Page 85 of Rooster's Remorse
Amara at the head with her hands flat on either side of a folder.
Razor on her right.
Python. Zorro. Boulder, Brick, Doom, Axel down the sides.
Finn at the end, sitting down, but he shouldn’t be in here. Prospects aren’t allowed in church. Considering this has something to do with me, I’m sure that’s why he’s allowed in.
There's a chair against the wall behind Amara's shoulder. That's mine.
Against the wall. Behind everybody. Where you put a thing you might need later.
I sit in it, and I keep my back straight, and I put my feet flat because that's what you do when you might need to move fast, and I count the doors out of habit and there's one, and it's on the far side of eleven men.
Lashes is in the chair beside me, hands folded in her lap, and she gives me half an inch of a nod.
"Hope's down," she says under her breath. "Ruby's got the monitor."
Amara opens the folder.
"Everybody's read the file," she says. "Ollie Kincaid's deposition, the ledger cross-match, the property survey, the photograph that came out of a Christmas card in this building four days ago. I'm not walking anybody through it twice. What's on the table is whether this charter puts men over the border to hit a property in Cochise County, Arizona, that belongsto Wendell Trask, to bring out captive women being held underground."
She lets it sit among the group.
"Vegas rides with us on the other side. Alejandro's tunnel gets us across with what we're carrying. That part's arranged." She looks down the table. "What isn't arranged is whether we go. So talk. Everybody talks before anybody votes."
For a second nobody does.
Then Zorro shifts in his chair, and I watch every man in the room clock it, because Zorro doesn't speak first. Ever. He's the one who listens for an hour and then says nine words that end the argument.
"I'm going to say it," he says, "because somebody has to, and it's going to make me sound like a piece of shit."
"Say it," Amara says.
"They're not ours."
The room goes still.
Mine doesn't. My pulse comes up in my throat, and I make myself keep my hands loose in my lap, because if I grip anything I'll start shaking and I’m not shaking in this room.
“They're not ours. And before anybody says it—I know what that makes me sound like. It’s the cruel reality here.” Zorro's got both hands flat on the table and he's looking at the wood, not at anybody. "Eleven women in a hole in Arizona, and I hope to God somebody gets them out. But we're not the ones who owe it. There's not a name on that ledger who ever touched this club. There's not one woman down there who's kin to anybody sitting here."
"Zorro—" Boulder starts.
"Let me finish." He raises a hand, still not looking up. "Our people got taken. Ours. Lashes got taken out of a parking lot forty minutes from this building and sold, and it took Brick eight months and a plane to Colombia to bring her home. Thatring's still standing. Those men are out there right now taking somebody's daughter. We've got a live thread on them, and instead of pulling it, we're putting every rider we've got two hundred miles into another country for people who've got no claim on us."
He looks up now.
"I want to go after the ones who took Lashes. That's ours. That's this club's." His jaw goes tight. "Kelsey's brothers came through that gate and we handled it. Sally Bernard came for one of ours and we handled it. Diego took Imani's father and we went and got him, because Imani sits at this table's family. That's how it works. You defend what's yours."
Nobody's moving.
"And I've got a wife fourteen weeks pregnant standing in that kitchen right now and a three-year-old asleep down the hall, and I know exactly how many men are left in this compound if everybody at this table rides north. I'm not trying to be a dick. I'm really not. But somebody in this room has to count the people inside the fence, and if it's not the Sergeant at Arms, then who the hell is it?"
Nobody answers him.
And the terrible part, the part that's got my eyes stinging while I sit against a wall with my feet flat, is that he loves his people so much he's willing to be hated for it.
That's a good man. That's exactly the man I'd want standing between a door and my child.
