Epilogue #2
He did it on the inside of my left forearm, which is the wrong place for a name-ink and everybody said so, and I told everybody that I look at my left forearm eleven thousand times a day when I'm holding something and that this was the entire point, and Thorn said, "She's right," and that was the end of the debate forever.
It says Marsh in small letters.
And under it, smaller still, because I asked, and because he understood immediately and did not make me explain:
.022 cold
"What's that?" said Bear.
"Valve lash."
"What's it mean?"
"It means fine is a scam," I said.
Gideon, across the fire, did not say anything at all. He just put his hand over his mouth for a second and then went and got another beer, and Cricket collected eleven dollars off Tuck without breaking eye contact with anyone.
Here's the last thing.
My father's building sat empty for a year.
Vane sent the sign man's number anyway, in November, in an envelope with no letter in it, just a business card for a man in Flagstaff who does gold-size lettering the old way.
I kept it. I want to be honest about that too.
I kept it in the drawer with my father's rag and I have taken it out about six times and put it back, because the sign it was meant for is on a building I said no to, and the sign it could be for is a piece of plasma-cut steel that Izzy made me with her own hands and a wobble in the S.
Gideon asked me once whether I was going to call him.
"For what?"
"For the new one. Straighten the S."
"Absolutely not."
"Elodie, the man does gold size—"
"The wobble's the point, Gideon." I didn't even look up. "Anybody can buy a straight sign. That one cost somebody a Sunday."
Vane never did anything with the building.
No tenant, no sale, no sign change — the old one is still up there with the D coming off it, and the pumps are dead, and the weeds have come up through the gravel where the Grimm Riders parked four bikes on the day everything started.
A shell company called Sablewood Holdings pays the taxes on time every year and does nothing else at all.
I stopped driving past after about four months. It's a mile out of my way and there's no reason for it and I'm not sixteen.
That's a lie, actually. Let me do it properly, since I've done everything else properly.
I stopped driving past because of the sign.
The sign is still up there. VASQUEZ & DAUGHTER, hand-painted in 1984 in a serif nobody uses anymore, with the D coming off it.
And for the first four months I'd go by at dusk once a week and look at it, and every single time I'd think the same three words, in the same order, like a tune you can't get out.
Come and get it.
And one Tuesday in September I got as far as the shoulder with the engine off and my hand on the tank, doing sums about a ladder and a can of paint and a building I do not own, and I sat there for eleven minutes.
And then I rode home to a shop with my name on the wall in bad welded steel with a wobble in the S, and I have not been back since, and that is the entire achievement of my adult life.
Gideon didn't stop.
He does a loop, most weeks, late — down the 40 and back, because he says he thinks better moving, which is true, and because he is checking on a building he will never admit he is checking on, which is also true.
He came in at eleven-forty on a Tuesday in March with his helmet still in his hand and his face doing something I'd never seen it do.
"There's a light on."
"Where?"
"In your father's office."
I put my coffee down.
"Squatters," I said.
"There's a car in the lot. Nice one. And the light's on and there's a man at the desk.
" Gideon set the helmet on the bench very carefully, the way he does when his hands need somewhere to go.
"Elodie. He's doing books. He's got two monitors and a ten-key and a lamp, and he's sitting in your father's office at eleven at night doing accounting. "
"Did you get a look at him?"
"I did more than that." He pulled his phone out. "I went past twice. Second time I stopped on the shoulder and used the zoom."
He turned the screen around.
Grainy. Green-lit. A man in his sixties, glasses down his nose, one hand on a ten-key, the other holding a pen against his lip in a gesture I did not know and Gideon clearly did, because he had gone the color of the concrete.
"Who is that," I said.
Gideon didn't answer for a second.
"That's Ollie Pratt," he said.
"Who's Ollie Pratt?"
"He's the man who should have had my gavel." He put the phone face down on the bench. "He went into the back of a livestock trailer outside Seligman in 2011. Closed casket. I carried the front left corner of it and I've stood at his stone every October for fourteen years."
The compressor kicked in.
Ran twenty seconds.
Kicked out.
"Gideon," I said carefully, "how sure are you?"
And Gideon Marsh, who reads contracts, and who has never in his life said a thing louder than it needed saying, picked the phone back up and looked at it again.
"He holds a pen like that because he broke that thumb in '98," he said. "I was there. I drove him to the clinic."
Outside, a truck went through its gears on the 40.
"So what do we do?" I said.
"Nothing tonight." He put the phone in his pocket. "Tomorrow I call Pennsylvania."
"And what do you tell them?"
He didn't answer right away. He walked to the bay door and stood there looking east, at nothing, at a mile of dark highway with a building at the end of it.
"When Ollie died," he said, "the casket was closed.
Vehicle fire. There was a coroner's finding and a dental match and a funeral with two hundred people at it, and I stood at the front left corner and I have never once, in fourteen years, thought about it for more than four seconds at a time, because what kind of a man goes over his friend's funeral looking for a gap? "
"Gideon."
"There was a gap." He said it very quietly. "There was always a gap. Fourteen years I've been running a charter that everybody in it thinks I'm minding for a dead man, and there was a gap, and I never looked at it, because looking at it would have meant wanting something."
I came over and stood next to him.
"And now?"
"Now there's a light on in your father's office," said Gideon, "and Callum Vane has spent a year paying property tax on an empty building for the pleasure of keeping something safe inside it."
"Not something."
"No." He looked at me. "Somebody. He wasn't buying property.
"He was buying a bookkeeper."
Out on the 40 a truck went through its gears, and a mile east of us a man who has been legally dead since 2011 turned a page under a desk lamp, and the compressor kicked in behind us and ran twenty seconds and kicked out.
"Call Roman tonight," I said.
"It's three hours ahead. It's two in the morning there."
"Gideon." I took the phone out of his pocket and put it in his hand. "Call Roman tonight."