HE PUTS PILLS IN IT. CRUSHED UP. THEY MAKE YOU SLEEPY. THE MAN OUTSIDE FOLLOWS YOU AND TAKES THE BIKE WHEN YOU PULL OVER. THEY DID IT 3 TIMES SINCE JUNE THAT I KNOW. PLEASE DONT LET HIM KNOW I TOLD. PLEASE. I HAVE NOWHERE ELSE TO GO.
He read it twice. Then he folded it very small and put it in the breast pocket of his shirt and buttoned the pocket.
Through the pass-through window he could see Curtis at the grill, his back to the room, flipping something. Behind the counter, Wren was wiping down the coffee station, wiping the same spot over and over, her head bent. The braid had come loose a little at the end. She looked very young and very small and very alone.
I have nowhere else to go.
Tom thought about his options the way he had once been trained to think about them, quickly and without sentiment.
He could get up and walk out, get on the bike, rip the tracker off the fender in the parking lot, and ride like hell for Austin. He would be fine. The man in the pickup might follow him or might not. Either way, Tom would be seventy miles down the road in an hour with a story to tell some deputy who would probably write it down and probably never do anything about it. And the girl would stay here, in this metal box in the middle of the desert, with a man who put crushed pills in coffee and a partner who stole motorcycles from people too drugged to fight back. And Curtis would know, the moment Tom tore that tracker off, that somebody had warned him. And there was only one somebody.
He could confront Curtis. He was fifty-four and had a bad knee and had not been in a fight since a bar in Killeen in 1997, and Curtis was big, and the man in the pickup was outside, and for all Tom knew one or both of them had a gun. And the girl would be in the middle of it.
Or.
"Bathroom?" he called toward the counter.
"Back by the kitchen," Wren said without looking up. "Door on the left. You have to jiggle the handle."
He got up. He left his helmet on the seat and his jacket over the back of the booth, so it would look like he was coming back, which he was. He walked down the narrow hallway past the kitchen door, where he could hear Curtis whistling along with the radio, and went into the bathroom and locked the door and leaned against it.
It was a tiny room, with a stained sink and a cracked mirror and a window the size of a shoebox high up on the wall. He took out his phone. One bar. He moved closer to the window and got two.
He dialed 911.