Chapter 19: Rafe's POV: What the Bike Cost

Rafe's POV

I left at six in the morning with her still asleep, one arm flung across my side of the bed.

I stood in the doorway for longer than I should have.

Her hair was across her face, and she was breathing slow.

Last night she had said my name into the pillow, and I could still feel her nails along my back.

I wanted to wake her up and do it all again.

Instead I went down to the truck, where the cashier's check from the bank was lying in the glove box under the registration.

Forty-one thousand dollars.

I had signed for the loan on Monday against the garage, the lot and the lift.

The loan officer had asked what I needed it for, and I'd said a motorcycle.

She had asked whose.

I said it belonged to a woman who was never going to let me pay for it, and she had stamped the paper without another word.

Chillicothe is an hour south on 23.

The buyer lived on a long gravel drive with a white barn at the end, and the barn door was open on a row of old Hondas, a Vincent and a Norton.

He was a sixty-year-old man in a pressed shirt, and he came out wiping his hands.

"You're the mechanic," he said.

"Rafe Lanier."

"I've been waiting two months for somebody to explain why I paid forty-one thousand dollars for a bike I never got."

"That's why I'm here."

I handed him the check.

He read it twice and then looked up at me, puzzled.

"You're paying me back."

"In full. The bike's not Boone Tarrant's. It belonged to Walt Gerrity, and it passed to his daughter. Boone had no right to sell it."

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