Sixteen

“Whoa.”

Aidan hadn’t slept much last night, but not because he was drinking or wallowing in his own misery. He’d been staying at the clubhouse, avoiding his too-empty apartment, where Lainie’s abandoned toys and Sam’s left-behind clothes in the closet reminded him of how alone he was, and how acutely he’d come to rely on their closeness and comfort and undemanding love to power him through each hardship the club faced. Last night, though, he’d wanted some privacy, so he’d gone home, and dragged his confidants with him. Beneath the glare of the chandelier at the kitchen table, dimmer switched flicked all the way up, Aidan had outlined his idea for the Parker farm, and for getting rid of the FBI presence in Knoxville for good.

Roman stayed for a while, then, when he was satisfied that Aidan wasn’t “completely stupid,” he’d left, saying he needed to check on his “kids.”

“Betcha fifty bucks he’s forgotten Kris is in London and swings by her place,” Carter said, wry curve to his mouth which said he himself had forgotten the girls were gone, and maybe he’d parked his bike in front of Leah’s apartment only to be slapped with the harsh reality of her absence all over again.

He, Aidan, and Tango had remained, smoking and drinking coffee. Aidan had woken just after six, drool on his chin and a crick in his neck, to find that he’d fallen asleep slumped over the table. Across from him, Tango had had his head down on his folded arms, snoring softly, and Carter had been stretched out on the sofa, one arm flung over his face.

Now, though his friends were yawning into their coffee mugs, Aidan strode into the chapel for this morning’s church meeting jittering as if he’d already down three espressos. He had a plan . He was taking action , and that had inspired a thrill to rival any level of caffeine consumption.

And then he caught sight of Walsh.

“Shit,” he said as he rounded the table to get to his new seat. “What the hell happened to you?”

Walsh sat half-slumped in the president’s chair, chin propped on his fist, his other arm lying along the table, forearm to the ceiling, IV needle hooked with tape in the crook of his elbow. A moveable coatrack had been roped into bag-holding duty, and one of the banana bags they kept in the chest cooler hung half-empty from the top of it.

His gaze shifted, half-lidded and lazy, toward Aidan, and he didn’t bother lifting his head from his hand when he said, “Stay hydrated, kids.”

Aidan frowned a moment, then it clicked. “Have you had anything but vodka and coffee for the past three days?”

Walsh tipped his head toward the IV bag. “You’re looking at it.”

Ratchet entered last, and closed the door, open laptop balanced in the crook of his arm. He set it down in front of Walsh, spun it around so it faced the length of the table, and looked to Walsh for confirmation.

“Hit it.”

He pressed play on the queued video, and a national news report started rolling.

“…D.C. authorities reporting the shocking news that FBI Deputy Director of Forensics, Special Agent Deborah Sawyer, was found dead last night in her own home. The investigation is still in its early stages, Tom, but so far, no foul play is suspected–”

“Mute it,” Walsh said, and Ratchet leaned over the table to do so with another button click. The footage kept rolling soundlessly, the grave-faced reporter in her red blazer interspersed with shaky, distance footage of a handsome colonial home, and a professional headshot of Sawyer.

“Fox?” Aidan asked.

Walsh nodded, and then eased the lid of the laptop shut until it clicked quietly. Each of his breaths was slow and audible, his eyes, beneath half-lowered lids, feverish. Not with illness, Aidan realized, as his gaze lifted and moved down both sides of the table, but with anxiety.

His own gut tightened in response.

Walsh said, “Fox wants to make one more stop, but he was pleased with the intel he got from Sawyer before she hanged herself off the second-story balcony.”

“Jesus,” Briscoe muttered.

Walsh shrugged. “It’s the job. She was Abacus.” He let that sit a moment, giving someone – anyone – a chance to argue. No one did, not even Hound, though Aidan snuck a glance down the table at him. The old timer was fiddling with an unlit cigarette, frowning at it, but not visibly disturbed by the news of Sawyer’s “suicide.”

“Obviously,” Walsh continued, “he’s not going to send along anything on the phone or electronically. And what he did tell me was in code, but he’s confident.”

“When is he ever not confident?” Albie asked. “Is he being careful? He better be being careful.”

“He is.” Walsh reached as though to adjust the needle in his arm, thought better of it, and flattened his free hand against the table. He swept them all with another almost-fractious gaze that was jarringly at odds with the too-tired slump of his body in the chair. He gathered a deep, hitching breath, and Aidan had the sense he was about to tell them something that none of them wanted to hear.

Maybe it was dread of more bad news, or maybe it was the sharp tug of pity he felt for Walsh in that moment; either way, he interrupted before Walsh could even get started.

“Actually,” he said, too loudly, whipping heads his direction, and then cleared his throat and started again, fingers rapping nervously on the table. His role in church had always been to vote and offer wisecracks; he never offered up agenda items on his own. “Actually, I have something I want to propose. Something to vote on.” He caught Tango’s gaze, and Carter’s, and Roman’s.

The first two nodded. Roman inclined his head in what Aidan read as an encouraging angle, but one laced with caution. Don’t expect this to go your way , his look said, because Roman himself didn’t even like the plan.

“It starts,” he turned back to Walsh, “with you writing a check. A pretty damn big one.” He started to make an apologetic face, but caught himself; VPs didn’t apologize. They made thoughtful decisions, and then defended them at church.

Walsh lifted a single brow with a third of his usual judgement. “Oh really.”

When they left the Parker place yesterday around noon, Aidan had gone straight downtown to the proper city office and pulled the plat for their property. He unfolded it from his pocket and spread it out in front of Walsh.

Across from Aidan, Michael sat forward to peer down at it as well.

Aidan said, projecting his voice so that everyone could hear, “During the festival, Dad had us man that stupid- that sign up table,” he corrected, and caught the corner of RJ’s smirk before he glanced away, and let his gaze swim in the safe waters between Tango and Carter. “Only one person put their name and number down on the sheet, and he even tried to prospect right there in person – and a few weeks later, when he came by the shop. Lewis Parker. Eighteen. Just a kid. Big chip on his shoulder. That” – he tapped the edge of the plat – “is his family’s farm. Been in the family for generations, and it’s slowly been sold off piece by piece as the market, and the big factory farms started squeezing out smaller, family-run farms. They’re surrounded on all sides by subdivisions, now, without enough space to grow crops. They sell goats: as pets, as livestock. The milk and the meat, too.”

Dublin breathed a humorless chuckle. “Lemme guess: you want us to buy a goat farm.”

“I do,” Aidan said, shooting him a look down the table, then turned back to Walsh, who watched him steadily. The color was beginning to come back into his face as the bag drained, his gaze sharpening. “I met with that fed woman this morning. Nowitzki. She was panting for a one-on-one, and I gave her one. I also told her we’d buried a shit-ton of bodies on the Parker’s land.”

“You what–” someone down the table started. There were a few curses and sharp inhales as others prepared to join in.

Walsh silenced them with an upraised hand. The other flexed into a fist on the tabletop, needle jumping in his elbow. His gaze narrowed, but Aidan didn’t read it as disapproving. Far from it. “Did she take the bait?”

“Yeah.”

“We rode by,” Roman said. “The feds were tearing that place apart.”

“What the fuck?” RJ said.

It was Michael who shushed him, with a flat stare and a fast, “Shut your mouth.”

He shut it.

Inside, Aidan was a shuddering mess, a horse in a lather before a race, but he thought he was managing to control his outward demeanor pretty well. To Walsh, he continued, “I haven’t looked at your books, obviously, but we bought Emmie’s farm, and that ended up being profitable.”

“It breaks even,” Walsh said, “and it’s insurance against developers.”

“Right, well, speaking of developers…” Aidan leaned over the plat and traced the eastern border of the Parker farm. “This subdivision here isn’t finished. We walked through–”

“We?”

“Roman, Carter, and me.”

Walsh glanced at each of them, and then back, eyes still bright, and focused, and giving nothing away. “Okay.”

“They’re just empty shells, not even drywall up. And when I asked at City Hall I found out the developer can’t afford to finish. They’re underwater, and with the market the way it is, they haven’t been able to sell any of the lots so far, and–” Walsh held up a hand, and Aidan realized he was breathing hard, that his face felt warm. He subsided, and took a deep breath.

Walsh considered him a moment, gaze sliding from the plat, to Aidan’s face, and back again. Finally, he said, “You want us to buy this land.” He tapped the subdivision, marked off in dashed lines on the white paper. It wasn’t a question.

“It’s one-hundred-and-fifteen acres.”

“How many houses up already?”

“Only five. But the plumbing’s roughed in, and they’re hooked to city water, so there’s water on the property.”

“It’s all cleared?”

“Logged, scraped, and smoothed,” Aidan confirmed. “There’s a pond, too.”

For the first time, Walsh’s face twitched, a sideways tuck of his mouth that Aidan knew to be considering. He tapped the plat with a ringed finger and said, “You didn’t bring this to me privately first.”

Every eye at the table was fixed on them, and Aidan felt their weight acutely. “No. It’s club business. I want us to decide as a club – not be handed it and told to vote on what’s already been decided.”

That earned a fast quirk of Walsh’s eyebrows. A landed barb. How often had Ghost and Walsh hammered something out in the office and then presented it with all but a PowerPoint and laser pointer, all ready save their seal of approval.

“And this land,” Walsh said, slowly, tracing its paper contours again with a fingertip. “You want us to…?”

“Convert it back to farmland. And let the Parkers manage it, if they’re willing, and so long as you can oversee the operation and make sure there’s not a lot of wasteful spending going on.” He waited for a protest from the table, but none came. He heard more than a few lighters click, the quick breaths of first drags on cigs. “Aren’t you always saying – or, shit, isn’t someone on TV always saying, the radio maybe – that the best way to build wealth is to invest in property?”

The faintest edge of a grin curved Walsh’s mouth, for a fleeting second. “Someone on the radio?”

“I’ve heard that before,” Aidan said, then, frowning, trying to lever authority into his voice: “Look, if it’s a shit idea, just–”

Walsh silenced him with a look. “It’s not a shit idea. But let me guess: you already promised this Lewis that he could prospect.”

“Yeah.”

A chair creaked, and Aidan glanced over to see that Roman had sat forward at the table. “Look, I know my opinion probably doesn’t count for shit, but I was real skeptical at first. But after I sat down and listened to what Aidan had to say about it, well.” He shrugged. “As far as plans go, it doesn’t suck.”

“Thanks for the ringing endorsement,” Tango said under his breath and sent Aidan an eyeroll behind his hand. Then he spoke up for himself: “I think it’s a good plan.”

“Of course you’d say that,” Dublin said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means you’re a kiss-ass,” RJ said, arms folded, leaning back in his chair like he was spoiling for a fight. “If our new VP says ‘jump’ you say, ‘what, on your–’” Whatever else he was going to say – and Aidan knew exactly what it was – turned into a yelp as something small and bright pinged off the side of his head. “Ow! What the hell?”

It was one of Walsh’s rings, he saw, when Michael got up to retrieve it and hand it back. A flaming skull the size of a bird egg on the back.

“You were told,” Walsh said levelly, “to shut your mouth. That meant to keep it shut.”

RJ rubbed at the side of his head and made a face, but held his tongue.

Aidan wanted badly to get up, walk around the table, and hit RJ with worse than a ring. But in the interest of his presentation, and his new title, he took a deep breath, returned his attention to Walsh, and said, “This accomplishes two things: it expands our reach in the city, helps us diversify, and also brings more citizens into the fold.”

“After you got their land dug up,” Roman reminded.

“They’re gonna have to sell their land anyway,” Aidan said. “It’s either take our deal, or give up farming completely.”

“And the feds?” Briscoe asked.

“Yeah, well…” Aidan resisted the urge to rub the back of his neck, where a self-conscious blush flared to life. “It’s a gamble, but I’ve got a theory about how that’ll go.”

As if on cue, a knock sounded at the chapel door. Boomer stuck his head through and said, “Boss? Feds are here.”

~*~

Nowitzki hadn’t come alone. She’d brought her partner, Daniels, and both of them looked tired, sweaty, and pissed – her more so. They’d left their entourage outside, though, and Aidan took that as a sign in his favor.

Walsh and Aidan approached them together, where they stood in the center of the common room, hands on their hips in a way that flashed their badges. Walsh had removed the IV needle from his arm and slapped a flesh-colored bandage over the vein before they rounded the corner. He’d wobbled a moment, and Aidan had been ready to catch him, but Walsh had waved him off and seemed steadier now.

“Mr. Teague,” Nowitzki greeted, mouth pinched unflatteringly. “I didn’t take you for a practical joker.”

“Good thing you didn’t meet me in high school, then.” The joke fell flat, as he’d known it would, but was worth making for the way her nostrils flared in agitation. “Lemme guess: you’re not here to fuck around.”

“ No .”

He stuffed his hands in his pockets and affected innocence. “Find anything interesting out at the Parker place?”

Her eyes flashed, but before she could answer, Daniels stepped forward, staying her with a low hand gesture.

“It’s a crime to file a false police report,” he said, and Aidan thought he was aiming for stern, an effect ruined by the crooked set of his tie, and the massive bags beneath his eyes. He was tired; tired was good; tired meant he wasn’t having the time of his life, the way Boyle had been.

“Yeah, I know,” Aidan responded, easily, “so it’s a good thing I didn’t file one, huh?”

He half-expected Walsh to step in here, but he kept quiet at his side. Aidan wondered if he was letting Aidan have his head with this one…or if it was taking all his concentration not to pass out.

Daniels’s frown deepened. “You–”

“I had breakfast with your partner here.” He gestured to Nowitzki with a head tilt. “And we talked a little. Apparently, she took something I said and ran with out.”

Nowitzki bristled, breath hissing out of her, shoulders bowing up. “You stupid shithe–”

Daniels gripped her sleeve and dragged her back. “That’s enough,” he barked. He leaned in toward Aidan, and said, “Okay, you had some fun. You fucked us over.”

“Legally, I might add,” Walsh finally spoke up. “Are you here to arrest him?”

Aidan said, “’Cause I could always tell you there’s bodies buried under the parking lot at City Hall. It might even be true.” He shrugged. “Who knows.”

“I don’t care if it’s legal or not,” Nowitzki said. She was vibrating with fury, teeth bared. Aidan thought that, given her youth, he’d made her look damn foolish in front of her partner and mentor today, and she wanted a pound of flesh as retaliation. Good luck with that, sweetheart . “You wasted valuable federal resources and man hours, and you can’t do that .”

“He did it, and he did it well,” Walsh said, and Aidan felt a flash of warmth in his chest. Was that…a compliment? Directed at him? Second only to Walsh’s initial speech when he’d nominated him. “You might as well get over being mad about it,” he told Nowitzki.

Daniels sighed. “I get it: we fuck with you, you fuck with us.”

“No,” Aidan said, and both agents looked at his face with the sort of sudden, fixed attention that left him wondering what he’d done with his voice to inspire that sort of reaction. Whatever it was, he felt the weight of Walsh’s gaze, too. “I was getting your attention.”

Nowitzki’s expression pinched yet another fraction, but Daniels lifted his brows.

Walsh picked up the thread. “When you got to town, we told you that a member’s son had been kidnapped by one of your own. To our knowledge, all you’ve done is kick rocks trying to find something incriminating on a dead man. Two dead men.” He lifted two fingers for emphasis. “We lost our president, and one of out most valued members, and we tell you a boy’s missing, and what did you do about it?”

“You wasted our time,” Aidan said, “so I wasted a little of yours. Call it even?”

The two agents exchanged a long, fraught look. When they turned back to them, Daniels said, “I called my superiors about the boy. They told me to leave it.”

Walsh snorted. “And why do you think they’d do that?”

“You’re being played by your own people,” Aidan said. “Maybe it’s time you pushed back.”