COLD BLOODED KING (Copperhead MC #1)

Chapter One · Evelyn

Chapter One

EVELYN

The gas light had been on for nineteen miles, and Evelyn Chase had spent every one of them doing arithmetic she already knew the answer to.

That was the list. She had run it four times since Roanoke, the way you press on a bruise to see whether it still hurts.

The road had stopped being a road about six miles back.

It was still paved, technically, but the state had given up on the shoulders and the mountain had been quietly taking the rest for a decade.

Rock face on her left, close enough that she could have reached out the window and dragged her knuckles along it.

Nothing at all on her right. Just a guardrail with a fifteen-foot section missing, and beyond that a dark that went down farther than her headlights could follow.

Somebody had gone through that rail. Nobody had been in a hurry to fix it.

Evelyn kept both hands on the wheel and took the curve at twenty.

She had picked the road for the reason anyone picks a road like this.

Two hours ago, in the parking lot of a gas station outside Christiansburg, she had opened the atlas she had bought with cash at a truck stop in Maryland and looked for the smallest name she could find.

Not a town with an exit sign. Not a town with a hospital.

A name in the smallest type the atlas printed, at the end of a line that did not connect to anything on the other side.

Blackthorn Gap. Population eight hundred and ninety-one, according to a sign she had passed a mile back that had been shot at least twice.

The road bottomed out and the mountain let go of her all at once, and there it was, laid along a creek in a hollow so narrow the whole town fit on one side of the water.

One traffic light, swinging. A church. A brick building with a hand-painted sign that said FEED and then a word she could not read.

Four or five storefronts, three of them dark in a way that was not about the hour.

It was ten past nine on a Tuesday in February and there was not one human being on the street.

Evelyn slowed, and the engine coughed, and something under the hood made a sound she had never heard a car make.

“No,” she said. “No, no, no.”

She got another quarter mile out of it. She got past the traffic light, past the church, past a shuttered diner with a plywood sheet where the front window belonged, and then the Corolla shuddered like something had gone out of it and coasted, and she steered it toward the only lit thing left in the world.

A gravel lot. A chain-link fence with a run of razor wire along the top. Stacks of dead cars three high behind it, black shapes against a blacker mountain, and past those the yellow rectangle of an open bay door with light spilling out into the cold.

A sign over the gate, steel letters bolted to a crossbar. HARROW SALVAGE AND HAULING. Below it, smaller, EST. 1984.

And parked in a row along the front of the building, close enough together that their bars almost touched, a dozen motorcycles.

The car rolled the last twenty feet and stopped on its own, and the engine ticked, and the silence afterward was enormous.

Evelyn sat with her hands in her lap and did not move.

She had a dead alternator and four hundred dollars and no plan past tonight, and she had put herself in a hollow with one road in, which was the same as one road out, and every instinct she had built over the last week and a half was screaming at her to get out of the car and start walking.

Instead she looked at the bikes.

Nine days ago she had been a forensic accountant with a lease, a dentist, and a plan to be a partner by forty.

She had opened a subfolder in a routing archive because the totals were forty thousand dollars off across a quarter and she was the kind of person who could not sleep with a number like that in her head.

She had found the second set of books. She had sat in a beige cubicle under a fluorescent light and read the manifests and understood, in about ninety seconds, precisely what was riding in those trucks and precisely whose operating authorities were carrying it.

And she had not called the police, because two of the names in the routing file had badges.

So she was not going to be scared of a row of parked motorcycles.

She got out of the car.

The cold came up off the creek and went through her coat like the coat was a rumor. She could smell woodsmoke and cut metal and, underneath it, the green mineral smell of moving water. Somewhere in the yard a dog started barking, then stopped, like someone had said its name.

The lot was bigger than it had looked from the road.

Past the stacked cars there was a second fence, and behind that, backed up in a neat row with their noses out, four flatbed trucks and a lowboy trailer, all of them clean, all of them lettered on the door with the same steel-colored logo as the gate.

There was a fuel island. There was a scale.

There was a light on in a portable office with a window unit hanging out of the side of it in February.

It was not a chop shop. She had audited chop shops. This was a company.

Evelyn walked to the gate and put her hand on it, and it swung open under her fingers, unlocked, which she did not know how to feel about.

“Hello?”

Her voice went nowhere. The mountains took it.

She was halfway across the gravel when a man came out of the bay door, and she stopped, because he did not walk out of it the way you walk out of a building.

He filled the doorway first and then he was outside, and the light was behind him for a second, and then he stepped clear of it and she could see him.

He was tall and built thick through the shoulders and chest, a man who had been strong for so long that his body had stopped asking him about it.

Dark hair going grey above the ears, cut short.

A beard, mostly black. Forearms bare to the cold, marked all over with ink she could not read at this distance except for one piece low on his right arm, a coiled shape with a wedge for a head.

And a vest. Black leather, worn soft, with a patch across the back she could not see and a small rectangle over his heart that said, in white letters, PRESIDENT.

He was maybe thirty feet away and he had not said anything, and that was somehow worse than if he had.

“My car died,” Evelyn said.

“I heard it.”

His voice was low and unhurried. He came another few steps and stopped, and she understood that he had stopped on purpose, at a distance he had chosen, and that he was letting her see him do it.

“Is there a station in town?”

“There’s a pump at Ruth’s. Ruth closed at six.” He looked past her at the Corolla, then at the plates, then back. “That’s not a gas problem.”

“No. I think it’s the alternator.”

“It’s the alternator.” He said it the way other people say the date. “Battery’s been carrying you since about Elliston.”

“How could you possibly know that.”

“Because you made it here.” He tilted his head half an inch toward the road behind her. “That’s a twelve-mile grade with no lights on it. You had your headlights on. Battery’s flat as a nickel.”

Evelyn folded her arms, mostly to stop her hands from doing anything. “Can you fix it?”

“Yeah.”

“Tonight?”

“No.”

She waited for the rest of it. There was no rest of it.

He stood there in the cold in short sleeves and looked at her with an expression that gave her absolutely nothing, and she had spent those days being looked at by gas station cameras and toll gantries and a state trooper at a weigh station outside Front Royal, and none of that had felt like this.

He was not looking at her face. He was looking at her hands, and her shoes, and the back seat of the car, which was empty, and then her hands again.

“You got a bag,” he said.

“I have a purse.”

“That’s what I said.”

Evelyn’s mouth went dry. “It was a fast trip.”

“Uh huh.”

The dog barked once more, deeper in the yard, and this time nobody stopped it, and she flinched, and she watched him see her flinch.

Something changed in his face then. Not softened. Nothing about him looked capable of softening. But something moved, and settled, and when he spoke again the unhurried thing in his voice had a floor under it.

“There’s a can of gas in the bay,” he said. “Five gallons. That’ll get you to the interstate and about forty miles up it. I’ll jump the battery and it’ll hold as long as you don’t stop and don’t run the heat. You stop, it’s done.”

“How much?”

“For gas out of a can?”

“How much.”

He looked at her a beat longer than the question needed. “Nothing.”

“I’d rather pay.”

“I know you would.” He turned and started back toward the bay, and over his shoulder, without any particular emphasis, he said, “Come inside. It’s nine degrees out here and you’re shaking.”

“I’m not.”

“Okay.”

She followed him anyway.

The bay was enormous and warm and smelled like oil and coffee.

A pickup sat over a pit with its front end apart.

Along the back wall, a workbench that ran forty feet, and above it, hung on nails in a row, a great many tools and one framed photograph, black and white, of seven men standing in front of this same building when the building was new.

There was a whiteboard beside the office door with a week of work on it, and Evelyn read it before she could stop herself, because reading a board like that was the thing she had been paid to do for most of a decade.

Six columns. Truck numbers down the left.

Loads, destinations, seal numbers, driver initials.

Somebody had written it in a careful blocky hand and updated it in a different-colored marker, which meant two people touched it, which meant somebody checked somebody.

Four of the loads were interstate. Two of those were brokered. All of it was ordinary, and all of it was legal, and she felt the drive shift against her ribs when she breathed.

Two other men were in there. One under the truck, boots out. One at the bench with his back turned, and he did not turn around, and Evelyn understood that he had been told not to.

“Sit,” the president said, and pointed at a folding chair by a kerosene heater, and she sat, and only when she was sitting did she realize how badly her legs had been shaking.

He filled a paper cup from a percolator that looked older than she was and put it in her hands without asking whether she wanted it. His fingers were warm. Hers were not.

“Diesel,” he said.

She looked up. “Sorry?”

“That’s what I go by.”

“Oh.” She held the cup with both hands. “Evelyn.”

“Evelyn,” he repeated, like he was setting it somewhere he could find it later.

He crouched, forearms on his knees, so that his eyes were level with hers instead of above them, and she noticed that he had done that on purpose too.

“I’m going to ask you one thing,” Diesel said. “And then I’m going to put gas in your car and jump it and open the gate, and you can go, and I won’t ask you anything else, and nobody here will ever have seen you. That’s the deal. You understand what I’m offering you?”

Evelyn’s heart was going hard enough that she could feel it in the hand pressed flat against her coat, over the zipped pocket, over the corner of the drive.

“Yes.”

“Who’s behind you?”

She opened her mouth to say nobody.

She had said nobody to a motel clerk in Winchester and to a woman at a laundromat in Staunton and to herself, out loud, in a parking lot, more than once. It was the easiest word in the language and she had gotten very good at it.

What came out was, “I don’t know.”

Diesel stayed where he was. But every line of him went still in a way that was different from the stillness he had been carrying before, and behind her, at the bench, the man who had not turned around finally turned around.

“You don’t know,” Diesel said.

“I know who wants it back,” Evelyn said. “I don’t know if they can find me. I’ve been careful. I paid cash and I’ve stayed off the interstate for four days and I picked this town off a paper map because I couldn’t find a reason anybody would look here.”

“That’s a decent reason.”

“It was the only one I had.”

He was quiet for a moment. Out in the yard, the dog started up again, and this time it did not stop, and it did not sound like it was barking at a possum.

Diesel stood up.

He did it without hurrying, which somehow made it worse, and he walked to the open bay door and stood square in the middle of it and looked up the road, and Evelyn set the coffee down on the concrete and stood too, and from where she was she could see past his shoulder to the top of the grade.

Headlights.

Two sets, high and wide, coming down the mountain slow with their brights off. Nobody drove that road slow with their brights off. She had just spent an hour on it and she knew.

Behind her, the man at the bench said one word, quiet.

“Boss.”

“I see it.” Diesel did not turn around. “Evelyn.”

“Yes.”

“Whatever’s in that coat,” he said, “you’re going to want to tell me what it is in about ninety seconds.”