Evan’s face darkened, his nostrils flared, and he lunged – only to be caught and tossed right on his back. Tenny placed a booted foot on his sternum, pinning him.
“Terrible,” he said, clucking. “Just terrible.”
Reese saw Evan snap before he moved; it wasn’t surprising. Tenny was being even more of an asshole than usual.
“That’s – alright, fuck you, that’s it!” Evan exploded with movement, kicking out with both feet, arms flailing. He grabbed at Tenny’s ankle and tried to claw him away.
Tenny pulled back, but slowly, in total control, expression one of mild distaste.
“Fuck you!” Evan repeated, scrambling to his feet. He whirled to face Fox, chest heaving, stabbing a finger through the air toward Tenny. “Fuck him! I give up! Fuck it!” He stormed off, and a moment later, the back door slammed shut behind him.
Fox said, “That was uncalled for,” his voice flat.
Tenny picked up his water bottle and scrubbed a hand through his hair. “It’s time to cut that one loose. He’s nothing but dead weight.”
Reese found himself frowning, as he thought of guys like Aidan, and RJ, and Boomer: brothers without special skillsets, but who were nevertheless loyal members of the club. He and Tenny – and Fox – all had elite training, and brought certain niche abilities to the table. Even Mercy and Michael had above-average willingness to commit violence. But most of the Dogs didn’t, and yet were still fully-patched members who sat at table and who voted on club measures.
“He’ll never best you in hand-to-hand,” Fox agreed. “Either of you. But it isn’t my decision to cut him loose.”
Tenny made a face.
“He can walk away before his prospect year is up, or he can stay. I will be recommending that he no longer train with us – with you, specifically, since you seem so hellbent on embarrassing him.”
Tenny spat a mouthful of water on the pavement and sneered. “He deserves to be embarrassed.”
“Right,” Fox said, dryly, “because it’s the nineteen-seventies and clubs are nothing but dick-swinging and pissing on prospects so they learn their place.”
Tenny stilled, expression frozen; deciding on a retort, Reese thought.
“Evan’s nothing special,” Fox continued. “He’s just a guy with shit luck who’s made bade decisions, and has nowhere else to go. Just like you.” He nodded toward his brother. Then climbed off the table. “You won’t have to train with him again.” He turned and walked off.
A sharp crackle of plastic drew Reese’s attention; Tenny had crushed his water bottle in his hand. He glanced down at it, expression disgusted, then chucked it away across the pavement.
He stalked over to the bench where Reese sat and threw himself down with a gusty exhale. “Fuck him,” he muttered under his breath, and began unpicking the tape from around his hands.
It was always one step forward with Fox and Tenny, and two steps back. Reese was starting to think that was just the way of brothers; with only a sweet-natured sister of his own, he had no real basis for comparison.
“He was trying to make you angry on purpose,” Reese said.
“I know that,” Tenny snapped, and then sighed. “I know that,” he repeated, softer. “He’s bloody good at it, the asshole.”
“You’re too hard on Evan.”
“Someone has to be. Do you want that incompetent idiot at your six? Guarding your back? Would you trust him to do what we did the other night?”
“No. But he could have played Carter’s part. He can be useful without being like us.”
Tenny’s lip curled as he dropped the tape and started on his other hand. “Aren’t there enough idiots in this club already?”
“I think acceptance is based on loyalty and willingness, not on usefulness.”
Tenny snorted. “Yes. A wonderfully efficient organization, isn’t it?”
Reese shrugged. “It doesn’t have to be.”
He watched Tenny’s profile, the unhappy set of his mouth, and waited for another biting rebuttal.
Instead, Tenny flicked the last of the tape onto the ground and heaved another sigh; settled leaning forward with his forearms resting on his thighs. “Why would anyone design such a thing?” he asked, tone reflective, barely above a whisper. “Why would inefficiency be tolerated?”
“Because it isn’t a squad of assassins,” Reese said. “It’s a family.”
“Family.” He snorted. “Christ, how very mundane.”
“Mundane can be good.”
Tenny turned to face him, finally; his masked was coming loose at one corner, the true him struggling to shine through; a bit of real tension around the eyes, and his mouth. “Careful. You’re very much in danger of sounding like one of them.”
At first, Reese had wondered why Tenny would throw these fits of intense club resistance. They had frustrated him: it felt like whatever progress had been made would evaporate. Like Tenny would start to lean into the idea of belonging, and then reject it wholeheartedly – and Reese along with it. But he’d learned that, rather, these fits were mostly for show. Like Tenny felt like he had to justify his initial prejudices; like he had to fight to remain the detached, perfect, government-trained assassin he’d been before, and which, at least as far as detachment went, he certainly wasn’t now. It was the only life he’d known, that of unemotional efficiency and usefulness; letting go of it was difficult. And so he rebelled, like today; acted like the club and everyone in it disgusted him.
Usually, the fits were brought on by something Fox had said or done. An order passed down from Ghost, whom Tenny still didn’t quite respect as his leader. But this time – this particular fit – had begun a few nights ago, when Tenny sat up suddenly, launched himself from bed, and left the room in a hurry.
They hadn’t spent any evenings together with one of the groupies since. And Tenny’s insults had seemed a little thornier and less teasing in the time since. What Reese had just witnessed with Evan hadn’t been Tenny’s usual, low-simmering disdain for the less talented. He was angry. Upset, something. And he’d taken it out on Evan.
Reese couldn’t help but feel that he was the one Tenny was truly angry with.
He’d improved, especially in the last few months, but he still lacked eloquence or subtlety when it came to talking about delicate subjects. So he cut to the chase. “What’s wrong?”
“Wrong?” Tenny’s brows lifted a fraction, and Reese watched his mask slide back into place; its corners unfurling, sticking tight. The veil came down over his eyes.
Reese hated being on the receiving end of it. He frowned again.
“You’re doing that more often,” Tenny said, lightly, glancing away. “Frowning. It suits you better than smiling, I suppose.”
Before he could register the impulse to do so, Reese gripped his wrist.
Tenny looked down at his hand, his pale fingers curled around his own wrist, and then slowly lifted his head, the mask skeptical now. “Something on your mind?” he asked, mildly.
Forget the mask, sometimes Reese still hated him. “What’s wrong? You’re acting strange.”
“I am? How so?”
“You’re angry,” Reese said, jaw setting, determined. Tenny could act like an ass if he wanted to, but Reese wasn’t going to be so easy to shrug off and dismiss. “Because of me.”
Tenny made a dismissive sound. “Why would I be angry because of you? You aren’t the one who fights like someone’s grandmother and then cries about it. The wanker.”
“Tennyson.”
He stilled. Didn’t breathe, didn’t blink, his gaze fixed to Reese’s face; a window, in the handful of seconds before he moved again, to a shocking degree of turmoil. Anger was too simple a word, but Reese didn’t have the means necessary to describe what he glimpsed, in that moment before Tenny turned away, shaking his head in dismissal.
“The last time we–”
“Oh, leave it!” Tenny hissed, bolting to his feet. He took a few long strides across the pavement,
one hand on his hip, the other pushing back through his tousled dark hair. Tension radiated from every taut line of his body; his spine was half-curved, a protective, defensive posture wildly at odds with his usual put-upon swagger.
Reese said, “No.”
Tenny whirled on him, gaze wild. “No? What’s gotten into you? What are you bloody digging for? Huh? Like you have emotions. Like you want to talk.” More barbs, like always, to distract from his own anguish. Don’t look too closely at me, I’m an asshole.
Reese knew the game now. He wasn’t offended. Wasn’t put off. He sat placidly, hands resting lightly on his thighs, and said, “You’ve been looking for a fight with someone since I kissed you.”
Tenny bared all his teeth in clear warning, like a dog backed into a corner.
“If it was bad – if it was wrong – if you didn’t like it, I won’t do it again. I’m sorry.”
He got another glimpse of raw, pained truth, before Tenny’s sneer covered it. “Is that what you’re worried about? Do you think that little – well, it wasn’t even really a kiss was it? That’s the first time you’ve ever attempted to initiate anything on your own, wasn’t it? You think that…?” He barked out a laugh that Reese could tell was fake, overdone, too loud. He walked back to the bench, patted Reese affectionately on the cheek. “Don’t flatter yourself. There’s nothing wrong with me.” He walked off toward the door, whistling a tune Reese didn’t recognize – when did he ever recognize tunes? He didn’t listen to music.
The door banged shut.
Reese sat for a long minute looking out across the heat mirages that shimmered between the wrecks in the salvage yard.
“You’re a liar,” he said, quietly, and went to pick up his things.
Sixteen
There was no one home when Fox pulled up at Eden’s house that evening, so he let himself in with his spare key and went to see what he could find in the fridge.
When they got back from Texas, Eden dove right back into renovating the tired, nineties-era colonial. Fox had been roped into helping her take the kitchen cabinets off the wall, sand and repaint them, and then hang them back up, now a soft gray. “Shouldn’t the brother who handles woodwork be involved in this?” he’d complained, and she’d told him to shut up.
She’d pulled down the curtains – and who put drapey peach curtains in a kitchen? – stripped the wallpaper, and painted the walls white. The new countertops had been ordered, but hadn’t arrived yet; she’d been eating lots of takeout and TV dinners in the interim, until she had a proper prep space again.
He found a beer in the fridge and went to sit on the couch.
Ten minutes later, the garage door went up, and Eden and Axelle came bustling in from the back door, toting paper bags from Stella’s.
“Oh, good, you’re here,” Eden said, spotting him. She set the bags down on the coffee table and unslung the satchel from across her shoulders. “Will you go get some silverware? I brought pasta.”
“Hello to you, too,” he said, standing, and she swooped in to press a fast kiss to the corner of his mouth, offering a distracted, fleeting smile as she pulled back. She smelled of the hunt. With her hair in a tight bun, dressed in jeans, and Docs, and her favorite black leather jacket, zipped nearly to her chin, he could tell she was fresh off a case, and still thinking about it. If she was glad to see him, then he knew which case it was.
“Oh, and beers for us,” Axelle called to his back as he headed for the kitchen.
“Get your own beer.”
“Charlie,” Eden said, crisply.
He sighed. “Fine.”
When they were all settled, Fox and Eden on the long sofa, Axelle cross-legged in a chair, foam container of noodles balanced in her lap, Eden set her own penne with pesto aside and instead pulled out her notebook, crammed with tidy, handwritten notes.
“Someone’s been busy,” Fox observed.
“Very. We went to talk to Allie Henderson’s parents.” She sat back into the corner of the sofa, angled her body, legs crossed, notepad held up on one thigh. A woman who’d already drawn some conclusions, and looked to them now to flesh out some more. She looked eager, and if Fox didn’t already know better, he would have said he hoped she hadn’t displayed this kind of excitement in front of the poor, distraught parents. But he did know her; his girl was nothing if not professional.
“It’s an all-too-common occurrence,” Eden said. “Allie was a wonderful student, beloved by her friends and the community – at least, according to her parents. All sorts of clubs and extracurriculars. Volunteer work, the whole bit.” She made an encompassing hand gesture. “She’s an only child, and the mother is absolutely distraught because the police haven’t found anything. The father is devastated, to be sure, but he was able to speak with me.
“According to phone records – which he gladly showed me, and apparently showed the police as well – Allie called them at ten-fifteen the night of her disappearance and told them she was leaving the party and coming straight home. She said she hadn’t been drinking, and he believed her, based on the clarity of her voice. The party was at the home of” – she checked her notes – “a classmate named Jimmy Connors, and Mr. Henderson said that was only a ten-minute drive from their own home.
“When Allie failed to show after fifteen minutes, the mother called her. After twenty minutes, they called again. After thirty minutes, the father got in his car and drive the route to the Connors place to make sure she hadn’t broken down on the way. He went into the party – still raging, by the way, and full of drunk teenagers, and no parents. He asked several of the other students if Allie had come back. No one had seen her, they said – the last glimpse of her was her leaving, and, according to one girl, very publicly turning Jimmy Connors down for a date on the front lawn.”
Fox started to respond, and she held up a finger.
“Just a moment more. Henderson called the police on the party, and when they arrived, and kids scattered like roaches in the light, he told them about Allie. Technically, it hadn’t been long enough to file a missing person’s report, but the officers knew Henderson, and they said it was a light evening, and offered to drive around and look.
“Her car was found at midnight, on Mill Road. Axelle and I went and scoped the location.”
“Find anything?”
“Lots of broken bottles and old crushed beer cans. Part of a broken taillight – though the police report indicates Allie’s car was intact, so it wasn’t hers.”
“Someone hangs out down there,” Axelle said, twirling spaghetti onto her fork. “There were cigarette butts, and old condoms, and candy wrappers, and all kinds of shit.” She wrinkled her nose. “Fucking disgusting.”
“It’s a dead-end road,” Eden said, nodding. “And aptly-named. There is in fact an old, abandoned saw mill at the end of it.”
“Which I’m assuming you went into,” he said.
She plucked her camera off the table and passed it over.
The sequence of photos he tabbed through looked straight from a horror movie: a hollowed-out gravel bowl of a parking lot, and a two-story, weather-beaten wooden building perched on the edge of a weed-choked stream. A pair of double doors hung haphazardly from busted hinges, and between them, a yawning black cavern of a doorway of the sort that kids would have dared each other to enter, only to come back out shrieking.
Fox checked the urge to ask if she’d been armed; he knew she had been.
The next photo was taken at the doorway, looking inside. A few boards had rotted away, or been pulled off, and sunlight fell in bold, yellow slats across the dirt floor. An open space, with a few bits of old, rusted equipment lying about: a saw, a chisel. The ceiling went all the way up to the second story, with only a narrow gallery to stand on; she’d captured a dove in mid-flight, as it had been startled by their entrance. A few old, warped boards sat propped in a corner, layered with dust.
The next photo was the interesting one: a close-up of a section of wall, and a very fre
sh symbol spray-painted onto it.
“The paint wasn’t wet, but it’s fairly fresh,” Eden said. “Within the last few weeks, I’d wager.”
The symbol itself was simple: an inverted triangle painted in fluorescent yellow.
Fox glanced up, and met Eden’s serious gaze.
“Yield,” they said together.
“I’ve got a call in to PD to ask if they saw this tag, or if they even searched the mill at all.”
“Send this one to me,” he said. “Or, better yet, come show it to Ghost yourself.”
She nodded, and accepted the camera back. “I was planning on going by Dartmoor in the morning.”
“Okay,” he said, settling back against the cushions, dinner abandoned. The chase was on, and that was way more exciting than lasagna. “Let’s back up a step. Jimmy Connors tried to deface Bell Bar and his dad gave us a line about high school kids having it out for the Dogs because of Allie’s disappearance. But it was Jimmy’s unsupervised party she left right before, and it was Jimmy she was publicly, and no doubt embarrassingly, turning down in front of all their friends.”
“I think Jimmy followed her, killed her, and then tried to stir up a buncha shit about the Dogs to cover his ass,” Axelle said. “The little shitstain.”
“Oh, he’s a shitstain alright,” Fox agreed, “but did the father say Jimmy was at the party when he arrived?”
Eden nodded. “Yeah. And wasted, apparently.”
“He could have been pretending,” Axelle said. “He could have left and come back.”
“Thirty minutes isn’t long enough to kill someone, dump a body, dump a car, and get back to your own party.”
“So he had help. He would have needed an accomplice to drop the car, anyway.”
Eden chewed at her lip a moment. “That tag, though. Jimmy may very well be our culprit, he and some of his friends. But that tag feels like a message, and Jimmy isn’t the head of any sort of organization.”
“The tag could be kids playing around with spray paint. It might not mean anything at all,” Fox said.
Homecoming (Dartmoor Book 8) Page 13