2. Claw
Claw
I hear her ten minutes before I find her.
There is a rhythm to this building. I have been in it every night for twelve years and I know the sound of the compressor cycling, the tick of the exhaust fan bearing that needs grease, the way the north wall pops when the temperature drops past zero.
So when something scrapes near the far bench, something with weight and intention behind it, I set down the receiver I am cutting and I stand there with my hand on the bench and I listen to my own building lie to me.
It is not a rat. Rats do not hold their breath.
I finish the pass on the mill anyway. Whoever it is has already made their mistake by coming in here, and hurrying is how men get put in the ground.
I wipe my hands. I kill the radio. I pick up the eighteen inch adjustable off the pegboard, because in this county a wrench is a tool and a pistol is a felony and I have never once needed the difference explained to me.
The west bay is up three feet because I have had a torch going on and off since supper and the fumes have to go somewhere, and I am going to think about that open door for the rest of my life.
I turn on the lights and I follow the blood.
There is a lot of it. Bare feet, both of them opened up, a stagger pattern that says whoever left it has been walking a long time on legs that stopped taking orders. It goes under my far bench and stops behind the tire stack.
I move the tires.
She is maybe a hundred and twenty pounds soaking wet and every one of them is trying to fight me.
She has a length of bar stock up like a bat and her arm is going in circles because she cannot hold it steady, and her hair is frozen into ropes, and her lips have gone that grey purple color I have only ever seen on men we pulled out of the Bitterroot in March.
Thin shirt. Thin pants. No coat. No shoes.
And on her wrists, twin bands of black and yellow bruising, wide as my thumb, sawed into the skin at the top edge where she twisted against them for hours.
Zip ties. Doubled. Long enough to bruise the bone.
Something in me goes over a cliff and lands quiet.
That is how it works with me. Other men in this club get loud when the rage comes. Sledge puts his fist through drywall. Pauly screams. I have never made a sound in my life when it happens. It just goes down into the basement and stands there in the dark and starts sharpening.
I put the wrench on the floor and slide it away.
She is looking at me the way an animal looks at the thing that has it cornered, all pupil, no thought, running pure spine. I have seen exactly that look twice before. Once on a dog Rooster's neighbor kept on a chain. Once in a mirror, when I was nine.
I ask her if she is alone. I ask how far back.
Two miles. A van.
That is all I need.
I drop the bay. I throw the interior bar. I key the side door, all three bolts, and I walk to the panel and put the compound gate on lockdown and the perimeter cameras on record, and I hear the motor grind out there in the cold and I feel something in my ribs settle for the first time in an hour.
Then I stand with my back to her for a ten count, so she can look at me without being looked at, so she can see that the wrench is on the floor and the doors are shut against the outside and not against her.
There is a difference. She will not believe it tonight.
She will maybe believe it in a week. I have a week. I have as long as it takes.
There is a phone on the wall by the compressor.
I do not go near it.
I know what happens if I dial nine one one.
A county deputy shows up in forty minutes, takes a statement, calls the state boys, and by Thursday she is a case number in a system that has three people to cover nine hundred square miles.
And whoever put those ties on her wrists has money, because men who move people always have money, and money buys the forty minutes and the case number and everything after.
She would be back in a van by the weekend and I would be standing in this garage with a report in my hand.
So I do not touch the phone.
I turn around slow.
"I'm going to come over there," I tell her. "Then I'm going to pick you up. That's it. You want to hit me with that bar while I do it, hit me. I'll heal."
She does not lower it. Good. I would think less of her.
I come around the bench and crouch again and I unbuckle my cut, and I hear the little hitch in her breathing when my hands go to my body, and I hate that sound so much my back teeth ache.
I shrug the leather off my shoulders. Twenty-two years of road grime and gun oil and sweat in that hide. It weighs about as much as she does.
I hold it out at arm's length like feeding something wild.
"Cold makes you stupid," I say. "You're already stupid. You came in a strange door."
Her eyes come up. There is a flash in them, way down under the ice, sharp as a shard.
"Door was open," she says.
"It was."
She takes the cut.
She does it fast, snatching, and the bar stock finally clatters down because she needs both hands, and she hauls the leather around herself and disappears into it, and something about the size of it on her, the way the shoulders hang halfway to her elbows, does a thing to me that I file away and do not examine.
Wrong night. Wrong woman. Possibly wrong forever, but that is a problem for a man who is not currently standing in a puddle of her blood.
"Feet," I say.
She tucks them under her.
"Hiding them doesn't fix them."
"I'll walk."
"You will not." I let that sit. "Office is forty feet. There's a cot, a heater, and a door that locks from the inside. You want to crawl it, crawl it. I'll go slow beside you. Or I carry you and it takes ten seconds."
She looks past me at the forty feet of concrete. I know what she is doing. She is counting exits and doing arithmetic on the cost of being touched, and the arithmetic is coming out ugly either way.
"Ten seconds," she says finally. It comes out through her teeth.
"Arms in. Under your knees and your back. Nowhere else."
"Just do it."
I do it.
She weighs nothing. That is the second fact I get about her, after the wrists.
She weighs nothing and she goes rigid as a board the second my hands take her weight, every muscle locked, waiting for the thing that comes next, and I keep my arms where I said they would be and I do not adjust my grip and I count the seconds out loud in my head so I do not walk faster than I promised.
Eight. Nine. Ten.
The back office is warm because the office is always warm, because I sleep here more nights than I sleep at the clubhouse.
Cot against the far wall. Space heater. A desk with three decades of invoices and one photo of my mother, face down, the way it has been since she died.
Gun safe. Coffee maker with a filter in it from yesterday.
I set her on the cot. I step back four full paces and I put myself against the desk and I fold my arms so my hands are visible and occupied.
"Door's there," I say, tipping my head. "Bolt's on your side. Throw it after I leave and I won't be able to get in."
She stares at me.
"You're lying."
"About what."
"That there's a lock only I control." Her jaw is shuddering but the words come out precise, and I understand suddenly that this woman was somebody's smart mouth before she was somebody's cargo. "Nobody gives that away."
"Go look at it."
"I can't stand up."
"Then look at it in the morning," I say, "and if I'm lying, you'll know something about me that's worth knowing."
Silence. The heater ticks. Outside, the wind starts pulling at the roof panels.
"There's a van," she says. Quieter now. "They'll come."
"Maybe."
"You don't know these men."
"No." I push off the desk and go to the door, and I stop with my hand on the frame and I do not look back at her, because I have figured out already that looking at her is a pressure she cannot afford. "But they don't know me either, and only one of us is standing in his own house."
I pull the door shut behind me.
Then I take the scoop shovel off the wall and I go out the side door and I walk her track backward across the apron and four hundred yards into the field, turning every red print under and dragging fresh snow over the top of it.
The wind is already doing most of the work.
By the time I come back the field is a blank white page, and whatever is riding around in that van tonight is going to run a flashlight over two hundred square miles of white.
Then I stand in the dark bay for a while with my hands hanging at my sides, listening.
It takes her four minutes.
Then I hear the bolt slide home, and I turn and go find something in this building I can take apart.