? What did he threaten you with?”
He tried to leave the table
. He surged awkwardly to his feet, thumping his knees and struggling to slide out of the booth. Tango caught his wrist in a grip Aidan knew to be stronger than it looked. Greg struggled a second, then seemed to remember they were in a crowded café, and stilled. His eyes rolled wildly.
“Let go,” he hissed through his teeth.
“I could help you, Greg,” Aidan said, and earned a sneer for it. “No, listen. Whatever Larsen’s told you about the Dogs, use your head. You know us” – gesture between himself and Tango – “you went to school with us. I pulled Billy Mayfield off you in the locker room once. So whatever Larsen said, it’s bullshit. We can help you, Greg, if you’re willing to come talk to my dad about what you know.”
“You think I’m a rat?” Greg asked. “Is that it? Fuck you, Teague.”
Aidan sagged back against the booth. “Fine, but the offer stands, if you get clear-headed.”
Tango held fast to the guy’s wrist.
“One last thing,” Aidan said, tone conversational. He plucked a cinnamon raisin muffin from the plate and watched Greg from the corner of his eye. “You wouldn’t happen to know who stabbed Andre the other night, would you?”
Quick flicker of something deep in the man’s eyes. Guilt, but not for having done the deed himself. This was bystander guilt.
When he wouldn’t answer, Tango released him, and he clambered away from the table in a loud clomping of boots that drew other customers’ eyes. As he left, Tango slid into his abandoned seat across from Aidan and pushed his shades up into the front spikes of his hair.
“I smell a chink in Larsen’s armor,” he said, dragging his coffee mug over.
“Me too,” Aidan said. “We haven’t seen the last of Greg.”
The patio was crowded with people all talking a hundred miles an hour, that caffeinated spark lifting voices into bright bubbles of laughter that echoed off the water splashing in the fountain. Molten sunlight poured bright and heatless over the tables, glinting on china and glassware, flashing in high silver arcs as points were driven home with waves of forks and knives. Stella’s had all the old magic, and the food was delicious as always. Ava and Ronnie had a table right along the wrought iron patio railing, with a view of the alley; Ava flicked muffin crumbs into the gutter for the hopping English sparrows and felt her toes curl in abject delight to be back here.
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