Cut Deep: A Biker Revenge Romance

Twenty-one bikes out front, and I've counted them twice. Twenty-one is the wrong number. I shut the Dyna down and sit in the dark with both hands on the tank, listening. The clubhouse is cinder block with a metal roof and a sign some drunk painted in 1998 — SEVENTY-FIRST CHAPTER over a copperhead with its mouth open wide enough to be funny. Seven years ago there were thirty-four bikes on a Tuesday. That was with two crews on the coast and Gus still walking. I pull the helmet off and hook it on the bar. Twenty-one. And the twenty-first is under a tarp. It's parked at the end of the line with the plate turned to the wall, which is a thing nobody in this club has ever done, because nobody in this club has ever owned anything worth covering. I look at it for four seconds and then I stop looking at it, because I have somewhere to be. I know the order of a Tuesday Church the way I know the sound of a bad lifter. Minutes. Treasury. Whatever Gus wants to say. The door. Rattler's been running the meetings since Gus went into the chair. Rattler's meetings run short. Rattler doesn't like being asked things in front of people. Inside it smells like burnt coffee, old beer, and the inside of a truck. Forty-odd men and women, most of them in cuts, most of them facing front, because the door is the coldest place to sit and nobody here was ever cold. Dutch is up front with the club's binder open. Broken zipper, coffee ring on the cover. He's reading in the voice of a man who has read the same paragraph four times and still doesn't want to be the one saying it out loud. Rattler is sitting in Gus's chair. Not beside it. In it. I found that out three days ago, in a back office at a casino in Reno, off a text message from a woman I've never met. I have been riding on it ever since. ". . . for the consideration of ninety thousand dollars," Dutch says, "transferring the parcel described in—" "Read the name." My voice comes out flat. I've spent seven years practicing not sounding like myself. It's a skill. It's like anything else. Every head in the room turns. The music runs one more second and then somebody at the back kills it. Rattler puts his glass down. He's forty-one and he still looks like the best-looking problem this town ever produced, and he still knows it, which is the part that made me leave. "Read the name into it," I say. "Page nine. Any member of this chapter can ask for a name to be read before a vote." "You're not a member," Rattler says. "I'm a Cross." Somebody in the third row says my father's name, quiet, like they're not sure they're allowed. Then I say the rest of it, and I say it slow, because I only get to say it once. "My name is Lorraine Cross. My father was Ethan Cross, who started this chapter and who has been dead on the seventieth highway for seven years. There are people in this room he fed when they had nothing, and there are people in this room he put on a bike when nobody else would, and I have not asked one of you for a thing since they put him in the ground." Nobody says anything. A chair scrapes somewhere. "Now read the name." Dutch looks at Rattler. Rattler looks at me, and I can watch him doing the arithmetic — how much of this room remembers my father, how much of it owes him, how much of it is currently sleeping with Marley Doss and knows damn well that it doesn't matter. He nods. Dutch reads it. The name on the transfer is Dale Rutledge. Which means the man sitting in the chair is selling my father's land to himself, out loud, with a receipt. Then I open my jacket. I take out a Federal Express envelope, creased down the middle, and inside it is a deed and eleven pages of my own handwriting in blue ink. "I've had a copy of that deed for four months," I say. "The county recorder is a public office. So is the assessor. You'd be amazed what of your personal business is public, if somebody's willing to sit in a room with a bad chair and read." I put the deed on the table and slide it up the line. It goes hand to hand. I watch it go. Half of them don't read it. The ones who do go quiet in a different way. "There's a problem with the paper Dutch is reading. Four problems, actually." I hold up the pages. "November, three years back, this parcel went up as collateral. March, two years back, again. August, last year, again. And February of this year, Dale signed a purchase option to a company out of Carson City that has never filed a single document with the state. Four instruments against one piece of ground that he has never owned outright." I let that sit. "He inherited the shop from my father. He never got the land. My father died holding the land in his own name, because my father was the kind of man who read things before he signed them." Rattler's jaw works once. "The shop," I say, "I don't want." That gets me something. I can feel it move through the room like a truck down a grade. "I want my father's book." Now the room really moves. Not much. But a dozen people change how they're sitting. "Ethan kept a ledger the entire time he had this chapter. Every truck, every envelope, every favor, every name that ever came through this door with a dollar attached. When he died, it went somewhere. It has never been at the shop. I've had somebody check the shop twice." "You don't know any such thing exists," Rattler says. "I've done books in Reno for six years," I say. "For people you would not want to owe. I know a man like my father. He wrote it down." Then I reach into the jacket one more time, and I take out the half a ring. It's cut clean through, the way you cut a padlock when you've lost the key and you are past caring about the lock. Fencing pliers, on the counter of my father's shop, on a Friday, three weeks after the funeral. I put it on the table next to the deed. "You want something read into the record," I say. "Read that." Somebody at the front says, "Oh, shit." That is the first time anybody in this building has sounded like a person. Rattler picks the half-ring up. He turns it over. He's smart enough not to ask what it is and stupid enough to look at it for a long time. I don't say her name in here. She never made me a promise. But everybody in this room knows the name anyway — Marley Doss has been doing the wives' nails at a table in the back of her own shop for six years, and not one of them has the money to go anywhere else. "You did," I say. I look at Rattler and I keep my voice on the floor, because if I raise it they hear a woman who got left, and if I keep it flat they hear a bank. "Twice. Once with a ring, and once at a courthouse in Carson City in October, four weeks before they put my father in the ground. And I know what you've been telling people, because I've heard it in two counties. So let me correct the record in front of everybody." I take one step forward. Nobody stops me, which is its own information. "I have had seven years to sign the papers. I have not signed them. There is no other woman in the state of Nevada with my name on your assets." The room does the arithmetic faster than Dutch ever could. "That means half of what you're sitting in is mine, Dale. Half of the trucks. Half of the yard. Half of whatever you've been moving through the back of my father's shop while I paid the light bill on it from six hundred miles away, because I couldn't sell it and I couldn't stand to see it go dark." Somebody in the back laughs, once, and it dies alone. "So. Here's my offer, and I'm only making it tonight. You give me my father's book. I sign everything. You keep the shop, you keep the chair, and you keep the girl." Rattler sets the half-ring down. "And if I don't?" "Then I stay married to you," I say. "And I start asking the county what you've been signing without me." That's when I see him. Back row, by the door, at the end of the table. A man I don't know. Hat down. Arms crossed on the tabletop. He hasn't looked up once — not when I said the name, not when the deed went by, not when I put the ring down. Every other person in this building is looking at me or looking at Rattler. Not him. His left hand is flat on the table. There's a joint missing. The last joint of the little finger, gone clean, old scar, healed flat. When I finish talking, he moves his glass one inch further away from him. That's the only thing he does. I don't wait for a vote. I don't ask permission and I don't say goodnight. I walk the length of that room and out the door with forty people watching my back, which is the only part of me I have ever been sure of. Outside the air is twenty degrees colder than the room. I'm reaching for my helmet when a voice behind me says my father's name. Gus Ferro is in the doorway in the chair, an oxygen line under his nose, a woman I don't know pushing him. He's sixty-three and he looks a hundred. He was at the funeral. He was the only man there in a cut who carried the coffin, and he did it from a walker, and he did not let anybody help him. "You came a long way," he says. "I did." "For a book." "For a book." Gus looks out at the dark and the line of bikes, and he takes a breath that costs him something I can't see. "The book's not all here," he says. I don't move. "What does that mean." "It means what I said." "Gus." The woman turns the chair. Gus lifts one hand and she stops. "Tuesday," he says. "Come back Tuesday. Ask me with the door shut." "Gus, if you know something—" "Ask me," he says, "about page forty-one." They take him back inside. The door closes. The music comes up behind it, and after a second it sounds like any other Tuesday. I put my helmet on and kick the Dyna over. It catches on the second try, which is one more than it should, because my hands are not doing what I tell them. It isn't fear. I've been afraid before, and I know what that feels like in the wrists. It's that I have not held anything this hard in seven years, and my hands have forgotten how. I ride north with the clubhouse lights shrinking in my mirrors and page forty-one sitting in a locked room behind me, and the last thing I think before the road takes me is that the number out front was still wrong. Twenty-one. And one of them under a tarp.