time on the inside of the back cover, because paper stayed, but paper could
also be lost, and he was his father's son.
Marsh's voice, when Paula called her, came through the phone loud enough
for Owen to hear from the table. "Read it to me again." And then a silence
with typing in it. And then: "Paula. That VIN belongs to a white pickup
truck. A total loss, wrecked and settled in 2021, title surrendered. Somebody
has washed that number onto this filing — they took a dead truck's identity
and put it on the SUV, which means the paper on that vehicle is as false as a
three-dollar bill and twice as deliberate." Owen could hear her breathing. "Do
you understand what that means? It means the filing is a crime all by itself,
and it still doesn't open the gate. To prove the number on the SUV doesn't
match the SUV, I have to read the number off the SUV. Off the metal. Which
is inside a locked barn, on private land, that the owners swear is empty.
Catch is complete, Paula. It's a perfect little circle, and they drew it on
purpose."
"What breaks it?" his mother said.
"Time, or the state police, or a mistake on their side." A pause. "I've already
put in the request to the state. I did it before I called you back. A washed title
crossing a state line to a shredder — that's the kind of thing they have units
for. But units take time to move, and your shredder truck comes Friday
week."
Eight days. The number sat in the kitchen between them all evening like a
fourth person at the table. Eight days until a truck came to the wash barn and
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took the SUV to Oklahoma to be fed into a machine that would turn it into
fist-sized pieces of itself, after which there would be no quarter panel, no
mismatched headlight, no forked crack in any taillight — nothing in the
world left of the thing that had come around the Elbow on County Road 12
in the dark, except what was written in a ten-year-old's notebook. Paula stood
at the sink a long time after the dishes, looking out at the dark street, and
Owen stood beside her because beside her was where he stood now, and she
said, "The sheriff is a good woman working inside a fence. The state is a big
machine that starts slow. And the Prescotts—" She stopped.
"They have lawyers," Owen said.
"They have lawyers and filing cabinets and time." She dried her hands. "We
need people who can't be filed away and forgotten."
Owen knew, before she finished saying it, what he was going to do. He went
to his room and got the notebook and opened it — not to the recent pages,
not to the watch or the plate or the VIN — but to the front, to the oldest page
in the book, older than the book almost, because the book had been a school
notebook before it was this. Two years ago a boy of eight, in a hand that
leaned hard and wobbled, had written down the names of the men who had
carried his father's coffin from the church to the grave, because somebody —
he no longer remembered who; maybe his mother, maybe the funeral
director, maybe his own new religion arriving early — had told him their
names as they passed, and he had understood that the names mattered and
that he would forget them if he didn't write them down. Six names under a
heading that just said CARRIED DAD. The Red Hollow Riders, in their cuts,
in the October sun, carrying Hollis Tate the last of the way with their hands
under the wood.
"Dad's riders," Owen said, and put the notebook open on the kitchen table in
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front of his mother.
Paula looked at the page a long time. Outside, right on its new schedule, the
patrol went past the house slow, lights sweeping the windows, and neither of
them turned to watch it go.
"Then we go Thursday," she said. "That's when they gather."
The co-op garage sat behind the feed store on the east edge of Alden, in a
long tin building that had been a tractor dealership in his grandfather's time
and still smelled of the oil soaked into its floors for fifty years. On Thursday
nights the Red Hollow Riders gathered there, as they had every Thursday
since before Owen Tate was born. It was not a secret place — Ruth Ketchum
put it in the church bulletin once a year when the club ran its toy drive — but
Owen had never been inside it at night, and when his mother turned into the
gravel lot and the big doors stood open with the light falling out in a long
yellow parallelogram, he held his notebook against his chest with both arms,
the way a person holds a thing that is about to be examined.
His mother parked under the cottonwood at the lot's edge, where Hollis used
to park, though neither of them said so. Fourteen motorcycles stood in two
rows on the concrete. Men were scattered among them the way men scatter
in any workshop — two on stools by the bench, one under a lamp with a
carburetor in pieces on a rag, a couple standing with cups in their hands
doing the serious work of talking. Fourteen bikes, laid out in steel and
lamplight. Numbers in a notebook were one thing. Numbers with weight
were another.