They would not let her walk away, and at first Ava thought she was in trouble.
It was the coat, she decided. She had tried to give Bull his coat back at the top of the slope — a debt is a debt, and a coat like that was worth real money, and she didn't accept things she couldn't pay for — and Bull had looked at her the way you look at a dog that has brought you a stick during a house fire.
"Keep it till you're warm," he'd said. "You're riding in the truck. You're coming with us."
"I have to—" She gestured vaguely east, toward the underpass, toward her shelf of concrete and the whole thin architecture of her survival, and found there was no sentence that finished that way. "My stuff is—"
"Your stuff is on your back. I can see your stuff, Ava." Not unkindly. The way you'd speak to a spooked horse. "The man whose life you just saved is going to want to know your name when he wakes up, and I'm not telling the president of this club that I left a seventeen-year-old girl standing in a ditch in a blizzard because she was too polite to get in a warm truck. Get in the truck."
So she got in the truck — a club chase vehicle, driven by a silent woman named Petra who handed her a thermos of coffee hot enough to scald and did not ask a single question, which Ava filed away as one of the great kindnesses of her life. The ambulance went ahead with two bikes running point, and behind it the convoy re-formed and rolled, seven hundred and fifty strong by the club's count, headlights painting the blowing snow gold for a mile in both directions, a river of thunder flowing east toward Billings at exactly forty miles an hour — the speed of an ambulance that cannot be hurried — and Ava rode in the middle of it like a stone carried in a flood.
At St. Vincent the parking lot filled and filled, bikes ranked in rows under the security lights while men stood in clusters in the snow, smoking, saying little, watching the emergency doors. Ava had seen her share of hospital waiting in her mother's last winter and knew the choreography, but she had never seen it performed by three hundred men in leather in a parking lot, refusing en masse to go home. Nobody left. Petra walked her inside, still inside Bull's coat like a child in a tent, and sat her in the family waiting room, and brought her a sandwich from a machine and stood watch over her eating it with the air of a woman who had decided that this, tonight, was her post.
The news, when it came, came in pieces. Surgery. The leg: fractures of the tibia and fibula, a crushed section of muscle, blood loss — serious, but the leg would very likely be saved, and the surgeon, a small tired woman who did not appear to know or care whose vest she'd cut off, said the sentence Ava would carry out of that night like a coin in her pocket: "Whoever got that machine off him and got pressure on the bleed did it inside the window. Another twenty minutes and we'd be having a different conversation."
Bull, standing beside Ava, put one enormous hand on the back of her chair and did not say anything at all.
"Coma," the surgeon said, "is the word, though with head trauma and blood loss we prefer 'unresponsive' until we know more. He's alive. That's tonight's whole headline. He should not be, and he is."
She left. The waiting room ticked. Bull lowered himself into the chair next to Ava's — the chair gave a small protest under him — and folded his hands, and looked at his boots, and said, in the tone of a man approaching a door he's not sure he should open:
"On the phone, and down in that ditch. You said your name was Wright."
"Wright," Ava said. "Ava Wright."
"Wright from where, Ava?"
She shrugged, suddenly wary in a way she couldn't source. "Everywhere. Nowhere. We had a trailer in Laurel. Before that my mom said we came from Washington, when I was little. I don't remember it."
Bull nodded slowly, and she watched a thought move through him like weather through a valley, changing the light on everything.
"Washington," he repeated. "Tacoma?"
"I was two," Ava said. "Maybe. Why?"
"No reason that can't wait," Bull said, and she would learn, in time, that it was the first lie anyone in the club ever told her, and that he told it to protect her from a seventeen-year-old avalanche for one more night. He stood up. "You're staying till he wakes up or till I say otherwise. Don't argue with me about coats or trucks or any of it. You hear?"
Ava, wrapped in a dead weight of leather and warmth in a hospital chair, with a dead man's pulse still ghosting under her thumb, was asleep before she could decide whether to argue.