Bo Hargrove. He said you know him. I know the name. Ray set down the wrench he'd been holding. I didn't think he knew mine.
Well, Ghost said he does now. That evening, Ray drove out to the edge of town. There was a pulloff on County Road 7 overlooking a small valley where the last light of the day gathered like water in a low place. He parked the Harley and sat. He pulled from his inside jacket pocket an envelope he kept there always, not because he needed to look at what was inside because its weight reminded him of something.
Inside the envelope was a photograph. Old color faded to something between gold and gray. Taken in the fall of 1999 at a gathering outside Knoxville that Ry could still remember with the kind of clarity you reserve for things that had changed the shape of your life. In the photograph, Ray at 34, younger and harderl looking, standing with several other men near a row of motorcycles. Ghost was there, two others whose names Ray wouldn't say out loud, even alone.
The gathering had been about club business, territory, money, the usual. But at the edge of the photograph, slightly out of focus, stood a man who didn't belong young. Late 20s, maybe 30, wearing a blazer over an open collar shirt. Not a biker, not law enforcement, either. Ray had learned to spot both by then.
This man had the look of someone who was buying something and trying not to appear interested. He'd been brought to that gathering by a man named Darnell Cooper, a loose connection of the club, the kind of guy who existed in the margins between legitimate business and the other kind. Cooper had told them the man in the blazer was a political consultant who needed some information about a competitor. The club didn't typically do that kind of work, but Darnell had vouched, and the money was substantial. Ry had been against it.
He remembered that clearly. He'd said his peace and been outvoted. The information changed hands. The man in the blazer took it and left. Ry had forgotten about him by the following spring.
He was looking at the photograph now, squinting at the blurred figure at the edge of the frame. He had never been sure, not completely, but the build was right. The posture, the way the man held himself slightly apart from everything like he was already calculating an exit. Bo Harrove Ray put the photograph back in the envelope. Put the envelope back in his jacket.
He sat for a while longer looking at the valley. He didn't know yet what Harrove wanted, but he understood in the way that men who have lived a certain kind of life understand things. That when someone from your past starts asking questions about you before you've even arrived somewhere, they're not asking out of curiosity. They're afraid of something and afraid men with power were the most dangerous kind. He didn't tell Mia any of this.
That night, she made spaghetti. The only meal she cooked with genuine confidence and they ate at the kitchen table of the rented house on Maple Drive and talked about what she'd seen of the town. She liked the library. She liked that there was a coffee shop that wasn't a chain. She was undecided about the town in general.
She'd learned to be slow with her assessments after moving so many times. Daddy, she said at some point, twirling pasta around her fork. H, what happened to your hands? She was looking at the scarring on his left knuckle. Not the crankshaft scar, the other one.
Older work. Which kind of work? He looked at her. She held his gaze steadily. 17.
Her mother's eyes waiting. The kind I don't do anymore, he said. She held the look a moment longer, then nodded and went back to her pasta. That was Mia. She knew which doors to open and which to leave alone.