She'd excused herself to the restroom at the diner because she'd needed to breathe air that didn't have him in it. And when she'd come back, the waitress — Carol — had pressed something into her hand under the cover of clearing plates. A pen. A napkin. And eyes that said I know without a single word.
Maya had written it with her hand shaking so hard she'd had to press down to keep the letters legible. Please. She'd folded it into her palm and waited for the moment, and when Carol came back with the coffee pot, she'd let it fall onto the tray, and Carol had palmed it like a magician, like she'd done it before, like this was something she knew how to do.
Now the lot outside was filling with motorcycles, row after row of them, headlights cutting through the rain like something out of a dream. Frank was standing. The big biker at the counter was standing. Roy looked like he might be sick. And Carol was across the room, wiping down a table, not looking at anyone — but Maya looked at her, and Carol's eyes flicked up, just for a second, just long enough.
Maya mouthed two words, and she didn't care who saw.
Thank you.
Chapter 9
Roy's Arithmetic
Roy Sutter had a system for living with himself, and the system was arithmetic.
It went like this: he owed Frank eight thousand dollars from the poker game in September — the one where he'd been sure, absolutely sure, the river card would save him. Frank had covered the debt. That was a fact. Facts were the foundation.
The game had been in the back room of a bar in Cottonwood, smoke hanging under the fluorescents, Frank dealing with those big calm hands of his. Roy had gone in with eleven hundred and the rent money. By midnight he was playing on promises. The last hand — queens full, and he'd been sure, the river was going to pair the board or bring the ace, it had to — and Frank had turned over the straight flush with the expression of a man reading a weather report. Eight thousand. Frank had paid the table out of his own roll and clapped Roy on the shoulder like a friend. "We'll work it out," he'd said. And they had. Oh, they had. On top of the facts, Roy stacked the subtractions: he was just the driver. He'd never touched the girl. He'd never raised his voice to her. When Frank talked about Phoenix and the state line, Roy told himself he didn't know the details, and not knowing was practically the same as not being involved, and the eight thousand dollars was a real number that sat on the scale opposite everything else and — most days — balanced it.
But arithmetic required stillness, and there was nothing still about tonight.
The girl's face kept doing something to the math. She was maybe twenty. She wore a gray hoodie with the cuffs pulled down over her hands, and she sat in that booth like the vinyl was the only thing holding her upright, and every time Frank spoke over her head she got a little smaller. Roy had a sister. The sister had a daughter about that age.
His sister lived in Prescott, worked at a dentist's office, called him every Sunday whether he picked up or not. The niece — Alina — was nineteen, studying nursing, the kind of kid who still texted her uncle dumb memes. Last Thanksgiving she'd fallen asleep on his couch with her nursing textbooks open on her chest. Every time Roy looked at the girl in the gray hoodie, Alina's face laid itself over hers like a transparency, and the arithmetic screamed. He had been doing his best all night not to do that particular subtraction — the one where he put his niece's face on the girl in the gray hoodie — because that one didn't balance no matter how many times he ran it.
Then the bikes started arriving, and the arithmetic fell apart completely.
A dozen. Two dozen. He'd stopped counting at thirty because the rain made the headlights smear together and because Frank had noticed him counting and given him a look that could strip paint. Roy's shirt was sticking to his back. His hands were shaking — actually shaking, like an old man's — and he kept having to put them under the table so Frank wouldn't see.
He could leave. That was the thought that kept surfacing, the way a drowning man's head keeps surfacing. The back door was past the restrooms, twenty steps, maybe twenty-five. He could be through it and into the rain before anyone looked up. He could keep walking — to the highway, to a truck stop, to anywhere that wasn't this booth with this man and this girl and this gathering storm of engines outside.
He could see it, actually see it: the short hallway with the flickering tube light, the restroom doors, the EXIT sign glowing red over the steel door, the rain beyond it cold on his face. He'd done it before — walked out of rooms he shouldn't have been in. He was good at leaving. Leaving was the one thing he'd ever been good at. His feet were already moving under the table, toes pointed toward the aisle like runners at a block.
He almost did it. When Frank stood up, Roy's whole body leaned toward the restrooms like a plant toward light. His legs were already half out of the booth. Twenty steps. The rain would be cold and it would be glorious and it would be away.
But then the big biker at the counter stood too — calm, unhurried, like a man with all the time in the world — and Roy understood, with a clarity that made his stomach drop, that the door wasn't the problem. The problem was what came after the door. Frank had people in Phoenix. Frank had people everywhere. You didn't run from Frank; you just chose where Frank found you. The back door led to the rain. The rain led to the highway. The highway led to Frank, eventually, inevitably, the way all roads in Roy's life had led to Frank since September.
So he stayed. He sank back into the booth and put his shaking hands flat on the table where he could see them, and he watched the biker watching Frank, and the engines kept coming through the walls, and Roy hated himself with a pure, clean hatred that no arithmetic could touch — not because he was loyal to Frank, but because he was too afraid to move, and he knew it, and knowing it didn't change a thing.
He thought about Alina's memes. He thought about the river card in Cottonwood, the one that hadn't come. He thought about the fact that eight thousand dollars had bought exactly this: a vinyl booth, a shaking pair of hands, and a front-row seat to something he didn't have the spine to stop. The engines rose and fell outside like breathing. Roy sat very still, and did nothing, and the nothing piled up around him like snow.
Chapter 10
Frank Notices
Frank Delinger counted the way other men breathed.
Thirty-four bikes. He'd stopped counting at thirty-four because the rain was coming harder and the far rows were just shapes and headlight glare, but thirty-four was enough. Thirty-four was a number with weight. You didn't get thirty-four motorcycles in a diner parking lot on a rainy Friday night in November by accident. You got them by invitation.