The Night He Didn't Call the Club

Birdie Chen-Marlowe has been the reassuring voice on the other end of every Olympia Reapers run for nine years. She's the reason the club doesn't lose men. Then someone shot her on the Grays Harbor corridor, and the man who promised to be her old man — Rhodes, the club fixer — was 200 miles away in a Spokane hotel with a woman named Neve, not calling anyone. Birdie patched herself. She called the state patrol. She has not asked for him since. A year later the patch is off Rhodes's back, he's driving a tow truck on the coast, and he leaves a weather log at her dispatch trailer every Thursday between eleven and noon. He doesn't ask her for anything. He's afraid to. She's not afraid. She just has her hand on the radio, and the line is open.