Chapter 6: Shadows at the Diner
The bell above the diner door didn't just ring; it seemed to announce trouble whenever the wind blew from the north. The afternoon sun was casting long, slanting shadows across the vinyl booths by the time I pushed the glass door open, the bell chiming its bright, cheerful note that contrasted sharply with the heavy knot in my stomach. Marge was wiping down the counter with a damp gray rag, her movements mechanical and unhurried until she looked up and caught sight of me standing by the door.
She stopped wiping, tossed the rag into the sink behind the counter, and walked over with a guarded expression on her face, her short graying hair catching the fluorescent light overhead.
"You shouldn't be hanging around here today, kid," Marge said quietly, leaning her forearms against the counter and looking out the front window toward the highway where a pair of heavy cruisers had just pulled up by the pumps. "The atmosphere in this town has turned sour since the rally ended. The Iron Skulls aren't packing up like they usually do; they're lingering down at the west end of the strip, and where they linger, bad things follow."
"I'm looking for Jax," I said, sliding onto one of the red vinyl stools and resting my hands on the sticky counter. "He wasn't at the salvage yard this morning. Bay Three was locked up tight."
Marge sighed, a long, weary sound that carried the weight of someone who had lived in this dusty corner of the state long enough to know every local tragedy before it happened. She reached into the pocket of her apron and pulled out a small, folded piece of lined notebook paper, sliding it across the Formica toward me.
"He was at the clubhouse last night," Marge said in a low murmur, glancing toward the kitchen doors to make sure the cook wasn't listening. "From what I heard from the delivery driver who dropped off the beer kegs, things got heated. Brick and the president want Jax out of town. They think he's gone soft, and worse—they heard whispers that he's got family attachments he never declared when he patched in twenty years ago."
I unfolded the paper with trembling fingers. Inside was a hastily scrawled address on the north edge of town, near the old gravel pit where the club kept their secondary storage lockers—and an underlined warning written in Jax's heavy, blunt handwriting: Stay away from the pit tonight.
"He thinks he can handle them alone," Marge said, shaking her head as she picked up a ketchup bottle and began refilling it from a gallon jug under the counter. "Jax has always been a lone wolf, but even a lone wolf gets cornered if the pack turns on him. That club is the only family he's known since he was your age, Leo. Walking away from it isn't like quitting a job at the hardware store. It's like tearing your own skin off."
I looked down at the address, the letters blurring slightly as the reality of what was happening began to sink in. The distance between the glamorous, roaring world of the biker rally and the quiet, desperate reality of my mother's kitchen felt impossibly wide, and Jax was caught right in the middle of the fracture. If the club found out about me—if Brick decided to use me to break Jax's stubborn defiance—there would be nowhere to hide in this flat, open country.
"He's not a ghost anymore, Marge," I whispered, sliding the paper back into the pocket of my old jacket alongside my scuffed sneakers and the memory of the faded photograph. "And I'm not going to sit at home and wait for someone to tell me he's gone."
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Marge stopped filling the bottle, her eyes narrowing as she looked down at me with a mixture of exasperation and deep, protective respect. She reached out and tapped the counter with her knuckle. "You're just as stubborn as he is, God help you both. Take the back road through the drainage culvert if you go out toward the pit. Don't take the highway where they can see you on that bicycle."
Without waiting for me to answer, she turned on her heel and walked back toward the kitchen, leaving me alone with the hum of the old refrigerator and the growing darkness pressing against the diner windows.
