Chapter 1
Sunday
There are four good things about working nights at a towing outfit in the high desert, and I want to list them before I complain, because my mother raised me to at least pretend to be fair.
One: nobody makes you go to a birthday party.
Two: the whole job happens through a headset, and a headset is a face with the face taken off.
Three: at three in the morning the highway calls in like a confession booth, and people tell you things they'd never tell a person they could see.
Four: the coffee is terrible, which means nobody ever stands around the coffee maker, which means nobody ever stands around me.
The bad thing is the chair. The chair is from 1988 and it leans left, and I have leaned left with it, and my chiropractor — who is going to go at eighty-four, peacefully, which is frankly more than a chiropractor deserves — says my spine is "an interesting document."
"Marsh." Petra's voice came up out of the radio like she was talking from inside a washing machine. "Marsh, I'm at the Chevron and there's no Nissan."
"There's a Nissan."
"There is famously no Nissan."
"Chevron on Delmar or Chevron on Eighth?"
Silence.
"Petra."
"I'm turning around," Petra said, with enormous dignity. "This is a normal thing that people do."
"Copy that."
"You didn't say it."
"I didn't say anything."
"You said it with your whole chest," she said, and clicked off.
I logged the correction, and drank some of the coffee, and looked at the clock, which said 11:52, which meant I had seven hours and eight minutes and a wall map waiting for me at home.
That's the fifth good thing, actually, and the one I don't list out loud. Nights are the only shift where the road talks. Days you get fender-benders in parking garages and people who locked their keys in a Prius. Nights you get the long empty stuff. Nights you get State Route 9.
I've had one hundred and four calls off Route 9 in two years. I know that because I keep a legal pad in my bag with a tally on it like a prisoner scratching a wall, which is a very healthy way to hold down a job.
Of those one hundred and four, ninety-one were breakdowns, tourists, a coyote situation I still think about, and one memorable gentleman who had driven into a cattle gate at eleven miles an hour and wanted us to know it wasn't his fault because he was "arguing with a podcast."
And thirteen were the other kind.
The other kind sound different. That's the part I've never been able to write down in a way that looks like anything but a woman losing it.
The caller's voice goes flat and slightly delayed, like they're reading their own words off a card half a second after saying them.
They can never tell you the mile marker.
They can always tell you the mile marker on any other road in the county, but not that one — they say I don't know, it's just the straight part, every single time, in a state where every part is the straight part.
And there's a sound behind them. Not a sound, exactly. A sort of dropped pitch, like a big engine idling three hundred yards off, patient as a dog waiting to be told it can go.
Twice I've heard it and then heard nothing, and read a name in the paper on Tuesday.
I've reported this to precisely one person, my boss Hollis, who listened to the whole thing with his arms crossed and then said, "Marsh, you need a hobby," and I said, "This is my hobby," and he said, "That's what worries me," which was, in fairness, the correct read.
Midnight came and went. The radio got quiet. I ate a sleeve of crackers over the keyboard like an animal and started the invoicing, which is the part of the job where I turn into a machine that converts other people's worst nights into forty-dollar increments.
At 1:20 Petra found the Nissan.
At 2:10 a man in Fallon called to ask if we did lockouts on a horse trailer, with a horse in it, and I want the record to show I handled that with grace.
At 2:40 Petra came back on.
"Marsh."
"Go."
"You ever think about how we're the only two people awake in the whole county?"
"There's about nine hundred people awake in this county, Petra."
"Name one."
"Bakers."
"There's no bakery."
"Then it's you and me and a lot of coyotes," I said.
"That's what I said."
"You said it worse."
"I said it poetically," Petra said. "Hey. You okay?"
"Why?"
"You've been off since Tuesday. You do this thing where you get real precise with people when something's chewing you."
I looked at the legal pad in my bag with the tally on it.
"I'm fine," I said.
"Uh huh," said Petra, and clicked off, and I sat with the fact that a woman who has never once seen my apartment can read me better through a radio than my own mother can through a window.
At 3:00 the coffee maker made a noise like it was being born.
And at 3:52 in the morning, the front door of the office opened, and a person walked in, which never happens, because the front office at 3:52 in the morning is a cinderblock room with one counter and a poster about hydraulic safety and me.
I didn't look up. That's not modesty, that's reflex. I've got a whole choreography for the counter: eyes on the keyboard, then eyes on the paperwork, then eyes on the hands, then eyes on the chin, then done, thank you, drive safe, goodbye.
"Ma'am," said a voice, "I think somebody's got my bike."
The voice was the first problem.
It came out low and gravelly and unhurried, like a truck downshifting on a grade a long way off, and it had a smile packed somewhere inside it, and I registered all of that in about a quarter of a second, which is how long it takes me to size up a caller, except this one wasn't a caller, this one was a man standing four feet away in a room.
"Somebody does," I said. "That'd be Petra."
"Petra."
"Five foot two, drives like a war criminal, wonderful woman."
"Huh," he said. "She left a note?"
"She never leaves a note."
"So it's just faith, then. Bike's gone, must be Petra."
"Bike's gone, must be Petra," I agreed. "Plate?"
He gave it. I typed it. I watched the screen, which is a safe place, and there it was: one motorcycle, recovered off the shoulder at Mile 66 of State Route 9, no rider present, hazard.
Mile 66.
My hands stopped over the keys, and I made them start again, because eighteen years is eighteen years and my hands are extremely well trained.
"It's forty for the tow," I said, "and thirty for the night."
"That's robbery."
"It's paperwork, which is worse."
And he laughed.
That was the second problem. It was a real laugh, the kind that gets out before a person can catch it, one big surprised bark of a thing that filled up that entire cinderblock room and bounced off the poster about hydraulic safety.
It was such an unreasonable amount of noise for a joke that thin that I felt personally responsible for it.
And I looked up.
I want to be honest about this, because I've turned it over a thousand times since and I still can't sand it down into something sensible.
I didn't look up because I forgot. I didn't look up because I was tired, though I was.
I looked up because for one single second I wanted to see the face that a laugh like that came out of.
That's it. That's the whole reason. Eighteen years of the strictest rule I have ever kept, and it went down to curiosity, the same way everything does.
So I looked up, full in the face, no chin, no nose bridge, no trick.
And I saw nothing.
Let me be clearer, because "nothing" sounds peaceful and this was not peaceful.
When I look at a person, the ending arrives the way a smell arrives — it's just there, it's already in the room, there's no travel time.
And when I looked at him, the room stayed the room.
Fluorescent light. Counter. Poster. A big banged-up man in a leather cut, mid-thirties, black hair shoved back off his forehead, a scar through one eyebrow that had healed crooked, dark eyes with lines at the corners from either laughing or squinting and knowing what I know now, I'd say both.
No hospital. No highway. No chair, no floor, no rain. No wrong-colored shirt.
Nothing at all. Just a man, waiting for me to take his seventy dollars.
Something happened in my chest. I'd love to describe it as an emotion. It was closer to a fuse.
"Ma'am?" he said. "You all right?"
"Do you have exact change," I said, because my mouth kept running while the rest of me left through a side door.
"Do I look like a man with exact change?"
"You look like a man who has three ones and a lot of confidence."
He put his hands on the counter and looked down at them like he was checking. "That's disrespectful," he said. "That's also accurate. Can I do fifty and owe you?"
"No."
"Can I do fifty and charm you?"
"You can do seventy and leave."
"See, that's a counteroffer," he said, "which means we're negotiating," and he started digging through a wallet with a chain on it, and I looked at his face again.
Still nothing.
I looked harder. I have never in my life looked harder at anyone. I stared at that man like I was trying to read something written very small on the back of his skull, and the whole time there was a sound in my ears like a phone left off the hook, and he glanced up and caught me at it.
He didn't flinch. That was the third problem. Everybody flinches, a little, when a stranger looks at them too long — they check their teeth, they check their fly, they look away first. He just raised the crooked eyebrow and looked back.
"Something on my face?" he said.
Nothing on your face. That's the entire problem, sir.
"You've got a scar."
"I've got several. This one's the handsome one." He counted bills onto the counter. "Got it in Barstow."
"Fight?"
"Cabinet door."
"That's the worst thing I've ever heard."
"It's not even the worst cabinet story I've got."
"There's more than one?"
"There's a genre," he said. "There's an entire body of work. I've been in fights in four states and the only thing that's ever put me in a hospital is my own kitchen, and I'd like you to sit with what that says about the trajectory of a man's life."