I Ran Home With My Baby to My Brother's Biker Friends, and the Three Who Tormented Me Said I Was Theirs to Guard novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Four Terms

Zo sets four numbered terms at the president's table; Dirk says gone by morning, Nik names a price, Mason brings a crib, and a patrol car idles at the gate.

Nobody said anything.

The stove ticked, and the phone buzzed itself still under my palm.

Mason shut the front door, and the sound it made seemed to give the room permission.

"Dutch," Dirk said, to no one, in the direction of the back hall.

A door opened down there.

The man who came out was heavyset, in his late thirties, with gray coming into a red beard and a bad knee he favored on the stairs.

Wendell Callanan, who everyone called Dutch, owned the yard and the club and my brother's loyalty.

He wore reading glasses on a cord and had flour on his sleeve from the bar's kitchen.

He stopped when he saw me in his chair.

"Zora," he said.

"Dutch," I said.

He looked at the baby for a long moment, and his face did something tired and complicated.

He did not look at the phone.

"Whose is she?" Dutch asked.

"Mine."

"No." He tipped his head at the dead screen.

"Whose is the other half?"

I said it plainly, so I wouldn't have to say it twice.

"Marcel Pellerin."

Dutch's mouth tightened, as if the name tasted of metal.

He did not repeat it.

I would notice later that he never did.

"Cyrus," I said.

"Where is he?"

"Tomorrow," Dutch said.

"Today," I said.

"You've got a baby with a cold hand and a split lip, and you want an answer at one in the morning?"

"I want an answer for nine years."

Nik whistled low.

Dutch looked at Dirk.

Something passed between the two of them that I wasn't meant to read.

"Sit," Dutch said, finally.

"You're already sitting.

"Say your piece."

I had practiced it somewhere around Alexandria, with the wipers going, and I had never once said it out loud.

I put Zuri against my shoulder and kept my free hand on the table.

"Four terms," I said.

"One."

I held up a finger.

"Zuri sleeps in a room with a door that locks from the inside.

"Nobody opens it unless I say so."

"Two," I said.

"I pay my way.

"I'll take dispatch shifts on your radio and I'll do your books by hand.

"I'm good with numbers.

"I don't want charity."

"Three.

"No man in this club touches me unless I ask."

Dirk made a sound that was almost a laugh and almost not.

"You have nothing to worry about on that one," he said.

"Four."

I looked at Dutch.

"Where my brother is.

"You tell me by the end of the week, or I take Zuri and I go."

"Go where?" Dirk said.

"Wherever Marcel isn't," I said.

"That's nowhere," Dirk said.

"Then I'll find nowhere."

Nobody spoke.

Dutch rubbed his beard with one hand.

"Gone by morning," Dirk said.

"That's the answer.

"Cyrus isn't here, you can't be here, and the badge is going to walk through that gate."

"Then let it," I said.

"Let it walk in front of the three of you."

"We don't tow for the Duluth police," Nik said, from the archway.

"Everybody knows that."

It was the first time he'd spoken since the lot.

His voice was warm and lazy, but his eyes weren't.

"Half the harbor thinks it's a feud.

"We don't take their calls, we don't take their cash, and they don't come through our gate.

"That's been true since before you left."

"I didn't leave," I said.

"I was sent away."

"Same thing," he said.

"Mouse."

It landed in my chest like a thrown stone.

I didn't flinch.

I held the baby tighter and stared at him until he looked away first.

"The back room," Nik said, quieter.

"There's a back room.

"It's yours if you want it.

"I'll want something for it."

"What?" I said.

"I'll tell you when I've decided," Nik said.

"Then I don't want it," I said.

"Nik," Mason said.

It was the sharpest thing I had ever heard him say.

Mason had gone out to the hall while we talked and come back with a space heater under one arm.

He carried a bottle warmer in the other hand, still in its box.

Behind him, a pair of patches I didn't know were wrestling a wooden crib through the archway, a good one, with the slats intact.

"Lost and found," Mason said, and set the heater down by my chair.

"Somebody's girlfriend left the warmer here two summers ago.

"Somebody else's kid outgrew the crib.

"It's clean.

"I washed it."

He had not asked me for anything.

I looked at him.

He looked at the floor.

"The back room has a deadbolt," he said.

"On the inside.

"I'll show you."

He did.

It was a former storeroom behind the bar, with a window painted shut and a single bed in one corner, and a heavy door that locked from within.

Mason plugged the heater in and put the crib in the corner.

He turned the bolt twice to show me it worked.

"Nobody comes in unless you open it," he said.

"Not Dutch, not me."

"Thank you."

"Don't." His ears had gone red.

"I mean, you're welcome.

"I mean, don't thank me yet."

I laid Zuri in the crib in her gray blanket.

She opened her eyes once, found my face, and closed them again.

I sat on the edge of the bed with my cut hand in my lap and cried for as long as it took the heater to warm the room.

Then I stopped.

I was not going to do it again.

At four in the morning I woke on top of the covers, with my coat still on, to a sound I knew.

A car idling.

I crossed to the painted window and looked through the one corner where the paint had flaked.

Out past the lot, at the chained gate, a patrol car sat with its engine running and its lights off.

I could see the shape of a man at the wheel.

He was not getting out.

He was watching the building.

A door opened somewhere under me, and Dirk Ziegler walked across the snow in his vest, with no coat, with no hurry at all.

He stopped dead center in the headlights-that-weren't, between the cruiser and the clubhouse, with his hands at his sides.

He just stood.

I watched the snow settle on his shoulders for what felt like an hour.

Then the cruiser's lights came on, a full white blaze across Dirk's body.

He did not move.

The car rolled back, turned, and went away down the street.

Dirk stayed where he was until the taillights were gone.

Then he looked up, straight at my window.

I stepped back from the glass.

I don't think he could have seen me.

I was sure he had.

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