Honey, I was a nurse in a war. A snake is just a snake. Men who put snakes in mailboxes — those are the ones worth being scared of, and being scared of them doesn't help either. She looked at the mailbox, at the scratches in the new paint. "Come on. Biscuits are getting cold, and you're going to tell me everything Eli said about watching this house, because I am done being watched without being consulted."
That was Thursday. Thursday night, the shooting started.
Miriam woke to the sound of her front window coming apart — a hard crack, then the bright cascade of glass hitting the linoleum, then Barnaby exploding into barking loud enough to wake the county. She was out of bed before she was fully awake, the old training doing what arthritis couldn't stop, and she hit the floor on the far side of the bed as two more shots cracked through the dark — one taking the porch light, one thudding into the cinder block above the kitchen window.
Then, from outside, Dez's voice, roaring: "CONTACT — WEST FENCE —" and Tommy's truck engine gunning, and return fire — sharp, disciplined pops, not wild — stitching out into the dark toward the road.
Miriam crawled to the hall closet, pulled the Ithaca down from behind the winter coats, and jacked a shell into the chamber with a sound like a closing door. She stayed low, moved to the bedroom window that faced the road, and peered out from the side of the frame.
Muzzle flashes winked out by the fence line — two, three — then Tommy's truck fishtailing across the dirt, Dez standing in the bed with his rifle braced on the cab, firing in controlled pairs. Two more wild rounds chewed sagebrush. Then a big engine roared to life beyond the fence, and taillights bounced away down the dirt road toward the highway.
Silence came back in pieces. The wind. Barnaby, still barking, now with a bewildered edge. Tommy shouting something. Dez's boots crunching fast toward the house.
Miriam! Dez hammered the doorframe — not the door, the frame, staying out of the fatal funnel, and Miriam noted with approval that somebody had trained him right. "Miriam, you hit?"
I'm fine, she called. "Come in slow so the dog doesn't take your ankle."
Dez came in with his rifle low, sweeping the room with his eyes, and found Miriam sitting on the edge of the bed in her nightgown with the shotgun across her knees and Barnaby pressed against her leg, trembling.
Two shooters, maybe three, Dez said, breathing hard. "Fence line, eighty yards. Tommy's checking the road. Nobody hit." He looked at the glass glittering across her floor. "Jesus, Miriam."
Language, she said automatically. Then: "You boys did good. Controlled fire, no chasing them into the dark. Somebody taught you right."
Sarge did. Dez lowered the rifle. His hands were shaking now that it was over. "You sure you're —"
I'm sure. Put the kettle on, honey. And find me the broom. We're going to be picking glass out of that linoleum until Christmas.
Eli arrived forty minutes later with six riders. He walked the fence line with a flashlight while Sarge checked the road. They found brass, boot prints, and the twin ruts where the truck had waited with its engine off.
They wanted you scared, Eli said, coming back to the porch. "Or they wanted you dead and they're bad shots."
They wanted me scared, Miriam said. "Dead women don't get warned first. The mailbox, the snake — this is all the same sentence, Eli. They're writing me a letter."
What does it say?
That Deke Slade is done being subtle. She met his eyes. "The charity run is in three days. Whatever he's planning, it's close now."
Eli was quiet. Behind him, the prospects boarded up her window, working fast. Barnaby had stopped barking and sat on Eli's boot, which seemed to surprise them both.
I can move you, Eli said. "A motel in Ely. Four men on the door. Nobody'd —"
No. Miriam said it flat, the way she'd said "not tonight" to death itself in the dirt beside Highway 50. "I am not leaving my house because a coward shoots at it in the dark." She looked at Tommy with his hammer and Dez with her broom. "Besides. Somebody has to feed these boys. They're running on gas station burritos and spite."
Eli stared at her. Then, slowly, the massive president of the Hells Angels smiled — a real one, small and surprised.
You win, he said.
I usually do, Miriam said. "Now. I'm making biscuits at six. Anybody who wants to guard my house eats at my table, and anybody who eats at my table washes a dish. Those are the rules. You tell Sarge."
She went inside, racked the shotgun, and watched from the kitchen doorway as Dez swept and Tommy argued with the plywood. Broken window. Scratched mailbox. Somewhere out in the dark, Deke Slade was planning something worse.
But the kettle was on, and the boys were hungry, and the charity run was in three days, and Miriam Vale — seventy-one years old, arthritis in her hands, a hole in her cardigan — felt the old familiar click in her chest, the one she'd felt in Da Nang when the stretchers started coming.
Countdown had begun.
She tied on her apron and got to work.
The plan was born at Miriam's kitchen table, which surprised everyone except Miriam.
Eli had wanted the clubhouse — maps, men, the war-room gravity of it. But Jessie was still in the Ely clinic with a nurse who had taken one look at eight hundred bikers and instituted a strict two-visitors policy, and Eli wouldn't go farther from her than he had to. So the officers came to Miriam: Eli, Dutch, and Sarge, ducking through her low doorway with their cuts creaking, sitting careful on her kitchen chairs like men trying not to break a dollhouse.
Miriam put coffee in front of each of them and a plate of biscuits in the middle, and said, "Talk."
Sarge spread a county map across the oilcloth. The charity poker run — the club's biggest public event of the year, five hundred riders expected, money for the children's hospital in Reno — ran its traditional route: out of Ely on Highway 50, five card stops, looping back through the canyon road north of town. Everybody in White Pine County knew the route. It was printed on flyers in every diner from here to the Utah line.