Page 72 of Lone Star

He shrugged, fast and jerky. Didn’t make eye contact. “Why would you? I don’t talk about it.”

The parking lot bustled with regular activity around them, customers coming and going, cars driving past constantly. A man in coveralls was unloading a Coke truck, running trip after trip with his trolley. A harried mother was trying to convince her kids to clean all the fast food trash out of their minivan and chuck in the BP’s trash cans.

Eden and Axelle had gone inside to grab sandwiches and gigantic sodas, spread out four tables over, out of earshot, scanning their surroundings and chatting. Eden checked her phone at regular intervals; Michelle wondered if she was texting Fox about this, and hoped she wasn’t. The moment had a strange quality: a sense of being wrong-footed, but wrong-footed together, like she and Jinx were conspiring.

“That club war I mentioned before.”

“The Vultures.” She remembered it vividly, Jinx’s undisguised contempt for RCs in general, and Pacer in particular.

“Yeah. Well, back then.” Another drag. He was making an effort to blow the smoke away from her, she’d noticed, but his fingers shook on the filter paper; hehadto smoke right now, telling her this. “Cade – my brother – he wasn’t patched in, wasn’t even a prospect. But he helped us out sometimes. Friend of the club, you know? When we had to make a delivery, and there was too much heat on us. Played go-between sometimes.” He finished the cigarette, stubbed it out, and lit another.

“Pacer was already in deep shit with the Vultures, but Jack hadn’t moved on them yet. He said he’d help Pacer, but we’d not had anything to do with the Vultures. Hadn’t even reached out. It was business as usual. We had a run to make, back east, to New Orleans. And a delivery to make to Nevada, too. The NOLA run was gonna be huge: all hands on deck, you know?”

She nodded. She could already see where this was headed, already vaguely sick about it for him, the way his brows were notched, the way frown lines marred his face; the way his lips trembled when he put the cigarette to them.

“Cade and a couple of his buddies offered to make the Nevada run. They took one of the club vans. It wasn’t marked or anything, but – the Vultures knew it was ours, somehow.

“I got the call at a rest stop in Mississippi. If Cade hadn’t had his wallet on him, they wouldn’t have been able to ID him.”

“Christ,” she breathed.

He set the half-smoked cig on the lip of his Coke can and braced his elbows on the tabletop; pressed his hands together. Not like a man praying, she thought, because he didn’t strike her as the type. But a man trying to hide how badly his hands were shaking; she understood that intimately – maybe more so, being a woman raised in a man’s world.

“Pacer got my little brother killed,” Jinx said, tone flat, eyes gleaming. “I hate his fucking guts. And now he’s gonna get my club brothers killed. I’m real tempted to ride out to his place and put a bullet in him.”

He was completely serious, she saw, and she wasn’t going to try to dissuade him from doing any such thing.

“Eric and Jesse at the Citgo say our murderer’s linked to the Chupacabras,” she told him.

It took a moment for the news to hit, smoke from the abandoned cigarette curling up between them. Then: “Jesusfuck.”

“We know it’s them,” she ticked off on a finger, “and that this killer’s calling himself the Holy Father.” Another finger. “My guess would be that he’s not the boss, just a super dramatic attack dog putting the fear of God into everybody.” The stupid nickname made unfortunate sense, in that light.

“And probably,” she added, voice tripping, “there was someone watching that gas station, so not only are Jesse and Eric in trouble, but us too for talking to them.”

“You’re in the crosshairs now,” he said, but not with censure. He tipped his head. “’Course, you already were, I guess. Now you’re just sticking your nose in.” Again, he didn’t sound reprimanding.

“I was tired of sitting at home while everything’s going to shit.”

“I figured. Candy should have figured that, too.”

She gave him a sharp look. “He’s your president.”

“And my best friend. I can call his ass out when he’s being a dipshit.”

A bit of wild hope fluttered behind her breastbone, an echo of the old, hard-pounding excitement she’d known when she worked for her dad.

“Why did you follow us?” she asked.

“Not to sound like a jackass, but I don’t know anything about those two.” He nodded toward Eden and Axelle; Michelle thought, based on the little tic in Axelle’s jaw, he’d been heard. “And somebody needs to watch your back.”

She waited for him to say something about her being a woman, or being pregnant, or being out of bounds – but he didn’t.

Instead, to her shock, he said, “So what’s the plan?”

She blew out a breath; pushed aside the emotion that lapped around her like hungry waves lately and justthought. Put aside all the ingrained prejudices about the club, and her gender, and theway of things. She’d never realized, before coming to the States, how adaptable the London chapter was – or perhaps it was just her father. She’d always been struck by the heaviness of it; by the roots, the sense of history, the tradition. But Phillip was open to nearly anything, ready to accept contributions from whomever. In London, the club couldn’t get away with the massive rides down main streets, the big, dick-swinging displays of authority. The club didn’townLondon; didn’t have a hand in every police pie. No guns worn boldly on hips; no shoot-outs in broad daylight. Subterfuge and subtlety were the ways they thrived.

The wayshe’dthrived.

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