How long were you planning to come to me? Reeves didn't answer immediately. He picked up his bourbon and this time he actually drank it and he set the glass down and said, "We were going to give you until the end of the month." Then the Danny Faulk situation moved up the timeline. Cole absorbed this.
The chapter know everything. They know enough. Reeves stood. He was a large man and he filled the space in a particular way when he stood not threateningly but with authority the kind that doesn't need to announce itself. Cole, whatever you decided when you came here, whatever you were trying to leave behind Garrison isn't going to let you keep it.
You know that. I know that. Then the only question is whether you deal with it alone or with brothers next to you. Cole said nothing. But something in his face changed a small, almost imperceptible shift.
The way a landscape changes when the cloud cover moves and light falls differently on terrain you thought you knew. Reeves, who had known Cole for 21 years, saw it and recognized it. He didn't press. He nodded once and he moved toward the door and the eight men behind him fell into motion in that coordinated quiet way, like a tide pulling back from a shore. Tuck was the last to move.
He stopped beside Cole and said quietly so only Cole could hear, "There's something else." Cole looked at him. Garrison reached out to someone local, Tuck said. Before tonight, before Dex Holloway made his calls, "Somebody in Harrisville was already in contact with Garrison's people. We don't know who yet."
Cole went very still. " Someone here knew you were in Harrisville," Tuck said. Before tonight, nobody on our side knew. So, the question is, who told Garrison? Tuck held his gaze for one moment, then followed the others out the door, and Cole stood behind the bar alone in the sudden quiet of the emptied room, and that question settled over him like whether someone in Harrisville knew, and they had told.
He looked at the room, at Patrice standing by the wall with her arms crossed, at Darnell Webb on his stool, at the tables, the chairs, the ordinary wooden glass familiarity of a place he'd spent 11 months making feel like shelter. One of these pieces of his ordinary life was not what he'd believed it to be. Patrice broke the silence first. Cole, she said, I'm not going to pretend I understood everything that just happened. You understood most of it, he said.
The man they mentioned. Garrison. Yes. What did he do? Cole looked at her directly.
Patrice Odum had given him work in rooms and 11 months of uncomplicated trust and she deserved the honest version of this. He ran an operation that moved a lot of money and hurt a lot of people. Cole said some of those people had families connected to the chapter. When the operation started reaching into places it had no business reaching, I found out about it. I made a decision.
The decision had consequences for Garrison. What kind of decision? The kind you can't take back, Cole said. And the kind that if you're the person making it, you'd make again. Patrice held his gaze.
She was 51 years old and she'd been running a bar for 15 years, and she was not a woman easily rattled. But there was something in what Cole had just said that rattled her slightly. Not because it was frightening, but because it was so plainly true, and the plainness of it was its own kind of revelation. " Who are you?" she said, not the way Darnell asked it, teasing, curious, with genuine weight, Cole said. "
I'm your bartender, and I need to think." Darnell Webb finally spoke. He'd been so quiet since the bikers left that both Cole and Patrice had almost forgotten he was there. " Boy," he said in the voice of a man who has been listening carefully and has reached a considered conclusion. " You're going to need more than a night probably."
Cole said, "That man Reeves," Darnell said. " He cares about you." " Yes, and you care about them. Those men." Cole was quiet for a moment.
They're the reason I'm still standing here having this conversation, he said. Some of them literally. Darnell nodded. He had the satisfied expression of a man whose suspicions have been confirmed in more complete detail than he expected. Then you already know what you're going to do.
Darnell said. You just haven't said it yet. Cole looked at him. There was something in Darnell Webb's certainty, not smug, not performative, but genuinely, quietly certain that moved something in Cole's chest that had been closed for 11 months. Not dramatically.
Not with any visible motion, but it moved. Go home, Darnell, Cole said. In a minute, Darnell didn't move. You said this garrison, he's got somebody here in Harrisville. Somebody who told him where you were.
That's what I was told. So, you're standing here wondering who Cole said. Nothing. Have you considered? Darnell said carefully.
That whoever it was might not have known what they were doing. That somebody talked to somebody who talked to somebody and didn't understand what they were putting in motion. Cole had considered that. He'd been considering it for the past 10 minutes, running names and faces and interactions through the filter of that possibility. The outcome of both scenarios, knowing informant and innocent one, required the same next step.
But the quality of that step was different, depending on which it was. And the quality mattered to him. Go home, Darnell, he said again, but gentler this time. Darnell went. Patrice started cleaning up, moving through the room with the familiar efficiency of a woman who has closed a bar 10,000 times, and she did it without asking Cole anything further, which was its own kind of grace.
Cole stood behind the bar and thought the room Key Reeves had left was still on the bar. Cole looked at it, then the front door opened. It wasn't one of the bikers. It wasn't Tuck. It wasn't anyone Cole expected.