The call came on a Tuesday evening in October, a little after seven, while Carrie was shelling peas at the kitchen table and listening to the radio weather. Her phone lit up with a number she did not know, and she almost let it go to voicemail out of habit. Something made her answer. The voice on the other end was young, male, and holding itself together the way a cracked cup holds water.
"Ma'am, I don't know if this is right. My name is Ben Aldana. Somebody at the Gas-N-Go gave me your number and said you were the person to call." He swallowed. "I'm at the motel by the fairgrounds. Somebody took a wrench to my bike while I was in the shower. Tank, mirrors, one of the bags cut open. I'm β it's my dad's bike. He can't ride anymore. I was taking it to him in Reno so he could see it run one more time."
Carrie set the bowl down and stood up, the way she had stood up from a hundred kitchen chairs in her life when standing was the first step of doing something. "Are you somewhere safe, Ben?"
"I'm in the office. The clerk's here. I'm okay. I just β I didn't know what to do. I called the sheriff's office and they said an hour, maybe two. It's getting dark."
"I know," Carrie said. "Dark comes fast this time of year." She was already reaching for her jacket on the hook by the door, and her hand did not shake, and she noticed that, and was grateful for it. "Stay with the clerk. Don't go out to the lot alone, and don't touch anything on the bike. Photograph it if you can do it from the doorway. I'll be there in twenty minutes."
"Ma'am, you don't have to β"
"I know I don't have to. Twenty minutes."
She made one call, from the porch, standing under the light Frank had installed the winter before he died, which she had never once had to change the bulb in. Ray Novak answered on the second ring, and she could hear his television go quiet as he muted it, the way he always did when it was her number.
"Ray. There's a boy at the fairgrounds motel with a cut-up motorcycle and a long hour to wait in the dark. It isn't mine this time. It doesn't matter whose it is."
"No," Ray said. "It doesn't." A pause, and she heard the grin in it, and the grief too, both of them old friends by now. "How many do you want?"
"Whoever's awake. Tell them it's a parking lot, not a parade. We're company, that's all. Company until the deputy gets there."
"Company," Ray agreed. "Twenty minutes."
Carrie rode out of Bishop with the dusk going purple over the White Mountains and the Electra Glide running under her like a held note. She thought about the night a year gone, when she had sat in this same cooling air with her own ruined bike and her own phone in her hand, and how the worst part had not been the damage but the aloneness of it β the sense that the dark was hers to stand in. That was the thing a phone call could fix. Not the tank. Not the mirrors. The aloneness.
They came in ones and twos, the way they had before, headlights swinging through the motel lot and settling, engines ticking as they cooled. Ray first, then Paul Osei with his tools more out of habit than need, then Ali Moreno, then others, until the lot held a loose ring of bikes and people with coffee the clerk kept bringing out in paper cups. Ben Aldana stood in the middle of it with his hands in his pockets, twenty-four years old and trying not to cry in front of strangers, and an old rider named Gus put a hand on his shoulder and said, "Tell me about your dad's bike," and Ben told him, and the telling did what telling does.
When the deputy arrived she was professional and tired and glad, Carrie thought, to find witnesses instead of a scene. Statements were given. Photographs were taken in the flat light of her flashlight. Ben's bike was loaded onto Paul's trailer with the care of men handling a sleeping animal, and Paul said the words Carrie had once needed to hear from exactly such a man: "It's all fixable, son. Every bit of it. You'd be surprised what comes back."
Later, when the lot had emptied and she was riding home under a sky gone to full dark, Carrie understood that the circle had closed in a way she had not expected. The call had come to her this time. She had not been the woman in trouble. She had been the number somebody gave out at a gas station, the voice that said twenty minutes β and meant it.
Chapter 27: The Deputy