They came down three highways in the dark, the way weather comes, except this weather had headlights.
From the north they rode out of the high country in a double line that stretched past counting, their engines low and patient on the downgrade. From the south they rolled up through the desert towns, where the only lights were porch bulbs and the green eye of a truck stop sign. From the east they crossed the state line with the wind still smelling of last week's rain, dust on their boots and scripture on some of their vests and nothing at all on others, because the Desert Covenant Riders had never required a man to be finished before he was allowed to be useful.
Cole Rafferty rode near the front of the southern column, and at every fuel stop he walked the line the way he had walked it for twenty years, touching a shoulder here, checking a strap there, saying a man's name the way you'd check a bolt β firmly, and expecting it to hold.
"Tank full? Boots dry? You eat anything since Tucson?"
At two in the morning they stopped at a gas station that had been closed since spring, its pumps bagged in plastic, its sign dark. Nobody needed the pumps. What they needed was the awning and the flat ground, and the thermoses came out β a dozen of them, plus one dented percolator that a prospect had rigged to a truck battery in the chase vehicle, which earned him a round of quiet applause and a permanent nickname. Coffee went around in foam cups and tin mugs. The riders stood in the spill of their own headlights and drank it black and were grateful, and an old man named Ferro, who had ridden with three chapters and buried two wives, said what several of them were thinking.
"Fifty years I've been on a motorcycle. First time I've ever ridden toward a roof."
Nobody laughed hard. It was too close to true, and the hour was too honest for hard laughter.
They were a mixed congregation, the way the Covenant had always been. There were two nurses riding side by side out of Gallup who had swapped a night shift to be there. There was a retired schoolteacher with a braid down her back and a patch on her vest she'd sewn herself. There were men who had done time and men who had handed it out, and by the second cup of coffee nobody could have told you which was which, and nobody tried. What they shared wasn't a past. It was a direction.
They gathered again at the last fuel stop before the flats, where the trucks fell in behind the bikes like patient cattle β a flatbed stacked with ladders and bundled shingles, a pickup with lumber racked straight as cordwood, a water tank on a trailer for the cleanup, and the smoker rig, because Ruth Ann Ferraro had declared that a crew that size would need two hundred pounds of brisket by noon and had flatly refused to be argued with. Behind the trucks came the trades in their own vehicles: Gus Halvorsen the roofer with his two sons, Emil the well man who never hurried and never failed, a sparky named Deena who could rewire a house by feel, and Mr. Okafor, retired CPA, with a briefcase older than most of the prospects.
Three hundred and twelve riders, when the road captain counted heads at the assembly turnout. Then three more came over the rise, late and unrepentant, and the count was abandoned as a lost cause.
The sky in the east had gone the color of a pearl held up to a lamp. Juniper Flats lay below them in the bowl of the valley, a scatter of roofs and cottonwoods, one water tower, one church steeple, and at the far end of Mesquite Street a small house with a stained ceiling and a widow in it who had fed a runaway boy in 1989 because her husband said no man pays to get home.
Cole stood beside his bike and looked down at the town and took his helmet off, though there was no law and no need. He was thinking about a skinny kid with a stolen sandwich's worth of courage, sleeping behind a garage with his jacket for a pillow. He was thinking about a big man's hands, gentle as anything, turning a wrench. He was thinking that a debt can ripen if you let it, the way fruit does, and that this morning it was finally, fully ripe.
He put his helmet back on. He lifted one gloved hand and circled it once, and three hundred engines woke in answer, a sound like the earth clearing its throat.
"Let's go get her home," Cole said, to nobody, to everybody, to a man thirty-three years in the ground.
It was the only prayer he knew. It had always been enough.
Chapter 12: The Return