She hung up. Ryan had been watching Jackson's face throughout the call, reading what he could from the one side he could hear. "She's moving faster," Ryan said. "Yes," Jackson said. "Because Hail knows.
Because hail knowing changes the risk to the evidence and to us," Jackson said. He looked around the room at Danny and Manny and Hector and the rest of the chapter, all awake now, all present, all carrying the same understanding of what it meant that a man who had likely arranged two murders had now made contact. The chapter needs to decide whether to stay or go. He said this crossed a line this morning that it hadn't crossed before. Hail reaching out means he's not going to sit still.
He's going to try to figure out what we have and whether he can stop it. Danny, Laura said she'd been in the corner and Jackson had briefly forgotten she was there, which meant she'd been very quiet, and quiet Laura Carter was more unnerving than any other version of Laura Carter. Not if the investigators move fast enough, Jackson said. And if they don't, Jackson looked at her honestly. Then he'll try something else, he said.
Like what he tried with my aunt, Laura said. Not a question. That's not going to happen, Ryan said. He said it with the flat certainty that he'd been producing since the storage unit. That quality of a man who has crossed into a place where fear is still present but is no longer in charge.
He's not going to touch anyone in this room. You don't know that, Laura said. I know that 12 members of the Thunder Ridge chapter of the Hell's Angels are in this room, Ryan said. And that Victor Hails man called Jackson on a phone, which means he doesn't know where we are. And I know that the evidence is already in federal hands and there is nothing he can do to put it back in that storage unit.
He paused. He can't undo it, Ryan said. He called because he's scared. A man who isn't scared doesn't call. He acts.
The room absorbed that. Jackson looked at Ryan and felt something he hadn't expected to feel. something that took him a moment to identify because it had been a long time since he'd felt it in this particular form. Pride. The kind of pride that comes from watching someone rise to the exact shape of who they are supposed to be. Emily's voice came back to him from a phone call 6 months before she died when she'd been talking about Ryan the way she always talked about Ryan with that fierce distilled tenderness and she'd said, "He's going to be all right.
You know, whatever happens, he's got something in him that doesn't break. She'd been right. She'd been right about everything really. Manny's phone rang at 10:38. He looked at the screen and then he looked at Jackson.
It's a Nashville number, he said. Not one I recognize. Answer it, Jackson said. Manny answered on speaker. The voice on the other end was male, older, and it was shaking, not with anger, with fear.
Is this my name is Derek Puit? The voice said, I'm calling because I heard someone told me that the Carter storage unit was opened. Emily Carter's unit. A pause. And in the pause, there was the sound of a man at the absolute limit of something he'd been holding for a very long time.
I need to talk to someone. I've needed to talk to someone for 21 years, and I never I couldn't. But if the unit is open, then it's already too late to stay quiet, and I'd rather His voice broke slightly and then steadied. I'd rather tell my side of it first than have it come out wrong. The room was completely still.
Ryan was on his feet. Jackson held up one hand steady, "Wait," and then said calmly, "Into the phone, Mr. Puit. My name is Jackson Reed. You called the right number. Tell me where you are."
The silence on the other end lasted 3 seconds. Then Derek Puit said, "I'm at a gas station off I40." "I've been driving for an hour. I didn't know where else to go." "Stay there," Jackson said.
"We're coming to you." He ended the call and looked at Ryan. Ryan looked back at him. "He knew my father," Ryan said. "Yes," Jackson said.
"He might know what happened to him." "Yes," Jackson said again. Ryan picked up his jacket from the chair. He said, "Then let's go." and he was already moving toward the door before the sentence was finished and Jackson was right behind him and behind Jackson the chapter moved the whole room gathering and reorienting with the fluid efficiency of people who have been moving together for years and know without discussion who goes first and who covers the back and how fast is the right speed for the situation at hand. They were in the parking lot in under 3 minutes.
The truth was accelerating now. 21 years of pressure finding its release in the space of 48 hours and there was no stopping it anymore and nobody in that parking lot wanted to. Emily Carter had built it to run. It was finally running. Derek Puit was not what any of them expected.
Ryan had built a picture of the man in his head during the 40-minute drive. The kind of picture that forms when you know someone stood at the edge of the truth and chose to walk away from it. When you know that walking away likely cost your father his life. He'd expected someone cold. Someone who'd made peace with his cowardice by convincing himself it wasn't cowardice.
Someone polished and defended and wearing the composed face of a man who has spent 21 years telling himself he had no choice. What he found at the gas station off I40 was a 63-year-old man sitting on a concrete curb beside his car with his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands. And when he heard the motorcycles pull in, he looked up in and his eyes were red and his face was wrecked. And he had absolutely none of the composure Ryan had anticipated. He looked like a man who had been drowning for 21 years and had just this morning decided he was tired of swimming.
Ryan got out of Jackson's truck. They'd taken the truck rather than the bikes. Fewer of them faster, less visible, and walked toward Puit. And Puit stood up when he saw him coming and went absolutely still. The way people go still when they recognize something they weren't prepared to recognize.
You look exactly like her, Puit said. His voice was barely holding together. You look exactly like Emily. Ryan stopped 3 ft from him. He looked at this man who had worked beside his father, who had known his mother, who had watched both of them die and said nothing for 21 years, and he felt the full weight of his anger.