For three days, the hospital became Ava's country, with its own borders and its own laws.
Petra had decreed it: the girl stayed. A cot appeared in a corner of the family room as if conjured. Riders rotated through in shifts of two and four, bringing food that was not from machines, bringing news that was mostly no news. Reaper lay in the ICU behind glass with his leg elevated in a scaffold of pins and his face grey as ash, and the machines breathed for him in a rhythm Ava found herself matching, sitting outside the glass with her homework — for she had decided, on the second day, that she would need a story for herself in whatever came next, and Bones, hearing her say so, had produced GED study guides from the club's library shelf as if he'd been waiting years for someone to ask.
She did the math sections twice. Thinking ahead was a form of prayer.
On the third day, Jordan Cole arrived.
The club's lawyer was not what Ava expected — fortyish, Black, crisply dressed, with a briefcase that looked like it cost more than the trailer she'd grown up in and a way of looking at a room that inventoried its exits, its witnesses, and its lies in one pass. Bull introduced them in the corridor and then, at Jordan's request, left them alone.
"I represent the club," Jordan said, "and right now that includes you, if you'll allow it. Three questions. Answer fast, don't edit. One: did anyone else see Reaper crash? Two: did you see any other vehicle near that stretch that night? Three: has anyone — anyone at all — contacted you since?"
Ava answered the first two without thinking: alone, no other vehicle she could recall, just the storm. The third she answered no, and then stopped, because the lawyer's stillness had a shape to it.
"Why?" Ava said. "Those aren't accident questions. Those are — " She searched for the word the library thrillers used. "Crime questions."
"Because the Montana Highway Patrol found something at first light that they were kind enough to share with the club before they sealed the site." Jordan Cole's voice did not change temperature by a single degree. "Reaper's front brake line was cut, Ava. Not worn. Not corroded, not frayed, not chewed by the crash. Cut — most of the way through, with a blade, recently, so that it would hold under gentle riding and let go the first time he truly needed it. In a blizzard. On an interstate. The patrol is treating the crash as an attempted homicide, and as of this morning, so am I."
The corridor seemed to tilt, gently, like a ship deciding something.
"He knew," Ava said. Her voice sounded far away. "Under the bike. He said — 'Should've known. Wrights don't walk past.' I thought he was just—" She stopped. "He knew somebody wanted him dead. He knew before he crashed."
"He may have suspected. He's a careful man with careless luck." Jordan watched her with an attention Ava recognized: it was the way she'd watched Reaper in the ditch, triage. "It changes the temperature of everything. A man tried to kill the president of the Montana Hells Angels three nights ago, and the only witness to the aftermath is a seventeen-year-old girl named Wright. I am going to say a sentence now and I need you to hear it all the way down. You are not safe in the way you were safe last week, and last week you slept under a bridge, so understand what that sentence means coming from me."
"What do I do?" Ava said.
"You do exactly what Bull has already arranged without asking you, because Bull has been doing this since before you were born. You stay inside the club's sight. You don't go back to the underpass. You don't walk anywhere alone. You let people who are very good at being a wall practice their trade." Jordan Cole snapped the briefcase shut. "And you think, Ava. You think back through that night, minute by minute, the way your father did paperwork in an ambulance. Because somewhere in your memory of that ditch there may be a detail that names a killer. Take your time. Don't force it. It'll come."
It came that night, at 2 a.m., in the cot, out of the black water of an exhausted sleep — a detail rising like a body: headlights that hadn't belonged. While she was sliding down the slope toward the screaming, before the convoy, before everything: a vehicle, up on the overpass east of the broken rail, sitting dark with its engine running. A black SUV. And as she reached the bottom of the ditch and the man stopped screaming — a small, pale rectangle of light, rising, steady. A phone. Filming.
The SUV had no plates. She was suddenly, absolutely certain of it, the way you are certain of things your eyes filed without asking your permission: front and rear, smooth black blanks, because when its lights swung across the rail as it pulled away she'd looked for a plate out of pure street habit — the habit of a girl who noted what could identify and what could follow.
We know where you are — no. Not yet. That came later, in a different chapter of the week, and it came as text on a phone Bull had given her that morning, a club phone, "for emergencies," with three numbers in it.
On the fourth day, at 6:12 in the morning, lying in the cot with the SUV parked in her memory, Ava's new phone buzzed once against her ribs.
Unknown number. Four words and a name, like a hand closing around a throat:
We know where you are, Wright.