Dutch was the one who knocked. Three knocks, solid, the knock of a man trying to sound more certain than he felt. The sound fell flat against the door and the house, and nothing answered it. He knocked again, and still nothing, and the silence that followed was the silence of a house that had learned to keep its own counsel. Torch glanced at Rex. Rex looked at the side of the house, at the narrow passage that led around to the back, and said quietly, "She said he sits in the garage." They moved around the side of the house without discussing it, the way men move when they have spent enough years together that decisions happen in the spaces between words. The shade on that side of the house was thin and hot, and the ground was hard-packed dirt with a few stubborn weeds pushing through.
The garage door was the kind that lifted manually, and it was open about two feet at the bottom, just enough to let air move through, not enough to see inside clearly. Through the gap came the smell of old oil and dust and hot concrete, and a darkness that seemed deeper than the shade outside. Gravel crouched down and knocked on the metal door itself, and the sound rang out sharp and flat, and echoed a little in the space behind it. A long pause followed, long enough that Dutch began to wonder if Emily had been wrong, if Jack was not here at all, if they had come all this way to knock on an empty garage. Then, from inside, a voice. Low, rough, the voice of a man who hadn't used it much lately. "We're closed."
Dutch almost laughed despite himself. Almost. The words were so perfectly Jack — the flat refusal, the closed door offered as a complete sentence — that for a second he was twenty years younger and standing outside some other door, hearing some other version of the same voice. He remembered, suddenly and without warning, the way Jack used to answer the phone in the old days: the same flat economy, the same refusal to waste a syllable, and then, underneath it, the willingness to ride all night if a brother needed him. The memory hit Dutch harder than the refusal had, because it reminded him of everything that had been lost between the man who answered that way and the men who had stopped calling. He swallowed, and steadied himself, and said what he had come to say. He swallowed, and steadied himself, and said, "Jack, it's Dutch." The silence that followed was a different quality than the silence before it. Thicker, charged, the silence of a man whose brain is processing something his body already knows. "Dutch," the voice said, flat. Not a question. Just the name, laid down like an object on a table to be examined. "Yeah," Dutch said. Another pause. "Dutch, Hells Angels." "Yeah, Jack, it's me."
The sound of something being set down. A stool scraping concrete. Footsteps, unhurried. Not the footsteps of someone rushing to open a door, but the footsteps of someone deciding with every step whether to keep moving forward or turn back. Gravel straightened up slowly, his bad leg stiff from the crouch, and Torch took a half step back, giving the door room, and Rex stood very still, as if any movement of his might break whatever fragile thing was happening on the other side of the metal. The footsteps came closer. There was a pause, a long one, in which Dutch could hear his own heart beating in his ears, and then the garage door lifted, rattling in its tracks, light spilling in underneath it and then all at once.
Jack Carter stood in the opening. He was sixty-one years old, and he looked like a man who had lived every single one of those years without any of the cushioning that comfort provides. He was thinner than Dutch remembered — not sick thin, but worn thin, the way a rope gets when it has been under tension for too long without relief. His hair had gone fully gray, and he wore it short, almost military, though he had never been military. His eyes went from face to face, Gravel, Dutch, Torch, Rex, taking each of them in with a slowness that gave nothing away, and then they settled on Dutch, and stayed there. Nobody spoke. The desert wind moved through the scrub. And in the doorway of the garage, with the shape of a motorcycle under a tarp behind him and fifteen years standing between them like a wall, the reckoning that none of them knew how to begin finally had a place to start.