Absolutely not, Eli said.
Hello to you too, Jessie said, and kissed his cheek. "I'm riding pillion. I'm not driving. Patch already checked —" She caught Patch's eye. "Tell him what you told me."
Patch looked like a man being asked to bless a thunderstorm. "I said her vitals are stable and the brace holds and if she stays on the back and doesn't do anything heroic she'll probably be fine, and I also said this is a terrible idea."
It's a charity run, Jessie said. "My husband's charity run. The one Deke tried to stop me from warning you about." She looked at Eli, and her voice went soft in a way that ended the argument before it started. "I'm riding."
Eli closed his eyes for one long second. Then he took her helmet from under her arm and held it while she climbed on behind him, arranging her braced leg with a care that made Miriam have to look away for a moment. Some things a person witnesses the way you witness a prayer — from a respectful distance.
Miriam climbed into the F-150, wedged her bad hip against the door, and keyed the radio Patch had lent her. "Support three, rolling," she said, feeling faintly ridiculous and entirely necessary.
The charity run rolled out of Ely at nine o'clock on a Saturday morning, rerouted through town like a parade that refused to be afraid.
Miriam had argued for the reroute, and Eli had listened — after the canyon, nobody wanted the pack strung out on the open highway where Deke's crew could pick at it. So the route went down Main Street instead, past the diner and the courthouse and the little park, with half the town turned out to watch, and then looped back out to Highway 50 for the long straight run to the poker stops. Eight hundred bikes in formation, chrome winking in the hard white sun, the rumble of it shaking storefront windows for a solid twenty minutes.
Miriam drove her F-150 in the support column, third vehicle back, with Patch riding shotgun and a bed full of water jugs, toolboxes, and the old first-aid kit she'd kept since Da Nang. Barnaby was home with the door locked and strict instructions, which he had received with deep insult. The prospects flanked her truck on their bikes. She'd told Eli she was driving support, and Eli — who had learned, in the weeks since the crash, that arguing with Miriam Vale was like arguing with weather — had simply nodded and said, "Stay in the column."
Jessie rode pillion behind Eli at the head of the pack.
She'd signed herself out of the hospital that morning against medical advice, with her leg still in the brace and Patch's furious blessing withheld entirely. Miriam had watched her climb on behind Eli in the staging lot, pale and grinning and utterly immovable, and had felt her heart do something complicated in her chest. The girl had nearly died on Miriam's tailgate three weeks ago. Now she was riding into the wind with her arms around her husband, and Miriam understood — the way she'd understood soldiers who insisted on walking back to their units — that some things you don't argue with. You just drive the support truck and keep the first-aid kit close.
The town stretch went beautifully. Kids waved from the curb, and one little boy in a plastic fireman's helmet saluted so solemnly that a whole row of riders saluted back. Old men took off their hats. Somebody's grandmother threw flower petals from a second-floor balcony, and they hung in the air behind the pack like pink snow. Outside the diner, the waitresses stood in the doorway with their hands over their hearts. For eleven miles, it felt like what it was supposed to be: a charity run, money for the county clinic, a good day. Miriam drove with her window down and let the town's noise wash over her, and for eleven miles she let herself believe Deke Slade might have decided to stay home.
Then they turned onto Highway 50, and the desert opened up around them, and Miriam felt the back of her neck go cold.
She saw the dust first — wrong-colored, off to the north, moving parallel to the highway. Then Patch said, very quietly, "Miriam," and pointed, and she saw them: four pickups, spaced out along a ranch access road, pacing the pack.
Deke, she said.
The lead pickup cut across the sagebrush and hit the highway a quarter mile ahead of the pack, spraying gravel. The others followed. They didn't try to block the road — they tried to get alongside. The first one pulled even with the pack's flank, and Miriam watched a man lean out of the passenger window, and she knew, with absolute bone-deep certainty, what was about to happen.
It happened fast after that. The pickup swerved toward the riders. Bikes scattered, horns and engines screaming. A prospect's bike went down on the shoulder in a burst of dust — Miriam saw him roll, saw him get up swearing, holding his arm at the wrong angle. Patch was already on the radio, his voice clipped and professional: "Rider down, mile nine, left shoulder — collarbone, maybe, he's walking, send the van." The pack compressed, riders closing ranks the way they'd drilled, the big bikes forming a wall around the smaller ones, but the pickups kept coming, feinting in, trying to split the formation. A second truck pulled alongside the support van ahead of Miriam and tried to crowd it toward the ditch; the van's driver — a wiry woman named Lou — held her line with both hands and a stream of language Miriam chose not to hear. Gravel rattled against the F-150's undercarriage like hail. In the side mirror Miriam caught a glimpse of Eli, standing on his pegs, one arm raised, holding the head of the pack together by sheer will, Jessie clinging to his waist with her braced leg tucked tight.
And then Miriam saw the fifth truck.
It came up from behind, moving faster than the others, and she recognized it — she'd seen it at the crash site in her nightmares, the overlapping tire tracks burned into her memory. Deke's pickup. It wasn't feinting. It was driving straight for the head of the pack, straight for Eli and Jessie, with murder in its grille.