Chapter 3
Sunday
He didn't say anything for about six seconds, which I've learned is a very long time for Rafferty Doyle.
"You put them there," he repeated.
"Yes."
"Thirty-one crosses."
"Thirty-one."
"On a state highway."
"It's not illegal," I said, and then, because he kept looking at me, "It's slightly illegal."
"Why?"
The wind got in under the door and went around my ankles. Somewhere behind me the coffee maker made its noise.
"Because nobody else was going to," I said.
He stood there in the gravel with his hands in his jacket, and I could see him running it — cop, reporter, crank, con — the whole slot machine going around behind his eyes, and I let it, because I've been watched like that my entire life and at least this man was doing me the courtesy of doing it to my face.
"You a reporter?" he said.
"I dispatch tow trucks."
"Reporters have jobs."
"I have a job. It's this one. You're standing in it."
"You a cop?"
I laughed. It came out badly. "Do I look like a cop?"
"You look like somebody who knows the mile markers on a road where a kid disappeared," Rafferty said, and all the friendly went out of his voice like a light going off in a house.
That was the first time I got a look at the other one — the version of him the rest of the world gets.
It's not loud. That's the thing nobody tells you about genuinely dangerous men.
He didn't step forward, he didn't raise anything, he just stopped performing, and the difference was like a door closing in a hallway.
"A kid," I said.
"Twenty-four. Rode north Tuesday and didn't come out the other end."
"Tuesday." I did the math I've been doing for two years without meaning to. "Tuesday night, clear, no wind after nine. Was he alone?"
"Why does that matter?"
"Because they're always alone," I said. "That's the pattern.
Thirty-one deaths, eleven years, and every single one of them is a single car with a single occupant.
Not one passenger. Not one." I pulled my coat tighter.
"Do you know how hard that is? Statistically?
Do you know how many cars on any given road have two people in them? It should be a third. It's zero."
Rafferty didn't move.
"He was with someone," he said. "Kid named Nash was right behind him. Nash came out. Teodor didn't."
"Then he wasn't with him," I said. "Not in the way that counts."
"Meaning what?"
"Meaning I don't know yet. Meaning I've got a wall."
"A wall."
"A wall," I said, "with a map on it, and thirty-one accident reports I obtained through means I would describe as enterprising, and I have never shown it to a single human being, and I am about six seconds from offering to show it to a man I met yesterday who I am fairly sure carries a knife."
"Two knives," Rafferty said.
"Wonderful."
"One's for opening things."
"That's what they all say."
"Who's they? Who are the other men in your life carrying two knives?"
"It's a small circle," I said, "but it's a committed one."
He looked at me for a second.
"You're not scared of me."
"Should I be?"
"Most people are. It's not a brag, it's a description. There's a thing that happens to a room when I come into it and I've watched it happen my whole adult life."
"I saw a woman die in a parking garage last Tuesday," I said.
"I mean I looked at her at the Safeway and I got the parking garage.
She was buying grapes." I pulled my coat tighter.
"So when you ask if I'm scared of you, understand that I've been doing this since I was twelve and the scariest thing I have ever encountered is a Tuesday afternoon in produce. "
Rafferty didn't say anything for a while.
"That's the strangest sentence anybody's ever said to me," he said, "and I once had a man in Elko explain his tattoo."
And there it was again — that laugh, the big surprised bark of it, out in the cold this time where it had room to go. It undid the whole dangerous thing in about half a second, which I already suspected was a trick, and I was right, and I also didn't care.
He rubbed his jaw.
"Okay," he said. "Ride with me."
"To the road?"
"To a garage."
The garage was forty minutes south with the roll door down and one light on inside, and the whole way there in the borrowed truck I looked out the passenger window at my own reflection, which is one of the four faces I'm allowed.
"Can I ask you something," I said, about twenty minutes in.
"Sure."
"The patch on your back."
"What about it."
"There's a word under the wheel and I couldn't read it in the lot."
He glanced at the mirror. "Enforcer."
"Ah."
"That's usually where the conversation ends."
"What does it mean?"
"It means when the club's done talking, I'm what's left," Rafferty said. "It's not as dramatic as it sounds. Ninety percent of it's standing in a doorway looking large."
"And the other ten?"
"The other ten's why nobody asks me to hold their baby."
"Do you want to hold babies?"
There was a pause about a mile and a half long.
"That's a hell of a question to ask a man at midnight," he said.
"I've got no small talk. I've never needed any. I've spent eighteen years talking to people who couldn't see me and it's made me extremely direct and very hard to be around."
"I've noticed."
"Which one?"
"Both," he said. "I like both."
He drove with two fingers on the wheel. He didn't fill the silence.
I'd expected him to fill the silence — men like him usually do, in my experience, which is admittedly a phone-based experience — and instead he just drove, and let me sit there with my heart going, and at one point wordlessly turned the heat toward my side of the cab.
I have thought about that heater vent more than I'd like to admit.
"What's at the garage?" I said, when we turned in.
"A test."
"Excellent. I love those. I test great."
"You don't know what it is yet."
"I'm just very confident," I said, "it's basically my whole thing."
Inside, a man in his sixties was sitting on an upturned crate eating a sandwich over a paper towel, and he looked up at us, and I looked at his shoulder.
"Emmett," Rafferty said. "This is Sunday Marsh. Sunday, Emmett Shaw."
"Ma'am."
"Hi," I said, to his collarbone.
Emmett looked at Rafferty. "You brought a person."
"I brought a person."
"Into the building."
"Emmett."
"I'm noting it," Emmett said. "It's a first. I'd have swept."
"Here's the test," Rafferty said to me, and leaned back against a workbench and folded his arms, and everything about him got very still and very careful.
"You've got a wall. You've got thirty-one crosses.
You've got a whole lot of the pattern and they're always alone.
And I've got one kid gone and a president who wants this quiet, which means I need to know right now if you're somebody who knows something or somebody who needs something. "
"Those aren't opposites."
"No," he agreed. "But one of them I can work with."
"So what's the test?"
"Tell me something you couldn't know."
I stood in that garage with the smell of oil and cut metal and a man's sandwich, and I understood that this was the moment, and that after it there wasn't a road back to my one chair and my legal pad and my very well-managed eighteen years.
"You're going to want to be sitting down," I said to Emmett.
"I'm sixty-one, I'm always sitting down."
"Fair."
"What's happening," Emmett said to Rafferty.
"I don't know yet."
I looked at Emmett Shaw's face.
I hadn't looked at anyone's face on purpose in eighteen years. Not once. And it came the way it always comes, no travel time, already in the room:
"You're going to die in this garage," I said.
Nobody said anything.
"Not soon," I said quickly. "That's — I should have led with that.
Not soon. You're older. Your hair's all the way white and you've got a beard you don't have now, a bad one, sorry, it's a bad beard.
You're under a bike. Not that bike. Something old with a springer front end and green tank paint that's been done twice, badly, and the second time was by somebody who didn't sand it. "
Emmett had put the sandwich down.
"It's afternoon," I said. "The roll door's up and there's that white light you get out here about four o'clock.
There's a radio on and it's a ball game, and somebody's losing, and you say something to the radio.
Out loud. You say — " and this is the part where my voice did something I wasn't proud of — "you say ah, come on, like you're disappointed in it personally.
And then it's just your heart, and it's fast, and you don't have time to be scared, and your left hand's still got a three-eighths in it. "
The garage was extremely quiet.
"You don't let go of the wrench," I said. "I've never seen anybody not let go."
Emmett Shaw sat on his crate and looked at me for a long moment.
Then he said, "Green tank."
"Green tank."
"Painted twice."
"Badly."
"Well, that's Delgado's bike," he said. "That's the Panhead that's been in the back since March. And he did paint it twice, and he did not sand it, and I have told him so." He picked his sandwich back up, looked at it, and set it down again. "Huh."
"Emmett," Rafferty said. His voice had gone strange.
"I'm all right."
"Emmett—"
"Raff, I'm all right." Emmett wiped his hands slowly on his knees. "Miss Marsh. Am I happy?"
That's not a question anybody's ever asked me. Not one person, ever, in eighteen years, and I've been carrying four thousand of these.
"You're annoyed at a baseball team," I said. "In your own garage. With your hands busy."
"Then that's fine," Emmett said. "That's better than fine. I've got a brother-in-law who's going to spend eleven years in a chair asking for pudding." He nodded to himself. "Green tank. I'll be damned."
I looked at the floor because my eyes had gotten unreliable.
"You handled that better than my mother did," I said.
"Well," said Emmett, "your mother loves you. I've only just met you."
"That's the most useful thing anybody's ever said about it."
"I've got a knack." He picked a bit of crust off his sandwich and thought. "Can I ask you a rude one?"