Bullies Sla-pped New Girl Cheerleader — Unaware Her Father Is A Hell Angels
Chapter 38
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"I know," she said."You handle it the same way you handled this one," he said. "Straight. Document everything. Don't give them an angle.""I know."He nodded. "And you call me," he said, "not when it's already happened.""Before." She almost said "I know" again; instead she said, "I will."He held her gaze for a moment. That was the other thing people missed about Ray Malone: He looked at you, fully, not through you, not at the situation around you, not at the thing he was planning to say next. At you.It was the kind of looking that told you without words that you were the only thing in his field of attention. She'd grown up under that look. She knew what it meant. It meant, "I see you." All of it: the strength and the doubt and the days you don't tell me about. "I see all of it, and I'm not going anywhere.""Saturday," he said. "I'll make dinner.""I'll be there," she said.He went down the steps. He crossed the street. He swung his leg over the Softail and settled into the seat with the ease of someone returning to something they never really leave. He looked at the road in front of him. He looked back once at Cass on the steps. She raised her hand, he raised his, then he nodded to Walt.Walt said something to the others, and then, one by one, the engines came on. Not all at once, not in a single coordinated roar, but sequentially, each one catching and settling into its idle—24 engines, finding their rhythm like an orchestra tuning that never quite resolves into chaos.The sound filled the street and rolled off the brick faces of the buildings and moved outward in all directions the way sound does in a town that has been quiet too long. It was not an aggressive sound.In the window of the bakery across the street, an older woman who had been watching since the bikes first arrived looked at her last customer of the evening and said, "Hell's Angels don't make noise like that when they're leaving trouble behind. That's what riding free sounds like."The customer looked. The bikes pulled out one by one into the flow of the street. Cass watched until the last one turned at the corner of Main and Collins.The street was quiet again. But it was a different kind of quiet than it had been that morning.She stood on the steps for another minute by herself. The night had gone fully dark now. The stars were properly out, clear through the cold air. She could see Orion beginning to rise in the south, the way he did every October, the same as every October before this one.