The motorcycle died in front of the Cutter Springs post office at ten minutes past two on the hottest Tuesday of August, and it died the way a light goes out, all at once, with no warning cough.
One second there was the low, loping potato-potato of a big old Harley rolling up Railroad Street at walking speed.
The next there was nothing but the tick of hot metal and the sound of a man saying a word that made Mrs. Delgado, coming out with her box of stamps, turn right around and go back inside.
Josie Etcheverry heard the word from half a block away.
She was pedaling home from Ruby Drug with a white paper bag in the milk crate bungeed to her handlebars, and the bag had her grandfather's name stapled to it, and inside the bag was a month of the little yellow pills that were supposed to slow down the thing in his head that nobody could stop.
She was thinking about the pills and about whether there was enough in the coffee can for the propane delivery, and so she almost rode past.
Then the man thumbed the starter, and the starter groaned, and the engine turned over and over and over without catching, and Josie put a foot down.
Everybody in Cutter Springs knew whose motorcycle that was. It was a 1976 FLH, black, with a dented front fender and saddlebags so old the leather had gone the color of a saddle left in the sun.
The man on it was Dale Haskett, who everybody called Boone, and who was so big that the Electra Glide looked like a reasonable size underneath him. He had a gray beard cut square across the bottom and a face like the rimrock east of town, all ledges and shadows.
People said he had done time in Carson City for breaking a man's jaw in three places.
People said he had once thrown a man through the front window of the Gold Dust Saloon, and that the window had been replaced but the man had moved to Winnemucca and never come back. People said a lot of things.
What Josie knew for sure was that when Boone Haskett walked into the Sinclair station, men in feed caps found something interesting to look at on the far side of the chip rack.
He tried the starter again. The engine spun, wheezing in the heat.