Chapter Twenty Nine
Nice Ducati
Months later, on a morning so clear it seemed to have been laundered, Amara Reed rode the bright red Ducati Panigale V4 out of Sacramento with a full free hour in front of her and nowhere she had to be until eleven. The case that had waited at the end of that road once was finished and filed. Other cases had come, as cases do, and been met. The motorcycle did what it had always done for her. It took the noise of the courthouse, the conferences and the calendars and the carefully written sorrows of strangers, and it converted all of it, mile by mile, into wind.
She took the highway without planning to. That stretch of road had been repaved in the autumn, and the new asphalt ran black and even under her tires, three lanes wide and unremarkable, the shoulder swept clean. No cones stood in their orange funnel. No cruisers angled across the gravel with their light bars dark and waiting. The grass had grown back over the place where a kingdom had briefly been pitched, and the only evidence that anything had ever happened there was that nothing happened there at all, which is the evidence every driver on that road had always deserved.
She rode the way she always rode, inside every limit the road posted and well within the ones the machine suggested, because Amara Reed had a professional relationship with rules that most people only pretend to have. She liked them legible. She liked them the same for everyone. The Ducati hummed its expensive hum beneath her, red as a struck match, and the morning opened in front of her the way mornings are supposed to open for people who have survived their difficult seasons, plainly and without commentary.
Traffic was light and ordinary, which she had come to understand was the highest compliment a road could be paid. A farm truck merged beside her and the driver lifted two fingers off the wheel in the ancient greeting of people who work early. A school bus crossed ahead at the junction with its lights blinking their brief amber warning, and every vehicle in sight slowed for it without being told, a small constitutional convention of brake lights. She thought about that sometimes on these rides, how much of civilization ran on signals nobody enforced because nobody needed to, and how the whole arrangement depended on the agreements being the same in both directions, for the powerful and the ordinary alike. The river showed through the trees on her left, wide and brown and indifferent, carrying its own traffic toward the delta at the pace it had kept since before there were courts. She rode on, in no hurry, which was the other gift of the morning. For one full hour, nobody on earth was waiting for Judge Reed to decide anything.
At the edge of town, where the highway gave up and became a boulevard, the light turned red and she rolled to a stop at the front of the line. A moment later another motorcycle eased up beside her in the next lane, an older machine with chrome gone soft at the edges, ridden by a man with gray in his beard and a jacket that had seen more weather than its owner liked to admit. He looked her over the way riders look each other over at lights, machine first and rider second, and then he looked at the Ducati again, longer, with the frank admiration of a man who knew exactly what he was seeing.
"Nice Ducati," he called across the gap.
She lifted her visor. He knew nothing about her but the motorcycle, and she knew nothing about him but the compliment, and for a red light's worth of time that was the whole of their acquaintance, complete and sufficient. It occurred to her, not sadly, that this was the most honest interaction anyone had ever had with her on a public road. No database had been consulted. No biography had been summoned to a phone. She was a person on a machine, and the machine was beautiful, and that was the beginning and the end of what the morning required anyone to prove.
"Thank you," she said.
The light changed. They accelerated away together into the morning, two strangers on two machines, matching speed for the length of one green corridor before his turn took him east and hers carried her on toward the tall buildings, and neither of them looked back, because looking back is not what the road is for. The Ducati settled into its long red stride beneath her, and Judge Amara Reed rode on toward her eleven o'clock, unhurried, unexamined, and entirely, ordinarily free.
Chapter Thirty
The Authority to Put Her in Cuffs