“And told them what?” she asked, disbelieving. “That rival bikers rode onto campus? Are we so desperate we’re going to sic UTPD on them?”
Maggie frowned. “I don’t like it. Schools are supposed to be safe. And,” she added, “if we turned this into a school issue” – she twirled a finger through the air – “then it stops being a gang war and starts being a case of the Carpathians terrorizing civilians. Stephens looks bad, the cops crack down, the Dogs aren’t Public Enemy Number One anymore.”
Ava grinned reluctantly. “Always working an angle, huh?”
“An angle that keeps you safe!”
“I’m fine, Mom.”
“This time!”
Ava made a calm down gesture and earned the mother stink-eye for it.
“I’m half-convinced Dad did it himself,” Ava said. “Trying to keep me at school and away from…here.”
Maggie sat back with a satisfied smile. “I think your dad’s about to come to terms with here. He’s starting to put things in perspective.”
“I’m guessing he had a little help with that.”
“He might have.”
Ava felt a flutter in her chest, something akin to hope that frightened and thrilled her. She hadn’t hoped for anything in five years. “Thanks, Mom,” she said, meaning it.
Maggie shrugged. “It’s the least I can do after getting your arch nemesis to write your recommendation letter.”
“Nothing like convincing my dad to accept my thirty-five-year-old as a fix for deceit.”
They locked eyes.
They burst into deranged giggles.
They laughed until Ava’s ribs ached. “God, Mom,” she gasped as she caught her breath. “How did life get so messed up?”
Maggie dabbed at the corners of her eyes and exhaled, quieting, gathering her composure. “Baby, it’s not messed up,” she said with a reassuring smile. “Just a little bumpy.”
Ava let her head fall back against the chair. “I don’t think I’m supposed to want to be back home.”
Maggie’s lips pursed, telling her what she thought of that New Age sentiment. “But do you?”
Ava nodded. “So much.”
Maggie nodded.
“I’m the first loser to ever leave college the exact same person who went into it.”
Maggie grinned. “Whoever said that was a bad thing?”
The clip of high heels alerted them to someone’s approach. Bonita brought the smell of bottled jasmine into the office with her, the perfume lifting off her cotton dress and black cardigan. She was in all black, her spike-heel above-the-knee boots gleaming in the sunlight, the big square frames of her sunglasses setting her face off in elegant contrast.
“Girls,” she said brightly, in her beautiful, accented English. “I didn’t think I’d find you both here. Buenas tardes.”
“Buenas tardes,”Ava and Maggie echoed.
Maggie said, grinning, “You’re awful dressed up.”
“I was supposed to have lunch with Carol” – James’s sister, who Bonita would rather die than risk offending with anything less than obvious style – “and we were going to have our hair done, but Stephanie at the salon, she turned me away! Can you believe that?” She crossed in front of Ava and settled into the other extra chair, hands clasped on one leather-covered knee. “Ten years I go there to have my hair styled, and she can’t take me anymore. I’m not on the client list, she says, and she has to cut back on her customers because of her back.”
Maggie snorted. “The only thing wrong with her back is that it spends too much time against too many different mattresses. She turned you away because of the Dogs.”
“What?”
Maggie recounted her trip to the florist shop, and Ramona’s strange reception of her and Jackie. Ava chimed in with her morning’s account of Cook’s Coffee, the suited man who’d been harassing Leah’s father.
“Dios mio,” Bonita said.
“Someone’s going around to each and every shop owner leasing storefront space, and threatening them somehow. Turn the Dogs away, or else,” Maggie said.
Bonita rolled her eyes. “Crazy, that’s what it is. Who in this town believes the Dogs are bad? No one. We get respect.” She lifted her nose, purposefully haughty. “All my time here, I go into a shop, and it is ‘What can I get you, Mrs. James?’ ‘How can I help you?’ ‘How is your husband?’ And now?” She leveled a look on Maggie that no one would have suspected her capable of, given her usual bright laughter and warm obliviousness. “What is happening, Maggie? Why is this happening now, when my James steps down?”
The old queen questioning the ruling power of the new royal family.
Maggie managed to keep her frown graceful. “It’s not about James versus Ghost as president. Any change in leadership is seen as a transitional period, a weak place. The Carpathians wanted to strike while things were disorganized.”
“And are we disorganized?” Bonita wanted to know, tone innocent, gaze anything but.
Ava shrank back in her chair a fraction.
“No,” Maggie said, firmly. Ava knew what her mother was thinking: that if anything, James had been the lax president, reactionary rather than proactive, worried about parties instead of predatory rivals. “Ghost has it under control.”
“I hope so. I can’t go weeks and weeks without my salon trip,” Bonita said, giving her heavy mane a shake to demonstrate.
Maggie offered a tight smile. “The boys will get it sorted. Knoxville works better with the Dogs around; they just need to be reminded of that.”
“Reminded of what?” a deep, masculine voice asked from the door. A shadow swelled, blocking the incoming sunlight, and Ava felt her stomach leap the same moment Maggie smiled.
“Reminded that you Dogs are all up to date on your rabies shots,” Maggie said.
Mercy folded his arms across his chest and leaned a shoulder against the doorjamb. He wore a black and blue flannel shirt with the sleeves folded back under his cut. The breeze rushed in around him and Ava thought she smelled lavender. “Got my tag and everything,” he told Maggie, returning her grin; then he swiveled his head and lost all humor as his eyes came to land on Ava. “You didn’t call.”
Oh, so they were going to play that game. In front of her mother, and Bonita, for Godsakes, he was going to get her with the old my old lady shoulda checked in routine. Well, news flash to him: one “I love you” in the middle of a Scotch-soaked night in bed together didn’t mean she was his anything.
“I forgot,” she said, shrugging, because what with feeling like shit and dealing with her truck, she truly had.
Mercy’s black brows pulled low over his eyes. “Someone slashed your tires, and you didn’t call me.”
She opened her mouth to respond, and then held her breath a second. This wasn’t just a game, she realized, but something more subtle and significant than that. He was doing this in front of her mother and Bonita – two MC queens – on purpose. Things were different, he’d told her, and apparently he’d meant it, because he was asserting himself as her man, openly, stepping up in the true one-percenter sense, taking her into his care and asking for her recognition, her cooperation.
He was going to have to be more official than that, though, because in the eyes of these two queens, she had her own one-percenter standards to meet. And she wanted to meet them, didn’t she? Didn’t she want to be his old lady, part of this sacred circle of women, one of the beloved few?
Yes. God yes.
She said, “Obviously, you talked to Dublin. So you know I had all the help and protection I needed.”
His expression became a scowl, one she found hilarious and adorable. “You should have called me,” he insisted.
“Mmkay. I’ll think about it next time.” And she turned away from him deliberately, not missing her mom’s small, pleased smile.
She felt Mercy’s stare a long moment. He said something in French that sounded like both a grudging compliment and a curse, and left the office with
a sharp rap of his knuckles against the doorframe.
Their tension forgotten for the moment, Maggie and Bonita exchanged a look.
Bonita laughed. “Little bambina, all grown up.”
“And giving ‘em hell,” Maggie said, grinning broadly.
Ava slipped deeper into her chair, blushing.
Brat. At some point in the last five years, Ava had grown herself a sturdier backbone. There was a coldness in her now, down deep under her skin, one that he’d created, if he was honest. He didn’t like it. He wanted his adoring, worshipful girl back. Instead, he had this mostly-grown little woman who could spend all night clawing him up and then turn him away the next morning. It pissed him off; it was hot as hell. And it was just a phase, he was convinced. He had some making up for lost time to do, but then she’d come back around.
Halfway to the clubhouse, he ran across Michael’s statue-still frame throwing a long shadow across the asphalt. He drew up to a halt beside him, only a little curious what had stopped the man in his tracks this time.
Without being asked, Michael gestured toward the clubhouse portico.
In its shade, Ghost stood with Fielding, his posture more threatening than defensive. “…no one in the world is as stupid as they’re claiming I am,” Ghost was saying, one hand on his hip, the other gesticulating aggressively.
“You know what it looks like,” Fielding said, voice patient. “I have to enquire…”
“And there’s that,” Michael said, pointing across the lot toward the perimeter fence, and Industrial Road. A small knot of people holding signs were pacing back and forth along the fence. Mercy caught the words No More and felt a heaviness in his gut.
“Protesters?”
Michael nodded.
“People bothered to make signs and come protest us? Jesus Christ, get a life.”
“They could be plants,” Michael said. “Either way: bad press.”
Mercy sighed. “When are you and me going hunting?” He didn’t relish the idea, but he wanted to do something. Sitting around was lethal for him.
“Dunno. When the boss tells us,” Michael said, voice laced with patience.
Fielding walked out from under the portico, shaking his head, and Ghost came toward them, face a thunderhead.
“Motherfucker,” he said when he was in earshot, not to either of them specifically, just to vent. “I give it three days,” he said, “before we’ve got every soccer mom in the county camped out on our street.”
“So push back. Get the Lean Bitches out washing cars in bikinis,” Mercy suggested. “Soccer moms won’t stand around and watch that.”
Ghost shook his head, frowning toward the small gathering of protesters. “I figured things would get worse ‘fore they got better. But this? I can’t fight the city.” He rubbed the back of his neck, exhaustion taking hold of his face, making it look drawn and lined. “I don’t have the resources for that.”
Michael spoke up, his voice almost soothing, though businesslike as always. It surprised Mercy, to hear him offer something like consolation to their president – to anyone. “We have the charity event next week. That’ll help. And we’ll handle the Carpathians.”
“Speaking of which,” Mercy said. “Where do you want us, boss? What can we do?”
Ghost sent him a stern look. “You can take my girls home for me. That’s what I need right now.”
Maybe it shouldn’t have - just like old times, after all – but the order surprised him. “Me?”
Ghost smirked. “Did I stutter? Yeah, you. Littlejohn does a good job, but I take it you’re more invested.”
“True.”
“If you know what’s good for you, you’ll stay that way.”
Mercy grinned. “Do I smell a shotgun wedding? I’ve wanted to call you Daddy for so long now.”
“Fuck you,” Ghost said, turning. “And stay with them till I get there.”
At first, she thought it was a ploy, Mercy coming back into the office, all official and removed, telling them that it was time to go home for the day, and that he’d escort them. Sure, she thought. But your plan sucks. Just you and me alone in the house together…with my mom.
But then she saw the protesters. She counted about ten, as they were driving out, and a minivan parked on the shoulder was letting off more. All held double-sided poster-board signs on sticks. Ava was able to read the marker-drawn message on one: Send the Gang to Gangland. This Is Not California. As they passed, she read another: Knoxville Moms Against Violence. Send the Dogs to the Pound.
Her hands grew clammy on the wheel. She checked her rearview and saw Mercy on his Dyna close behind her, and the sight of him quelled the leaping pulse in her stomach.
As she followed her mom’s Caddy through the heart of the city, past the Main and Market shops and restaurants, she saw the heads turn their way, eyes and ears drawn by the black bike and the man flying Dogs’ colors. So many of the proprietors knew Maggie’s black Cadillac, and probably Ava’s black truck. She saw the expressions on the faces: curiosity, doubt, fright, even hostility.
A sign, in the window of As A Daisy: Knoxville Moms Against Violence.
The red ribbons, tied on lampposts. Weren’t those usually a part of Red Ribbon Week at the school? The anti-drug campaign.
And there, up high on a billboard as they turned at the next light, Mayor Mason Stephens’ face looming large above them, the caption promising to make the city a safer, more prosperous place to live.
The city was turning against them. It was starting slow, but like a cancer, it would spread and spread, and then consume.
Ava was shaking by the time they pulled up at the house. She sat for a long moment after she’d killed the engine, rubbing the backs of her arms, staring at the closed garage doors, feeling a chill that had nothing to do with temperature.
She jumped when someone rapped on her window, then scolded herself when she saw that it was Mercy, and climbed out.
“Where did those people come from?” she asked. “The protesters.”
He was in protection mode, scanning the street, the house, the yard, eyes scouring the shrubs for hidden boogeymen, hands hovering down low, ready to grab for his knife, or the Colt semi-auto he kept in his waistband, hidden by his cut.
“Doesn’t much matter,” he said, eyes touching her briefly before he continued his scan. “The mayor coulda trucked ‘em in, for all we know. It’s a threat either way.”
Maggie walked around the front of the truck and joined them, snorting in delicate disagreement and flipping her hair over the collar of her denim jacket. “If the day ever comes when I’m afraid of Suzie Homemaker coming at me with a sign, it must be Armageddon.”
One corner of Mercy’s mouth lifted in a faint smile. “Yeah. But a crowd of Suzies with signs would make good cover for some dude with a gun.”
The insinuation fell over Ava like ice water; she watched it do the same to her mother, Maggie’s eyes widening.
“Oh.”
“That’s what I’m here for,” he said in the old, reassuring way of years past. Not the calculating lover, but the stoic, good-natured guard and companion. So many nights, when she was a girl, they’d eaten dinner, the three of them, waiting for Ghost, Mercy admitting that he didn’t follow football and asking Ava about the novels she was reading for school, and for fun.
He gestured up the sidewalk. “Ladies first.”
Inside, Ava went straight to her room, unsure how she felt about Mercy’s presence here again, after all this time. Last night had changed certain aspects of this new relationship they’d tumbled into, but there were still roadblocks she had to navigate. The kitchen of this house was the place where he’d first kissed her. Her bed, where she tossed her hoodie, was where he’d laid her down the first time. To have him here, to have her parents know, to be older, to be repeating the same mistakes, to be thrilled by the feel of it…it was all a tangle. And she felt terrible about what she’d done to Ronnie. He’d never asked for this, for her ugly co
mpass heart spinning toward a north she couldn’t trust.
She changed into black leggings and a long, flowing white t-shirt, went barefoot back down the hall, and found Mercy on the couch with a beer, Maggie visible through the doorway into the kitchen, setting out packets of chicken to defrost.
She lingered partway through the room, beside the arm of the couch. She ought to go help her mother with dinner (or hinder, depending on how she looked at her inadequate cooking abilities). But she wanted to sit down beside Mercy, lean into his side, slide her hand down his thigh, nestle in beneath his arm, feel his warm touch against her arm and have him tell her some mundane story about his day, just to feel like an important piece of his life.
She didn’t get to do either before he spoke to her.
“What’s got you all spooked? Those bitches with the signs? Don’t worry about that. I don’t think anyone’s really gonna use them as cover.”
She moved to sit beside him; she had to turn sideways to fit between his knees and the coffee table, her thighs brushing against his jeans with a soft sound that tickled the insides of her ears and gave her gooseflesh. She sat a respectable distance from him, faced the TV – Pawn Stars – and folded her hands in her lap.
“It was really awful,” she said, “what I did to Ronnie. I feel guilty about it.”
He studied her with a faint almost-smile, elbow propped on the arm of the couch, bottle halfway to his mouth. “Him you feel guilty about. But me no.”
She turned to him sharply. “Why would I feel any guilt about you?”
He shrugged and glanced away. “You were rude to me.”
Her mouth fell open. “Rude to you.”
“And you didn’t call me.” His face hardened, less amused, more serious. “We’ve got murderers on the loose. When someone tells you to call, you call.”
“I did call, I just didn’t call you.”
“That’s my point.”
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