Chapter 1 #2
"It's the truth," he said, wounded, "and I've never once told it before tonight, so congratulations, this is the most anybody's gotten out of me since Easter." He pushed the money across. "Sixty-eight."
"That's not seventy."
"It's most of seventy. It's the majority of seventy. In a democracy—"
"Sixty-eight and you sign the release."
"Deal," he said immediately, and I understood I'd been played by a man who'd had sixty-eight dollars the entire time and simply wanted the conversation.
I turned the clipboard around. He signed. He wrote like a man filling out a hostage note — big, fast, absolutely illegible.
"That says nothing," I said.
"It says Rafferty."
"It says a fence fell over."
He laughed again, and this time I was ready for it and it still got me, and I thought: there is no ending on him, there is no ending on him, on a loop, like a tune you can't get rid of.
"Where's the lot?" he said.
"Out the door, left, the gate with the chain. It's open."
"Appreciate it." He knocked twice on the counter — a little goodbye rap, like he was patting the whole building on the head — and turned to go.
And I said, "You were at Mile 66."
He stopped.
It was a small stop. A half-step. Anybody else wouldn't have caught it, but I've spent my whole life reading people out of the corner of my eye and I can tell you exactly how a body changes when a question lands somewhere it wasn't supposed to.
"That's what the ticket says?" he asked. Pleasant. Too pleasant.
"That's what the ticket says."
"Then I guess I was at Mile 66."
"Bike was on the shoulder with no rider."
"Bike does that sometimes."
"For four hours?"
"It's an independent bike," he said. "We don't ask each other a lot of questions."
I should have let it go. There was a version of that night — a much longer, quieter, safer version — where I let it go, and finished my shift, and went home to my one chair, and added a line to a legal pad.
"Mister Rafferty," I said.
"Rafferty's the first name."
"Rafferty."
"Yeah."
"Nobody parks at Mile 66," I said. "There's nothing at Mile 66. There's nothing from 61 to 74, that's the whole point of it, it's thirteen miles of nothing, and people go out there and they don't come back and everybody writes it up as driver error—"
I heard my own voice go up and I stopped it like slamming a door.
The room got very quiet. The coffee maker gurgled, entirely on its own schedule, unhelpful.
Rafferty turned around all the way and looked at me across that counter for a good three seconds.
"Huh," he said, softly.
"Sixty-eight dollars," I said. "Gate's open. Left."
"Right." He didn't move. "You get a lot of calls off that stretch?"
"I get some."
"How many's some?"
"Enough that I stopped counting," I said, which was a lie so large it should have set off a smoke detector, since the number was one hundred and four and I could have told him the tally in my sleep.
"Uh huh." He rubbed his thumb along his jaw. "What's your name?"
"Why?"
"Because I like to know who I'm being lied to by. It's a courtesy thing."
"Sunday."
"Sunday," he repeated, and then, because everyone does it, "like the day?"
"Like the day."
"Huh." He nodded slowly. "That's a good name for somebody who works nights."
And he went out.
I sat there for approximately four seconds.
Then I stood up so fast the 1988 chair rolled back and hit the filing cabinet, and I grabbed my coat off the hook, and I left the phone off the hook with it — which in my line of work is roughly equivalent to arson — and I went out the door after a stranger.
I want to say I had a plan.
I did not have a plan. I had a map on a wall in an apartment with one chair, and eighteen years of sitting extremely still, and one man that the future had somehow forgotten to write down, and he had been standing on the exact thirteen miles of road that had been eating people for a decade.
The wind off the desert was cold enough to hurt. The lot lights buzzed. He was already at the gate, walking a black bike backward out of the row with one hand, easy, like moving furniture.
"Hey," I said.
He didn't look surprised to see me. That was the fourth problem, and by then I'd stopped counting problems and started just letting them pile up in the corner.
"Sunday," he said.
"You were out there four hours."
"Ticket's very informative."
"What were you doing?"
He swung a leg over the bike and settled, and the cut turned as he did, and I finally got a look at the back of it: a rocker, and under it a wheel with something dark curling up off it, and a word underneath that I couldn't read in that light and would be able to read perfectly well by the end of the week.
"Looking for somebody," he said.
"Did you find him?"
"No."
"Are you going back?"
He looked at me for a second, and I made myself hold it, and the nothing where his ending should have been sat between us in the cold like a third person.
"Tomorrow night," he said.
"Take me with you."
I have replayed that sentence more times than any other sentence I have ever said. I'd like to report that it came out cool. It came out fast and slightly too loud, in a parking lot, at four in the morning, from a woman in a coat over pajama pants.
Rafferty looked at me a long moment.
"No," he said, not unkindly, and kicked the bike over, and the noise of it filled the whole lot and rolled off across the flats, and he pulled out and turned north.
North. Toward Mile 61. Of course he did.
I stood there in the cold with my hands in my pockets until I couldn't hear him anymore, which took a long time, because the desert doesn't let go of a sound like that easily.
Then I went back inside, and hung up the phone, and answered the six calls I'd missed, and told Petra I'd been in the bathroom, and finished my shift.
And at 8:04 I drove home with the sun coming up in my mirrors, and stood in front of my map with a cup of tea I did not drink, and put my finger on Mile 66, and said, out loud, to nobody:
"Tomorrow night. Fine."