Which is the problem, Dutch said. "Deke knows it too. Jessie's warning says the hit's planned for the run, and there's only so many places to stage an ambush on that road."
So we don't ride that road, Eli said.
Sarge tapped the map. "We leak a false route. Let it slip at the diner — Deke's had ears in there for years, everybody knows it. We run our mouths about construction on the canyon road, detour through the south pass instead. Deke sets up on the false route, and we roll the real one with deputies waiting."
And if he doesn't take the bait? Dutch asked.
Then we ride the false route expecting him, with twice the guns we usually carry. Eli's voice was flat. "Either way, we're ready."
Sarge came back after dark, smelling of beer and diner grease, and Miriam put coffee in front of him without asking.
Well? Eli said.
Sarge wrapped his big hands around the mug. "Sat at the counter next to Harlan Pryce — talks like a screen door in a windstorm — and after my second beer I started in about the county closing the canyon road for culvert work. Said the run's detouring through the south pass. Said it three times, three different ways, in case anybody was hard of hearing." He glanced at Miriam. "Two booths down, a Dust Devils prospect was nursing one coffee for an hour and writing on a napkin. Left before I did."
Did he buy it? Dutch asked.
He bought something. Sarge drank. "Question is whether it was the route or the performance."
Miriam thought about that napkin traveling hand to hand through the dark toward Deke Slade. "Then we find out tomorrow," she said.
Miriam had been quiet, turning her coffee mug in slow circles. Now she set it down.
I'll drive the support truck on the false route.
Three heads turned.
Absolutely not, Eli said.
I'm seventy-one, Eli, not dead. Miriam folded her hands. "Think. Deke's watching for the club's support vehicles. He knows your trucks, your trailers, your boys. He does not know a sunburned red '89 Ford with duct tape on the bench seat. I can sit on that false route with a cooler and a first-aid kit and look like exactly what I am — a nosy old woman who got lost. And if something goes wrong out there, who do you want in the support truck? One of your prospects, or a combat nurse?"
Miriam —
You put two prospects on my house to keep me safe, and I thanked you by feeding them. Now I'm asking to be useful instead of guarded. She looked at each of them in turn. "Jessie got run off the road trying to warn this club. I dragged her out of the dirt. I am in this. Don't you dare park me on the porch with a shawl."
Dutch rubbed his jaw. Sarge looked at the ceiling. Eli looked at Miriam for a long time — the way he'd looked at her that first morning on the porch, measuring.
Your truck breaks down if somebody sneezes, he said finally.
Then I'll bring tools.
He exhaled through his nose. "Fine. False route. You stay behind the riders, you stay on the radio, and the first sign of trouble you put that truck between you and it and you drive away. That's the deal."
That's the deal, Miriam agreed, and all three men knew she was lying, and she knew they knew.
They worked out the details over two more pots of coffee: who'd do the talking at the diner (Sarge, loud, after his second beer, the way he'd done it a hundred times), which stops would move, where the real route would go, where Sheriff Danner's deputies would wait — because Eli had finally, carefully, brought the sheriff partway in. Not the whole truth. Enough.
When they left, the house felt strangely empty despite Barnaby and the ticking clock. Miriam washed the mugs, swept the floor, and sat on the porch with the shotgun across her knees, watching the sun go down behind the mountains. The desert turned the color of a healing bruise — purple, gold, then black.
She spent the afternoon with the Ford. The old truck needed coaxing — oil checked, belts eyed, the spare kicked with the ritual suspicion of a woman who'd been stranded before. She loaded the cooler with water and sandwiches, set her old field kit — bandages, splints, the good scissors — behind the seat next to Amos's Maglite, and stood a moment with her hand on the warm hood.
You got one more run in you, old girl? she asked the truck.
Tommy, coiling an extension cord nearby, grinned. "She'll make it, ma'am. She's almost as stubborn as you."
Watch your mouth, Tommy.
Barnaby supervised from the tailgate, one eye on everything, and Miriam thought about Jessie in her hospital bed and told herself the truck would be fine, because the alternative didn't bear thinking about.
Tom called that night. Her older son, from Ohio, where the trees grew too close together.
Mom, Pete says there are bikers at your house.
There are bikers everywhere, Tommy. It's Nevada.
Mom. A pause, the particular silence of a child who is forty-six and still worried. "Are you safe?"
Miriam looked out the dark window at Tommy's truck by the cottonwood, at Dez walking the fence line with a flashlight.
I'm safer than I've been in eleven years, she said, and realized it was true. "Don't you worry about me. Worry about your golf game."
After she hung up, she sat a long time in the dark kitchen, thinking about Amos, about the photograph on the mantel, about what he'd say if he could see her now — his widow, planning ambushes with bikers at her kitchen table. She thought he'd laugh. Then she thought he'd check the shotgun and ask if she needed anything from town.
I miss you, she told the empty chair. "You'd have loved these boys."