Page 42 of Thunder

Thunder

Most of my life I didn't have much to lose, and I'll tell you, it made me a hell of a lot braver than I am now.

That's the trade nobody warns you about.

You spend years as a man with a daughter and a club and not much else, and you tell yourself that's lean, that's hard, that's the price of the life.

Then one spring a redheaded girl crosses a bar to say your name, and a few months later you're sitting in your own truck outside church with your hands tight on the wheel because for the first time in longer than you can remember you've got a full hand of things that can be taken from you, and the taking's already started.

Phantom called church for noon.

He doesn't call church for noon on a weekday unless something's wrong, and every man rolling into the lot knows it.

The mood in the clubhouse when I come through the door is the flat quiet of men waiting to find out how bad.

I take my chair.

Sergeant at Arms sits at the head table's right hand, always has, and I lower myself into it, being as careful as I can, so my hip doesn’t make a show of anything.

Phantom stands at the head of the table and puts both hands flat on the wood and lets the room go still.

"Dakota's investigator called her again," he says. "Last week."

And just like that, the temperature in the room drops ten degrees.

He gives us all the details as blunt as can be, because Phantom doesn't dress up bad news, never has.

The man Dakota hired back in the spring—back when she still thought her mama had run off, before any of us knew the truth was going to come clawing up out of the ground—that man never fully let go of the job.

He's the kind that can't.

He pulled a record somewhere, a discrepancy, some loose thread in the story of a woman who supposedly drove off into a new life and left no trace, and it snagged him, and now he's pulling.

"He's talking about Big Spring," Phantom says.

Nobody moves.

Everybody at this table who needs to understand that sentence understands it.

Big Spring is where the ground is.

Big Spring is the word that turns a missing-persons cold case into four men with shovels and a president who gave the order.

There are exactly five people in this room who put their hands on that night, and every one of us goes very still when the word lands.

Me.

Spur.

Banshee.

Blaze.

And the man at the head of the table who told us to.

"How close is he?" Spur asks. His voice is flat, handler-flat, the voice he uses when he's already running the angles.

"Not close. Yet." Phantom's jaw works. "But close enough that I'm not gonna sit here and pretend it's nothin'. A man like that, with a thread and a grudge and no sense to leave a thing buried—" He stops. "He keeps pullin', he doesn't find Jolene livin' it up in Arizona. We all know what he finds."