Chapter 25: Both Hands on the Wheel

Boone's POV

The deputy was still photographing the cut line when the road captain's nephew called me.

"She took the Ford," the kid said. "She told me Birdie's. I called Birdie. She's not there."

I did not remember the drive down off the county road.

I remember that the deputy followed me in his cruiser with no lights, and that I was out of the truck before it stopped rolling.

There were thirty bikes and a dozen trucks in the clubhouse lot.

It was Friday night, and the whole line was inside.

I knew where she was.

"Boone, wait for the second car," the deputy said.

"No."

"Then I'm right behind you."

I went in through the kitchen, the way she always did.

Rafe's voice reached me in the hall.

It was thick and slurred through his wired jaw, and it came out of a phone speaker into a room of forty silent men.

"Amos put it in the cab himself. He said the old man was never going to sell. He said, if he's gone, the boy signs."

I stopped in the kitchen doorway.

The line sat frozen at the long table, every face turned toward the bar.

My wife stood behind it.

She had her hair braided tight and a bar rag over her shoulder, and her hands lay flat on the wood on either side of a glass of whiskey.

She was not shaking.

She was looking straight down the bar at the man who had killed my father.