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CHAPTER 4

DEACON

Chelsea’s alarm went off at four, and she hit it like it owed her money.

I’d slept maybe two hours. The rest of the night I’d spent awake with her hair across my chest and one of her feet shoved under my calf for warmth, listening to the last of the rain run off her roof and telling myself I was a lucky son of a bitch and a fucking stupid one, in about equal measure.

She sat up and swore at the clock. In the gray light she found her jeans by feel and dragged them on, and I lay there and watched her do it, because I’d waited four years to watch her do anything besides bag bread.

“Coffee’s downstairs in ten,” she said, and bent to kiss me. Her mouth was soft and sleepy and gone before I could hold onto it.

Downstairs the ovens were ticking up to heat. She moved around the kitchen in the half-dark, flicking switches, pulling trays, and I sat on the same stool as the night before with a mug in my hands and felt more at home than I had anywhere in years. She hummed while she worked, off-key, some country song from the radio. She was oblivious to it. I’d have sat on that stool till noon to keep listening.

“I meant to tell you last night,” she said, with her back to me. “Then I got distracted.”

“By what?” I smirked.

She threw a dish towel at my head.

She told me about the gray sedan with dealer plates, parked across Main, and a young man at her counter that afternoon, looking at her more than the bread, and leaving empty-handed. Then she told me about Harry on the phone Sunday, canceling dinner, snapping at her about talking to people. I didn’t like any of this one fucking little bit.

“Dealer plates,” I said. “You get a number?”

“Only the dealership name on the frame.” She frowned. “Desert Star. Desert Star Motors. Why?”

“Just curious.” I finished my coffee and stood. “Anybody else comes in that you don’t know, you call me. Doesn’t matter what time.”

She turned around. Studied me. She had flour on her forearm already, the burn scar dusted white.

“You’re doing it again,” she said.

“Doing what?”

“The thing where you look at me and I don’t think you are thinking anything good.” She waved a hand at my face. “See… that.”

I kissed her so she’d stop looking at me like that, and left by the back door with the sky just starting to pale.

I’d left the bike two streets over, behind the shuttered feed store. I stood beside it a minute in the cold and thought about the rules.

Nobody could know. Not the town, and not my brothers.

Preacher wanted her as a source, and a source is only as good as her word. If the table found out I was in her bed, everything she’d told us would sound like pillow talk, and Gage would be the first to say it.

Keeping it quiet protected her standing. That was the reason I’d have given anyone who asked.

The real reason was the gray sedan. Whoever was sitting in it had friends out at that ice house. To them, a woman asking questions was just Harry Laine’s nosy daughter. A woman sleeping with one of the Unholy Few was the club’s eyes on their operation. I wasn’t going to be the one to risk her life.

Rudy Baca sold used cars in Las Cruces and owed me for the year I kept his brother-in-law’s name out of a conversation that would’ve ended badly for everybody. I called him from the shop at eight.

“Desert Star,” he said, and went quiet. “That’s a Deming lot. Small. They don’t sell a lot of cars, if you follow me. They lend them. Guy wants to drive around without his own plates on him, Desert Star’s where he goes.”

“Who owns it?”

“Nobody I’d want to name on a phone, Deac.”

Deming meant Mora country. Mora country meant Tomas Rivas’s friends, whatever was left of that friendship after Gage put a bullet in Javier’s leg.

Rudy’s call gave me the who. The why was harder, and for that I needed Tito Ruiz.