Marla's Road King came screaming into the lot thirty seconds later. She was off the bike and kneeling on the gravel beside the truck's open door with a flashlight in her teeth, feeling Aitona's pulse, pressing his feet between her hands. When she looked up at Boone, her face was all ER.
"He needs a hospital," she said. "His core temp's down. His feet—he needs to go now, Dale. Not in a pickup."
Boone looked at Josie.
He had his phone in his bad hand. He held it so she could see it. He didn't dial.
"I'm calling it in," he said. "Ambulance, sheriff, all of it. They're gonna come. And when they come, they're gonna call that Ochoa lady, and you know what happens after that." His voice didn't shake. "I'm telling you first. To your face. Like I said I would."
Josie stood on the frozen gravel in the headlights. She looked at her grandfather, wrapped in Boone's coat in the cab of the truck, his white hair standing up in back, his bloody hands, his bare blue feet in Marla's lap. Behind them, out on the highway, one by one, the motorcycles of the Ruby Iron were coming in from the dark, their headlights making a long, slow, shining line.
"Okay," she said. "Call."
The ambulance took Aitona to Elko at 3:40. Deputy Kyle Arnett, who had been a Cub Scout when her grandfather taught a small-engines merit badge in the back bay of this very building, wrote his report on the hood of his cruiser and kept clearing his throat. At 5:15, when the sky over the Rubies was just turning the color of a bruise, Renata Ochoa's state Ford pulled in with its cracked windshield, and Ms. Ochoa got out in a parka over her pajama top, and said, "Hi, Josie," very softly.
Before she got in the car, Josie went to Boone. Nine motorcycles were parked in a half-circle around the front of the old shop, and the men and the one woman who rode them stood beside them in the cold with their breath smoking, not saying anything, watching.
She reached into the pocket of her coat and took out the distributor rotor, gray plastic, about the size of a thumb, and put it in Boone's hand.
"Don't let anybody drive his truck," she said.
Boone closed his fingers on it, as much as they would close.
"Nobody," he said.