Page 27 of The Wild Charge

“Jesus, fucking–” The straw rustled as he kicked around and drew himself upright, gaze snapping up to Tenny’s face where he’d pressed it to the gap in the slats. “Fuck you,” he snarled. “You aren’t supposed to be in here.”

“Oh? I’m not? That’s news to me.”

“No one comes in here without Ghost.”

“Well.” Tenny slouched against the side of the trailer, making a show of getting comfortable. “That’s not true. Mercy comes in here without him. And I’ve seen the prospects bring your dinner and empty your” – a pointed glance toward the shadowy corner of the trailer, accompanied by a snort – “chamber pot.

“Perhaps,” he continued, “it’s a matter of you not wanting to be alone with me. Perhaps because you think I have a vendetta. Hm?”

In the shaft of moonlight, Luis’s face twitched.

“You bragged about it before. About shooting me. But now I think you’re afraid.”

Luis managed to hold still this time, but that first twitch had been enough. Had been damning.

“Do you want to hearwhyI think you’re afraid?”

Luis sneered. “Not like I can keep you from monologuing like a comic book villain if you want.”

“If I’m monologuing, it’s a page taken from your book, you dramatic little wanker. See, here’s what I think: I think someone, your higher-ups, perhaps, have realized that we have you. You haven’t checked in, or you’ve missed a checkpoint. In that organization, someone’s keeping tabs on everyone, and you’ve gone off the grid. You aren’t where you’re supposed to be, and it’s been noticed.

“Now, maybe, hopefully, they assume you’re dead.

“But if they don’t think that…maybe they think we have you. Maybe they’re even staging a rescue.

“Or.” He took great pleasure in lowering his voice to something serpent-like and threatening. “Maybe they think you’veturned.”

Luis bared his teeth in a humorless smile. “I’ve already given you names.”

“Yes, yes, you have turned. But they don’t know that, yet. And now you’re thinking, maybe, instead of kidnapping people’s old ladies, and shooting members, it would behoove you to get on our good side, because once you’re loose, Abacus will kill you. Maybe you’re thinking you’ll prey on some of the club’s do-gooder, Robin Hood nature.”

Luis gestured to the trailer around in him. “How noble of you.” His smile – his grimace – wavered, though. He was right at the edge.

Tenny knew, if he pushed him – if he unlocked the door, and slipped inside the trailer, and put his hands in just the right places; if he pinched nerves, and blocked air flow, and sent electric pain impulses shooting down arms and legs – he could break him like a brittle twig. Because despite all that he’d given them so far, Tenny knew there was something else, some last scrap of information, a lifeline to which Luis clutched with the last vestiges of his fraying sanity.

Not now, though, a voice in the back of his mind whispered. That exacting, calculating voice that had never failed him during a sparring match, or during an op. That voice that had made him better than all his peers, and kept him alive this long.

For now, Tenny took a step back. He was surer, now; he’d seen the animal gleam in the other man’s eyes and recognized it, alone like this, in the dark, away from the spectacle of Mercy with his hammer and Walsh with his clipboard. “Thank you,” he said, taking another step.

Luis sat up straighter, so their gazes stayed lock through the slats in the trailer. “I didn’t give you anything,” he said, half-snarling, half afraid that he somehow had.

Tenny gave him his best, sharpest grin. “See, the thing about you, Luis, is that you’re not stupid. You aren’t just after drugs and women and local power. You’re a big thinker; you aim high. And because you’re not stupid, you’ve learned how the Lean Dogs think. How they behave. You’ve anticipated their movements and come to some frighteningly accurate conclusions about the way their little outlaw brains work.

“ButIam not one of them.”

“You’re flying their colors.”

Tenny plucked at the front of his cut. “So I am. I’ve flown lots of colors, in my time. But let me assure you: patches or no, title or no, I’m not a Lean Dog. I’m an entirely different sort of creature the likes of which you’ve never seen before.”

Luis stared at him, jaw clenching, shadows dancing down his throat in his sliver of moonlight. “Really? What’s that?”

“Let’s just say…” He edged back another step, voice beginning to echo faintly off the concrete and steel. “If you think Mercy cutting you into little bits is the worst thing that could happen to you…you’re mistaken.”

Seven

Tuscaloosa, in the height of summer, proved green, and humid, and drowsy. Battered orange and red lawnmowers worked back and forth across thick lawns; kids in shorts moved down sidewalks, talking on phones, dribbling basketballs, laughing with one another, faces gleaming with sweat. They passed sprawling brick ranches, white clapboard farmhouses with rocking chair porches, and single-wide trailers with floral sofa front porches: all of them were flying crimson flags printed with the Alabama A, or Big Al, the mascot. Reese had Googled the city last night, and gone down the rabbit hole; for a few seasons there, the elephant mascot had worn a lei around his neck at some of the games.

They’d departed before dawn, and arrived now in the late afternoon, the sun molten overhead. Reese felt sweat sliding down his back, beneath his clothes, and spotted a trickle of it on Tenny’s temple when they pulled into the Holiday Inn parking lot and took off their helmets.

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