Page 17 of Open Road

“I know.”

He holds my eyes a half-second longer than necessary, then he’s gone.

Scout lingers. His nature, he moves through exits the way he moves through everything, a beat behind, checking what got left. “Man,” he says, stops, and starts again. “A kid, Roam.”

“Yeah.”

“Little one.”

“Yeah, Scout. She’s small. Noted.”

He shakes his head. Not at me, at something else, some version of this situation he’s running in his own mind. “You need anything…”

He doesn’t finish the sentence. Doesn’t need to. It’s club brotherhood in its plainest form, no ceremony or performance. You need anything, there’s an open door, no conditions.

“I know,” I say.

He claps me once on the shoulder, heavy-handed the way he does everything, and walks out.

Creed hasn’t moved from the head of the table.

I wait.

He turns his coffee cup in a slow circle. One rotation, then another. He does this when he’s choosing words, which doesn’t happen often, so when it does, the words are worth waiting for.

“She in trouble,” he says.

“Yeah.”

“The husband, he connected to anything we’d recognize?”

“Don’t know yet. Nothing she’s said points to it, but she wasn’t exactly giving me her full history on the side of a highway at three in the morning.”

Creed nods slowly. “Find out what you can. Gently.” The word comes out of his mouth as if he’s handled it carefully. He doesn’t use it often. “She’s had enough men collecting information from her by force.”

Something shifts in my chest like a gear or something that acts like one. “Yeah,” I say. “She has.”

He looks at me for a long moment, and his face does something it does maybe three times a year, since Devil came into it and remembered how to let things matter. A slight softening at the corners, almost imperceptible. Something private.

“You did right,” he says. “Bringing them in.” He stands, lifts the gavel, sets it down in its place, and walks out.

I follow him into the hall, my boots quiet on the floorboards, and head toward the closed door at the end of it. This compound is twenty-two years of my life absorbed into its walls, everycrack in the plaster, every loose board, every shadow that means something, and every one that doesn’t. I’ve walked this hall a thousand times in every direction, on the way to something and on the way back from it, in states ranging from fine to not.

The door is still closed.

No sound from behind it.

No light under it.

Good.Let them sleep.

I stand there with both hands in my pockets and dog tags against my chest. The Florida morning is getting louder outside, birds running their mouths, heat already building in the air, the compound shifting from night to day as people start moving through it.

The door is plain, painted beige, but not by choice. The handle is brass-colored, and there’s a scuff mark near the bottom where something was dragged past it once, years ago.

Behind it, two people are sleeping who don’t belong here.Don’t belong here yet. That correction shows up in my head without invitation, and I leave it alone. Don’t turn it over. Don’t examine it.

Janie.