Chapter 1 #2
He nodded slowly. He didn't say I'm sure she's fine, which is what everybody had said for three weeks, and the not-saying of it landed in my stomach like a swallowed ice cube.
"Sit tight," he said, and got up.
"Where are you going?"
"To make a call."
"You have a phone."
"I have a phone," he agreed, walking away.
He made the call by the ice machine, with his back to me, in about forty seconds. When he came back his coffee had gone cold and he drank it anyway, which I respected.
"Somebody'll run you out," he said.
"Somebody."
"Kid named Cricket."
"Cricket."
"He's twenty and he talks too much and he'll be here in ten minutes, and if he offers to show you a tattoo, say no."
"Why?"
"Because it's not finished and he'll make you look at it for a while."
"I meant why are you doing this."
He picked up my grocery bag off the table. Just picked it up, casual, and the weight of it registered on his face — a small shift, nothing, the flicker you'd miss if you weren't watching for it.
He set it back down. Exactly where it had been.
"That's a Kroger bag," he said.
"They're everywhere."
"Nearest Kroger's forty minutes."
"I'm a tourist."
"Sure," he said.
We looked at each other.
"It's my mother's," I said. "It isn't loaded. The shells are in the duffel because apparently that's the rule on a bus, which nobody could tell me if it's a real rule or a made-up rule, and I asked three people—"
"It's a real rule."
"Is it?"
"No idea. I've never been on a bus."
"You've never been on a bus."
"Not once."
"How is that possible?"
"I've had a bike since I was fifteen and nowhere I wanted to go bad enough to sit down for," he said. "Load it."
"What?"
"Before you go out there. Load it, or leave it in the bag and forget you've got it, but don't do the thing in the middle where you've got a gun and it's not ready and you think you're covered. That's how people get killed with their own hand."
The parking lot was very quiet.
"Why would I need it loaded," I said.
He looked at me for a long moment. And then he did the thing I've thought about even more than the laugh — he sat back down, on the wrong side of the table, next to me, so that we were both facing the road, and he said:
"Your grandmother's got a man on her porch."
"What man?"
"Wearing something that isn't his."
"Roman."
"Bly land sits across the only road out of the north end," he said, to the road.
"It's been quiet out there for twenty-eight years because it was quiet out there for twenty-eight years, and about six weeks ago it stopped being, and I have been sitting in this parking lot on a Tuesday because from here I can see who comes down off that ridge and who goes up. "
I said, "Is she alive."
Which is a question, it turns out, that you can ask out loud in a normal voice, standing outside your body, at a picnic table.
"She was Thursday."
"How do you know?"
"Because I sat right here Thursday and she came down for feed and went back up."
"You didn't talk to her."
"No."
"Why not?"
And Roman Kade — who I did not yet know was the president of anything, who I thought was a nice large man with a coffee — said, "Because she wouldn't have let me."
Then a bike came up the road with a kid on it who was too skinny for his jacket, and Roman stood up, and the whole gas station changed shape around him in a way I felt in my teeth.
The kid pulled in, killed the engine, took his helmet off, and said, "Prez."
I said, "Sorry, what?"
Cricket looked at me. Looked at Roman. Went a color I've only otherwise seen on a horse's tongue.
"Oh," he said. "Oh, no."
"Take her out to Bly's," Roman said. "Straight there. Don't stop at the Kesler gate, don't be clever, and if there's a car in the drive you keep riding and you call me from the top of the hill."
"Yes, sir."
"Prez," I said.
Roman put his hand out for the second time in twenty minutes.
"Roman Kade," he said. "Grimm Riders. I'm the president, and I gave you bad directions on purpose, and if you're going to be mad about one of those you should pick the right one."
I did not shake his hand.
I picked up the grocery bag with my mother's revolver in it and my duffel with the shells and I got on the back of a twenty-year-old's motorcycle in a red hoodie, and as we pulled out I looked back and he was standing exactly where he'd been standing, facing the road, hands empty, watching us go.
Cricket shouted over his shoulder at the first stop sign, "Do you want to see my tattoo?"
"No," I said.
"Okay," he said, "but it's a wolf."
Second stop sign: "Are you mad at him?"
"Yes."
"Okay. Cool. That's — yeah, people are, sometimes." Pause. "Not usually on day one."
"Is that a record?"
"It's up there," Cricket said, with what I'd swear was pride, and pulled out onto Old Ridge.
Third stop sign, at the bottom of the hill, with the whole valley going gold on the left side:
"He's not gonna let anything happen to her, you know."
"To who?"
"Your grandma."
I sat with that on the back of a stranger's bike with a gun in a grocery bag on my lap.
"Cricket."
"Yeah?"
"Why does the president of a motorcycle club care about my grandmother?"
And Cricket — twenty years old, one patch, no filter and no idea what he was standing on — said, "Man, nobody tells me anything," and let out the clutch.
We climbed six miles of ridge into the dark with the temperature dropping a degree a minute, and I hunched down behind a kid in a jacket he hadn't earned yet, in a hoodie the color of a warning label, thinking about a man who gave me directions to a hole in the ground to find out what kind of person I was.
He'd found out.
I don't think he was expecting to have to do anything about it.