9. Rook
ROOK
Ibuild the whole thing in fourteen hours.
Diesel gives me the table on a Tuesday and I put it in front of him Wednesday at dawn, and he reads it twice and hands it back and says one word, which is ground.
That is the only advantage I have ever needed. It is the only one I have ever taken.
The ground is a section road six miles north of Turner.
I chose it out of two hundred candidates because of four things.
It runs east and west between two quarter sections of summer fallow with a shelterbelt on the north side that has been dead since the drought, which means cover and no eyes.
It has a cattle guard at the east end and a washout at the west that a two wheel drive SUV cannot take at speed.
It has no cell service, which I confirmed personally, standing in the road, in the dark, on the ninth of December.
And it is forty minutes from a port of entry and twenty minutes from nothing, which means that when a supervisory officer decides to come out and personally inspect his new lane, he will do it alone, because a man who is stealing a lane from the federal government does not bring the federal government with him.
January nine. Half past two in the morning. Two degrees with the wind out of the northwest at fifteen, which is important, because wind that direction takes sound east and there is a ranch house four miles east and I do not want them awake.
Deacon is in the shelterbelt with a rifle he has had since the years he wore a state uniform at Deer Lodge, lying in dead caragana in a white coverall.
Pike is at the washout in a pickup with no plates and the engine cold.
I am in the ditch on the south side of the road, ninety feet from where the trucks will stop, with frozen dirt against my ribs and a hood up and my hands bare because gloves cost you a quarter second.
And Delaney is behind the wheel of the truck.
I fought that for a month and lost, and the reason I lost is that she is right.
Nobody else in this club can back a fifty-three foot van up a section road in the dark on ice, because nobody else in this club spent years reversing a straight truck into a loading dock built in 1961 by a man who hated everyone.
She can put a trailer anywhere. She can put it anywhere with the mirrors iced.
Also I have stopped pretending I can make her stay behind. That happened somewhere around the fourteenth of November on a gravel shoulder south of the port.
She has a radio on the seat and a shotgun she does not want and the property cut on her back, which is no longer a costume and has not been since Warden looked at her across the table on the seventeenth of December and asked her a question and got an answer, and the whole room heard it.
"Peggy's warm," she says on the radio. "I'm in position. My hands are doing a thing."
"That is adrenaline."
"That's what I figured. Rafe."
"Say it."
"Come back."
Headlights on the Turner road.
It goes fast. They always go fast, and anybody who tells it long afterward is decorating.
Two vehicles. A straight truck with a box, which is the Bakken load, and a black SUV behind it, which is Nash Overbeck coming to supervise his own lane in his own personal vehicle at half past two in the morning, exactly as I built it for him to do.
They come down the section road and the box truck stops nose to nose with the trailer. The SUV swings out and comes up beside it and stops at an angle, and its headlights go across the front of my truck and light Delaney up in the windshield, and I feel every year of my life at once.
Overbeck gets out with his hands up in a friendly way and his coat open and starts to say something about the cold.
Pike puts the pickup across the washout end.
Deacon shoots out the SUV's rear tire from the shelterbelt and the sound goes east on the wind, and the box truck driver comes out of his door already on his knees with his fingers laced behind his head, which tells me everything about how his employment has been going.
Overbeck runs.
He gets six steps, which for a man of fifty-eight in a shearling coat on frozen ground is respectable, and he gets them toward the truck, toward the cab, toward her, because he is not a stupid man and he identified the leverage in half a second.
I come out of the ditch.
I hit him at the hip and we go into the fallow and the frozen dirt takes skin off both of us.
He is heavy and he is strong through the shoulders and he gets a hand in my collar and something out of his coat, and I break the wrist against my knee and take it away from him, and it is a service weapon, and I throw it into the dark.
Then it is close and short and mostly headlights. He gets two on me, one of which opens my eyebrow, and the blood goes into my eye and freezes on the lid. I get him turned and get an arm across his throat and hold it there until he stops meaning it.
I get him up on his knees in the middle of the road in the high beams.
Deacon comes out of the shelterbelt and stands off at fifteen feet with the rifle down.
Pike has the driver face down at the washout.
Somewhere behind me a door opens and does not close, and I know without turning that she is standing on the step of the truck, and I let her stay, because she said the same rule to me on a gravel shoulder and it goes both directions.
Overbeck spits and looks up at me through the lights.
"You don't do this part," he says. His mouth is running. "That's the whole point of you. Nine years I've known you. You're the one that plans it. You've never once put your hand on anybody in your life."
"I know."
"Rook." He starts to laugh and it comes out wrong.
"Rook, I have copies. I told you. There are copies in a bank in Lethbridge and a lawyer in Great Falls, and if I don't walk out of this field they go, and that woman standing on the step of your truck goes to a federal prison for ten years.
You hear me? Ten years. You do this and you do it to her. "
The wind comes across the fallow with nothing to stop it.
"There are no copies," I say.
"There are copies."
"There are no copies, Nash. You said it in the room and I have thought about nothing else for fifty-six days.
A man who has copies does not need a lane.
A man who has copies does not come out to a section road at two thirty in the morning to look at one load with his own eyes.
And you never made one in your life, because a copy is a thing you have to hand to somebody, and you have never handed anybody anything.
" I take a breath and it is cold enough to cut.
"You had the box in Redcliff and she burned it in a gravel lot and you have been running on nothing since the fourteenth of November, and you came out here tonight because you had to see for yourself that you still had us. "
He stops laughing.
"I am going to tell you one thing," I say. "I have never said it out loud to a living person and I am going to say it to you because you are the last thing that is going to hear it."
Deacon turns his head away. He does it deliberately. It is a courtesy and I have never loved a man more for anything.
I get down on one knee in the road so we are level.
"His name was Mateo," I say. "He was in the cab."
Overbeck's mouth opens.
I finish it.
The Bakken driver is twenty-six and he has a kid, and he tells me that immediately and in detail, which is what they all do, and I let him get through it.
Then I stand him up and I put him in his own truck and I turn him around on the section road myself because he cannot hold the wheel.
"You go east," I tell him through the window. "You dump that box in the first coulee past the Willow Creek turn and you keep going and you do not stop this side of the Dakota line. You have a message and you are going to deliver it exactly."
"Yes sir."
"You tell Knox Mattox that the Hellroaring MC does not move anything that breathes.
Tell him the officer he bought is in a field north of Turner and he can come get him whenever he likes.
And tell him that the man who runs freight for this club had a brother.
" I put my hand on the sill. "Say it in that order. "
He goes east with his lights off for the first mile because his hands are shaking too hard to find the switch.
Deacon and Pike take the SUV apart and take what needs taking. The ground will be frozen until April, which is a problem I have already solved on paper, and I am not going to write down where.
Delaney is standing at the front of my truck when I come back, in the headlights, in a cut with my road name on the back of it.
Her hands are on the grille. She has seen all of it. Every second, again, and the distance she has chosen this time is nothing at all, which is how I know what she has decided.
I stop in front of her with a frozen eyebrow and a dead man in the fallow behind me and I let her look. I have spent eighteen years making sure nobody ever saw this, and I have got a woman in Ferris, Montana who has now seen it twice and stayed both times.
She reaches up and puts her thumb under the cut over my eye, very gently, and does not ask.
"Rafe," she says. "Get in. It's cold."