He was walking across the parking lot toward the diner. He was younger than Curtis, maybe thirty-five, lean and sunburned, in a faded ball cap and jeans and a plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up, the kind of man you would not look at twice at any gas station in the West. He was not walking toward the door. He was walking toward the Road King, unhurried, with his hands in his pockets, his eyes moving over the bike the way a buyer's eyes move over a horse.
Tom watched him stop beside the rear wheel. Watched him glance once toward the diner windows, a quick, casual glance that slid right past Tom's booth as if it were empty. The glass was tinted and dirty and the afternoon sun was full on it; from outside, Tom realized, the windows would be nothing but glare. The man could not see in.
The man crouched beside the bike as if to tie his boot. His right hand came out of his pocket holding something small and black, about the size of a matchbox. He reached up under the rear fender, behind the saddlebag, where the frame made a pocket nobody ever looked into, and held his hand there for a second or two. When the hand came out again, it was empty.
Then he stood up, retied nothing, and walked back across the gravel to the gray pickup, and got in, and the phone glow came back on behind the windshield.
Tom put the menu down.
He knew exactly what he had just seen. He had owned a motorcycle shop for nine years. He had installed a hundred GPS trackers on a hundred bikes for owners who were afraid of losing them. Little magnetic boxes with a battery and a cellular chip. You stuck one under the fender, and somebody with the right app could watch you on a map in real time, every mile, every turn, every stop.
Every rest area.
You get to feeling sleepy, you pull over, you hear? There's a rest area about thirty miles on. Nice and shady. Good place to close your eyes.
Something cold moved down Tom's back, from the base of his skull to the bottom of his spine, and stayed there.
"You ready to order?"
He looked up. Wren was standing beside the booth with her order pad and a pencil. Her face was composed and blank, the face of a bored teenage waitress on a slow Tuesday. Only her hands gave her away. The pencil was trembling.
"What's good?" Tom asked, loud enough to carry to the kitchen.
"Chicken-fried steak's good. Burger's fine." She did not look at him. She tore a sheet off the pad, folded it once, and set it on the table beside his hand, under the edge of the napkin dispenser, in one smooth motion that took less than a second. "I'll give you a minute to decide."
She went back behind the counter.
Tom slid the paper out from under the napkin dispenser and unfolded it on his knee, below the edge of the table. It was written in pencil, in small cramped capital letters, pressed so hard that the point had torn through in places.