Chapter Thirteen
Roan
Torch calls me at four in the afternoon from a gas station in Coldwater and I can hear it in his voice before he says a word.
“It went wrong.”
“How wrong.”
“There is a man in Sunrise Hospital with his hand in a bag,” Torch says.
I put my head against the door frame of my own kitchen.
“Say it in order.”
“Junior went in the office and I was in the shop with Wade and there is a lift with a Suburban up on it and two of them working under it, and one of them goes for a bar.” He is talking fast and flat, which is what Ellis does.
“So Wade puts him on the floor. And then the other one comes off the wall with something, and Junior has come back through the door, and it went round for about eleven seconds.”
“What took the hand.”
“The bar,” Torch says. “His own bar. Wade got it off him and did the arm and the man had his hand up on the frame of the lift and it went through the wrist. Roan, I want that understood. Nobody set out to.”
“That is not going to matter.”
“I know it is not going to matter.”
“What did you take.”
“Nothing. There was nothing. Two Suburbans, a Charger, four pallets of oil, and a back room with a desk in it that Junior went through and there is nothing in it, there is not so much as a rifle bag.” He breathes.
“Roan, the shop was working. They had a customer’s car up on the lift.
There was a woman in the waiting room with a kid. ”
“Where is she.”
“She went out the front when it started.”
“So she has got a phone.”
“She has got a phone,” Torch says.
I stand in my kitchen with the light on over the sink.
“Come home,” I say.
“Sutter is going to call you.”
“I know.”
“Roan, they did not have it. I want to say that out loud once and then I will stop.” He stops for a second.
“There is a thing that happens in a room when men are hiding something and it did not happen. That old boy who lost the hand, he was sat on the floor with his arm up and he was screaming at us about what, he did not know what we were in there for. He was asking. He was asking with his hand off.”
“Men lie in extremity.”
“They do.”
“Well then.”
“Yeah,” Torch says, and he does not believe it, and neither do I, and both of us put it away, and that is the exact moment. I have gone back to it since. That is where it turned, four in the afternoon on a Friday, on a phone, with two men agreeing to stop listening to a thing they had both heard.
Sutter calls at seven.
“Roan.”
“Sutter.”
“I have got a fifty-nine-year-old man in a hospital in Las Vegas with a hand in a bag on ice that they have already told me is not going back on.”
“I have heard.”
“His name is Terrell Guidry and he has worked in that shop for nine years and he is not a member of anything.” A pause. “He came off a construction crew in oh-nine. He puts brake pads on Suburbans.”
“Was your shop working guns out of that bay.”
“What?”
“It is a straight question.”
“No,” Sutter says. “No, we do not put anything through that shop, because that shop has a waiting room with a coffee machine in it and my mother-in-law gets her oil done there. What are you talking about, guns.”
“Twelve crates went out of my yard Thursday morning.”
There is a silence on the phone, and it is the wrong shape.
I have spent nine years listening to men on phones. I know what a man sounds like when he is enjoying it and holding still. And what comes back down the line is four seconds of nothing and then a voice with the polish off it.
“You think I took a load off your yard,” Sutter says.
“I think somebody did.”
“With what?” It goes up. “With who? Roan, I have got a truce that pays me eleven months of the year and a fourth charter opening in Fallon in November and you think I have sent men two hundred and forty miles up a road with one way through to lift crates off a salvage yard with dogs on it.”
“You sent a bag up that road.”
And there it is. He does not deny that. That is the one thing in the whole conversation he does not deny, and I hear him not deny it, and I put it in the column where it belongs, and then I let the rest go past me, because a man who has done one thing has done the other one.
That is what I did. I want it written the way it happened.
“That is a different conversation,” Sutter says.
“Is it.”
“That is a conversation we are going to have in a room, with paper, at a meet, like grown men.” His voice comes back down.
“And I will tell you now, I was going to give you until November on that. I was going to let you sit with it. That is finished. Terrell Guidry is fifty-nine and he is right-handed.”
“Sutter.”
“Do not,” he says. “Do not call me again before the meet.”
He hangs up.
I stand there in my kitchen with the phone in my hand, and I want to be clear about what I felt, because I have had eleven months to find the word for it and the word is relief.
Not about the hand. God, no.
About the fact that a man in Coldwater was angry at me on a phone, and that whatever else was true, the thing that was chewing my club was out there and had a name and a body shop, and not in a truck on an interstate being driven by a woman who leaves a fifth strap on because four is not right.
Church, Saturday, eight in the morning.
Nine men. Wade has got his wrist strapped and Junior will not sit still.
“Say it,” Deacon says.
Torch says it. All of it, in order, without embroidery, including the woman in the waiting room and the kid, and including that there was nothing in the shop, and Junior tries twice to say something about the desk and Deacon shuts him down both times.
“So it was not there,” Hollis says.
“It was not there,” Torch says.
“Then it is somewhere else,” Junior says. “They have got four properties in that.”
“Junior,” Deacon says.
“I am just saying.”
“You are just saying the thing that lets you not think about a man’s hand,” Deacon says. “Sit back.”
Junior sits back.
“Alright,” I say. “Where are we actually. Hollis.”
“Buyer at the Line has gone,” Hollis says. “That is done. He was polite about it, which is worse.”
“Fourteen months,” Torch says.
“Fourteen months,” Hollis says. “And the second thing is that we are now a club that has put a civilian in a hospital in Clark County. Which means a police report, which means an insurance claim on a body shop, which means paper in a city where I have got no relationships whatsoever.”
“That is theirs to manage,” Torch says.
“It is theirs to manage and they will manage it,” Hollis says, “and they will manage it in a way that costs them nothing and costs us something, because their counsel is patched and mine is a legal pad.”
“Roan,” Priest says. “Sutter.”
“Sutter says they did not take it.”
“Do we believe him,” Fritz says.
Everybody looks up.
That is the first thing Fritz has said in this room in two days and he says it flat, with his hands on the table, looking at me.
“No,” Torch says.
“I did not ask you,” Fritz says. “I asked him.”
“Curtis,” Deacon says.
“It is a fair question,” I say. “No. We do not believe him. He did not deny the bag.”
“That is not the same,” Fritz says.
“It is close enough.”
“It is not close enough. It is not remotely close enough.” He is not raising his voice.
That is the thing that makes the room go still, that Fritz Nakagawa is saying the most confrontational thing anybody has said at this table in a year in the voice he uses about a wheel bearing.
“A club that puts a woman in front of a man for four months and takes photographs is doing a slow careful thing with lawyers in it, and lifting twelve crates off a yard forty miles up a canyon is a fast stupid thing that starts a war they do not want. Those are not the same club.”
“They are the same club,” Torch says.
“They are the same club doing two things that cancel each other out.”
“So who took it,” Junior says.
Fritz does not answer.
He puts his hands flat on the table and he does not answer, and it goes about two seconds too long, and Deacon’s head comes round.
“Curtis,” Deacon says.
“Marcus.”
“You called Ada at seven on Thursday morning.”
“I did.”
“Before anybody in this room had said the word Ada.”
“Before anybody in this room had said the word Ada,” Fritz says.
“Why.”
“Because I am the road captain,” Fritz says, “and when something goes off a yard on my road at night, I call the woman who sees everything on it. I would have been at fault if I had not.”
“That is true,” Hollis says quietly.
“It is true,” Deacon says. “Curtis, I am going to ask you a direct question at this table and I want you to think about the rule before you answer it.”
The room has gone completely still.
Priest has stopped writing. I can see the nib off the page.
“Ask it,” Fritz says.
“Did anything move through the Neck on Wednesday night or Thursday morning,” Deacon says.
And Fritz Nakagawa sits in a concrete room in front of eight men with his hands flat on the table and does not blink.
“I am not going to answer that,” he says.
Nobody breathes.
“Say it again,” Deacon says.
“I am not going to answer that.”
“You know what the rule says.”
“I know what the rule says better than anybody in this room,” Fritz says.
“The rule says I can refuse. It says I cannot lie. I am doing the first one and I am not doing the second one, and I want it written in the book exactly like that, Wendell, in those words, because in about six months somebody is going to read it back and I want it to say what I actually did.”
Priest looks at me.
“Write it,” I say.
He writes it.
The room stays exactly where it is for about eleven seconds, and I have been in some rooms, and I have never sat in eleven seconds like that.
“Are you going to ask me another one,” Fritz says.
“No,” Deacon says.
“Marcus.”
“No,” Deacon says again.
And that is the part I did not understand until months later, and I have gone back to it a hundred times.
Marcus Oyelaran had it right there. He had a road captain refusing to answer a question about the Neck on the night twelve crates went out of a bay, and every other man at that table was already three hundred miles away in Coldwater thinking about a body shop, and Deacon could have asked the second question.
He asks nothing.
He looks at Fritz.
He looks at him for a very long time, with that flat face and his hands on the table, and Fritz looks back and does not look away, and the whole room sits in it and does not know what it is watching.
Then Deacon says, “Doors.”
Everybody stands. Junior is talking about the other three properties before he is out of the chair.
I stay where I am.
Priest closes the book and squares it up and stands, and stops.
“Roan.”
“Say it.”
“That was your road captain telling this table that the thing we are all chasing is not in Coldwater,” Priest says, “and every man in here heard it as him being awkward about a phone call.”
“I heard it.”
“Did you.”
“Wendell.”
“Because there is a version of this where a man refuses to answer a question in this room to protect somebody,” Priest says, “and there is not a long list of people he would do that for.”
I look at him.
Fifty-eight years old, twenty-six years patched, the book under his arm, standing in the doorway of the assay office with the light behind him. Looking at me steadily, the way he has looked at me since I was a boy in that yard.
Waiting.
I have thought about that face more than I have thought about anything in my life.
“He is the road captain,” I say. “He is protecting the road. That is what he is protecting.”
Priest holds it for another second.
“Right,” he says. “Yes. That is what I thought.”
And he goes out into the bar room, and I sit alone in a concrete box with the door open, and Terrell Guidry is fifty-nine and right-handed and I do not think about him once for the rest of the day.