A man stepped out.Dark jacket.No coat for the weather, which meant he didn’t plan to be outside long.He didn’t walk toward the store.He stood in the open door of his vehicle with one hand on the frame and the other hand down at his hip where I couldn’t see it, and he scanned the lot -- left to right, slow, taking inventory.
He took clocked the Buick, my bike, and even me.
I threw a leg over the bike.
“Get on.”
She followed the softly spoken command.She didn’t ask which side.She didn’t ask where to put her hands.She scrambled on, hiking the dress up with a clumsy heave.She swung a leg over the seat, her heel scraping against the pipe before her foot found the peg.The helmet bumped once against the back of my shoulder as she settled, grabbing for purchase.
Her fingers dug into my shirt as she held on.
It wasn’t the loose grip of a girl who’d been on the back of a bike before and remembered the etiquette.Both of her hands closed in the front of my jacket like the leather was a railing and she was a half-step from going over, and both fists pressed into my stomach through the cut.
The man in the dark jacket lifted his hand off the SUV’s frame.
I was already moving.
I twisted the throttle.The rear tire spat a plume of gravel, the back end sliding for a split second before it caught traction.We shot out from under the canopy, and I leaned hard into the turn onto the county road.She moved with me instead of fighting it.On a first ride, that was the only thing that kept you upright.
Behind us, a door slammed.Then a second door.The high beams of the second SUV swept across the front of the store, across the pumps and the spot we’d been parked in three seconds ago, and then they swung wide toward the road.
I opened the throttle the rest of the way.
The county highway south of Nashville at eleven-thirty on a weeknight was a black river with a yellow line down the middle of it, and the bike ate it.The tree line on either side blurred into something you couldn’t look at without your eyes watering.Cold came up off the asphalt, through my jeans, through the cuffs of my jacket, and somewhere behind us, in the mirror, the SUV headlights came around onto the road in a wide, scrambling arc and started after us.
They were big vehicles.They were fast on a straight.They were not fast through curves, and I knew every curve on this stretch of road betweenHadley’sand the county line by the time I was twenty.
I took the first one without braking.
Her hands clamped tighter.I felt the second fistful of jacket bunch under my ribs.She made a small sound, not quite a word, swallowed almost before it started.She put her helmet against the back of my shoulder and pressed it there.That was all.
I checked the mirror.
The headlights clung to us through the first curves, too bright in my mirror.I knew a feeder road up ahead they wouldn’t expect.I took the turn hard, the tires screaming.I saw their brake lights flare red as they overshot the turn-in.They’d be back, but I’d bought us thirty seconds.It would have to be enough.I didn’t slow down.
The next exit north was a county road.From there, I could hit a web of back roads leading to the woods south of the compound.A man on a bike could get lost in those trees.The men in the SUVs would have to be born in them to follow.I pointed the bike at the exit.
Chapter Two
Lennox
The bike slowed and I didn’t let go of his jacket.
Thirty-odd miles with my fists tangled in his jacket.Somewhere along the way it stopped being something I held and became the only thing keeping me upright.By the time the engine dropped into a lower gear at the gate, my fingers wouldn’t obey the part of me that knew to let go.He didn’t comment.He rolled to a stop in front of a high chain-link fence topped with razor wire.A man stepped out from a small lit booth and walked to the side of the bike, and the two of them spoke in voices too low for me to catch over the idle of the engine.The man at the gate looked at me once.Not long.A flick of the eyes, top to bottom, the cathedral train of the gown bunched around my thighs and my feet hooked against the foot pegs.Then he looked back at the man in front of me, said something short, and the gate slid sideways on a rail.
We rolled through.
The compound was bigger than I’d let myself imagine on the ride in.The headlight cut a yellow channel across packed gravel, and along it I caught the shapes of things -- a long low building with a peaked roof and bikes lined shoulder to shoulder beneath the awning, the orange wink of a fire pit gone down to coals in the middle of an open yard, a garage with its bay doors half closed and a wedge of fluorescent light spilling across the dirt.A man in a denim cut stood under the awning with a rag in one hand and watched us roll past without lifting it in greeting.Somewhere past the tree line, well off to the right, a dog barked twice and stopped.Two younger men in jackets without patches crossed the yard between the garage and the main building and turned their heads as we went by.The one in front said something to the one behind him.The one behind him said nothing.
Four buildings, then I lost track.Six men, then I made myself stop.
The bike came around a long curve in the gravel and then slowed again, stopped, this time near a row of smaller structures set back from the main building under a line of pines.Cottages.Square little porches.One of them had a wreath of dried hydrangea on the door, so ordinary I almost laughed.Then almost cried.Did neither.
He killed the engine.
After the engine died, the compound felt unnaturally wide-open.My ears rang.My thighs were shaking from holding the seat for half an hour and I hadn’t noticed until the vibration of the bike ceased.
He didn’t say anything.He sat still on the bike for a beat, looking somewhere past the cottages, then reached down and put his hand over both of mine where they were still clamped in his jacket.The heat of his palm was the first warm thing I’d touched since I’d left the bridal suite.He didn’t pull my hands free.He just left his hand there until my fingers remembered they had bones in them, and one at a time they came loose.
