Chapter 7
SPARK
There are four Thunder Bastards bikes parked nose-out in front of Wade’s barn in broad daylight, lined up where anybody passing on the county road can count them, and today this farm is loud.
A prospect whose name I forgot rides the lane end to end every hour, slow, pipes wide open. Cross works down the fence line with a staple gun and a stack of printed notices,
PRIVATE PROPERTY
NO TRESPASSING,
one every hundred feet like mile markers.
Brick’s had the barn doors off their busted hinge since morning, planning the frame square, keeping his eyes on the wood as he works.
Boulder walked me through the whole of it at sunup, before he left for Tarver, his hand warm on the small of my back like it belongs there.
Cole. I’ve been carrying his name around all morning like a bolt held between my lips while my hands are full, safe where nobody can see it. Nothing’s been said out loud yet about the two of us. Everything got said in that gray morning light all the same.
“They want a quiet barn,” he said, watching the prospect make his first slow pass. “So we make everything about that barn loud. We’re making it the loudest piece of ground in Carrow County.”
He’s going to visit his lawyer, something about the estate, the deed on record. Bikes and floodlights are the rest of it. And the floodlights are mine.
Wade’s old generator hasn’t run since spring.
It takes me the morning, carb apart and soaking, fresh fuel, new plug, and when it catches on the second pull, settling into a steady knock, Brick looks over from the doors to give the machine a nod, like it earned it.
I rig the two floodlight stands Cross hauled out here, one covering the lane, one over the barn doors, and start on the motion sensor for the gate.
“When you’re done,” Cross says, feeding me wire off the coil, “we need this whole lane to light up if a deer mouse breathes near that gate.”
“It’ll light up before a mouse looks at it.”
Whiskey’s bike is parked inside the barn with the seat off.
Two weeks that electrical gremlin’s been chewing on him, and this morning he hauled the bike out here on a trailer, said if he’s pulling farm shifts anyway it might as well break down where the mechanic is.
Between generator pulls I trace the harness and find it, a ground spliced with electrical tape instead of a proper connector, buried under the tank.
Cross doesn't even look over from the fence line, just holds out a flat hand, and Whiskey walks a folded ten into it like a man walks a folded ten into it like a man who knew since breakfast he was going to lose it.
“That’s on me,” Whiskey says when I hold up the offending wire, not even embarrassed. “I’ll fix it right this time.”
“Obviously.”
Casey comes out at midday in Songbird’s car, a basket riding shotgun.
“Songbird sent me. Also she said if I came back with all the biscuits, she’d know you forgot to eat.” She sets the basket on the tailgate of Wade’s truck and climbs up next to it, no ceremony, like we’ve done this a hundred times before.
We eat watching Brick hang the first door back on its new hinge, cussing it gently. She tells me about working the floor at The Hollow, the three-bedroom unit upstairs she sleeps in, how the cook hollers about everything all night.
“Weird, isn’t it,” she says, finally, “when a place full of strangers starts holding you up.”
She sleeps over a bar. I sleep in a borrowed bed at the compound while my own house stands empty at night.
Brick comes over when the second door swings true, wipes his palms on his jeans, and doesn’t look me over at all.
“Where do you want your light hung, boss?” Gruff, no edge on it anywhere.
I show him, and he holds the stand steady while I run the wire. He hands me the right screwdriver before I ask for it. It’s not sorry out loud. From Brick, I’d bet this is what sorry looks like.
The generator needs heavier wire to the gate than what’s left on Cross’s coil. Wade never trusted memory over paper, so I fetch his parts book from the truck to check what he ran to the well pump the year he wired it.
Wade wrote everything down. Gauges, gaps, torque specs, what he paid for a belt in 2019 and where he bought it. I’m flipping for the well-pump pages when the margins start talking.
Sep 28. Dogs at the gate again. Two trucks. Told them no.
Oct 3. Dogs. Same lean one doing the talking. No again.
Oct 8. Dogs twice today. Chest tight since supper. Not telling the girl.
It takes me a second. Dogs. Gallows Hounds.
The generator keeps up its knock, Brick’s drill going somewhere overhead, and I stand there with the book open, reading three lines over and over in handwriting I’d know anywhere. Two weeks. He wrote it in the margins of a parts book and carried it quiet so I wouldn’t have to know.
The next day there’s no entry. The next day is October ninth.
“Cross.” My voice comes out raw. “Come read this.”
He reads it and goes very still over that last line, and when he looks up he’s frowning. “Which day did he pass?”
“The ninth.”
Cross doesn’t say anything for a moment. When he does, his voice has dropped. “My log’s got colors on your line October ninth. Two trucks and a bike, half the afternoon.”
He takes his phone out and photographs the three margins without asking, quick, businesslike, a man securing evidence before anything else can happen to it.
I strip my gloves off slow. I set the book down gentle on the tailgate, and the whole day goes cold on me at once, the generator knock reaching me from a long way off.
They stood at that gate squeezing a sick man’s heart for two weeks. Then they sat on our line and watched the house for hours on the day it finally quit in him.
Where was I? An hour away, buying a part we’d never use.
“Spark,” Cross says, careful. “Boulder needs to hear this.”
“He needs to hear it from me,” I’m already climbing into the truck.
The floodlight over the barn doors kicks on behind me as I roll down the lane, brand new, dusk-triggered, doing its job. It lights up the whole yard like a warning.