Page 113 of Price of Angels

“Yeah,” Michael said. “I hear ya.”

The man who’d come out of the house to shake his hand had been slender and small-boned, with a hawkish face by contrast and small dark eyes that missed nothing. He’d introduced himself as Curtis, and while he spoke, Michael was taking note of all the tattoos going up his arms. Again, he saw the running dog silhouette, this time in solid black ink. And above the breast pocket of Curtis’s black leather vest was a narrow patch that declared him “President.”

“I spent the weekend showing Curtis and his crew the finer points of hog killing – they’d never got in that close to one before. They let me do the knife work till they got more comfortable,” he told Holly.

Sunday night, before Michael headed back to Tennessee, Curtis grabbed two beers from the fridge and walked Michael out to one of the courtyards. There was a fountain tucked into the corner, a concrete casting of vases spilling the water from one down into the next, into the next, and into a pool at its base. Japanese maples dappled the moonlight. The smell of honeysuckle was sweetened by the dew.

Curtis urged him to sit at an iron table, took a long pull off his beer, and said, “So what is it you do for a living, son?”

Michael hadn’t liked to talk, even then, and he’d given a brief description of the odd jobs he did, the handyman work, the occasional backyard car repair, to supplement what he made delivering and training dogs.

Curtis had smiled – a threatening sort of smile Michael would remember forever – and said, “I like the way you handle a knife. I like it so much, I’m thinking about offering you a job.”

He hadn’t accepted. Not then.

But two months later, when he and Uncle Wynn were eating ramen for dinner and rationing the Dog Chow, Michael answered the phone on the first ring, and immediately agreed to bring Curtis another dog.

After that trip, and that beer by the courtyard fountain, he’d accepted a job working at Curtis’s very lucrative car and bike shop. He’d shipped half of each paycheck to Wynn. And he’d quickly learned that this business was run by and peopled with Lean Dogs, that this was a motorcycle club endeavor.

When they asked him to prospect, he accepted.

When they patched him in, they told him why they’d wanted him in the first place: his knife, and what he could do with it. Only now…it wouldn’t he hogs he was slicing into in the dark.

Michael shrugged. “Eventually, there was an opening for someone like me here in Knoxville, and I put in my paperwork. I wanted to come home to Tennessee.” He shrugged again. “That’s it. That’s how it happened.”

Holly started to smile, and then smoothed her lips. “After all the buildup, I was expecting major drama.”

He glanced back at his cards.

“You don’t do drama, though. You’re too solid for that.”

It felt like a compliment. He took it as one.

In a quiet, feather-light voice, she said, “Your uncle raised you?”

He didn’t look at her. “Yeah.”

“All those dogs. That must have been fun growing up.”

“He has a farm, ‘bout an hour from here.”

“How nice.”

“It is.”

“Why don’t you have a dog now?”

“I travel too much. It wouldn’t be fair to a dog.” When he glanced up at her, wondering how many more questions he’d have to field, he found her gazing at him with warm reverence.

He had no delusions about her feelings for him anymore. They were stuck, the two of them. For better, probably for worse.

“You don’t want to talk about it,” she said.

He shrugged.

“So I’ve been thinking,” she went on brightly, “that I ought to be practicing with the gun, like you said.”

“Yeah, you do.”

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