“We fit in where, Dora?” Connor asked.
“You are my vanguard. Because of our alliance, my network extends over two-thirds of the United States. You have seen to it that competitors in the States have been crushed. I control all of it, and when I cut it off, there will be no one to fill the void—for the first time ever—because there will be nothing to grow that can fill it.”
“How does that make your country better?” Hoosier asked. He, too, was a farmer’s child. “A dead field is a dead field. It’s not like you can turn around and grow food crops after you’ve depleted the nutrients.”
“I have rooms of money, too. But I mean to use it.”
Sherlock listened and put the pieces of information where they belonged. “There’s a lot of blood on the money you’ve made, ma’am. No disrespect—there’s blood on ours, too. But do you think this is gonna play out like a humanitarian mission? Are you going to stand in the plaza and throw money to the peasants?”
She blinked, and Sherlock knew he’d offended her. He clenched his hand on his thigh so that he didn’t react to the spike in his nerves that knowledge made.
“Do you believe that the end justifies the means?” she asked.
“It can. Maybe here it does. I’m wondering if the weight of those rooms of money is greater than the weight of the dead bodies on your doorstep—and on ours. I’m wondering if the friends you’ve made as La Zorra the cartel queen will still be your friends when you tell them that you’re throwing all that money they helped you earn to peasants in the plaza. Instead of letting them make more.”
“This is why I have so few friends, Sherlock. Let me ask you.” She looked around the table, meeting the eyes of each officer in turn. “How will you take it if I am successful? I’m asking you to stop earning, too.”
“We’re four of twelve,” Connor answered. “We can’t answer for the table.”
“But you? How will you take it?”
Connor shrugged. “Speaking for myself, there’s only so much money I need.”
“This is why I can trust you. I know how much money you have made from our association. I know how wealthy you all are—some more than others, but all of your members must be very comfortable—or very bad managers of their finances. And yet you live simply. There’s little change among you, except that you are building families. My enemies carry platinum, diamond-encrusted handguns. Julio Santaveria always kept a box of solid gold toothpicks in his pocket. Single-use. These are men who cannot be trusted. These are men who are easy to ruin.”
“That’s all well and good. But we can’t hold a front that covers the western two-thirds of America, Dora. We’ve been fighting battles, and that’s already got us extended too far. Even if we vote in the new charter, that’ll just be a few more bodies. We’re not an army. We all fit around one goddamn table.”
“I understand, Hoosier. But you’re not alone.” She pushed her chair back and stood. “I asked you to come to me for a particular reason. There is someone here who cannot travel as freely in the States as I can. He is the only other person who has my complete trust, and though he can’t travel to the U.S., he can move things anywhere. I can’t give you an army in your country, but I can give you an ally who can, for example, find a man in a black site prison and bring him home to you.”
She was talking about Trick, who’d disappeared into Fed custody for weeks, until Dora had found him and gotten him out.
Stepping away from the table, she crossed the room and knocked on a closed door. “Ya es hora,” she said, apparently to the person on the other side. Sherlock noticed something different, softer, in her voice but couldn’t give it significance.
The door opened, and a man walked out. He smiled at La Zorra in a way that seemed personal.
“Fucking hell,” Bart muttered. “No fucking way.”
Sherlock scanned his memory, trying to find a name. But Hoosier asked, “Who?”
Bart stared at the man approaching, side by side with Dora, and answered, “David Vega.”
~oOo~
“He killed Havoc. Put Isaac and Len in prison. I want no part of it.”
Bart stabbed at his steak. Once back in the States, they’d stopped at a truck stop to process what had just happened.
“You worked with Vega before,” Hoosier countered. “His plan brought down Santaveria.”
“Isaac brought down Santaveria. The Missouri Horde did. Their plan, their execution. Their sacrifice. Vega just opened a fucking door.”
Hoosier slammed the side of his fist down, and all the dishes jumped. Diners nearby stopped and looked, then went back to their own meals. “With help. Your fuckin’ Saint Isaac didn’t perform any fuckin’ miracle. We helped. And the Bulls. And Vega.” He took a breath and spoke more calmly. “Look, Bart. It is fucked up that the bastard who…gutted your friend is walking the earth at all, but there’s a…big picture here. It’s no surprise she’s his wife. We’ve known that all along, and there was no clear word on whether he was dead or alive. Now we know. Changes nothing, except now we know. We know it all.”
“We also know that she kept the information from us. We need to get this to the table,” Connor said.
“No.”
Connor literally paled in shock. He was adamant that there always be full disclosure among the members when it came to club business. He didn’t even like officer-only meetings. “What? Dad—”
“Not until there’s a plan in place. This is too hot, son. Bart’s proof of that right here. And this isn’t a short-term deal. This is a war, not a battle. Until we can show the table that there’s a good plan, all we’ll do is make strife.”
“We gotta at least tell them we know that the plan is to kill the thing making our bank.”
“That’s the number one thing they can’t know. Now until we can lay out a plan for the next thing. We can’t say we’re losing this until we can replace it with something.”
“There are men at that table who will take it hard that we had them fighting against their interest without their buy-in. I would take it hard to be lied to like this.”
“It’s not lying. It’s getting shit in order instead of stirring it up.”
“It’s underhanded, Dad. However you stir it.”
“Our table is not tight like it used to be, and you know it. Things haven’t been the same since a…a…traitor sat among us. Trick stepped out. We lost Lakota. The past year has been wearing us all thin. We need to be whole, son. We can’t be split right now.”
Connor glowered at his plate but said nothing more. Finally Hoosier said, “Officer vote, then. Do we hold back at the table until there’s a plan in place?”
It took a long time for anybody to vote. Finally, Bart huffed. “I fucking hate it, but he’s right, Con. We’re in too deep now. We’ve got to see it through. We can’t do that if we’re fighting over uncertainties.”
Sherlock agreed. “We’ll bring as much as we can to the table and hold back the mess until we understand it ourselves. I do that all the time—when I don’t understand the intel myself yet, I can’t explain it. It just confuses the issue to bring it up too soon.”
“You’re all doing backbends rationalizing this. Vega is leading some fucking shadow agency, and Dora’s got us in his goddamn pocket. A fucking Fed! Feds took Trick—they tortured him. Vega fucking tortured the Missouri Horde and killed your best friend, Bart. And now we’re in league? And keeping it off the table? If we break, this’ll be why. Fucking secrets and lies.”
“Connor…”
Connor shoved his plate away with such force that, across the table, Bart had to catch his water glass as it came off the edge. “Don’t you fucking ask, Dad. The vote’s the vote. You better know I’ll stand by it.” He stood, threw a couple of twenties on the table, and stalked out of the restaurant.
Sherlock jumped up. “I got his back. We good in pairs?” At the moment, they’d beaten back their enemies and were well within safe territory, so he expected they were.
Hoosier nodded, and Sherlock threw down some cash and then headed out to catch up to Connor—who’d never, in all the years Sherlock had known him, ever walked away on a run without making sure someone had his father’s back.
~oOo~
It was late, well past midnight, when Sherlock finally got home. Sadie had been going to bed early since she was pregnant, usually conked out before eleven. So he came in quietly, silencing the alarm as quickly as he could.
He hung his kutte on the back of a chair and emptied his pockets of keys, wallet, knife, and personal phone. The burner always stayed with him. After he docked the personal for a charge, he went to the fridge and got a beer, standing inside the wedge of the open door while he drank the whole thing. Finished, he belched and closed the door.
He set the empty on the counter and got three steps before he stopped, went back, rinsed it out, and put it in the recycling bin in the pantry. His girl was reforming his slovenliness. She got such a look on her face when he messed up what she’d made clean. He couldn’t deal with the guilt.
His house, their house, was a great deal different now, without any kind of structural change or even many changes to the furniture. Most of Sadie’s things were in storage. But she’d spread her personality over everything nonetheless. Besides the vigorous cleanliness and tidiness, all of the rooms were now much more colorful. All the bright colors of her apartment had found their way here.
He liked it; everywhere he looked, he saw Sadie’s touch.
She was, as he expected, sound asleep, curled on her side, facing the center of the bed, tucked tightly under the covers like a burrito, so that just the top half of her head peeked out. She liked to sleep with the windows open, and a light November rain earlier in the evening had brought in a chilly breeze. He closed the windows to just a crack, easing past the squeak in one of them and double-checking to make sure he hadn’t woken her.
Stripping quickly, he pried the covers loose so he could slide in with her. That roused her a little, and as he came in close and put an arm around her, she made a cute whimper and a sigh.
“You’re back.”
“Yep.”
“Missed you. Everything okay?”
Out there, chaos and war loomed, and the future scared the shit out of him. But in here, everything was perfect. “Yep. Everything’s good.”
“Good,” she murmured, already falling back to sleep.
He kissed her cheek and gently rocked her hip. “Roll over, sweetheart.”
She did as he said, and he pulled her back against him, tucking her as close as he could get her. He pressed his hand to the little swell of her belly and settled his head on the pillow.
“I love you, little outlaw.”
“Love you,” she answered on the breath that took her back to sleep.
EPILOGUE
Sadie made that awful sound again and dropped her head to the mattress. “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t!” she wailed. Her face was fiery red, and her whole naked body was soaked with sweat. She’d torn the hospital gown off long ago.
With his hand still on her back, rubbing like that might do anything at all to help, Sherlock crouched down so he could be face to face with her. “You can. You don’t have a choice, little outlaw.”
The midwife said, “Sadie, honey, all that energy you’re putting into yelling needs to go into pushing. That’s how we get this done.”
“Fuck you! This fucking hurts!”
Even after her doctor, and the midwife, and the nurses, and everybody else had assured her that taking meds today wouldn’t blow her recovery, she’d refused. Everything. She’d done okay through hours of labor, focusing on him, counting through contractions, all the things they’d told her to do.
And then it had been time to push, and everything had gone to hell. The first push, she’d screamed Fuck a duck! No way! and since then it was like she was trying to run away from the rest of it. She wasn’t getting done what she needed to get done, and Sherlock could see the looks the midwife and nurses were giving each other—they were getting worried.
“Oh no, oh no, oh no,” she cried and reached out to him.
“Okay, sweetheart, let’s do this.” He grabbed her arms and pulled her back up. She wanted him to hold her through a contraction, so she knelt on the bed, in something almost like a squat, and wrapped her arms around his neck.
He could feel that he had some impressive bruises and scratches across the back of his neck. Bite marks on his chest, too. Normally, getting marked up like this would have been more fun.
One kid was it. He was never going to let Sadie go through something like this ever again. He wanted to take care of her, not put her through agony. If he had known…
She screamed and wailed and grunted, and Sherlock looked over her shoulder, watching the midwife down at his girl’s business end. When the contraction was over, Sadie drooped on Sherlock, crying. Leda, the midwife, huffed and stood back.
“Okay. Sadie, I know it hurts, honey, but there’s no going back. This little guy wants to be born, but he needs some help. It hurts so much because he’s so close and you’re not helping.”
Sadie didn’t respond. She cried, and Sherlock held her, feeling furious and useless and increasingly afraid. He looked at Leda. “Help her.”
Leda nodded, looking thoughtful. “Let’s try this. Let’s get her off her knees. Sherlock, you get on the bed. We’ll sit Sadie between your legs, so she can lean on you.”
He nodded. At this point, he would have done literally anything that would help. When he stepped back from Sadie, though, she clenched and panicked.
“Not going anywhere, sweetheart. Just getting closer.”
After he sat but before they could help her settle against him, another contraction hit her. Sherlock simply grabbed her and placed her, his hands gripping her thighs. She screamed, a whole new level of horrible, and he thought he’d hurt her.
“Good!” Leda encouraged. “That’s good. Come on, Sade. Gimme a push.”
He could feel her trying to comply.
Sherlock held her up in the position he had her, now afraid to move. And then the contraction was over. Sadie rested back on him, panting—but quieter, calmer. He relaxed a little and kissed her wet temple. “You’re doing good, Sadie.”
She shook her head. “I suck. It’s too much.”
“I’m right here, and I’m not letting you go. Lean on me.”
A scant smile pulled her mouth up a tiny bit and then disappeared. “Oh fuck, no,” she moaned.
Leda looked at Sherlock. “Do exactly what you did before. Lift her legs like you did and sit up with her. Sadie, Sherlock’s going to do as much as he can. You just do the rest.”
For the first time since this stage had started, Sadie nodded. Sherlock did his part, sitting up, bringing Sadie up with him, and pulling her legs up, like he was trying to fold her. Sadie pushed—silently this time. Her face went an alarming shade of purplish red, the color moving down her throat, over her chest and shoulders, but she kept going, pushing until she could no longer.
Sherlock could see the baby moving in her body, and for a moment, he was stupefied by the sight.
Then Leda said, “Yes! Here he is! Gimme another one, Sade. Right now. One more good one. We can get this done.”
Sadie shook her head. “I can’t.”
Sherlock put his mouth to her ear. “Try, sweetheart. I’m right here.”
She whimpered, but then she pushed, as hard and long as she could. And then she gasped and looked down between her legs. Sherlock looked, too.
The midwife was holding his son. She suctioned out his mouth and nose, and the gory little bundle cried, feebly at first and then with increasing gusto. Leda set him on Sadie’s still big, but now soft, belly. A scrunched-up, lopsided, red little face. A thick mop of dark hair plastered goopily to his head. A body coated in pink slime. He was beautiful.
“Look at that, little outlaw. Look what you made.”
“Fuck a du
ck, that hurt,” she gasped, and a laugh burst from Sherlock’s aching chest.
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