Page 62 of Rooster's Remorse
"So we don't stage it out of here," Python says.
"No. We don't." She looks down the table. "I called my brother."
The room goes still around that one sentence.
"Damon's bringing four of his own down from Vegas. Him, Cobra, Dixon, Kade, and Widow. They're already stateside, theyknow that ground better than we do, they'll have the trucks and the beds and a place to put eleven women that isn't the back of a bike. Vegas stages it. We supply it. Damon and I run it together." She lets it sit. "This isn't a Chihuahua run. It's both charters and it's my brother's neck next to mine. I don't call him for the small shit, so nobody in this room treats it like it is."
Six years I've been in this club, and I've never once heard her call Vegas for anything.
She's doing it now, for eleven women none of us have met, in a country we don't work in, and it shows the kind of person Amara is.
Deep down, she wants to do right by people.
"Imani," Amara says.
Imani opens her folio. "The ledger gives us WT, ten regulars, and a lot of money moving through something with a bank behind it. What it doesn't give us is the clean set. Names, addresses, the routes in and out. Rooster's father has all of it in his head." She glances at me, then back. "And there's a legal instrument for pulling it out of a man in protective custody. A sworn deposition. His counsel files a motion, the government weighs a protected witness's testimony against the disclosure risk, and if it's framed as material to an active criminal matter?—"
"Is it an active criminal matter," Razor says.
"It will be by Friday." Imani doesn't smile. "I know three lawyers in Tucson who owe my family, trafficking across state lines is federal, and I can make this the kind of matter a judge wants on paper. It's slow. Two weeks, maybe three. But it's clean, and when we walk into that property, we'll walk in knowing every name in that ledger and where each one sleeps."
"Do it," Amara says.
Then Axel speaks up, from the side, not loud. "Before we bring her in."
The room slows.
"She's going on this run. She's the only one who's seen the inside of that place and she's not going to sit here while we go. We all know she won't." Axel's looking at me, not at Amara. "So I need to know what she is to him. Because if we're two hundred miles into another country and it turns, and this one—" he tips his chin at me "—has to pick between the woman and the op, I want to know it now, not while it's happening."
Every face at the table turns to me.
I've got a clean answer ready.
We grew up together, true.
She's a witness, true.
I owe her, true.
I look at the reaper burned into the wood.
My hands want to move on my knees and I hold them still, because a man who fidgets through this is a man who isn't sure of it, and I'm sure of it.
It's the one thing I've been sure of my whole life.
"She's the love of my life," I say.
No one in the room moves.
"I've known her since we were six. I was going to marry her. I left her to keep her alive and it didn't work. It got her parents killed, was the reason she was in a hole for nearly a decade, and she came all this way to look me in the face, and I still can't fix one inch of it." My voice stays level and I make it stay there, because if it goes I lose the room. "So you're asking what she is to me. She's everything. And I've got no right to her. I don't know what we are, because that's hers to say and she hasn't said it."
Nobody talks.
"But you asked me something," I say to Axel. "Whether I'll pick her over the op. I won't. The op isforher. There's no world where getting her out and getting this right are two roads I have to choose between. They're the same road. That's the only reason I'm worth anything to you on it."
Axel holds my eyes.
Then he nods, once and sits back, and I know I passed his test.
