Page 13 of Roadrunner

“Spends them with me. She doesn’t really have family, just some friends here. I think that’s part of why we get along.”

“Tell her to come here instead. You two can have dinner with my family.”

“It’s all right with your parents?” My voice climbed a little. “They know about me?”

He laughed, short and dry. “My mother asked me to invite you.”

Something moved through me all at once.

Surprise, and under it something closer to nerves, and under that something that felt, absurdly, like hope.

I wiped my face with both hands. “It won’t be an imposition?”

“Not at all. It’s just the four of us. My parents, me, and my sister.”

I couldn’t stop smiling. “I’d love to come.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

Alex

Then

I’d built the Hard Eights’ clubhouse in my head long before I saw it. A run-down adobe shed on the wrong side of town. Boarded windows. A parking lot full of potholes. A steel door with two spray-painted dice on it, both showing four, and a secret knock to get past it. Somewhere behind that, I’d half convinced myself, was a room lit by candles where men in leather decided who was worthy and who wasn’t.

I was wrong about all of it.

The clubhouse was a former gas station on one of Marana’s main roads, freshly painted, with a new awning and a clean lot. Nothing on the doors said dice, or skulls, or anything at all to mark it as a motorcycle club’s home. The overhead bays still read what they’d always read—Front End Alignment, Brakes, Tune-Up—left over from whoever had run it as a repair shop.

Inside the office, an old postcard rack still turned on its spindle, the cards on it looking older than the saguaros outside. I lifted one out. The color had gone flat, the paper yellowed from years of sun through the west window. A rattlesnake coiled on a strip of desert highway. Greetings! From Marana.

I put it back in front of the others just like it and looked around. A shelf of automotive manuals ran the length of one wall, spines cracked, each one dated—1945 straight through to 1998, without a gap.

“This place is awesome,” I said.

“There’s a Mexican joint and a donut shop across the street.” Riley nodded through the glass toward the OPEN sign blinking in the donut shop window. “What more could a guy want?”

It was a long way from what I’d pictured. I grinned at him. “I love it.”

He led me back through to the garage, where the smell of meat smoking in a row of homemade barbecues hit me before anything else did. Folding tables ran down the center of the concrete floor, each one set with a tablecloth and eight chairs. Somewhere past them, a Fender amp played rock and roll low enough that people could still talk over it. Men in leather vests stood around in clusters, easy with each other, like a reunion.

Riley’s descriptions had been good enough that I could have picked most of them out cold.

Brisco was hard to miss. He was bald, built and out of nothing but muscle. The club’s enforcer. He grinned at everyone, but there was something behind his eyes that told you the grin had limits.

Price, the club’s president, stood off to one side, long and lean, black hair falling over half his face. He pushed it back often enough that I caught glimpses of a face that could have modeled watches or cologne somewhere else entirely. He didn’t say much. When he did, people listened, and his eyes never stopped moving.

Near the grills, talking with Price, was Lackey, the treasurer. He was the only one of them who looked like he could walk into an office building unremarked. Pressed jeans, clean boots, a white t-shirt under his kutte that matched his teeth. He spoke in short, exact sentences.

And then there was Sparks. The club’s mechanic, a former elementary school teacher from Minnesota, hair slicked back with what I suspected was more grease than product. He talked with a mild stutter that came and went depending on the word, and he used his hands constantly, which were about as clean as the stories he told.

We drifted toward a knot of men who’d gathered to hear one of those stories. I was the only person there not wearing leather, and I’d decided against buying anything from the Harley shop for the occasion. It felt like exactly the kind of thing Riley made fun of other people for doing. One of the men was wearing Converse just like mine, and that helped.

“Do I need to finish this later?” Sparks asked, glancing at Riley.

“Not unless you’re uncomfortable,” Riley said, tipping his head toward me. “She won’t be.”

Sparks nodded and turned back to his audience. I did my best to look uninterested and listened hard.