Chapter 2 #2
"Ash Fork's two hours west," I said. "There's a bay behind the clubhouse that's got a compressor and forty years of junk in it.
It's not a shop yet. It could be a shop in a month.
We've got recovery work coming through from the Pennsylvania charter, we've got four charters' worth of bikes, and we've got — currently — a guy called Tuck, who is enthusiastic. "
"Is Tuck good?"
"Tuck sorted the fasteners by length."
She laughed. Then she stopped laughing, and it was like watching a light get switched off from another room.
"I can't," she said.
"Okay."
"That's it? Okay?"
"Should it be something else?"
"Most people ask why."
"Do you want to be asked why?"
"No."
"Then okay," I said.
She stood there with her hands on the bench and her back to me and I watched her shoulders do about four different things.
"You could offer me more money," she said. "That's what people do. They think it's a money answer, so they go up, and then when I say no again they get to be insulted, and then they leave, and everybody's tidy."
"Would more money fix it?"
"No."
"Then it'd be a waste of both our time and I'd look like a fool." I picked up the flashlight, which I had, at some point, put down without being yelled at. "I'm going to ask you one thing and then I'll drop it."
"Ask."
"Is anybody hurting you?"
She turned around. Her face was — I've thought about this a lot since. It wasn't scared and it wasn't offended. It was tired, in a very specific way. The way a person looks when you've asked them a question they have answered in their own head nine hundred times and lost the argument every time.
"No," she said. "Nobody's ever laid a hand on me in my life."
"That's not what I asked."
"It's what you asked."
"It's what I said," I said. "It's not what I asked."
The wall clock ticked. Somewhere out on the interstate a truck went through its gears.
"Go home, Gideon," she said, not unkindly. "It's two hours. You've got a wasp to tell people about."
I got as far as the pumps.
Then I stood in the dark next to my bike for a while looking at the building, because I am a man who reads contracts, and because a building will tell you the truth if you let it.
Here is what the building said.
The sign: VASQUEZ & DAUGHTER, hand-painted, forty years old, the D flaking. Nobody has painted that sign in a decade and nobody has taken it down either, which means one person loves it and one person hasn't got around to hating it enough.
The office: newer window unit, blinds, a space heater visible through the glass, a nice chair.
The shop: no heat at all except a wood stove with a pipe going out through a hole cut in the wall with a saw by somebody in a hurry.
The loft window over the parts room: a blanket nailed across it.
Two vehicles in the side lot with current plates and one with a college parking sticker. A house behind, lit, four windows.
And in the shop, at two in the morning, one light on and a woman still working, in a dead man's coveralls taken in twice, on a bike she wasn't being paid for.
You could put every one of those facts in front of a judge and get nothing.
That's what I kept running into, standing there in the cold with my hand on the tank.
Every individual line is legal. A man can have a nicer chair than his mechanic.
A man can heat his office and not his shop. A person can sleep where she likes.
It's arithmetic. She'd used that word, hadn't she. Out in the lot, flat, like a woman quoting somebody.
The last thing I looked at was the sign. Somebody had painted it by hand, forty years ago, in a serif you don't see anymore, with the kind of care that costs a week. And under VASQUEZ, in letters half the size, the word DAUGHTER, and the D coming away in flakes the size of a thumbnail.
Not the whole word. Just the first letter.
I stood there in a stranger's lot at half past two in the morning and got genuinely, unreasonably angry about a letter.
I have negotiated with sheriffs, banks, and one genuinely frightening man from Philadelphia. I know what a hostage situation looks like when there's no rope in it.
I rode back to Ash Fork and got in at four and sat on the steps of the clubhouse until it got light, and then I called Roman Kade in Pennsylvania, which is three hours ahead, which meant he'd been up for two hours already because Roman Kade is a lunatic.
"Marsh."
"I need to ask about money."
A pause. In Roman's world a pause is a paragraph.
"We don't have money," he said. "That's not a negotiating position, that's a fact. We're sixty short on the foundry note and Ash is doing origami with the numbers."
"I know."
"So what are you asking?"
I looked out at the lot, at the six bikes and the stack of pallets and the sign over our own door.
"Nothing yet," I said. "I'm going to go be a nuisance for a couple of weeks and then I'll call you back with an actual number and you can say no to something specific."
"That's the most alarming sentence you've ever said to me."
"I'm aware."
"Gideon." Roman's voice did the thing it does, dropped into that flat president register that means I'm about to be a friend and then immediately not one. "Is this a woman?"
"It's a shop."
"That's a yes with a hat on."
"It's a shop," I said, "with the best ear in the state standing in it, working for room and board, and I'm going to need about four hours to explain the paperwork, and you're going to hate all of it."
Down the line I heard him sit down.
"Before you do," he said, "one question, and I want the true answer, because you're about to spend two weeks building a case and I'd rather you built the right one."
"Go on."
"Does she want out?"
I thought about the way she'd said no to the job. Not scared. Not evasive. Flat, and fast, and closed, like a woman shutting a valve she's shut a thousand times.
"I don't know," I said.
"That's the true answer."
"It is."
"Then here's the free advice and then I'll shut up and listen for four hours.
" Roman's voice went somewhere I hadn't heard it go in a while.
"Find out. Before the money, before the lawyer, before you do anything clever.
Because I've watched men spend everything they had getting somebody out of a room, and about a third of the time it turns out the person wasn't in a room, she was in a fight, and what she needed was somebody to hold her coat. "
"And the other two-thirds?"
"The other two-thirds," said Roman Kade, "you go get her out. Start with the paperwork."