Chapter 1 #2
Sharon came back with the pot.
"He do that a lot?"
"Never," I said. "That's the concerning part."
"He's here every day at one." She topped me off without asking. "Orders the same thing. Doesn't talk. Reads a paper that's four days old."
"Four days old?"
"Same paper," Sharon said. "Every day. For a month."
I put the cup down.
Because that's not a man reading. That's a man holding a prop, in a booth, at a fixed time, in a public room with a fire door — and I had known Fitch for two years and had never once thought about why a fence with a bad heart and worse nerves would sit in the exact same seat in the exact same window every single day of his life.
He wasn't eating lunch. He was being available.
"Sharon," I said. "Does anybody meet him?"
"Nope."
"Nobody? Not once?"
"Not while I've worked days." She thought about it. "Well. There's the fella who stands out front sometimes."
"Which fella."
"Dressed real nice," Sharon said. "Suit and everything. Just stands. Never comes in, never orders. I asked him one time if he wanted a table and he said —" she laughed — "he said he was 'waiting on the good part.'"
I sat in that booth with a cold third of somebody else's patty melt and felt every hair on both arms stand up at once.
"How long's he been doing that?"
"Oh, honey," Sharon said. "Longer than Fitch."
Options.
Options.
One: run. West, fast, dump the car in Missoula, and be a completely different woman by Sunday. Doable. I'd done it four times. The problem with running from an MC is geography — they don't chase you, they just live everywhere, and one day in three years you buy gas in the wrong town.
Two: give it back through somebody else. Except everybody else was going to be a Fitch. Fitch was the bottom of my list of people with courage.
Three — and I hated it, and I kept coming back to it, and I sat in a diner booth turning it over like a bad tooth —
Three: walk in the front door.
Not send it. Not launder it back through four hands. Walk into wherever they were and put it on a table and say I did this, I didn't know, here it is, and here's my name.
The thing about my skill — the finding-the-soft-spot thing — is that it works on organizations too. And an outlaw motorcycle club's soft spot isn't money. Money's just weather to them, same as they are to me. Their soft spot is being disrespected in public.
Which meant the money wasn't the crime. The crime was the taking. And the only currency that pays down a taking is standing there while somebody looks at you.
Fitch had said it himself, screaming, in the last useful sentence of his life: handing it back means somebody has to look at you.
I paid for the patty melt. I tipped Sharon forty dollars. I put on sunglasses I didn't need because the sky had gone the color of a nickel.
Then I went out to the Sinclair station on the corner to put gas in a car I had not yet decided which direction to point.
I'd like to tell you I made the decision.
I had the nozzle in the tank and my card in my teeth and I was watching the numbers roll and telling myself, say a number, if it stops on an even number you drive west — which is the kind of thing I do and which I don't recommend — when a truck pulled into the lot.
Not fast. That was the first thing. It came in at maybe eight miles an hour, like a man parallel parking at his own mother's house.
Two bikes came in behind it. Then a third.
They didn't rev anything. Nobody shouted. The truck door opened and a man got out who was the approximate size of a vending machine, and he did not look at me at all. He went inside and bought, I later learned, a Gatorade and a bag of sunflower seeds.
A second man leaned against the pump island four feet from me and read the octane sticker with apparent interest.
"Eighty-seven," he said.
"That's what they say."
"You want the eighty-nine?"
"I don't think my car knows the difference," I said.
"No," he agreed. "It probably doesn't."
He was maybe fifty, with forearms like bridge cable and a wedding ring worn down to a wire. He didn't look at my hands, which is what people look at. He looked at my feet, which is what you look at if you want to know whether somebody's about to run.
"You're not gonna run," he said.
"I'm considering it."
"You're not, though."
"How do you figure?"
"You put the nozzle in," he said. "Runners don't fill up. Runners take what's in the tank and sort it out in ninety miles." He nodded at the pump. "You're topping off. That's a woman planning a drive."
"Maybe I'm planning a long one."
"Sure," he said comfortably. "Everybody is."
Nobody touched me. Nobody said a name. There were four of them and none of them raised his voice, and I understood, standing there with a gas nozzle in my hand and the numbers still rolling, that this was so much worse than shouting.
Shouting is negotiation. Shouting means somebody wants something from you.
These men had already had the conversation. Somewhere, in a room I hadn't been in, this had been decided, and what was happening in the parking lot of a Sinclair station in Dickinson, North Dakota, was not a confrontation. It was logistics.
The pump clicked off.
$41.09. Odd number.
"Ma'am," the vending machine said, from behind me, kindly, with a Gatorade in his hand. "You're going to want to come with us. But finish your gas first. It's a long way."
"Where are we going?"
"Havregard."
"Is that far?"
"Four hours."
"Is there a bathroom situation, or—"
"There's a bathroom situation," he said. "We'll stop in Bismarck. Deke doesn't make it past Bismarck either."
"You're Deke."
He looked, for one second, genuinely pleased. "How'd you get that?"
"You bought two Gatorades and you're only holding one," I said. "The other guy's in the truck. You're the one who takes care of people. People who take care of people get their names said out loud."
Deke considered that.
"Huh," he said. "Wolf's gonna like you."
"Is that good?"
"No," said Deke.
I hung up the nozzle. I got in the truck. I did not run, and I want it noted that I could have, right up until the door closed, because that's the part I've thought about most since — that at every single point I could have gone west, and every single time I chose the room with the people in it.
Somewhere around Bismarck, a man in the front seat turned around and asked if I wanted half a cinnamon roll.
I said yes.
I've since learned that this was, functionally, the most dangerous decision I made that entire day.