Chapter 29 Twenty nine

Chapter 29 Twenty nine
Rivera's response came eleven minutes after I sent the message about my father.

Meeting arranged. Tomorrow, seven AM. Diner on East Colman Street. I'll have two agents outside. You go in alone.

I put the phone down and sat in the dark garage and thought about a name Viper and a race four months ago and a scored helmet clasp and the specific question of why a Kane asset would want to speak to me directly instead of through federal channels.

The answer I'd arrived at was the one that scared me most because it required my father to be connected to this in a way I hadn't accounted for.

Dax found me at ten PM.

She came into the garage without knocking, which was how she came in when something had already moved past the point of announcement, and stood at the Ducati's side with her arms crossed and her reading-a-situation expression fully deployed.

"You're not sleeping," she said.

"Observant."

"What did Rivera say about the meeting."

"Seven AM. East Colman diner. I go in alone." I set down the socket wrench I'd been turning over in my hands without using. "Dax how much do you know about the people Kane recruited in the years before the Chen Wei situation."

She looked at me carefully. "Some. The financial records give us names and payment dates but not always context. Why."

"Because the person who wants to meet me knew my father," I said. "I don't know how yet but that's the only explanation for why they'd specify me and not Rivera." I looked at the workbench. "My father interacted with a lot of people through the garage. Young riders, mostly. People who came in with damaged bikes and left knowing more than they arrived with."

"He taught people," Dax said.

"He couldn't help it," I said. "It was how he operated. You brought him a broken machine and he fixed it and explained every step and you left understanding something you didn't before." I paused. "Some of those people would have stayed connected to the racing world. Some of them would have ended up in Kane's orbit the same way people ended up anywhere in this city through proximity and circumstance and not enough options."

Dax was quiet for a moment. "And one of them is the person who wants to talk to you."

"That's my read."

She pulled the stool from under the workbench and sat down, which was unusual enough that I clocked it Dax didn't sit in the garage. She stood or she moved but she didn't sit, and sitting meant she was settling in for a conversation rather than managing one.

"My brother was the same way," she said. "Not with mechanics with people. He remembered everyone. Names, faces, what they'd told him three years ago, what mattered to them." She looked at the floor. "It was what made him dangerous to Kane's network. He'd been collecting information without realizing it for years just by paying attention to people the way most of us don't." A pause. "Dutch knew that about him. She knew that was the real threat."

I looked at her. "Is that why she had him killed. Not the investigation specifically. Him."

Dax was quiet for a long time. Long enough that I thought she wasn't going to answer.

"Yes," she said finally. "The investigation was the mechanism. But Marcus was the reason. He was going to keep asking questions regardless of what the answers cost him because that was who he was." She looked at the Ducati. "Some people are built that way. The asking doesn't stop even when it should."

I thought about my father explaining a fork repair to a seventeen year old who hadn't asked for the explanation. About the compulsion to share knowledge, to make people understand, to leave someone better equipped than they arrived.

"Cole knew him," I said. Not a conclusion a thought becoming language.

Dax looked at me.

"That's who it is," I said. "Cole. He was one of my father's people."

The garage held its late night quiet around us. Outside the compound was down to its skeleton crew Reaper's perimeter rotation, the gate prospect, the ordinary sounds of a biker compound at rest.

"You don't know that yet," Dax said carefully.

"No," I agreed. "I find out tomorrow."

She stood and pushed the stool back under the workbench. "Get some sleep. Whatever the meeting tells you, you need to be functional to use it."

She was at the door when I spoke.

"Dax." She stopped. "If Cole was one of my father's people if he came into Kane's orbit the same way a lot of people did, through grief and anger and not enough options what does that mean for how we handle him."

She turned and looked at me with the expression she wore when a question was more important than its immediate answer.

"It means we handle him the way your father would have," she said. "We find out what he actually is before we decide what to do about it."

She left and I covered the Ducati and went to my room and lay in the dark and thought about my father's hands on a bent fork and a sixty dollar charge and the long strange way that kindness moved through time and kept producing consequences long after the person who'd generated it was gone.

My alarm went off at six.

I dressed and went to the diner and found Cole in the back booth and sat across from him and didn't say anything and let the silence work the way my father had taught me silence worked when you gave it enough room.

And Cole looked at his untouched coffee and said: "I knew your father."

And everything I'd been carrying toward that sentence for twenty-four hours settled into place around it like a machine finding its correct geometry, every component where it belonged, the whole thing finally making the sound it was supposed to make.