That's what you said then, too. Marcus set the jet down. He was quiet for a moment. I should have come to find you, he said. After a year, 2 years, when you'd had time, I should have driven out here.
I wasn't here for the first 18 years, Will said. Wherever you were, Marcus said, I should have come. Marcus, Will said. He looked up from the carburetor. You kept the number current for 22 years.
You sent the updated number every time it changed. I knew the number and you knew I had it. And that was the understanding between us. He looked at the older man. That's not nothing.
That's the whole thing, actually. Marcus stood with his hands at his sides and looked at Will with the expression that never quite reached his mouth. Jimmy would have been insufferable about being right. He said, "He always said you'd come back." The shop was very quiet.
The clock on the wall ran 3 minutes fast. What did he say exactly? Will said. He said you couldn't walk away from people who needed fixing. Marcus said he said you do it for bikes as long as you could pretend that was enough and then one day something would happen and you'd remember that it wasn't.
He looked around the shop at the bikes in progress, at the parts bins lined up along the wall, at the photograph of the knucklehead on the corkboard. He wasn't wrong. Will looked at his hands on the workbench. He thought about Jimmy Puit saying that with the laugh that started quiet and built, saying it with the certainty of someone who knew you better than you knew yourself at the time, and he felt the loss of him with the familiar ache, the stone that had gotten easier to carry, but had never gotten lighter. No, Will said, he wasn't wrong.
They worked together for a while after that. Marcus had never been a mechanic, but he had always been good in a shop. The kind of man who handed you things before you asked and held components steady without being told and understood that the silence around good work was its own kind of conversation. They got the Triumph's carburetor cleaned and reinstalled and the tank back on and the fuel line reconnected. And by 11:00, the bike was ready to start.
Will kicked it over. The Triumph fired on the third kick settled into its idle. The British twins particular sound filling the shop with the deep heartbeat of a machine that had been waiting to run again. Both men listened to it. "There it is," Marcus said.
"There it is," Shuamo will agreed. He let it run for a few minutes to make sure the fuel was circulating clean, watching the gauges, listening to the note, and when he was satisfied, he cut the engine, and the shop went quiet again. "The men are at the motel on the highway," Will said. "Two nights," Marcus said. We'll ride out Tuesday morning.
You don't have to stay, Will said. Will, Marcus said with a tone that closed arguments. We'll stay two nights. Let Hutchkins get his feet under him with the case. Let your town settle, he looked at Will.
And I want two days. Of what? Will said. Of this, Marcus said simply. Of the shop and the coffee and the 3 minutes fast clock and Will Carter at his workbench with grease on his hands being exactly who he was.
Will looked at him for a moment. Then he nodded. "All right," he said. "2o days." Monday morning came clear and cold.
The kind of Montana cold that arrived with a blue sky that looked too clean to be real. The world after a night of hard freeze wearing the brightness of something scrubbed back to its original color. Will was at Emily's kitchen at 7:00 exactly. She opened the door before he knocked, which meant she'd heard his truck. And Maggie was already at the kitchen table with a glass of orange juice.
In a very serious expression, eating toast in the methodical way she ate everything one corner at a time. You came, Maggie said as though this were a question she'd been holding. I said I would, Will said. Mom said you might be tired. Maggie said.
Your mom's usually right. Will said some. But I'm here. Maggie accepted this and returned to her toast. Emily poured coffee and set it at the spot across from Maggie.
And Will sat down. And it was Wednesday in all the ways that mattered. The ordinary ritual of the kitchen table, the child's serious eating, the coffee that Emily made too strong because she'd learned from Will's pot and overcorrected. They talked, the three of them, which meant Will and Emily talked, and Maggie inserted observations at intervals with the confidence of someone who didn't distinguish between her opinions and other people's topics. They talked about the night before and about Hutchkins's morning, which Will had checked on with a call at 6:30, learning that all of Brandon's remaining men had surrendered without incident to the deputies at the warehouse, and that Billings PD had opened a parallel investigation based on Decker's testimony, and that the DA's office would be talking to Lou and Tommy and the other business owners in the coming days.
Hutchkins had sounded it on the phone at 6:30 like a man who had slept 3 hours and felt better than he had in 6 weeks, which was a specific and understandable combination. What happens to Brandon? Emily asked. That's the courts, Will said. Hutchkins says the extortion charges alone carry significant time if they go to trial.
If he cooperates fully, which Hutchkins thinks is likely based on last night, the picture changes, but it changes toward accountability rather than away from it. There's no version where he walks. Good, Emily said without particular satisfaction in it. Not vengeance, just the plain acknowledgement that consequences needed to exist in order for the word consequence to mean anything. Good," Maggie echoed clearly without any idea what she was agreeing with, but committed to the word.