Ride Or Die: The Prez's Claim

The Hollow Saints didn't look like a motorcycle club. That was the first thing that bothered me. It looked like a garage. Saints Custom & Salvage, painted in flaking gold on a cinderblock wall, three bays, a gravel lot with more Harleys than cars. But the floor was swept. The tools hung in outlines drawn on the pegboard. Somebody in this place was very, very careful. I know careful. Careful is what people look like when they're hiding something. I gripped the strap of my laptop bag and walked in. "You lost, sweetheart?" The man who said it was wiping his hands on a rag, big, gray in his beard, a patch on his vest that read **SGT AT ARMS**. He didn't say it unkindly. He said it like he already knew I wasn't. "Marlowe Quinn. I'm the auditor. Mr. Pratt's office sent me." Something crossed his face, gone before I could name it. "Prez is in the back." *Prez.* I'd practiced not flinching at that word in the car. The back office was colder than the shop. One window, a steel desk, a wall of filing cabinets. And a man sitting behind the desk with his boots crossed on the corner, reading nothing, doing nothing, as if I'd walked into his living room. He was younger than I'd pictured. Mid-thirties. Dark hair pushed back like he'd stopped caring what it did. A black shirt, sleeves rolled, and under the ink on his forearms, scars that didn't come from tattoo needles. But it was his eyes that stopped me. Pale, flat, patient. The eyes of a man who never had to raise his voice. "Knox Ravencroft," he said. "They call me Ghost." "I'm here for the books, not the nicknames." The corner of his mouth moved. Not a smile. Something that noted I'd said it. "Then let's give you the books." He set a ledger on the desk. Green cloth, cracked spine, older than I was. Beside it, a laptop with a sticky note on the lid: *passwords in the drawer. don't lose them.* "Everything's there," he said. "Six years of it. Tell me what you find." "That's it? No lawyer hovering? No one watching me?" "I'm watching you." He said it so calmly that it took a second to land. I sat down anyway. That's the trick with men like him. You don't give them the satisfaction. I worked for three hours. Here is what you learn about a set of books: the lies are never in the big numbers. Big numbers are for show. The lies are in the little ones, the ones nobody bothers to disguise because nobody looks. A supply invoice rounded up by forty dollars. A parts order from a vendor whose address turned out to be a P.O. box. Then the same vendor again. Then again, every month, a little larger each time, like something growing in the dark. Somebody was skimming, and they were good at it. But I wasn't here for the skimming. I was here for one name. I turned the pages back two years, and my stomach dropped before my eyes caught up. *E. Quinn.* Eli's handwriting. The sharp E, the way he crossed his Q like a little sword. He'd signed off on a dozen entries in the last weeks before he disappeared, and I traced each one with my finger like a blind woman reading a face. He'd been here. He'd been *trusted* here. And then he'd vanished, and the club had told the police he'd quit and left town. That was all. Nobody had looked for him. Nobody had looked at all. I turned to the most recent pages, just to check the pattern, to see how the skimming looked now. That's when I saw it. Three months ago. Last quarter's reconciliation, in blue ink, across the bottom of the page. *Approved. E. Quinn.* Eli had been gone for two years. The pen slipped in my hand. The office was silent. Somewhere out in the shop, a wrench hit concrete, and the sound cracked through the wall like a gunshot. "Something wrong?" I looked up. Knox hadn't moved. Same chair, same crossed boots. But he wasn't looking at the ledger anymore. He was looking at me, and there was nothing flat about his eyes now. He'd known which page I was on. He'd known the second I found it. "No," I said, and closed the book slowly, the way you close a door on something that might follow you out. "Nothing's wrong." He held my gaze a moment longer. "You're a bad liar, Miss Quinn," Knox said quietly. "That's going to be a problem." And outside, the roar of a dozen engines I didn't recognize turned into the lot.