That's a road flare. Brandon said it is. Will said that's not a weapon. No, Will agreed. It's a tool which is what I work with, which is what I've always worked with.
He looked at Decker, then back at Brandon. I think you should leave my shop. I think tonight is the last night you should come here and I think when the morning comes you should think seriously about how you want the next few days to go. Is that a threat? Brandon said it's information.
Will said what you do with it is your business. The flare burned. Nobody moved for what felt like a long time but was probably 6 seconds. Then Brandon said something in a low voice to the two unknowns and they moved back. Decker moved last and slowly, and he looked at Will for a moment with an expression that wasn't fear and wasn't respect, but was somewhere between them, the expression of a man encountering a variable he hadn't accounted for.
They went out the back door. Will stood with the flare until he heard the vehicle start down the road and pull away. He stood there until the sound of engines faded completely. Then he walked to the sink and extinguished the flare under the faucet and stood at the sink with both hands braced on the edge looking at the drain. And he breathed slowly and deliberately for 30 seconds.
His hands were steady. They had always been steady. He was grateful for it again the way you're grateful for a thing you'd forgotten to be grateful for. He picked up the landline and called Hutchkins. Hutchkins arrived in 20 minutes alone in his personal truck rather than the cruiser, which told Will that this was a conversation the sheriff wanted to have off the record, or at least off the radio.
Hutchkins was a solid man who thought in straight lines, and Will had come to respect him precisely because of that quality. Straight line thinkers didn't surprise you. They were reliable in the specific and limited way that reliability mattered. Will told him what had happened, everything precisely without editorializing. Hutchkins listened with his arms folded and his jaw tight.
When Will finished, Hutchkins said, "You lit a flare inside your own shop." "On the burning end." Yes. That's not going to hold up as threatening behavior on your part. I know.
Hutchkins looked at him. They're going to come back well, and the next time they won't be looking to talk. I know that, too. So, what are you planning to do about it? And I want an honest answer because the honest answer determines whether I'm going to have a problem on my hands that I can manage or one I can't.
Will looked at the sheriff steadily. There was a version of this conversation he decided not to have the version where he told Hutchkins the whole truth. And there was a version he decided to offer instead, which was a true portion of the truth. I have people coming, Will said, people who knew me before I was here. They're going to help me deal with this in a way that doesn't create problems for you.
I need you to trust me on that. Hutchkins was quiet for a moment. The clock on the wall ticked 3 minutes fast. What kind of people? The kind that Brandon Keller isn't prepared for.
Will said, "That's not an answer. It's the most useful answer I have for you right now, Dale." It was the first time Will had used Hutchinson's first name in four years of knowing him, and Hutchkins noticed it, and Will had intended him to notice it. The name signaled something, a change in the register of the conversation, a move from official to personal. Hutchkins looked at him for a long moment.
Are we going to have violence in my town? I don't know, Will said honestly. I hope not. The people coming aren't looking for a fight. They're looking to make something very clear to a young man who has confused the absence of opposition with the absence of consequence.
Hutchkins absorbed this. He looked at his hands folded together in front of him on the workbench. He looked like a man choosing between two things he didn't love. I can't protect you overnight, he said finally. I've said that I don't have the manpower.
I'm not asking you to. And if something happens, if something happens that requires a law enforcement response, you'll get a call, Will said. I'll make sure of it. Hutchkins nodded once slowly, the nod of a man choosing to trust something he can't fully verify because the alternative is worse. I'm going to need you to keep me informed, and he said, "You keep me informed, and I keep my end of this clean, and maybe we come out the other side without a disaster."
"That's exactly what I want," Will said. Hutchkins left. Will locked up the shop both doors the way Marcus had suggested and went to his house and made himself a sandwich he didn't particularly want and ate it standing at the kitchen counter because sitting felt like something that happened when the situation was resolved and the situation was not resolved. He thought about Marcus. He thought about where Marcus would be tonight.
Whether he was already on the road, whether the call had gone out to the others in the way that calls went out in that world, not by committee or announcement, but by the specific communication of men who understood each other without having to explain themselves. He thought about the last time he had been part of that system 22 years ago and how it had felt from the inside. Not what the outside imagined it felt like, not what movies made of it. The actual feeling of belonging to something that moved when you moved, that heard you when you spoke without requiring you to justify your volume that showed up when the showing up mattered. He'd walked away from that.
He needed to walk away from it. But standing in his kitchen in Silver Creek with a halfeaten sandwich. Um, and the quiet of a November night around him, Will Carter understood something. He'd been understanding slowly for years, but was only now willing to name clearly. Walking away from something isn't the same as being done with it.
Saturday came and nothing happened. Will open the shop at 7, work through the afternoon, sent Pete Alcott a second message that the shovel head was ready whenever he could make the 40-mile drive, and spent the evening replacing the timing cover on a 72 Norton Commando that he'd bought himself 3 years ago and still hadn't gotten around to finishing. The Norton was his, and when he worked on his own bikes, it was different, more personal, the way cooking for yourself is different from cooking for others. Emily came by at 2:00 in the afternoon and brought Maggie which was unusual and which told Will something about Emily's state of mind that she wanted her daughter where she could see her rather than home with the neighbor. Maggie was small for four with her mother's dark eyes in a manner that suggested she'd arrived in the world already skeptical of things that didn't make sense.
She walked into the shop with the assurance of a child visiting a familiar person and went directly to the stool beside the workbench where Emily always sat and climbed up on it and looked at the Norton. What's wrong with it? She said timing covers leaking, Will said. Is that bad? It's not good.