CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO #2
I know what can be inside a sealed case. I have carried worse than what is inside a sealed case, and I have carried it for people who wrote my name down before I was born.
I took it off the board anyway. The tacks came out easy. I pushed all three back into the cork in a straight line. For once the counting was only counting. Nothing bad waited if I stopped at two. I finished because I liked the row.
Then I carried it to the bar and put it on the wood where everybody could see it.
“There’s a job on the board.”
Bex stopped pouring. Luca’s file stopped. Marcus turned his phone over and did not look down at it. Adrian had come in behind me without a sound, the way he does.
I put two fingers on the ticket.
“It’s mine if I want it. Real house, real seal, and they asked for me by name.” Nobody interrupted me, which was somehow worse. “Six weeks ago a man in a coat had my whole life on a piece of paper. I’m not giving up my job on top of it.”
There it was on the bar between the candy dish and a plastic dinosaur, and I waited for the argument.
I did not get an argument.
What I got was three men saying one word at exactly the same time, in three completely different voices, like something they had rehearsed for years and never practiced.
“When?”
It came out of Adrian flat, and out of Luca around a mouthful of something, and out of Marcus like a man already turning a page in a calendar. Then all three of them heard each other say it.
Not one of them took it back.
I had a whole speech built. I had built it standing at the board with my shoulders on the brick, and I had put a hard edge on the end of it in case anybody in this building wanted to try telling me what I was allowed to carry, and now I was standing at my own bar holding a speech nobody wanted.
My eyes stung and I made them quit. That is what that afternoon did to me, over and over, in small pieces, all day.
Bex had to put the bottle down.
“All of you. Word for word. That is not normal.”
“It’s efficient,” Marcus said.
“It’s a condition,” Bex said. “There are doctors.”
“Pickup at eight,” I said. “Drop before the banks open. It’s a night run and it’s a hundred miles of nothing in the middle.”
“Good,” Luca said, from the vise, looking straight at me. “I hate the ones in town. Everybody’s awake in town.”
“You’re not invited.”
“Then invite me. I’ve got padded gloves, the longer levers, and no intention of pretending my hands don’t need a stop every thirty miles.”
“Thirty miles. Every time.”
“Every time,” he said. “You can ride the whole run in front of me without looking back, trouble. I’ll still be there when you stop for gas.”
“Then you’re invited.”
He went back to the bracket with a smile he made no attempt to hide.
Marcus came down the bar and stopped close enough that I had to tip my chin up, and then stopped there, which is his entire method and he knows it.
“You want the good news or the reason I’m looking at you like this?”
“Good news.”
“I know that house. They pay in full, they pay on time, and not one man in that building will put a hand near you.” He tapped the ticket once with a gold ring. “The other answer you already have.”
My whole back went warm from the belt up while I was still working out what he meant, and I drank cold coffee to have something to do with my mouth.
“Say the reason anyway,” I said.
“No,” Marcus said. “You’ve got a run to ride and I want you thinking about the road.”
“That’s the worst thing anybody has ever done to me.”
“It’s in the top three,” he agreed.
Adrian picked the ticket up, read it once, and put it back down in front of me instead of anywhere else.
“Tonight,” he said.
“Victoria Russo rides at eight,” Bex said, making her voice a foot deeper. “Gate stays open. Somebody stay awa—”
“Bex.”
“—ake,” she said into her collar, and did not break for one second.
Adrian laughed. One syllable, out of him before he got a hand on it, and every head at that bar came around to look at the man it had come out of.
“All year I’ve been working on that,” Bex said. “All year.”
?
The daylight was gone by the time we brought the bikes into the yard. November air cut clean through the gap at my collar. I zipped it closed and put my helmet on the seat.
Luca crouched at my back wheel with the pressure gauge, using the thicker grip he had fitted to it. Then he checked the brake light while I worked the lever.
“Tire’s right. It was right this morning too. I looked anyway.”
“You looked at it this morning.”
“And now it’s evening.” He stood carefully and put the gauge away. “Belt’s good. Brake light works. I put the bracket in your left saddlebag. The one without tonight’s packing kit. It’s for the kid’s shelf. Don’t lose it.”
“Why is it in my bag?”
“Because you’re coming back,” Luca said.
He said it to my back wheel and not to me, which is how that man says the enormous things. My hands were not steady on the grips afterward and I blamed the cold.
Marcus came across the concrete with his hand out and something small sitting in it.
“You left this on the bar. Again.”
The loupe. I took it and put it in the inside pocket where it lives, and his fingers closed a half beat late, so that the back of my hand dragged across his palm on the way out.
“That was on purpose,” I said.
“Obviously,” Marcus said. “It’s the only thing I did today that took any planning.”
“You put the loupe on the bar.”
“Vic,” he said, “I have no idea what you’re talking about, and I would like the record to show that I have never lied to you about anything that mattered.”
“And about this?”
“About this, constantly.”
Adrian swung a leg over the black Dyna, put his hand over the throttle, and did not start it.
“Ride in front.”
Two words, but he waited for my answer. That was new enough that I still noticed.
“That was my plan,” I said.
He smiled at the tank and started the bike.
Teddy was in the church doorway with Bex behind him, holding the dinosaur up at chest height, making it wave.
“Are you coming back tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow night,” I said.
“That’s not tomorrow. That’s tomorrow night.”
“Then tomorrow night.”
“Okay,” he said, and made the dinosaur wave harder, and that was the entire goodbye, because he is nine and he has already learned which promises are the ones that hold weight.
His father was behind him in the dark of the shop with a stack of chairs in his arms. He lifted a hand off the top chair. I lifted mine.
The gate stayed fastened back against the fence. The watcher lifted a hand. No bolt to ask for, no order somebody had to change before I could leave.
I looked at the three men on their bikes. Each waited for me.
“Ready?” I asked.
Three nods. Mine was the last engine to start.
I put my hand on the grip and rolled the throttle on, and the noise came up off the brick on both sides and filled the Ironline end to end.
Out through the gate. Down Rosewood, then east, with the water going black on my right and the ticket flat against my ribs.
Four bikes on the harbor road under the sodium light, and the one out front was mine.