Page 2 of Bones and Ashes

Which is a fascinatin' piece of truth, if I'm being honest. Because of course, I'm the only reason these people are here.

Now… what they want with me… that's another story. Because this is clearly not an arrest. And his silence is allowin' my mind to do what it does best when I don't have enough information. It spins.

If it's not an arrest, what is it?

Federal prosecution.

Witness deal.

Execution with paperwork.

Some version of all three.

The folder on his desk is thick. Not padded-for-performance thick. Actually thick. Like someone spent real time puttin' this relic together.

I watch him turn a page. Then another. Then he closes it.

He looks up.

Hazel eyes. The dead kind. Not angry or calculating, just genuinely unbothered. Like he's already decided how this ends and the conversation between now and then is just procedure.

There's a beat where neither of us says anything, and I get the distinct impression he's done this enough times that he's comfortable in the silence and I'm supposed to feel the opposite.

I don't give him the satisfaction of confirmation.

Finally, he takes a breath. "I'm—" and then there's this pause. The kind of pause a man takes when he's choosin' which version of himself to introduce. "Call me… Mike."

All right. Well, clearly this is gonna be a game of 'let's play games'.

Fine with me.

I know what I did and why I'm here.

He knows what I did and why I'm here too.

But if he's not gonna get to the point, then neither am I. So I say, "Mornin', Mike. How can I help ya today?"

The corners of his mouth lift, just a bit. "You ever heard of the Bakken formation?"

Yeah. He got me there. Because before I can lock it down, the confusion spirals into my brain, making me tilt my head and squint my eyes. I'm not even sure what he said, that's how unfamiliar I am with the words that just came out of his fuckin' mouth.

But I play it cool. "Can't say that I have."

"No," he agrees. "You wouldn't."

Which is a provocation in my eyes. No, of course not. You're just a dumb biker. Which, fair. I am. "So what's it got to do with me?"

"The Bakken formation," he says, lookin' out the window now at the still spectacular sunrise, "is roughly two hundred thousand square miles of subsurface rock sitting under Montana, North Dakota, and two Canadian provinces. It's named after a farmer, discovered in the fifties, and ignored for decades because nobody could figure out how to pull the oil out cheap enough to bother with it." He pauses for a moment to pull himself away from the sunrise and take me in. "You following me so far?"

I'm not. But I can play. "Rocks. Farmer. Oil."

"Perfect," Mike says.

Again, the corners of his mouth lift up just a bit.

Just enough to be insulting.

"Current estimates put recoverable reserves somewhere between seven and eighteen billion barrels depending on who you ask and how honest they're feeling. Hydraulic fracturing solved the cost problem around 2000, production boomed past what the pipeline infrastructure could handle, and now you've got more oil moving through that corridor than the state has capacity to track—which, for our purposes, is the only part of that sentence that matters to you, specifically."