Chapter 2
Rafferty
Every club's got a guy they send when the talking's finished.
I've never had a problem with being that guy. What I've got a problem with is the ten minutes before, when everybody's still talking and looking at me sideways like I'm a dog they've got by the collar, and the ten minutes after, when everybody's very carefully not looking at me at all.
The middle part I'm great at. It's the ends that get me.
"You're doing the thing," Emmett said.
"What thing."
"The thing where you stand in my bay and radiate."
I was standing in his bay. I'll give him that. It was eleven in the morning, the roll door was up, and the whole garage smelled like cut metal and burnt coffee, which is my favorite smell on earth and I'd never say so out loud because Emmett would have it embroidered on something.
"I'm not radiating."
"Rafferty, there's a heat shimmer."
"I'm thinking."
"That's worse," Emmett said, from under a Softail. "Historically. For everyone."
Emmett Shaw is sixty-one years old, has run this garage since before I could ride, and is the only man in the club who's never once been afraid of me, which I've decided is either wisdom or an early symptom of something.
"Two prospects went out Tuesday," I said.
"I heard."
"One came back."
"I heard that too." A wrench turned. "Which one?"
"Nash came back. Teodor didn't."
The wrench stopped.
Emmett rolled out from under the bike, sat up, and wiped his hands on a rag that was, at this point, dirtier than his hands. He's got a face like a paper bag somebody smoothed out to use again.
"Teodor," he said.
"Yeah."
"The kid who wouldn't eat the eggs."
"That's the one."
"Because of the texture."
"Because of the texture," I said.
Emmett looked out the roll door at the flat white nothing for a while. "How's Nash telling it?"
"That's the part." I crouched down and picked up a socket I didn't need, just to have something in my hand.
"Nash says they rode out to check the tail end of the Cold Fork paperwork — some storage unit thing Bishop wanted eyes on — and they took Route 9 because it's forty minutes shorter.
And Nash says he was behind Teodor the whole way.
Says he never lost sight of him. Says Teodor's taillight was right there in front of him for thirteen straight miles. "
"And?"
"And then he came out the other end and there wasn't a bike in front of him and there never had been."
Emmett didn't say anything.
"That's his words," I said. "And there never had been. Kid's twenty-four and sober as a judge and he sat in the chapel and said that sentence to eleven men and then went outside and was sick in the gravel."
"You believe him?"
"Hold on, there's more, and this is the part that's been sitting in me since Tuesday." I turned the socket over. "Bishop asked him how long he'd been riding behind Teodor. And Nash says thirteen miles. And Bishop says how long is that in minutes, and the kid opens his mouth and nothing comes out."
"Nerves."
"Bishop asked him four times. Different ways.
When did you enter the road, when did you leave it, what was on the radio, was it dark.
" I looked at Emmett. "And every time, the kid gets this look like a man reaching into a pocket that isn't there.
Thirteen miles of his life and he can't put a number on any of it.
He can tell you what he ate that morning.
He can tell you the plate on the truck that passed him at the junction before. "
"Huh."
"He's got the whole day," I said. "It's just got a hole cut out of the middle of it."
Emmett was quiet for a bit.
"That's not a scared kid," he said.
"No."
"That's a kid something took a piece of."
"Christ."
"Yeah."
"You believe him?"
"I went out and looked," I said. "Four hours. Walked the shoulder from 61 to 74 with a flashlight. No bike, no gouge in the dirt, no glass, no nothing. Thirteen miles of nothing that has been nothing since Nixon."
"That where you lost your ride?"
"I did not lose my ride, I parked it, and some woman had it hooked to a truck."
Emmett laughed, which he does silently, so it just looks like he's having a small event.
"There's a joke in there," he said.
"There's not."
"There's a joke where the enforcer of the Ashes and Iron Motorcycle Club gets his bike impounded—"
"Emmett."
"—by a tow truck—"
"I will hit you with this socket."
"You won't," he said comfortably, "because I know where your carburetor lives," and went back under the Softail.
That's the thing about Emmett. He's the only room in my life where the ten minutes before and the ten minutes after don't happen. It's just the middle part, all the way through.
I gave it a minute. Then I said, "There was something out there."
The wrench kept going. "Go on."
"Not a something. I didn't see anything." I turned the socket over. "But about two in the morning I'm standing at — call it 66, 67 — and it's dead flat, dead quiet, and I hear an engine."
"It's a highway."
"It's a highway with eleven cars a night on it. I know what a car sounds like coming. This came from behind me and it didn't get louder."
Emmett was quiet.
"It stayed exactly the same volume for four, five minutes," I said.
"Just sat back there in the dark idling like it was waiting for something.
And I turned around and put the light on it and there's nothing, and the second the light hits nothing, the sound quits.
Not fades. Quits. Like somebody lifting the needle off a record. "
"Huh."
"And then I stood there another hour and a half like an idiot waiting for it to come back."
"Did it?"
"No."
Emmett rolled out again. "You tell Bishop?"
"I told Bishop I'd go back tonight."
"What'd he say?"
"He said the thing he says." I did the voice, which is a hanging offense in that club. "I want to know what it is before I decide what we are to it."
"That's a good line."
"It's a great line. He's had it since Idaho and he's going to run it into the ground."
"He's not wrong, though."
"He's never wrong, Emmett, that's the whole problem with him. A man who's never wrong makes everybody else slow." I set the socket down. "Kid's been gone six days. Six days is not a period of contemplation."
"That's not the same as telling Bishop."
"No," I agreed, "it's not."
He gave me a look I've been getting off him since I was nineteen, and I'd love to tell you I've built up a resistance.
"Raff."
"Don't."
"You don't have to be the one who goes out alone."
"Somebody's got to be."
"Sure. And it's always got to be you, and it's always got to be at night, and it's always got to be with nobody watching, because God forbid anybody see you do the part where you look for something instead of the part where you break it.
" He tossed the rag onto the bench. "You know what you are?
You're a hammer that's real embarrassed about being a hammer. "
"That's very deep, Emmett."
"I've got a lot of time under these bikes."
"You've got a lot of time under these bikes because you work slow."
"I work thorough," he said, "and one day a man's going to be alive because of a bolt I torqued right, and he's never going to know, and that's going to be the best day of my life and I won't even be there for it."
I looked at him.
"That's the most depressing thing anybody's ever said in this building," I said.
"It's a garage, we're not curing anything." He stood up, knees popping, and got his coffee off the bench. "Who's the tow woman?"
"What?"
"The one with your bike. You said 'some woman' with a face."
"I said it with no face."
"You said it with a face," Emmett said. "I've known you twenty years, you've got about four faces and that one usually costs somebody a window."
Here's what I didn't tell him.
I didn't tell him that a woman in a cinderblock office had stood up out of a broken chair at four in the morning and followed me into a parking lot in her pajama pants and asked to come along.
I didn't tell him that before she did it, she'd looked at me for about eight seconds like she was reading a page in a language she used to speak.
I didn't tell him that when I said the words Mile 66, she hadn't asked me what I meant. Everybody asks what you mean. She'd just gone very still, the way people go still when you say a name they've been waiting years to hear somebody else say first.
And I didn't tell him that on the ride home I'd caught myself grinning like a moron on an empty road at four-thirty in the morning because a stranger had called my signature a fence falling over.
"She had opinions about my handwriting," I said.
Emmett drank his coffee.
"Uh huh," he said.
"Don't."
"I didn't say a word."
"You said several."
"I said uh huh, which in this establishment is legally a shrug." He set the mug down. "You want to know what I think it is?"
"You've got a theory."
"I've got sixty-one years and a radio." He leaned back against the bench.
"I think a road's just a long thin place where a lot of people have been scared.
That's all it is, Raff. Miles of folks at their most afraid — you ever notice that?
Nobody's frightened in a living room. Put a man alone in a car at two in the morning doing seventy and he's about four inches from every bad thing that ever happened to him. "
"That's not a theory, that's a mood."
"It's both." He picked up the wrench and pointed it at me. "And here's the other half. Thirteen miles is not a lot of road. If something's out there, it's stuck. It's not roaming, it's not working the whole state, it's doing thirteen miles over and over like a man pacing a hallway."
"So?"
"So you know what makes a man pace a hallway."
"What."
"Waiting on somebody who isn't coming," Emmett said, and went back to the bike, and I stood in that bay and did not have one single useful thing to say to it.
"What's Bishop want done?" he said, from underneath.
"He wants it done quiet till we know what it is."
"And what do you want done?"
That was the wrong question, and he knew it was the wrong question, and he asked it anyway, which is Emmett's whole method.