Chapter 8
Rafferty
I knew she was lying in the parking lot.
I want that established, because of what I did next, and because I've had a lot of time to sit with the order of events.
I knew, and I let it go, and I let it go for the same reason I always let things go: because the alternative is a conversation, and conversations are the part I'm bad at.
I'm not bad at them because I don't have words.
I'm bad at them because when a thing gets stuck I only know one direction to push, and it's forward, and forward is a door coming off its hinges.
So instead of asking Sunday Marsh what she'd found in a county building, I went and found something to hit.
His name was Cal Herrick and he ran a salvage yard eleven miles off Route 9, and I'd been sitting on him for three days.
Here's the thread: Teodor's bike never turned up.
Fine — nothing turns up on that road. Except a stripped tank with a partial VIN that matched it came through a Reno buyer on Thursday, and the Reno buyer got it from a hauler, and the hauler got it from Cal, and Cal has been pulling wrecks off the shoulder of State Route 9 under a county contract since 1998.
Which meant that for twenty-eight years, every single vehicle that thing took had gone through one man's gate.
"That's not a suspect," Bishop said. "That's a tow contract. Sunday's outfit has half the same paperwork."
"He's had thirty-one cars in his yard."
"So has she, in a filing cabinet."
"Bishop—"
"I'm not saying don't look at him," Bishop said. "I'm saying you've got a woman who's found four letters in a road and a name we can't crack, and you've got a man with a legitimate business and a stripped tank, and I know which one of those you want it to be, and I want you to know I know."
"Is that a no?"
Bishop looked at me for a long moment.
"Take Judah," he said. "Talk. That's it. Talk, Rafferty."
"When have I ever—"
"Reno," Bishop said.
"That was—"
"Elko."
"Bishop."
"I can keep going, and the reason I can keep going is that I've been the one writing the checks afterward.
" He put his cup down. "I'm not saying you're a problem.
You're the best thing this club's got when there's something to do.
I'm saying you have got one gear for the twenty minutes before, and the twenty minutes before is where every single one of these things gets decided. "
"Then send Judah instead."
"Judah's not the one who needs to learn it," Bishop said.
I stood there a second.
"That's a hell of a thing to say to a man on his way out the door."
"That's why I said it now," Bishop said, "instead of tomorrow."
Here's what nobody in that chapel said out loud, and what I'd have said if anybody had asked me, which nobody did:
I had spent four days being useful in exactly one way.
I sat on a floor with a woman while she came apart.
I held a cup. I told her about a paint job for forty minutes.
And she'd looked at me on that counter like I was the only quiet room she'd ever been in, and then twelve hours later she'd stood in a gravel lot and lied to my face, and I could feel the whole thing sliding away from me down a slope I didn't have any hands for.
And when that happens, I go find a gate.
That's not an excuse. That's a diagram.
We took two prospects because Bishop's rule is nobody rides alone, and one of them was Nash — the kid who'd come out the south end of thirteen miles with nothing in front of him — who had asked to come in a voice that made it impossible to say no.
"You stay on the bike," I told him.
"Yes sir."
"Don't call me sir, I'm thirty-six."
"Yes—" He stopped. "Okay."
"You stay on the bike, both of you. This is talking. I'm going to go in there and be extremely boring for ten minutes and then we're going to leave and get pancakes."
"There's a place in Tonopah," Judah said.
"There's a place in Tonopah," I agreed.
Nash rode up alongside me at the light before the turn. It's a four-minute light. Everybody in that county knows it's a four-minute light.
"Can I ask you something?"
"You're on a bike at a red, so make it fast."
"Do you think he suffered?"
I looked over at him.
"Teodor," Nash said. "Everybody keeps telling me the investigation's the important part and nobody will answer that one."
"I don't know."
"That's what Bishop said."
"Bishop's not lying to you either."
Nash nodded and looked down the road for a while.
"I keep going back to the middle of it," he said.
"That's the part I can't — I've got the junction before, and I've got coming out the south end, and in between there's this thing that isn't dark, it's not anything, it's like reaching for a word you know you know.
" He flexed his hands on the grips. "And I think if I could get it back I'd know what happened to him. I think it's still in there."
"Kid."
"Yeah."
"Don't go looking for it," I said.
The light went green.
I have thought about those four minutes every day since, because it was the last conversation anybody had with Nash before he walked toward an empty row of cars and said it's right there.
I meant it. I want to say that. When I said talking, at that moment, in that lot, I meant talking.
The yard was four acres of dead cars behind chain link on the flat, and Cal Herrick came out of the office in a windbreaker with a clipboard and the specific weariness of a man who has been visited before.
"I know who you are," he said.
"Then this'll be quick."
"It's about the tank."
"It's about the tank."
"I don't ask where they come from," Herrick said. "That's the whole business model, son, and it's been legal since before you could ride."
Judah, easy: "Nobody's saying otherwise. We're asking about the road."
"The road." Herrick shifted the clipboard. "What about it."
"Twenty-eight years of contract pulls," I said. "Thirty-one fatals. You've had every one of those vehicles on a hook."
"Thirty-two."
Everything in me went still.
"Say that again."
Herrick's eyes moved.
That's it. That's all it was. A man's eyes moved off my face and toward the gate and back, half a second, the thing you learn to read in about four years of doing this badly and then permanently.
"Thirty-one," he said. "I misspoke."
"You said thirty-two."
"I said thirty-one."
"Cal." Judah, still easy, still hands loose. "It's fine. It's a number. Tell us about thirty-two."
"I want you off my property."
And I stepped forward.
That's the whole thing. That's the moment the report should say, if anybody wrote reports about me.
Not the shouting after. Not the rest of it.
Just: and Rafferty stepped forward, one step, inside a man's arms-length, which is not talking anymore, which is a sentence in a different language entirely.
Herrick swung the clipboard, because a scared man swings what he's holding.
I took it off him. That part's easy, it's always easy, and then I had him against the fence with a fistful of windbreaker and he was saying something and Judah was saying my name in the voice Judah uses about twice a year, and I want you to know that I heard both of them.
"Thirty-two," I said. "Who."
"I don't—"
"Who was thirty-two."
"There is no thirty-two," Herrick said, and he was crying, which is a thing that happens more than people think, "there's a car, there's a goddamn car, it comes in on the hook and I put it in the back and in the morning it's not there, it's happened four times, four times in twenty-eight years, and I stopped reporting it after the first because you know what they do to a man who reports that—"
"What car."
"A sedan," he said. "Brown. Bench seat. Cracked dash."
I let go of him.
And behind me, out at the gate, Nash said, "Raff?"
He wasn't on the bike.
He was standing about fifteen feet inside the fence, and he was looking down the row at something, and his face had gone the color of the sky at four in the morning.
"Nash. Get back on the—"
"It's right there," Nash said.
The row was maybe two hundred feet of stacked wrecks, three high, going away toward the back of the yard. Empty. Judah saw an empty row. Herrick saw an empty row. I saw an empty row.
"There's nothing there, kid."
"It's right there," Nash said, "it's got its lights on, why doesn't anybody—" and he took a step toward it.
I got about four feet.
I've gone over this a thousand times and I still cannot tell you what physically happened, and neither can Judah, and neither can Herrick, and Nash can't because Nash doesn't remember the yard at all.
What I've got is this: the kid took one step toward an empty row of dead cars, and then he was eleven feet to the left and off the ground and coming down on the corner of a flatbed trailer, and the sound was the worst sound I have ever heard, and I have heard some.
His leg was wrong in two places.
"Get the truck," Judah was saying, "get the truck, get the truck—"
I don't remember the drive.
They put six pins in Nash's femur at County and told us he'd walk fine in a year and that the hip was the thing they'd be watching, and he was awake enough by ten that night to ask me whether the pancakes were still happening, and I said yes, and went out into the hallway, and stood there for a while.
Here's what I did in that hallway for an hour, and I'd like it written down because it's the only useful thing I've ever done with my own head.
I ran it backward.
Not the yard — everybody runs the yard, the yard's the obvious part. I ran it back further. Back to the light where the kid asked me if Teodor suffered and I said don't go looking for it and then took him to a salvage yard where the thing that had eaten his memory kept a car.
Back to the lot, and a lie, and the specific hot feeling in my chest when a woman I'd been on a floor with three days earlier said nothing, it's a dead end in a voice I'd never heard her use.
Back to Emmett saying you're a hammer that's embarrassed about being a hammer and me deciding that was poetry instead of a warning.
There were about nine places where a different man puts a hand out and stops it.