Page 2 of Bram

Rusty nodded. “Yes, sir.”

He lingered, half-in, half-out, like he wanted to ask something else. But he thought better of it.

“Three days,” I said. “That’s how long we got.”

He left me standing there, just the letter and the glass and the calendar with its red ring, bright as a wound.

I didn’t open the letter. Some things you could wait on, just a little longer.

I killed the light, locked the door, and walked out into the hard sun.

Three days until the man who killed my wife was going to be released from prison.

two

Bram

The church table was the same as always: oak, pitted, ugly as the business that happened around it. The room was built for keeping things in and people out. No windows, just the single overhead bulb throwing a dirty cone of light across the circle of patched men. I sat at the head. Didn’t need to call the meeting to order. Every man there already knew why he’d been summoned.

“Sorry looking sons of bitches,” Rusty said, chuckling as he looked down the table of men who’d seen more shit in their lives in the last two years than most men saw in a lifetime. “Need to cut out the whiskey, weed, and pussy.”

“First two for sure, that last one would cause a fucking mutiny,” I said.

Rusty stood at my right, big arms folded. He was loyal to his last breath. Getting me through Millie’s death was probably his greatest and most difficult accomplishment. He was a statue until the last man took his seat, then he sat with the sort of purpose that said we’re not leaving until this is over. On my left, Kodiak Johnson, the club’s Road Captain, dropped into his chair, checked the lineup, and made a quick mental inventory. He was always counting, always thinking two steps past everyone else in the room.

“You look like shit,” he said to me.

“Pretend I’m holding up a mirror, fucking asshole,” I said and slapped him on the shoulder.

Down the table, Sniper sat straight-backed, hands splayed flat. The discipline was for my benefit, not his. Trace hunched forward like he was about to get thrown out of a bar, every line in his body taut and ready to snap. The scar in his left eyebrow was silver in the fluorescent light, a line of old damage no one joked about anymore. They were my two oldest boys, Trace born exactly a year after Sniper. Millie and I fucked like there might not be a tomorrow and, eventually, there wasn’t.

“Dad,” Sniper said, pulling me back to reality, a reality that had sucked for far too many fucking years.

I nodded at Sniper, the son I’d made president of the Kingman, Arizona chapter of the Jackson Brothers MC. His stay in the Navy SEALs had made him the right man for Kingman, with the Desert Scorpions so close.

I’d put Trace as the Santa Fe, New Mexico chapter president. He was expecting his fourth child, which is why his eyes were glued to his phone. Each of my other sons were presidents of their own chapter, chapters that stretched from Barstow to Washington, North Carolina.

The rest filled in quietly. Full patch, all of them, no hang-arounds or prospects. The air was meat-thick with expectation and the ghosts of every cigarette ever smoked in that room.

Bones Henry, the club’s treasurer, stumbled in, his fly down. Unfortunately for the rest of us, he’d forgotten to put on underwear. The men groaned and told him to zip that shit up.

“He had a late night,” Rusty said. “His old lady tossed his ass out.”

“Again?”

I waited until the door shut, then set the letter on the table, not bothering to open it. The stamp in the corner said Department of Corrections and that was enough for the men who could see it. The ones who couldn’t got the point anyway. They knew the day was coming.

I said, “The Colonel’s out in seventy-two.”

“Motherfucker,” Trace said, looking up from his phone. A bullet had clipped his shoulder the night his mother was murdered. Around that scar were eight tears and the word PAYBACK.

They all remembered. No one said Millie’s name, but I saw it pass over their faces, a flicker of something ugly and quick, gone before it landed.

“I want on this,” Sniper said. “Just me.”

“You know I can’t fucking do that, son.”

Sniper had been in his room playing video games that night, headphones on. He had no idea what had happened for several minutes. Then his fucking world caved in. No Child should have to see their mother gunned down, and I’d worked my ass off over the years, trying to keep him from going to prison just to kill the man who had his mother killed.