"You doing okay?" he said.
"I'm all right," I said. "What about you?"
"Better every day," he said.
He turned back to the window. He'd left a hand on the console between us. Not reaching. Just there. I drove the next ten miles knowing exactly where it was.
THE RALLY SITE WASsix miles outside Bandera on a cleared section of ranch property: a flat stretch of land backed by live oak and mesquite, a covered pavilion sized for a crowd, and somewhere north of forty motorcycles parked in rows that wereeither carefully organized or casually perfect. Hard to tell which. Brisket smoke had been in the air since the turnoff. By the time I parked, the live music was already running its soundcheck under the shelter and the full bar had a line. The whole site had a kind of organized chaos that wasn't chaos at all. Every man moving through it knew exactly where he was supposed to be.
Cricket appeared before I had the engine off.
"You made it." He had a bottle of water in each hand and the expression of a man with excellent news about himself. He handed one to Scorch, looked at me. "You actually showed up."
"Said I would," I said.
He opened his mouth, thought better of it, and closed it again. Real growth.
"Brim's got the route table set up," Cricket said. "Comal Saints rep's been waiting."
Scorch was already moving.
The introductions went fast, eight men in twenty minutes, names and road names arriving in pairs I wasn't going to sort in real time. The club had clearly been briefed. They were equally clearly pretending they hadn't. I recognized the theater. Three years on a hospital floor and you knew what it looked like when a whole shift had advance information and was choosing not to display it.
Flint, Sergeant-at-Arms, looked at me a beat longer than the rest. Built like he'd been assembled specifically to end arguments.
"Scorch says you're a trauma nurse," he said.
"That I am."
A pause. "Good to have on-site."
"That's what I keep telling him," I said.
The set of his jaw eased by one degree. Beside him, Burr did the same read and reached the same conclusion. I'd been assessed by worse.
Across the site, Scorch had the route map under his hands and two guest clubs paying attention. The job was running in front of the warm manner now, direct and organized. The pull across my shoulder blades came slow and stayed.
SATURDAY MORNING CAMEin loud.
Three clubs and forty-nine riders off the highway by nine, the ride-out staged and run clean, Detour on sweep where Scorch could see him. I watched them leave from the top of the field, the whole line of it moving as one thing. The sound got into your chest whether you wanted it to or not. The Road Captain who'd made it happen was already looking ahead.
The afternoon had gone hot and dry the way Hill Country afternoons did in May, heat coming off the limestone itself, the air tasting of dust and caliche, a hawk riding a thermal high over the south ridge. The Pecos Devils came back in around half-past noon, twenty men loud off the highway, and the site absorbed them the way it absorbed everything: in volume.
I'd moved around the back of the shelter to find the bathroom trailer, away from the noise and press of bodies, and was cutting back through a narrow corridor of scrub and parked trucks when I nearly walked into him.
I went still. Cold hit the back of my neck. The feeling had a name and the name was danger, and it had found me all the way out here.
Trevor Gaines. Pecos Devils cut on his back, older than I remembered, the same set to his jaw.
"Well, Whitley Stahl." His eyes moved over me, slow and deliberate. "Damn, you look good."
I calculated the distance to the main pavilion. Sixty feet around the truck, maybe seventy.
"Walk away, Trevor," I said. "I'm walking away now."
"Road name's Sidewinder now," he said. "In case you were wondering how things turned out, Peaches." Warm and proprietary, like we were picking up a conversation.
I remembered a lot of things. I didn't say any of them.
