She turned off Highway 95 onto a nameless, unpaved washboard road. The truck rattled violently. She wasn't thinking about Dutch. She wasn't thinking about the arrogant kid with the knife. She was thinking about the fact that she needed to pick up dog food, and she had forgotten to ask Betty to order a new case of filters for the commercial coffee machine at the diner.
Survival was in the mundane. Survival was keeping your mind fixed firmly on the immediate practical tasks of living. If you looked too far forward, you got anxious. If you looked too far back, you drowned. The dirt road ended at a rusty chainlink fence.
Beyond it sat a double wide trailer. It was old, skirted with faded corrugated tin to keep the coyotes out from under the floorboards. A massive ancient cottonwood tree provided a canopy of shade over the metal roof. It wasn't much, but the mortgage was paid off, and the nearest neighbor was 2 miles away. Amelia parked the truck in the dirt driveway.
Before she even cut the engine, she heard the barking. It was a horse rhythmic sound. She stepped out of the truck, her boots crunching in the dry earth. A golden retriever mix came limping around the corner of the trailer. He was missing his front left leg, lost to a speeding pickup truck years before she found him at the pound.
His muzzle was white, and he moved with a stiff, arthritic gate. Hey, Barnaby. Amelia said. Her voice dropped its rough edge. It became soft, utterly human.
Barnaby thumped his tail against the side of the trailer and pushed his heavy head into her knee. She knelt in the dirt, regardless of her jeans, and buried her hands in the thick fur behind his ears. He smelled like dust and dried sage. It was the best smell in the world. She walked up the wooden steps to the small porch, Barnaby limping faithfully behind her.
She unlocked the deadbolt and pushed the door open. The inside of the trailer was an oven. She walked straight to the window unit in the living room, cranked the dial to the maximum setting, and listened to it wheeze to life. It would take 2 hours to make the room tolerable. She walked into the tiny kitchen, filled Barnaby's bowl with kibble and fresh water, and then went down the narrow hallway to the bathroom.
She turned on the cold water in the sink. She splashed her face. The water was metallic, tasting of well pipes and copper. She grabbed a faded towel and pressed it against her eyes. When she pulled the towel away, she looked at herself in the mirror.
She saw the lines bracketing her mouth. She saw the heavy bags under her eyes. She reached down to her right cuff and slowly undid the button. She rolled the flannel sleeve up to her elbow. OC 73.
RIP Cal property. The adrenaline of the afternoon was finally leaving her system, draining out through the soles of her feet, leaving behind a cold, hollow ache. Seeing Dutch had broken a seal she had carefully maintained for two and a half decades, the past didn't come back in a neat chronological narrative. It came back in jagged, violent flashes. Oakland, November 1973.
It wasn't a glorious last stand. It wasn't a movie. It was raining. The clubhouse smelled like wet wool, stale beer, and overflowing ashtrays. Amelia had been sitting on the scarred leather sofa in the back room, trying to read a paperback novel by the light of a flickering neon beer sign.
Cal had been arguing with a prospect near the front door. Cal was a giant of a man, wide and loud, with one laugh that could shake a house off its foundation. He wasn't a saint. He was a violent man who lived in a violent world. But to Amelia, he was a center of gravity.
Then came the sound. It wasn't a knock. It was the sound of a battering ram hitting the reinforced steel door. The metal shrieked. Someone yelled, "Carps!"
Someone else yelled, "Mongs!" Nobody knew. It was just chaos. Amelia remembered the sudden, deafening roar of a 12 gauge shotgun. "The sound didn't just hurt your ears, it punched the air out of your lungs.
The lights went out." She remembered Cal roaring, a sound of pure unadulterated fury. He didn't run to the back. He ran to the front, shoving his heavy shoulder against the buckling door, trying to buy the men in the back room time to grab their pieces or get out the reinforced windows. The door splintered.
The wood gave way. Amelia hadn't seen the shooters. She had only seen the muzzle flashes illuminating the dark room like a strobe light. Boom! Boom!
Boom! Cal was thrown backward. He didn't fall gracefully. He collapsed like a demolished building, crashing through a glass coffee table. Amelia hadn't screamed.
Her throat had locked entirely. She had crawled across the filthy floor, crawling over broken glass and spilled beer, until she reached him. He was gasping. The air was escaping from his chest in wet, bubbling wheezes. She pressed her hands against the holes in his leather cut, trying to stop the heat from leaking out of him.
His blood was incredibly hot. It coated her hands, slippery and thick. He had looked at her. He didn't say anything profound. He didn't deliver a dying monologue.
His eyes were just wide with shock, and then they went dull. The center of gravity disappeared. The police had breached the back. The boots, the screaming, the rough hands dragging her away from the bunt, the cold, bright lights of the interrogation room. The silence.
Amelia blinked, pulling herself out of the memory. She was standing in a small bathroom in a trailer in Nevada. She let out a long, ragged breath. She turned on the shower, stripped off the flannel shirt, and stood under the cold water until her skin was numb, washing the dust of the diner and the phantom blood of 1973 down the drain. The sun had been down for an hour when Amelia heard it.
She was sitting in a faded recliner in the living room, reading a library book under the light of a single floor lamp. Barnaby was asleep at her feet, his good legs twitching as he chased dream rabbits. Over the low hum of the window AC unit, the heavy rhythmic thud of a motorcycle engine approached. It wasn't a pack. It was just one.
The engine noise grew louder, turning off the washboard road and onto her dirt driveway. The headlight swept across the living room window, casting long, distorted shadows against the cheap wood paneling. The bike rolled to a stop outside. The engine idled for a moment, a deep, uneven lope, and then was cut off. Barnaby woke up.
He didn't bark. He just let out a low, confused woof, and looked at Amelia. Amelia didn't panic. The adrenaline spike from the afternoon had burned out, leaving her strangely calm. She closed her book and set it on the side table.
She stood up, walked into the kitchen, and opened the bottom drawer by the oven. Under a stack of oval dish towels, her fingers found the heavy, cold steel of a 38 special revolver. It was an old gun, simple and reliable. She checked the cylinder. Five rounds.
She didn't point it. She held it down by her side, the barrel resting against her thigh, hidden in the folds of her loose denim jeans. She walked to the front door, turned the deadbolt, and pushed it open. The desert tonight was surprisingly cool. The stars were brilliant, unfiltered by city lights.
A man was sitting on the wooden steps of her porch. His back was to her. He was slumped over, elbows on his knees, his head in his hands. The expensive chopped Harley was parked in the dirt a few yards away. He wasn't wearing a leather vest.