Dutch, we're clear at the canyon. Bring them home.
Miriam started the Ford. The engine coughed, caught, and rumbled — a coffee can full of bolts rolling downhill, running, which was all that mattered.
Behind her, the bikes turned in the canyon mouth like a single animal, and followed the old woman's red truck back toward Ely.
The morning after the canyon, Miriam woke before the sun and knew before her feet touched the floor that the day would not be a quiet one. There was a particular quality to the air on mornings when trouble was already driving toward you — the desert went still in a way that had nothing to do with peace. Even Barnaby felt it. He stood at the screen door with his one good eye fixed on the road and did not bark, which was worse than barking.
Miriam made coffee and carried it to the porch. The two prospects the club had posted at her house — boys, really, twenty-two and twenty-four, trying to look invisible beside their bikes — nodded to her from the yard. She had stopped arguing about them three days ago. She had started leaving a thermos on the porch rail instead.
At half past eight, a car came up the dirt road that did not belong to anyone she knew. It was an old sedan, pale blue gone mostly to primer, riding low on tired shocks. The prospects straightened. Miriam set her mug down and rested her hand on the porch rail, near — but not on — nothing in particular. The shotgun was inside, behind the door. She had decided some weeks ago that she would rather be seen reaching for coffee than for a weapon, unless the weapon was required.
The car stopped well short of the house. The driver sat for a long moment with the engine running. Then she killed it, and got out, and Miriam recognized her from the diner in Ely — the woman who refilled coffee cups without meeting anyone's eyes. Deke Slade's girlfriend. Annie Ruiz.
She was shaking. Miriam could see it from the porch, forty feet away — the tremor in her hands as she closed the car door, the way she kept glancing back down the road the way she'd come, as if the dust itself might be following her.
Morning, Miriam called. "You want coffee? I got a whole pot and nobody to drink it but me and the dog, and the dog's a liar about being awake."
Annie didn't smile. She walked up the dirt path with quick, uneven steps, her arms wrapped around herself though the morning was already warm. She was a small woman, maybe forty-five, with dark hair pulled back hard and the kind of thinness that didn't come from dieting. She wore long sleeves. In Nevada, in June, Miriam had learned to notice long sleeves.
They said I could talk to you, Annie said. Her voice was thin. "The boys at the road. They said — they said you were the one who —" She stopped. Started again. "I'm the one who left the note. Under your door."
Miriam studied her for a moment. Then she turned to the prospects. "You boys go on down to the road. Take a little ride. I'll holler if I need you."
Ma'am, Eli said —
Eli said keep me safe, and I'm telling you the safest thing right now is privacy. Go on. Twenty minutes.
They went, reluctantly, their bikes coughing down the dirt road. Miriam gestured to the porch steps. "Sit if you want. Or stand. I don't care much, but my hip votes sit."
Annie sat on the top step like a woman perching on the edge of something she might need to jump off of. Barnaby came over and laid his scarred head on her knee. She stared at him, then — to Miriam's quiet surprise — her hand came down and rested on his head, and some of the shaking eased.
He'll bite Deke Slade on sight, Miriam said conversationally. "Just so you know where the dog stands."
That got the ghost of something across Annie's face. Not a smile. The memory of one.
I don't have long, Annie said. "He thinks I'm at the laundromat. He counts the quarters. He —" She stopped herself. "You need to know the whole of it. Somebody does. It's been eating me alive."
Then tell it, Miriam said. "Start wherever it's heaviest."
Annie drew a breath that shuddered. "The Dust Devils are paying him. Their president. Cash, in an envelope, half now and half when it's done. Done means —" Her voice dropped. "Done means Jessie dead and the charity run burning and Eli broken so bad he can't hold the club together. Then the Devils ride into White Pine County and there's nobody left to tell them no."
Miriam kept her face still. "How much?"
Fifteen thousand now. Fifteen after. Annie laughed, a short ugly sound. "Thirty pieces of silver. He thinks it's a fortune. Men like Deke always think the next score is the one that finally makes them somebody."
And the canyon? Yesterday?
That was supposed to be the run. Hit the pack where the road narrows, make it look like road rage, like desert craziness. When your people showed up waiting, he — Annie's hands twisted in her lap. "I've never seen him that angry. Not even —" She didn't finish. "He's moving it up. Whatever's next, it's soon. He won't wait now. Being made a fool of in front of his own crew — that's the one thing he can't swallow."
Miriam nodded slowly. "Why are you telling me this, Annie?"
Because somebody's going to die. The words came out flat. "And because five years ago I watched him —" She stopped. Her jaw worked. "You know about Jessie and him. From before."
I know she left him for Eli, Miriam said carefully.
She didn't just leave him. Annie stared at the dirt road. "What he did — behind closed doors, when nobody was looking — she carried it for a long time. Then one night it got bad enough that she went to the club. To Eli. She showed them. And the club voted." Annie's voice went very quiet. "They took his patches in front of everybody. Stripped him. Told him to ride out and never come back. Five years ago."