6. Claw
Claw
They come on a Thursday afternoon, in daylight, in a grey Suburban with Washington plates.
I hear it on the gravel apron before I see it, and I am already moving.
Bay door open eight feet because I have a rebuilt shovelhead half assembled and the fumes have to go somewhere.
Stormy is at the parts counter with a coffee, going through the invoice box because she has decided my filing system is an insult to God.
"Bunker," I say. "Now."
She does not argue. That is one of the ten thousand things about her.
She sets the mug down and she is across the floor and lifting the plate in the machine room floor before the Suburban doors open, and the last thing I see is the top of her head going down the ladder and her hand pulling the plate shut over herself.
I hit the switch. The bay door starts down.
Two men come under it before it is halfway.
Big. A different big than mine. Big like men who lift things in a gym and have never had to carry anything up a hill. Puffer jackets, both of them, which is a garment I love because it hides a pistol from a civilian and hides nothing from anyone who has been shot at.
"You are the mechanic," the front one says. Accent thick and flat.
I wipe my hands on the rag and keep wiping them, which puts my hands high and busy and closer to my belt line than they were.
"I'm a mechanic."
He takes out his phone and turns it around.
It is her.
The photograph is from before. Her hair is longer and her face is fuller and she is laughing at something outside the frame with a hand up, and there is a birthday candle burning in the corner of the shot, and I have to stand very still for a full second because looking at that photograph of her happy and knowing where it came from does something to me that I will be paying for later.
"You have seen."
"No."
"Look longer."
"I looked."
The second one has drifted right, past the tire stack, toward the office door. He is doing it far too casually to be casual.
"Four thousand dollars," the first one says. "Cash. Today. You call, you tell us, no questions from anybody. We are not police."
"I noticed."
"There is a woman like this in every town."
"There is," I agree.
He puts the phone away and looks around my bay, and I know exactly what he is doing because it is what I would be doing. He is counting exits. He is pricing the tools. He is deciding whether a man who works alone in a metal building four miles from anything is worth the friction.
His eyes stop on the parts counter.
On the coffee mug. Still steaming.
There is a long, thin moment where the whole afternoon balances on a nail.
Then he smiles, and it is a very bad smile, and he says something in Russian to the other one and they both start to move, and I say, easy as anything, "Not in here. Concrete's a pain to clean. There's a bay out back."
They stop. They look at each other.
They follow me out the side door.
That is the part I want on my headstone. They followed me out.
The alley behind the shop is twelve feet wide, gravel, walled on one side by my building and on the other by the stack of engine blocks and dead frames I have been meaning to haul off for six years. No sightline from the road. No cameras except mine.
The first one gets three steps in before he understands.
He is fast, credit where it is due. His hand goes inside the puffer and he is quick and he is trained and he gets it two thirds of the way out.
Mine is already up.
I built the can on this pistol myself, on a Tuesday, listening to the radio. It is packed with steel wool and thirteen baffles and it takes a subsonic round and turns it into a sound like a heavy book dropped on a carpeted floor. I have tested it against a decibel meter in this exact alley.
Twice. Center. He goes down onto the gravel with his hand still in his jacket.
The second one runs.
He gets twelve feet.
I stand there in the cold with my ears ringing at a frequency only I can hear and I look at what I have done and I feel absolutely nothing about it.
That is worth knowing about myself, and I have known it since I was nineteen, and it is why I sleep on the floor outside her door instead of asking her for a single thing.
Then I go inside and get down on the machine room floor and knock twice on the plate, which is the signal, and say her name, and I hear the bar come out from underneath.
She comes up the ladder on her own. She looks at my hands. She does not ask me one thing.
"Stay inside," I say. "Side door stays shut no matter what you hear. I'll be back tonight."
"Okay."
That is the whole conversation. It is the best one I have ever had.
Then I get to work.
I go through their pockets. Two phones, both of them cheap, both with the same three numbers.
I pull the batteries and I know while I am doing it that it is a formality.
Two handsets sat in my gravel apron for four minutes and told a tower outside Hamilton exactly where they were standing, and somebody with a laptop is going to read that eventually.
It stopped being a question of whether an hour ago.
Now it is only how many, and when. Forty-one hundred in banded cash in the first one's inside pocket, which is a level of confidence that tells me Viktor sent these two out expecting to buy a mechanic and go home.
A folding knife. A photograph, printed, of five different faces, and hers is second from the left, and I fold it and put it in my back pocket instead of burning it because I am going to want to look at the other four later.
I bring the truck around. I use the sheet plastic I keep for painting and the roll of the good tape.
It takes forty minutes and I do it the way I do everything, in order, without hurrying, and when it is done I hose the gravel and rake it and lay fresh over the wet, and I burn the plastic scraps in the barrel behind the machine room.
The bodies go into the truck bed under a tarp and a stack of scrap frames. The Suburban I drive nineteen miles up the forest road at dusk and put over the edge into a ravine that will hold it until June, minimum.
I get back at half past eight and I stand in the shower off the machine room until the water goes cold, and then I stand in it a while longer.
She does not ask me where I was.
She is sitting at the parts counter when I come out with a towel around my neck, and there is a plate in the microwave for me, and she looks at my raw scrubbed hands and my wet hair and the fact that I have changed clothes, and I can see her arriving at the whole thing in stages like a train coming down a long straight track.
She does not say a word.
She gets the plate out. She sets it in front of me. She sits back down on her stool eighteen inches away, closer than she has ever sat, and she puts her elbow on the counter and her jaw in her hand and she looks at the side of my face for a very long time.
"Eat," she says.
I eat.