"That's why he orders it," Ethan said. It wasn't a question.
He was thinking out loud, working through it with the methodical, unsentimental logic of a child who has had to process a lot of pain with very limited emotional vocabulary.
"So there's always a place, just in case." Millie didn't say anything.
There wasn't anything to say. Outside, the rain was coming down harder.
And 60 miles away on a dirt road outside Wikieup, three Hell's Angels were watching a trailer with lights on inside and a man's shadow moving back and forth across the window. And one of them, the one with the gray eyes and the silver skull ring, was very still on his bike, watching that shadow and doing the kind of arithmetic that doesn't involve numbers.
The arithmetic of what you're willing to risk and what you're willing to become and whether any of it matters when a woman is locked inside a trailer and a badge is standing at the road like it belongs there. Grim had been watching for 40 minutes when Danny Reyes pulled up beside him.
Danny was 38, had been riding with the Arizona chapter for 12 years, and had the particular gift of being someone you wanted beside you when things became complicated. He also had the ability to read Grim silences the way a sailor reads weather.
"Sheriff's deputy is at the gate," Danny said quietly.
"Not county. Kingman-adjacent."
"I know who he is," Grim said. "You know him personally?"
"I know his car."
I know his car because I've seen it outside Clay Mercer's place three separate times in the last two years. Grim's voice was careful and quiet.
"He's not there because somebody called it in. He's there because somebody tipped Clay off and Clay called his friend."
Danny was quiet for a moment. "How do you want to play it?"
"We don't touch the badge," Grim said immediately.
"We don't go near him. We don't talk to him.
We don't look at him. He doesn't exist."
"Then how do we get around him?" Said the third rider, Marco, who had grown up in this exact stretch of desert and knew it the way other people know their own houses.
"There's a dry creek bed that runs along the east side of the property. It's not on any map that was made in the last 30 years."
Grim looked at him.
"How narrow?" "We leave the bikes," Marco said.
Marco said, "Go on foot." The three of them sat with this for a moment.
Going on foot meant going slow.
Going slow meant more time. More time meant more risk.
That whatever was happening inside that trailer deteriorated past the point of recovery. Grim got off his bike.
"Then we go on foot," Grim said. What happened in the next 20 minutes Grim would never recount in detail to anyone.