Fifty Million

Chapter 14:

He knew before I did.

That's the thing that's sitting in my chest like a stone. Not that Marcus was looking for me. I knew he'd look. But that he had my mama's house in a folder six months before I ran. That he had a man watching it. That there was a plan — a whole quiet machinery of it — and I was the last one to find out.

I'm still holding the phone.

"Elara." Kael's voice. Careful. "Give me the phone."

I don't move.

"Baby. Give me the phone."

I look at him. He's got Hendricks by the collar still, one knee down in the puddle, and he's not looking at Hendricks at all. He's looking at me.

"Why," I say.

"Because you're shaking."

I look down at my hands.

I am. The phone's rattling against itself.

I hand it over.

Kael takes it, looks at the screen, and something goes through his face so fast I almost miss it. Then he stands up, pulls Hendricks to his feet by the collar, and walks him to the mouth of the alley.

"You're gonna get in that car," he says. "You're gonna drive back to that motel. You're gonna pack your bag. And then you're gonna drive three states over and you're gonna tell Marcus Sterling that you lost her."

"He'll kill me."

"Probably." Kael opens the car door. "But if you're still in this state at sundown, I'll find you first, and I'll be a lot less polite. So you got a choice. That's more than he ever gave her."

Hendricks gets in the car.

The blue sedan pulls out. Slow, then fast, then gone past the sign, and then there's just rain and the alley and Kael standing in it with a phone in his hand that isn't his.

"He's not going to leave," I say.

"No."

"He's going to send somebody else."

"Yeah."

"Then why'd you let him go?"

Kael turns around. "Because if I keep him, your husband knows something happened to him. If I let him go, your husband gets a phone call saying a biker scared him off and he thinks he's dealing with a biker." He walks past me. "Let him think that."

I follow him out of the alley.

Miss Ada is standing in the door of the general store with her arms crossed.

"You boys done?" she says.

"Done, Miss Ada."

"Good. There's blood on my sidewalk."

"It ain't his."

"It better not be." She goes back inside and the bell rings behind her.

Back at the bar, Kael puts Hendricks's phone on the counter and stands there looking at it.

Then he picks it up. Scrolls. His jaw works.

"What," I say.

"There's forty-one pictures of you."

"What?"

"Forty-one." He turns it around. "Your mama's house. The gas station. The diner window last night. This one's from the roof of the church. He's been up there."

My stomach turns over.

I sit down on the stool. Hard.

"You want to see them?" he asks.

"No."

"Good." He drops the phone in his jacket pocket. "Because I'm gonna give this to Ellis and let him decide what to do with it. A man taking pictures of a woman from a church roof ain't nothing to do with me being a biker. That's a crime in anybody's book."

"And if Ellis does nothing?"

"Then we got a different conversation." He pours himself a drink. Doesn't drink it. Just holds it. "You want one?"

"Yes."

He pours one for me.

I take it and I drink it and it burns going down and I don't even cough, which tells me something about how much I've changed in three days.

"What now," I say.

"Now we wait. Ellis takes the phone. Ellis makes a call or two. And in the meantime—"

His phone rings.

Not Hendricks's. His. He pulls it out of his pocket and looks at the screen and something in his face goes flat.

"Excuse me," he says, and he walks into the back.

The back door closes.

I sit there with my drink.

And then I stand up.

Because there's a door, and there's a hallway, and the door's not all the way shut.

I know I shouldn't. I know it's not mine to hear. But I've spent two years living in a house where the only way to know what was going to happen to me was to listen at doors, and my feet are already moving.

I stop in the hallway. Close enough to hear. Not close enough to see.

"—no. No, that's not what I said. I said hold it." Kael's voice. Low. Controlled. "No, don't — listen to me. Listen to me. You don't do anything until I tell you. Nobody moves a thing."

A pause.

"Because if money moves, they see it. That's how they get you. They watch the wires." Another pause. "I don't care. You tell the bank to sit on it. Tell 'em it's a family emergency. Tell 'em anything."

A pause. Longer.

Then something changes in his voice. It goes down. Quiet and flat and hard as a nail.

"You wire the fifty mil to the account on the paper. Not the one I gave you first. The one on the paper." Pause. "Tonight. After close. Not before."

I stop breathing.

Fifty mil.

Fifty million.

I hear him laugh, short and ugly.

"Yeah," he says. "Yeah, I know what I'm doing. I've done it before." Pause. "No. No, don't — don't put her name on it. I don't care what the lawyer says. No name. Nothing in her name. It's got to look like a man buying a building, not a man buying a woman out." Pause. "Because that's what it's gonna look like to his lawyers. That's exactly what it's gonna look like."

Another pause.

"Because it is a building. It's not a —" He stops. "It's not like that. Don't say it like that."

Silence.

And then, quiet, in a voice I've never heard him use:

"Because I got about four days before the county calls in and somebody starts asking why a Sterling's got a file with my name on it and a woman with four fingerprints on her throat. And when they do, I want to already own the ground he's standing on. So yeah. Wire it. Tonight."

Click.

Silence.

I'm standing in the hallway and I can't move.

Boots. Coming.

I get back to the bar and I'm sitting on the stool with my drink in my hand and my heart going like a hammer and Kael comes out of the back and his face is exactly the same as it was before, and he picks up his drink and drinks it and says, "Sorry about that."

"Who was that?"

"Business."

"At this hour?"

"Business don't care what time it is." He sets the glass down. "You finish that?"

"No."

"Drink it. You look like you need it."

I drink it.

And I'm looking at him — really looking at him, for the first time since last night. The cut on my shoulders cost probably three hundred dollars. The bar's got a mortgage on it, probably. The bikes in the lot are old ones, ten years old, well-kept but old. The room upstairs has a bed with a broken frame and a bathroom with a window that doesn't shut all the way. The man's been wearing the same two shirts for three days.

And he just said fifty mil on a phone like it was a grocery list.

"Kael," I say.

"Yeah."

"What did you do before this?"

He looks at me.

"I mean it," I say. "Because I've been in a house with a man who had money, and it didn't look like this. It looked like marble and cars and a cook. This don't look like that."

Kael looks at his glass.

Then he says, "I wasn't always a biker."

"I figured."

"My dad had a company. Construction, mostly. Then he got into something else and that something else got him killed when I was nineteen." He turns the glass. "I took what was left and I made it bigger. A lot bigger. And then I got out."

"Out?"

"You can't run a business and a motorcycle club. Not the way I run this club. So I sold the company and I kept the money and I bought this town." He says it perfectly evenly. "I own the bar. I own the building. I own the property under three other buildings on this street. I own the land the gas station sits on. I don't own the church. Nobody owns the church."

"You own the town."

"I don't own the people." He looks at me. "That's the difference. Marcus owns people. I own dirt. I like dirt. Dirt doesn't look at you sad when you raise your voice."

I stare at him.

"How much?" I say.

"How much what?"

"How much did you just wire?"

His face doesn't change.

And then he says, "How much did you hear?"

Chapter 14 Ends.