Chapter 1
CHAPTER ONE
Present Day
Rooster
Four-forty in the morning and there's ice on the water in the dog bowl by the garage door.
I break it with my thumb.
The dog's not mine. She’s the club’s, I guess.
She started coming around when Hope was born and Ruby started leaving food out, and now there's a bowl, and someone has to break the ice in it on these frigid mornings.
She's not up yet. It’s too cold.
One light on in the whole club, and it's the one I turned on.
I need coffee first, then I can deal with the bikes.
Six of them are under the overhang, frost on every seat. I move each one out and back so nothing seizes.
Python's first because Python's is the one that'll fight me.
Zorro's after.
Doom's is clean enough to eat off, and I take an extra second with it.
There are boots on gravel behind me around five. "You do that every damn morning?"
Compass, hood up, hands pulled into his sleeves.
"Yep."
"Why?"
I set Doom's bike on its stand and step off it. "They're cold."
"They're bikes."
"They're cold bikes." I go past him. "Coffee's on."
He follows me in because the kitchen's warm and he's twenty-six.
Chairs are up on the tables in the main room.
Ruby's pozole from this weekend is still in the air and it's the middle of the week now.
The heater ticks and he pours a cup of coffee, holding it under his chin like a candle.
"You ever sleep?"
"Sometimes."
"Like, hours? Consecutive?"
"Sure." I take a sip of my coffee.
"You know what's messed up." He blows across the cup. "I've been prospecting for two years and I'm losing my mind about it. Two years. And you've been—"
"Longer."
"Way longer." He looks at me over the rim. "Doesn't that eat at you?"
"No."
"Why not?"
Down the hall a door opens and shuts.
"I'm not in a hurry," I tell him.
He sets his cup down and looks at me like he's about to try again from a different side, which he will, because he's twenty-six and it's five in the morning and there's nobody else to talk to.
"See, that's not a thing people say."
"Okay."
"Nobody says that. Everybody's in a hurry. Boulder was in a hurry. Doom was in a hurry, and he'd have cut his own hand off before he told you so." He points at me with two fingers around the cup. "You've been here since before I got here."
"I know when I got here."
"So?"
Ruby's got a coffee can up on the shelf over the stove, and the lid's been sticky since the summer.
I take it down and work it open with the flat of my thumb and get it started for her so she doesn't have to fight it at six.
"So nothing," I tell him.
"That's it? That's the whole—"
"You want eggs?"
He stops and blinks. "I mean. Yeah."
I get the pan down.
* * *
Ruby comes in at six, looks at the coffee I made, dumps it, and makes her own.
She sees the can open on the counter and doesn't say anything about it.
She never has.
She just puts her hand flat on my back for half a second on her way past the stove, the same half second, every morning, and then she's gone into her business, and I'm out of her kitchen.
Zorro after her, then Brick with his med kit already on his shoulder because Imani's got him running Mateo's blood pressure twice a day and he takes it more seriously than Mateo does.
"Rooster." Two knuckles on the doorframe as he passes. "Garage. That compressor's dying."
"It's dead." I don't look up from my cup.
He stops walking. "It's dying."
"It's been dead since October." I tip the cup at him. "You're talking to a corpse."
He points at me without turning around and keeps going.
Lashes comes in around seven with Hope on her hip and the baby's got a fistful of her hair.
"Hey." She drops into a chair one-handed and starts working her hair loose. "Is that coffee yours or Ruby's?"
"Ruby's."
Her whole body goes slack against the chair back. "Thank God."
"Sure."
"I'm not sorry." She gets her hair free, and Hope makes a noise like she's been robbed, and Lashes holds her out to me.
I take her without saying anything.
She goes still against my chest. Little girl always does.
I hold my coffee out to the side so I don't get it on her head, and I don't move for a while.
Hope's got her fist wrapped around the chain of my dog tags through my shirt, and she's pulling on it with her whole body.
Her mouth is going like she's working out something serious.
Lashes watches me over her cup.
"What?"
"Nothing." She sips. "Nothing at all."
"Say it."
"Nope." She stretches her legs out under the table and closes her eyes. "I'm having four minutes where nobody's touching me. That's what I'm doing. That's my whole morning."
"Take five."
"Don't tempt me, Rooster."
Nova comes in behind her with her hair still wet, drops her bag on a chair, already talking. "Ruby, I'm stealing a tamale, I've got clinicals at nine." She sees me and stops. "Oh, that's not fair."
"What?"
She waves the tamale at the whole situation. "You're standing there holding a baby. Being enormous. It's very effective, Rooster, and I want you to know it's working."
"On who?"
"On everyone. That's what I'm telling you."
"Eat your tamale."
"I'm going to." She takes a bite and points the rest of it at Lashes. "Is he always like this in the morning? He's like a park ranger."
"He's been up since four," Lashes says, eyes still closed.
"Four?" Nova stops chewing.
"He does the bikes." Lashes doesn't open her eyes.
Nova turns and looks at me with half a tamale in her hand. "You do the bikes?"
Doom comes through the door behind her, takes in the room in one pass, pours a cup.
He gets to me and stops.
He looks at Hope asleep on my chest, doesn't say one word, and then he tips his chin about a half-inch and goes and stands at the counter.
Nova leans back against him without looking and he catches her weight with one arm.
Hope's hand opens and closes against my shirt and she makes that gurgly sound all babies do.
* * *
The compressor's a Campbell Hausfeld that came with the building, and the motor's been screaming since October.
Today it's not screaming anymore, which is worse.
I've got the panel off and my arm in it to the elbow, feeling for the coupler I can't see.
Compass is sitting on an overturned bucket eating the second half of an egg sandwich he didn't earn.
"You want the light?"
"I want the coupler." My knuckles find the housing instead.
He shifts on the bucket. "Yeah, but do you want the light?"
"Would help."
He gets the light and doesn't hold it anywhere useful. Of course.
The walkie-talkie’s on the bench by my head and it's been silent all morning, and that's normal.
It goes off at eleven-forty.
Compass grabs it before I can get out from under. "Yeah? Go."
"There's a woman at the gate."
Compass rolls his eyes at me. "There's always a woman at the—"
"On foot."
My arm's still in the machine.
I come out of it fast enough that I take skin off my forearm on the housing, and I don't feel it happen. I see it after. A long red stripe filling in from the wrist up.
Compass keys the radio. "On foot from where?"
The walkie-talkie hisses, and nobody says anything into it.
"She says she walked from the highway."
The highway's nine miles. Nobody walks it.
In August it kills people, and in January, it's forty-one degrees with the wind coming down off the Sierra, and there's nothing out there but gravel, cholla, and the ditch.
"So tell her—" Compass looks at me. "What do I tell her?"
I take the radio out of his hand. "Marco, she want a ride or a phone?"
"No."
"No, what?"
"She doesn't want anything." The carefulness comes into his voice then, slowly, like a man choosing where to put his feet. "She's asking for someone."
There's frost on the inside of the window over the bench where the sun hasn't come around yet. I'm looking at it. There's a shop rag in my hand and I've stopped using it.
"Who?" I ask.
"She won't say. Says she'll say it to him."
"Him who?"
"That's what I'm telling you, güey." The radio pops and cuts and comes back. "She'll say it when she sees him."
Compass laughs. "Okay, so somebody's got a problem." He looks over at me and the laugh goes out of his face. "What?"
"Nothing."
"You look—"
"Nothing." I drop the rag on the bench. "I'll go see what the fuck this is about."
It's a four-minute walk from the garage to the gate, and I do it in three.
I don't know why I'm walking fast.
There's no reason for it.
It's a woman on a road, and it's not the first strange thing to come up that gravel since I've been here.
There's a hundred versions of this that end with somebody's cousin needing a ride into town.
There's something on the back of my neck.
I've had it before.
I had it in a parking lot in Bullhead City when I was twenty-four with two men sitting in a car forty yards out and no reason on God's earth to think they were there for me except that they were.
I haven’t had it once since I crossed the river, not one time in all these years, and it's here now and it's climbing.
I wipe the blood off my forearm with the heel of my hand and keep walking.
The gate sits at the end of a gravel run with the desert coming up to the fence line on both sides.
There's a woman on the other side of it with a black backpack hanging off one shoulder.
Marco's in the block hut with the door open, one hand on the frame.
He tips his chin at me and steps back.
She's small.
Something's wrong with how small she is, and I don't have the word for it.
Her jacket's too big and it isn't warm enough, zipped to the chin, and her hair's pulled back so tight it changes her face.
Her feet are planted. Her hands are out of her pockets. She hasn't moved. She's looking at me.
I put my hand on the gate. "Ma'am."
Nothing.
"It's forty degrees. Whatever this is, you're not doing it out here."
Her eyes go across my face.
Slow. One side to the other and back, like she's reading something she used to be able to read, and I stand there and let her because I don't know what else to do with myself.
Freckles across her nose.
Not many. A scatter over the bridge and out onto her cheeks. And one of them sits low and off by itself, near the corner of her mouth.
The gravel's coming up.
I've got the gate in my hand, and I'm holding it hard enough to feel the wire, and I don't remember reaching for it.
There's no air. I'm pulling, nothing's coming, and my ears have gone hot, and everything past her has gone gray at the edges.
I'm looking at that freckle by her mouth and I cannot make my eyes go anywhere else, not one inch, not for one second.
I used to put my thumb on it.
I used to put my thumb right there, and she'd bite it.
Some noise comes out of me.
It isn't a word. It's the sound you'd make if somebody put a knife in under your ribs and you weren't expecting it.
Marco takes a step out of the hut and then stops, because there's no reason for it, because it's noon and it's cold and there's a woman standing at a fence.
I buried this.
Ten years ago I buried her, and I did it right. I did it the way you do it, I put her in the ground, and I salted it, and I never once went back and dug.
I didn’t literally kill her, but figuratively, I killed her memory.
Not on the bad nights. Not on the ones worse than that.
Every day I've had since I was twenty-five is stacked on top of that hole, every single one, and she's on the other side of a chain-link gate in Chihuahua breathing.
She's breathing.
There's a wet heat climbing the back of my throat and my eyes are burning.
I'm not doing anything about any of it.
I'm standing in the road in front of God, Marco, and a woman I killed in my own head, coming apart at the seams like a cheap shirt.
I can't stop looking at her mouth.
She watches all of it happen.
She doesn't move. She doesn't look away. She stands there with her hands where I can see them, and she lets me have every second of it, and there's nothing on her face at all.
That's the part that gets in.
Not the freckle. Not the ten years. Her face, while she watches me break in half in the middle of a road.
Nothing on it.
Then she takes one step forward. "Hello, Finn," she says.