She looked at her knuckles healed now. That was the hand and the bruise. Cole said on the right swung at me when I started yelling. My arm up in time. She said it factually.
They left after that. Inside and I threw up from adrenaline. And then I sat down and I wrote down everything they said word for word while I could still remember exactly. I already had the recording running. I'd started the recording the moment I saw them in the lot.
Their faces on my property camera. Cole looked at her. You have them on camera, he said. I've had cameras on the property for 4 months, she said. Since the second time Puit approached me and I realized he wasn't taking no for an answer.
I have everything, Cole. I have 26 pieces of documentation, recordings, written accounts, camera footage. I have a conversation where Puit told me directly that if I didn't sign the papers by the end of Octoberms, he'd make sure I lost everything I was trying to protect. October, Cole said. October.
Haley said the two of them looked at each other across the open bay of Morgan's auto and cycle repairs with the smell of oil and metal around them and the cold coming in through the open door. I'm ready, she said. I've been waiting until I had enough that he couldn't make it disappear. I think I have enough. I was going to go to the county attorney's office next week.
She paused. I've been doing it alone. And doing things alone is another pause. Lot. You don't have to do it alone.
Cole said, not the next part. Haley looked at him. The evaluating look, the look of someone who has been burned enough times to measure twice. What does your involvement look like? She said, "Be specific.
If it looks like a group of bikers showing up and making threats, that's the worst thing that can happen for me right now." That's exactly what Puit wants. He'll turn it into the story, the story where I'm not a woman trying to save her father's business. I'm a woman who weaponized a gang to intimidate a businessman. I can't give him that.
Cole nodded. That's not what it looks like, he said. What does it look like? Cole said. It looks like witnesses have been watching you work for two weeks who can say clearly and publicly what they've seen.
And it looks like connections to the kind of attorney who takes cases like yours and wins them. Haley was quiet, not fighters, Cole said. I mean, we can be. That's not what this needs. This needs the truth in a room where people are paying attention.
The truth. We can help you get it in the room. Haley was still for a long moment. Outside, the wind moved through the trees that lined the property and somewhere down the road, a car passed and its engine sound faded into distance. Her phone was on the workbench beside her.
The evidence folder had 26 entries. She looked at Cole. I have a meeting with the county attorney's office on Tuesday, she said. I was going to go alone. Go with a full account of what you have.
Cole said 26 pieces and go knowing that there are people in this town who will stand up and say they watched you work and they know who you are. You'd do that. She said have a question. Ray Kowalsski would do that. Cole said Ry doesn't do anything he doesn't mean.
And if Ray goes Hatch goes. And if Hatch goes, he stopped. You've got more people than you think. There's Haley. You've just been alone long enough that you've forgotten how to count them.
Something crossed her face then, something she didn't manage in time, not the small smile from the other day. Older and more complicated, the look of someone who has held something together for so long that the first real offer of help lands not like relief, but like grief does because it reminds you of exactly how long you've been holding." She turned away from him for a moment. She picked up the grease rag and set it down again. Not because she needed to, but because her hands needed something to do.
When she turned back, her expression was composed. She said, "Tuesday." Cole said, "I'll call you Monday with the time." She said, "Oh." He nodded.
He turned to leave. He was at the bay entrance when she said, "Oh." He stopped. Turned back the bike. She said, "There's Ray's bike."
That was the first time in a long time that something went the way it was supposed to go. She paused. Had the quality of something real in it. Well, I needed that more than I knew. Cole looked at her across the length of the bay.
But me, too, he said. He walked out into the cold. Behind him, Carol came back up. Steel guitar, old and honest, moving through the walls of the garage that her father had built and that she was not going to let anyone take. Not now.
Not after everything it had cost to still be standing in it. They came the way hard weeks always end not with resolution sim but with the particular exhaustion of someone who has been running on adrenaline long enough that their body has started sending invoices. Was at the garage by 7:00, not Morgan's garage, the Hell's Angel's garage on Route 9. He had called Sunday evening and said Pete wanted to come in and hear about his sportster directly from her. And Pete was a man who worked early shifts and could only come before 8.