Page 88 of Catcher

Silence stretches.

I step into his space, close enough that he has to tip his head back to look at me. “Start spillin’ your guts,” I say, voice low and dead. “Who do you owe? How much? What’d you do to get that kind of heat pointed at your sister?”

Robby’s mouth trembles, but nothing is coming out of it.

Nova plants both hands on the back of the chair and leans down by his ear. “This is the part where you decide whether you leave here busted up or not.”

Riggs doesn’t raise his voice from where he stands off to the side. “Every lie you feed us buys you pain.”

Robby shakes his head hard enough that the chair rattles. “I didn’t mean for Ruby to get touched.”

Rage flashes white-hot through me. I grab the chair’s front legs and jerk it forward until the metal screeches across the concrete. Then I rear back and drive my fist into his face hard enough to snap his head sideways. Blood flows from his mouth. My hand throbs, but it only makes me want to inflict more pain. I fist his hair and yank his head back.

Robby breaks. Snot, tears, blood, all of it mixing while his words trip over each other, and his chest heaves. “Shit, shit, man, I took a job for a guy they only call by his last name, Crowley,” he gasps, voice wet and wrecked. “It was supposed to clear what I owed. Just hold a shipment… pills. That’s it.” He shakes so hard the chair rattles against the floor. “But I skimmed some. Sold some. Used some. I thought I could fix it before anybody noticed.” His face crumples. “Then I couldn’t. I ran, and they came looking.”

Something in me goes dead quiet after that. Not calm… worse. The kind of silence that comes right before a man does something he can’t take back. I step in close again, and the panic in his eyes turns animalistic. “You didn’t think,” I say, low and flat. “That’s the problem.” My hand closes around his neck, lifting him and the chair off the concrete floor. “You gambled with her life as if it was spare change.” My throat burns. “She’s pregnant, you stupid motherfucker. You put two lives on the line because your worthless ass couldn’t stop feedin’ your habits.”

Robby struggles to breathe, but it doesn’t move a damn thing in me. I watch him turn blue, and his eyes bulge from the pressure around his neck as I squeeze.

“Catcher,” Riggs says, his voice low and hard, barely cutting through the red haze roaring in my ears. “He can’t keep talkin’ if he’s dead.”

My fingers finally unclench. Robby drops with the chair in a violent crash to the floor. He folds forward against the restraints, dragging in ragged, choking breaths. For a while after that, time slows. It turns into sweat stinging my eyes, rust and bleach sitting thick in the back of my throat, Riggs’ voice cutting in low and even, Nova’s boots scraping concrete every time he circles the chair, and Robby breaking a little more with every answer he gives us.

Names, places, routes, debts, drop points.

Men he worked for.

Men he owed.

Every piece of it comes out ugly and panicked, soaked in tears, fear, and the stink of a man finally realizing there isn’t a bottom to the hole he dug. By the time two hours pass, the air in that shed feels used up. Robby is slouching in the chair as if his body quit on him, and I’m still standing there listening to him spill enough dirty information to start a small war. These people he got into bed with have operations spread across southern Louisiana. Every word he says makes it clearer that Ruby got caught in something much bigger than her idiot brother ever understood.

“Lock him up,” Riggs finally says.

Nova hauls Robby out of the chair, and the bastard acts as if he can barely stand. If I had it my way, he wouldn’t.

We take him into the clubhouse through the back entrance and shove him into one of the old, never-used rooms. The place is bare bones—no window, no decorations, nothing soft in it except a narrow cot shoved against the wall and a stained blanket folded at the foot. A concrete floor, cinderblock walls, and one weak ceiling light hums overhead. It’s the kind of room built to strip a man down to his nerves.

Nova backs out first, then Riggs pulls the door shut, and the deadbolt slides into place from the outside with a heavy thunk that leaves Robby locked in with nowhere to run and nothing in that room but his own fear.

Riggs’ eyes settle on me next. “Ruby comes back here once she’s discharged.”

“Already planned on it,” I say.

Riggs nods. “Go get your woman. Once everyone is here and the clubhouse is locked down, we’ll hold church.”

I head outside to where I keep my old truck parked and climb into the cab. The drive back to the hospital feels longer somehow. Streetlights streak across the windshield while my ribs scream every time I shift behind the wheel. By the time I walk back into Ruby’s hospital room, the clock on the wall reads a little after six o’clock. Her curls spill messily around her face, eyes heavy with exhaustion, but alert the second they land on me standing in the doorway.

For a second, neither of us says a word. I stand there looking at her, making sure she’s breathing, making sure she’s real, and hating how close I came to losing something I never even got the chance to call mine out loud.

Her gaze drifts over my face slowly. “Robby?”

Even after everything, she still asks about him first.

I move farther into the room, shutting the door quietly behind me before crossing toward the chair beside her bed.

“He’s alive.”

Her shoulders loosen a fraction. “Thank you,” she whispers, and it sounds like it hurts her to say it.