She's easy to find. Another pause longer this time. We'll be in touch. Phelp said. I'm sure you will.
Emily said and ended the call. She stood for a moment holding the phone. Then she put it in her pocket and went back to work. She was finishing the ground connection on the Sportster when Dax appeared beside her. You got a call.
He said it wasn't a question. Phelps, she said. He's smooth-voiced checking whether I had a lawyer or now they know. Is now they know, she said. I gave them Patricia's name.
She looked at Dax. They're going to move faster now. They know we have counsel. Dax said. How much faster?
Maybe tonight, he said. Maybe tomorrow before 10:00. He looked at her steadily. Which is why two of us are staying. She looked up from the bike.
It's Marcus and Ray. He said in the lot, not inside. You don't need babysitting. And I'm not saying you do. But they'll be outside tonight.
And if a van with Meridian's logo or anyone else's logo comes down this road at 2 in the morning, you'll have people who know what to do with that. Emily looked at him. She thought about saying she didn't need it. She thought about the independence of that statement and the genuine truth of it and also the other truth. The one that sat beside it without contradiction that accepting help from people who were offering it freely was not weakness.
Her father had known that his garage had survived three lean years in the early 2000s because the community had kept its cars and bikes coming to him even when they could have gone cheaper elsewhere. He had accepted that help and remembered it for the rest of his life and paid it forward in every cookout, every discounted repair, every time he'd put a wrench to something for someone who couldn't quite make the full rate. Thank you, Emily said. Don't thank me, Dax said. You fixed my bike, you would have thanked me with a check, she said.
This is different. Maybe he said, or maybe people like us, people who do the work and keep the records and and fix the things that need fixing. Maybe we were always going to end up standing in the same place when something came after what we built. And he looked at the sign above the door, her father's letters in dark green on white. Walter Carter spent 22 years building something worth protecting.
It turns out there were people who understood that even when he was gone. Emily looked at the sign. She had not cried about any of this. Not when she read the letter. Not when she found the brake line.
Not when Patricia said the word cooperative about Gerald. Not when she heard that her father had written his note of doubt in 2019 and filed it in a binder and gone on building his life around a trap he couldn't see the whole shape of. She did not cry now either, but she put her hand against the wall below the sign for just a moment. The way you put your hand on something to confirm it's still there. It was there.
The garage was still there. And tomorrow at 10:00 in the morning, Emily Carter was going to walk into the Dallas FBI field office with her father's binder under her arm. And she was going to tell the truth about everything she knew. And the truth was documented. And the documentation was meticulous.
And the man who had tried to build a crime around a dead man's careful notes had made a serious miscalculation about what kind of woman that dead man had raised. Emily went back to the Sportster. She had a ground connection to finish. And she was going to finish it right. Marcus knocked on the garage door at 6:45 the next morning.
Emily was already up. She had slept 4 hours. Which was becoming her standard. And she had made coffee and gone through the binder one more time, not because she needed to. She had the contents memorized by now.
But because there was something steadying about handling it, about feeling the physical weight of her father's careful work in her hands. When she heard the knock, she set the binder down and opened the door. And Marcus was standing there with two cups from a drive-thru she hadn't heard him leave to find. And Ry was visible in the lot behind him. Leaning against his bike.
Looking like a man who had spent a comfortable night outside and had no complaints about it. You didn't sleep. Marcus said not an accusation. An observation, she said. I'm fine.
She took the coffee. You were out there all night. Ray and I traded off. Marcus said three on, three off. Nothing came down the road.
He paused. Phelps didn't send anyone. Either they decided it wasn't worth the risk, Emily said. Or they're waiting to see what we do first. Or both, Marcus said.
You ready for today? Emily looked at him. She was wearing clean jeans. Her least damaged work shirt. And her father's old leather jacket, the brown one, with the worn elbows that she'd taken from his closet the week after the funeral and had worn exactly twice since.
Both times when she needed something from him that she couldn't articulate. She looked, she knew he's like exactly what she was. A mechanic's daughter going to the FBI to tell the truth. Ready, she said. Patricia was at the Dallas field office at 9:42 standing outside with a briefcase and the expression of someone who had been to this building before and knew exactly how it worked.
She looked at Emily's jacket. Looked at the binder tucked under Emily's arm. Looked at Dax and Marcus and Ray who had written down with her. And she said, "The three of you wait outside. This goes smoother without an audience."
Dax nodded once. We'll be here. Patricia looked at Emily. Ready? People keep asking me that, Emily said.