All Chapters of Claimed By The Outlaw: Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

50 Chapters

The Weight of a New Name

The ceremony was nothing like she had imagined. She had imagined something formal, something with gravity and structure, the way a court proceeding had gravity. What Dutch had organized was nothing like that.It was a Sunday evening. The compound yard was lit with string lights someone had run between the fence posts, and the brothers had dragged out the fire pit and there was food and music and the particular warmth of people who did not need a reason to gather. Pearl had made a cake, which Sloane had not expected and which made her laugh when she saw it, white frosting and blue letters that said: Welcome Home, Vega.Dutch stood at the center of the yard with his arm in a sling and his eyes sharp as ever. Colt stood to his right. Rafe stood to Colt's right and winked at Sloane when she caught his eye, which she appreciated because it kept her from crying.Dutch said very few words. He said: Marco Vega rode with this club before most of you were born. He rode with his whole chest open

The Message

She did not panic. She had learned, somewhere in the last several weeks, to treat panic as a resource that had to be rationed. She was going to need her clarity now and panic would cost her that.Tell me what the message said, she said.Colt sat with his phone in his hand and his forearms on his knees and looked at her with the expression he wore when he was deciding how much to say. She had learned to recognize that expression and she had learned to be impatient with it.All of it, she said.He exhaled. The message was written on the attorney's desk in marker. It said: The witness does not change the math. Remind her what she is risking.She sat with that.Who sent it, she said.Not Doyle. His cooperation agreement has him under close monitoring and the killing undermines the agreement he needs. Not Garrett, who is in federal custody pending trial. Someone else. Someone who was inside the network but is not cooperating and is not in custody.Someone Cross hasn't identified yet.That'

The Depth of the Root

Thomas Calloway.Cross had pulled his file on her laptop before she finished saying the name. She turned the screen around so the table could see and Sloane looked at the face of a man she had never seen before and tried to understand what it meant that he existed.He left the Bureau six years ago, Cross said. His official departure was characterized as retirement. In reality there had been an internal investigation into financial irregularities that was closed without charges after witnesses declined to testify. He currently operates a private consulting firm with offices in Washington and Chicago.A consulting firm, Rafe said.That is what it is called.What does it actually do?Best current theory, Cross said, is that it provides institutional knowledge. Former law enforcement and intelligence personnel who know how federal investigations work and can advise clients on how to avoid becoming subjects of them. Which is legal in the right context and profoundly criminal in the wrong o

What The Perimeter Knows

By the time they reached the yard the car was gone. But Rafe had seen it from the machine shop window and had the partial plate on his phone already, and two brothers had pulled motorcycles out and gone after it without anyone giving an order.Cross came out of the bar with her phone at her ear.She walked to Colt and said: the depositions have been moved up. Not twenty-four hours. Tonight. I have a federal judge on the phone who has agreed to an emergency session at the Denver courthouse. I need Sloane and Vivienne in a car in the next two hours.Sloane had not packed a bag. She did not need to. She had been packed in a loose sense since the morning Cross told them about the attorney and she understood that readiness was a form of respect for what was coming.She went inside and told Vivienne. Vivienne was already putting on her coat.The club mobilized around them with the efficiency Sloane had come to expect and still found astonishing. By the time she came back down to the yard th

Federal Grounds

The federal building on Sixteenth was glass and steel and security checkpoints and the particular fluorescent light that made everyone look like they had not slept. Sloane had never been more relieved to walk into a government building in her life.Cross moved them through security with the efficiency of someone who had done exactly this before. The judge was already there, a woman of perhaps sixty with silver hair and the patient authority of someone who had heard every possible story. A court reporter was set up in a conference room with walls that were opaque and a table that was clean and a camera on a tripod that was already recording.Cross introduced the judge as the Honorable Patricia Cane, who shook Sloane's hand with a firm grip and said: I have read the preliminary materials. You are going to tell me what you saw and what you know and we are going to make sure that what you say is on record in a way that cannot be erased. Are you ready?Yes, Sloane said.She sat down. She f

The Ground Floor

They moved fast. The agents knew the building and they took her through a door and into a stairwell that smelled of concrete and then down a level to a corridor that was all fluorescent light and no windows and she held Vivienne's arm and focused on breathing normally.The sound from the ground floor resolved itself as they moved away from it: not a door coming off its hinges. A fire exit alarm. Someone had pushed a fire door open from the outside.Cross was on her radio and her phone simultaneously, which Sloane found both impressive and terrifying.Interior room, Cross said, pointing. Both of you. Lock it from inside. Do not open it for anyone unless I knock three times and say my last name.Sloane went in. The room was a storage room converted into a small conference space: four chairs, a table, filing cabinets, no windows. The door locked from inside with a bolt. She threw it.She and Vivienne stood in the locked room and listened to the muffled sounds of a federal building managi

What a Best Friend Worth

She called Mira from the car on the way to the safe house.Mira answered on the first ring, which was either good fortune or evidence that Mira had been sitting with her phone in her hand. Knowing Mira, probably the second.Are you inside the compound, Sloane said.I am in Pearl's kitchen eating leftover stew and being interrogated about my intentions by a sixty-seven-year-old man with his arm in a sling, Mira said. I assume this is not a casual call.Listen carefully and don't argue with me. Something is happening. You are going to stay inside the compound tonight. You are not going to go outside the fence for any reason. Dutch knows. The brothers know. Tell Pearl.A pause. When Mira spoke again her voice had changed, the practical, clinical register she used when things were serious.How bad.Manageable. By morning it will be different. But tonight, stay in.Okay. Sloane.Yeah.Come home safe.She closed her eyes for one second. She said: tell Dutch I called.He's already beside me

What Vivienne Does Not Know

She stared at the photograph for a long time.Are you certain, she said.Rafe confirmed it with facial recognition an hour ago, Colt said. He did not want to say anything until we were somewhere secure. The match is a ninety-four percent confidence rating.She looked at the closed bedroom door where Vivienne was sleeping.Vivienne's mother, she said slowly, is the facilitator. The woman connecting the cartel to Calloway's network, operating outside of everything Doyle disclosed and everything Garrett was involved in.That is what the evidence suggests.She sat with it. She thought about Vivienne in the federal conference room that evening, giving two hours of testimony about her brother's crimes. She thought about Vivienne saying: I always wanted a sister. She thought about a woman who had built a three-year file out of moral courage.Does she know, Sloane said. Does Vivienne know what her mother is?There is no way to know yet. She may have suspected and not known how to face it. She

Revere

She called Cross at six-fifteen.Cross listened to the message content without interrupting, which Sloane had learned was what Cross did when she was thinking fast.You are not meeting him alone, Cross said.I know that.And you are not meeting him at all without federal support in position.Also not in dispute. What I need to know is whether meeting him with federal support in the room is better or worse than not meeting him at all.Cross was quiet for a moment. The warrant comes through in the next two hours. If we have the warrant in hand we can move on him the moment he makes contact. A public meeting of his choosing might actually be an asset because he would be outside any network protection and on ground he has no control over.He thinks he has the leverage, Sloane said. The information about Vivienne's mother. He believes I will cooperate to protect Vivienne.And you are going to let him believe that, Cross said. Until we move.Yes.A pause.The federal agents who cover this w

Elena

woman's name, Sloane would learn later, was Elena. Elena Hale, Garrett's mother, Vivienne's mother, the woman in the parking lot photograph, the third element in a network that had wrapped itself around the Iron Vow MC and Warren Doyle's operation and a former FBI deputy director and an unknown quantity of cartel relationships.But right now, in this coffee shop on Colfax Avenue at eight in the morning with federal agents outside and Thomas Calloway going still across the table, all she knew was that the woman had her daughter's eyes and her son's composure and was sitting between Sloane and the door.You need to leave, Calloway said to Elena. His voice was controlled but beneath it she could hear the first note of something that was not.I am not leaving, Elena said. She sat with her hands flat on the table, very composed. She looked at Sloane. I apologize for the manner of this meeting. I want you to know that I did not authorize the attorney's death. Thomas acted without my knowle

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