4. Claw
Claw
I give her the burner on day three.
Cheap flip model, three hundred prepaid minutes, one number in it. I set it on the desk and slide it toward her with my knuckle and I go through the rules like I am reading a torque spec.
"Green button, one, send. That rings the phone in my pocket. It's never off, it's never on silent, and it's never out of arm's reach. If it rings I come."
"From where."
"Anywhere. Don't care." I put the second thing on the desk.
A key, brass, worn. "Office bolt on the inside.
This is the outside deadbolt for the side door, and there's exactly two of them, and now you have one.
Do not open a bay for anybody. Do not go past the plastic curtain unless I'm in the building.
Do not stand in front of the office window, it's not glass but the frame will still take a round through it. "
She has gone very quiet.
"You're leaving," she says.
"Two hours."
"Where."
I could lie. It would be easier and she would probably let it go.
"Into town," I say. "To find out how bad this is."
The Canyon Vipers clubhouse sits four miles down the county road, and it stinks like it has always stunk, stale beer soaked into the plywood, exhaust, cigarettes, somebody's chili. Rooster is behind the bar at ten in the morning doing books he cannot read.
I tell him. All of it, straight, no shaping.
He listens with his jaw working and when I get to the wrists he sets the pen down.
"You brought her inside the fence," he says.
"I did."
"Without a vote."
"I'll take whatever you want to give me for that."
Rooster is sixty-one years old and has buried more men than I have met. He looks at me for a long moment and something moves behind his face.
"Nah," he says. "You'd have been out of the club by Tuesday if you'd left her in the snow." He picks the pen back up. "What do you need?"
"Ears. Everything anybody's heard about people moving through the corridor. Transport, not product."
By nightfall I have it.
It comes in from three directions and it all points the same way.
A Russian outfit, Seattle down through Spokane and east on the interstate, running girls in produce trucks and passenger vans and stashing them in a warehouse outside Missoula between legs.
Name at the top is Viktor. No last name comes back from anybody, which tells me more than a last name would.
There is a lieutenant with a shaved head asking around three towns west, showing a photograph and offering four thousand dollars cash, and there is a second crew that came through the diner in Darby yesterday afternoon.
Four thousand.
That is what she is priced at. Four grand and a photograph and the confidence to hand it around a county they do not own.
I go home and I sit in my truck outside my own garage for seven minutes with the engine ticking as it cools.
There is a version of this where I move her. Put her in a car, drive her to a chapter in Nevada, hand her off, let distance do the work. It is the smart play and I have made the smart play my entire adult life.
I am not going to do it.
I want to be honest with myself about why, because a man who lies to himself gets people killed. It is not honor. It is not even entirely the wrists, although the wrists are down in the basement and the basement is very busy.
It is that on day two she came out of the office at six in the morning, wrapped in my cut, dragging one wrapped foot, and she stood in the bay door of the machine room and looked at the lathe until her coffee went cold.
And when I came up behind her, thirty feet back and loud on purpose, she did not flinch.
She turned around. Slow, and pale, and still holding the doorframe like a rail. But she turned around and she looked at me and she did not flinch.
Somewhere in the last three days a switch got thrown in me that has no off position, and I already know that everything I do from here is going to be in service of a woman who has given me nothing and owes me less.
Fine.
I get out of the truck and I go inside and I stop being a mechanic in every way except the ones that show.
The machine room is fourteen feet by twenty and it is the reason I have money that nobody in this county can explain.
By day I am a mechanic. That is true and it is even most of what I am. But two nights a week for twelve years I have made things in here for men who cannot buy them at a counter, and I am very good at it, and my work goes out of this state in wooden crates marked as agricultural parts.
I clear the bench.
First: the perimeter. I pull four cases down from the loft, and I spend six hours in the treeline outside the fence setting flash charges on trip lines, low, ankle height, at every natural approach.
They will not kill anyone. They will turn a night breach into a bunch of blind men standing in a bright field with their hands over their eyes for fifteen seconds, and fifteen seconds is a very long time.
Second: the building. I weld quarter inch plate over the office window frame from the inside, and I run bar stock diagonal across both bay doors, and I take the side door off its hinges and re-hang it in a welded steel frame with three throw bolts, and I fill the hollow core with sand.
Third: the light. I run a separate switched circuit for the overheads and I put the breaker inside the machine room, so that any night I need to, I can drop the entire building into black in one motion.
Then I zero my optics for twelve feet, twenty feet, and forty. Inside distances. Hallway distances.
Fourth: the arsenal.
I build for eight nights straight and I sleep three hours at a stretch on the office floor.
The lifts stay loaded the whole time. Two bikes go out finished, on schedule, and the sign stays lit and the hours stay posted, because a shop that suddenly goes dark is a shop that has just told the whole valley something.
Suppressor cans, cut and threaded and packed.
A short rifle chopped down to a length that turns corners in a shop bay.
Loads I put together myself on the press, heavy and slow and made to stay inside a body instead of going through the wall behind it.
Four charges the size of a coffee can. A dozen other things I do not have names for.
Fifth, and last, and the only one that actually matters.
I take her down the hole.
There is a bunker under the machine room floor, six feet by eight, poured concrete, put in by whoever owned this ground before me for reasons I have never asked about and have my own theories on.
Water. Ammunition. A chemical toilet, a case of batteries, three rifles in a rack.
In twelve years I have used it to store things and for nothing else at all.
I show her the plate and where the finger notch sits under the swarf. I make her haul it open herself, twice, because a woman who has only ever seen a man do a thing has learned nothing.
Then I put her back in the office doorway with a coffee and I say the word bunker out loud, flat, no lead-in.
She goes.
Twenty-two seconds.
We do it again. Fourteen. Again. Ten.
"Bar goes through the eye on the underside," I tell her down through the open hatch. "Once that bar is through, nothing standing on this floor gets that plate up. Includes me."
"What if it is you?"
"Then I wait." I crouch at the lip. "And if somebody comes down that ladder and it is not me, you use whatever is in your hand and you use all of it."
She looks up at me out of eight feet of dark.
"I don't have anything in my hand."
"You will," I say.
On the ninth night, at two in the morning, with the room smelling like hot brass and cutting oil, I take a piece of tool steel out of the scrap bin and I make one more thing that is not for me.
Four inch blade. Full tang. Bevel on both sides. I grind the edge until it will take the hair off my arm, and I scale the handle in canvas micarta and I check the balance on the edge of my finger, and I sand the grip down and down and down until it fits a hand about the size of my palm.
I do not know yet if I am ever going to give it to her.
I put it in the drawer, and I turn off the light, and I go lie down on the concrete outside her door.