Page 3 of Bones and Ashes

Again he pauses to squint. To clock me.

"All right," I say. "You're movin' oil?"

"We're movin' oil."

"And this oil is what… secret or somethin'?"

"Somethin' like that."

"OK. Well, Mike. I like a man who gets to the point. So do you have any plans on makin' yours?"

Now I get a real smile out of him. Not a happy smile, no. This is the smile of satisfaction. The smile that understands that his meetin' with me is progressin' the way he wants it to.

"There are twenty-one wells in a sixty-mile radius of where you're sitting. They produce. They sell. None of it hits a state report. The revenue moves through a chain of companies you will never find the end of, and it lands in accounts that don't belong to anyone with a name you'd recognize." He leans forward. "Now, most people at this point in the conversation ask me what the money's for. What gets funded. What gets built. And that's the wrong question, Legion."

He waits. Wants me to ask.

I don't.

"The right question," he says, "is who."

Who. Well. That's interestin'. I guess. He's funding people. People that do things. Black budget shit. Things that don't come with paperwork, at least not the kind you can audit.

"Your predecessor understood the arrangement," he says.

Brick's ghost appears. Takes a seat at the table between us.

Not dead Brick. Useful Brick.

Brick who kept things runnin' smooth and didn't ask the kind of questions that make men like Mike have to do paperwork.

"Your club has value," Mike says, like he's reading a property assessment. "Not your men. Not your guns. Your roads. Every unmarked access point and service route through a hundred miles of terrain. And more importantly—which one's passable in April. Which one floods out the first week of runoff. Which one the rancher at mile twelve will shoot at you for usin'. Which gate's been welded shut since 1987 and nobody's bothered to take off the map. Which landowner takes cash, which one takes a favor, and which one you just don't drive past at all. Satellites photograph roads, Legion. They don't tell you which one's the right one. They can't tell you if it rained last Tuesday and caused a flash flood that will take a month to dry out. That infrastructure took decades to build. It's not replaceable."

He folds his hands.

"When something goes wrong on one of those routes—and things do go wrong—your people are already there. A problem appears, your men handle it, and by morning it's like it never happened."

"Problems," I say. More to myself than him.

"Badlands moves product for us. It always has. There has never been a time when Badlands wasn't compromised, Legion. So if you think you're protecting something here—if that's why you killed Brick and the rest of my men.”

His men. Interesting.

"You're wrong," he continues. "It's a dangerous thing to be a principled man inside an outlaw club."

A long breath escapes from me before I can stop it.

"Listen to me, son," Mike says, leanin' forward a bit. "Badlands exists because of me and the men I work for. If you need a minute to come to terms with that, take it. But by the time you walk out of here, it had better be gospel in your mind. You move things. You know this. You've been doin' it for years. That's your job. It's always been your job. Nothing has changed."

I get it. I understand what he's sayin'.

But I didn't kill half of my club just to get stuck inside the same deal Brick had.

I stand up, flip the chair back around, then sit on it properly, leanin’ back. I stare at him for a good ten seconds. He doesn't squirm or get impatient. Doesn't get angry. Just lets me work it out.

Finally, I say, "What do I get?"

And this time, the smile he gives me is dead real. "You get to live, Legion. You get away with what you and your brothers did in the church."