Chapter 6 #2
"You said do the whole thing." Ash Delacroix has a voice like somebody talking you down off something. "Gideon. Tell them what she does in a day."
"Right now?"
"Right now."
So I told them. Four bikes in six days on a wood stove and no money. Diagnosed a fuel fault at sixty feet from under a truck. Called a machinist in Kingman who does not speak to human beings and got a deck cut on a Thursday. Fixed a Sportster in a parking lot with a pocketknife and a belt.
"And what does the club pay for engine work in a year?" said Ash. "Across four charters? Between us and Kasimir's contacts and Wren's recovery contracts — what do we spend on machine work and rebuilds?"
Roman's jaw moved. "Sixty-something."
"Seventy-one," said Ash, "last year, and forty percent of it went to two shops that overcharge us because they know we can't go anywhere else in November." He tapped the pad. "This isn't a woman's inheritance. This is vertical integration."
"That's a hell of a way to say it," I said.
"It's the only way to say it, Gideon, that's my entire point. I'm not arguing the moral case. Everybody in this room already agrees with the moral case, the moral case is why we're in this room. I'm telling you there's a business case underneath it and it's real and if you'd led with it—"
"If I'd led with it," I said, "it'd be a lie, and Roman would've heard it in four seconds."
"He would have," Roman agreed.
We sat there.
"Do the numbers anyway," said Roman, finally. "Ash. Do them properly, not the pitch. If it's two-forty against seventy-one a year of spend with a thirty-percent margin, then it's a fifteen-year payback and the answer's still no. If it's something else, come back to me."
Ash did the numbers. It took him about ninety seconds because he'd already done them on the ride over, which is why I love that man and why he is dangerous.
"Eleven years," he said.
"Eleven years."
"Eleven years, and that's before the note."
"Run it again with her doing outside work," I said. "She wouldn't be a captive shop. She'd have a highway. Fleet contracts, tow-ins, the whole 40."
Ash gave me a look of real sympathy, which is worse than anything Roman does.
"I did," he said. "That's the eleven. Without the outside work it's nineteen and I didn't say it out loud because I like you."
Bear, from the end of the table, in the voice of a man who has been thinking hard for forty minutes and has one contribution: "What if she paid us back?"
"She's got nothing, Bear."
"No, I mean — after. Out of the shop." He frowned at his own hands. "Like she owes it and works it off."
The room went very quiet.
"Bear," I said, "say what you just said back to yourself."
He did. I watched him get there. It took about four seconds and then his whole face came apart.
"Oh," said Bear. "Oh, no. No. Forget I— no."
"Yeah."
"That's the exact—"
"It's the exact thing, Bear."
"I'm going to go outside," said Bear, and did, and I have never in my life been prouder of a man for being wrong out loud in a room, because it was the moment every person at that table understood that there was no version of this that ended with a number over her head, and that whatever we did for Elodie Vasquez had to be something she could never, ever be billed for.
"Then it's no," said Roman Kade. "I'm sorry, Gideon. It's no from Hollow Ash and if your table votes yes on their own I'll tell you the same thing I'd tell mine — you'll be putting a lien on a clubhouse with four men's kids in it for a shop two counties away."
I lost the vote at my own table eight to three on the Friday.
Bear voted yes. Cricket doesn't vote, she's not a patch, she's something else the club has never had a word for.
Tuck voted no and then came out to the yard afterward and stood next to me for a while without saying anything, which is Tuck's version of an apology and is worth more than most people's speeches.
"It's not that we don't want to," he said eventually.
"I know."
"It's just that we've got forty thousand dollars."
"I know, Tuck."
"And two hundred and forty is—"
"I know."
He shut up. We looked at the yard. Somebody had left the compressor on and it kicked in, ran twenty seconds, kicked out.
"So what do you tell her?" said Tuck.
"I don't know yet."
"You want the honest thing or the nice thing?"
"When have you ever offered me a choice."
"Fair." Tuck put his hands in his pockets. "The honest thing is I voted no and I'd vote no again tomorrow, and I'm not going to stand out here and pretend a sunset converted me. My kid's eleven. You put a lien on that clubhouse, her name's on it, whatever the paper says."
"I know."
"But here's the other honest thing, and then I'm going home." He scuffed the gravel. "In three weeks, you have never once asked this table for anything that wasn't money."
I turned my head.
"Say that again."
"I said all you've asked us for is money, and money's the one thing we haven't—"
"Tuck. What's in that bay?"
"Which bay?"
"Ours. The one behind the clubhouse."
"Junk," said Tuck.
"What's under the junk?"
And he turned and looked at it properly, which I don't think he'd done in four years. Roll-up door, sagging. Forty years of pallets, a dead ride-on mower, nine boxes of somebody's Christmas.
"...A floor," he said slowly. "And a beam. And the three-phase we ran in for the compressor in '09 and never hooked up."
The compressor kicked in behind us. Ran twenty seconds. Kicked out.
"I need to go be a nuisance," I said.
"You just did four hours of nuisance and lost eight to three."
"I lost eight to three on the wrong question." I picked my helmet up off the tank. "Go home, Tuck. Tell your kid the lien's off."
And that's the question. That's the whole job, right there, that's what nobody warns you about when they hand you a gavel at twenty-seven: not the fights, not the funerals — the drive home afterward, with the true answer sitting on the tank in front of you, and two hours to work out how to say it.
I rode out to Ash Fork the next morning and she was up on the lift bay welding a bracket, and she killed the torch when she saw my face and pushed the hood back.
"Well," she said.
"They said no."
"Both of them?"
"Both of them. Roman first, then mine, eight to three."
She nodded slowly. Set the torch down. Wiped her hands on her thighs.
"Okay," she said. "Okay. That's — that's fine, that's actually completely fine, because I told you—"
"Elodie."
"—I told you, on the trolley, I said you can't fix it, and you said nine days, which was very sweet and extremely male—"
"Elodie."
"—and now it's Saturday and we're all adults, so—"
"Elodie." I got up onto the bay and took the hood out of her hands. "I'm not done."
"Gideon, they voted."
"They voted on money," I said. "Money's one answer. It's the first one you reach for and it's the one everybody's got in their hand, so it's the one you check first. It came up short."
"So?"
"So it took me two hours on the highway to work out that I asked the wrong question." I put the hood on the bench. "I asked them to buy you a building. I should have asked them what we do about a mechanic."
She looked at me for a long moment.
Then, out in the lot, a car door shut. Expensive. That soft, heavy, engineered thunk that no vehicle on that highway makes, and both of us heard it, because both of us have ears.
"Who's that," I said.
Elodie leaned around the doorframe.
Long black car. Not a truck. Nothing in that lot has ever been a long black car.
"I don't know," she said. "But he's parked in the office spot."