It’s on fire

Raven

The steel door rolled down behind me, and the night stayed on the other side of it.

The Phantom Skulls clubhouse was an old warehouse at the dead end of Dock Road. It smelled like beer, motor oil, weed and cheap perfume.

On the bar, Dutch and a prospect were arm-wrestling over a pile of crumpled twenties.

The prospect's face had gone purple, and his elbow was about to go through the wood.

Dutch slammed his hand down. The twenties disappeared into his vest.

"Next!" he yelled.

Nobody volunteered.

In the middle of the room, Hooch sat in a chair with his leather cut hanging open, and a redhead was giving him a lap dance that had stopped being a dance three songs ago.

In the dark corner by the jukebox, one of the brothers had a girl pinned to the wall with her leg hooked around his hip. Down the back hallway, a door was banging in a rhythm that didn't need explaining.

None of it shocked me. I had seen worse at my father's Christmas parties.

The lighting was just better.

"Well, look what the storm dragged in!"

Heads turned. Somebody whistled. Somebody else yelled, "Damn, Rae, you clean up like a high-class hooker!"

"Your mom gave me lessons!" I yelled back.

The room howled.

A prospect I didn't know, new and pimply and brave, looked me up and down. The wet silk was plastered to every inch of me. He started across the floor with a grin.

Three brothers stepped in front of him at once. Tank put one hand flat on the kid's chest and shook his head.

Rule one in the Phantom Skulls clubhouse: nobody touches Raven. Rule two: see rule one.

The Skulls didn't patch women, didn't let them in as members. Women came through that door as one of three things. An old lady. A club girl. Or trouble.

I was trouble.

I had been trouble since the night I rolled into Pier Forty two years ago, one week after I walked out of my father's house, on a Ducati held together with zip ties and spite. The Skulls ran the street races down on the pier. I lined up against their best rider in front of half the club and beat him by a wheel for eight hundred dollars.

Bear, the club president, took his ten percent. Then he handed me a beer and asked who had taught me to ride.

"Nobody," I said.

"Bullshit," he said.

He was right. I never told him who.

Two years later, I raced his purses, rebuilt his bikes and drank his beer. I never asked why he had decided I was his kid.

He was behind the bar now. When he saw me, he put down the bottle he was pouring.

Six-foot-five. Gray in the beard. A scar through one eyebrow that came from a knife fight in Laredo. He took in the ruined dress. The boots. The charcoal jacket hanging off my shoulders like a coat on a hanger.

"Well, shit," he rumbled. "She wore a dress."

Slider slapped the bar. "Pay up, old man!"

"I said she would never wear one on purpose."

"You said, and I quote…" Slider jabbed a pool cue at him. "'That girl wears a dress the day I wear a thong.'"

"Keep talking and that cue goes up your ass."

"Is that a yes on the thong?"

Slider was the club's vice president. He was all elbows and ink, tattooed to the knuckles. He could crack any phone in the city with a beer and ten minutes.

"Turn it up!" somebody bellowed. "She's here! Play it again!"

I looked up.

On the TV over the bar, somebody had cast a phone video to the screen, and there I was.

Gordon Vale's dance floor. My father with a microphone in one hand and his bourbon in the other.

Oh, no.

On the screen, I leaned into the mic.

Forty bikers leaned with me.

"Since my father's answering for me tonight, he can marry you."

The ring dropped.

"CLINK!" the whole clubhouse screamed.

The place lost its mind. Bottles hammered on tables. Dutch pounded the bar so hard the bottles jumped.

I put my face in my hands.

"Queen shit," Dutch announced, still counting his twenties. "That's straight-up queen shit, Rae."

"Who's the Ken doll on his knees?"

"Nathan Vale," I said into my palms.

Hooch looked around the redhead's shoulder. "The Porsche guy? The one who lost to you at the pier and paid a prospect to hand-wash his car so it wouldn't remember?"

"That's him."

"Motherfucker irons his jeans," Slider said darkly. "You were gonna marry that?"

"I was never going to marry that."

Bear came around the bar and stopped in front of me. "And the suit?"

"Nobody."

Slider was already there, plucking at the lapel with two tattooed fingers. He rubbed the wool, flipped it open and squinted at the label.

"Nobody's got a tailor in Milan," he said. "And a monogram." He read it out. "A.A." He looked up at me with huge, wounded eyes. "Alcoholics Anonymous? Rae. Is this an intervention?"

"Touch me again and I'll break your fingers."

"Black Aston," Bear said slowly. He knew cars the way priests know sin. "DBS. That's four hundred grand of nobody."

Slider's thumbs were already flying. Black Aston. A.A. Rich enough to own a tailor. It took him eleven seconds. I counted.

He turned the phone around.

Aaron Wylder looked out from the cover of some business magazine. Dark suit. No tie. That same flat, patient stare, like he had already read the last page and didn't care for the ending.

Nobody said a word.

"Aaron fucking Wylder?" Tank said.

"You got in Aaron Wylder's car," Bear said.

"I borrowed it."

"With him in it?"

"It was raining."

Slider lowered the phone. "You carjacked a billionaire. In a prom dress."

"I didn't carjack…" I stopped. Thought about it. "Fine. A little."

The room exploded again.

"What's he like?" the redhead called over Hooch's shoulder.

I thought about it. Hands at ten and two. A freight train filling my window. A pack of cigarettes he had carried for eleven years just to prove he would never open it.

"Cold," I said.

"And?"

"Drives like a felon."

"And?" Slider leaned in. "Come on. Is he hot?"

"He's…" My mouth went dry, which was ridiculous. "Tall."

"Ohhhhhhh," said forty grown men.

I threw a coaster at Slider's head and missed.

Bear didn't laugh with the rest of them. When the noise moved back to the arm-wrestling, he jerked his chin toward the far end of the bar, away from everybody.

I followed.

He poured two fingers of Jack, slid one across to me and didn't touch his own.

"Your old man's gonna hit back," he said, turning the glass slowly on the wood.

"I know."

How's the garage on Ninth?

I took a sip. The whiskey went down like a lit match.

"Where's your boy tonight?" Bear asked.

"At the shop." I heard my own voice go thin. "I didn't go there tonight. I didn't want my father's dogs following me to his door."

Bear didn't say anything. He just turned around.

"Slider."

Slider looked up from the arm-wrestling pile. "Yeah?"

"Take the truck. Go to Ninth Street and bring Miller back here."

"Now?"

"Did I stutter?"

Slider tossed the cue on the pool table, grabbed the keys off the hook and was gone.

The steel door rumbled up, let in a gust of rain and came back down.

My phone was somewhere in the back of my father's Escalade with my purse. I borrowed Bear's and called Jace.

Straight to voicemail.

"It's Jace. I'm under a car. Leave it at the beep."

I hung up. Called again. Same thing.

"Probably got his hands in an engine," Bear said. "Phone's in his jacket across the room."

"Probably," I said.

I sat at the end of the bar with the Jack I didn't finish and watched the door.

I thought about my father. Marcus Vance didn't take humiliation. He banked it, and he always, always made a withdrawal.

If he came, I needed something bigger than a video. Bigger than a scandal.

I knew exactly where it was.

The night I walked out two years ago, I had opened the safe in the lake-house study with a code he didn't know I knew. I took one thing, a black flash drive I had once watched him handle like a loaded gun. I had never plugged it in. It was taped inside the gas tank of a dead Honda in Bear's back lot, and most nights I forgot it existed.

Tonight, I couldn't think about anything else.

Twenty minutes went by. Thirty. Forty.

The steel door came up so hard it slammed the top of the frame.

Slider came through it at a run.

Somebody killed the jukebox.

In two years, I had never heard that jukebox off.

The whole room turned. Forty people went silent at once, and in that silence I could hear the rain on the roof and my own heart.

Slider didn't look at Bear.

He looked at me.

"Rae." His voice was wrecked. "It's the garage."

I was already standing. I didn't remember getting up. "What about the garage?"

"It's on fire." He swallowed. "The whole place. Fire trucks all over Ninth. Cops wouldn't let me past the tape. The roof's…" He stopped. "It's bad, Rae."

"Jace." It came out calm. Too calm. "Where's Jace?"

Slider didn't answer.

"Slider. Where is he?"

"His truck's parked out front," he said quietly. "And the bay door's down."

The floor tipped.

Miller's lease is up in January. I know the owner. And the fire inspector.

My father's voice flooded back into my head.