It was crusted white with frost. One leg was bent at an angle that made her stomach turn. "Oh God," Margaret whispered, and dropped to her knees beside him in the snow. The cold soaking instantly through her nightgown and robe. "Oh God, can you hear me? " The man's head turned barely, and one eye cracked open.
And even half frozen and delirious, there was something sharp and alert in that single eye, something that was already calculating danger even as his body was failing. "Get away. " He rasped, the words slurred and broken. "Lady, get inside. Get away from me. " "You're going to die out here," Margaret said, already working her hands under his shoulder, trying to gauge how she could possibly move a man twice her size through snow up up to her knees. "I am not leaving you to freeze in my own front yard. " "You don't understand. " His hand, when it closed around her wrist, was like ice, like touching a corpse.
And yet the grip had a desperate strength to it that startled her anyway. "They're looking for me. If they find me here, they'll" His voice broke apart into a fit of shuddering that might have been a cough, or might have been a sob. "They'll hurt you, too. " "Who is looking for you? He didn't answer.
His eye rolled back, his grip on her wrist went slack, and his head fell forward into the snow. Margaret Doll had exactly one half of one second to make a decision that would change the rest of her life, and she did not spend it weighing the sheriff's warning or the patch on the dead man's jacket that she could now see clearly in the flashlight beam, the winged skull, the words that made every hair on the back of her neck rise. Hells Angels. She spent that half second thinking of her son Daniel and the last thing he had ever said to her on a hospital bed 3 years before he died in a car accident two towns over. You always taught me that a person's worth isn't in what they look like, Mom.
It's in what they do when nobody's watching. Nobody was watching now, just her, an old woman in a bathrobe kneeling in a blizzard beside a dying stranger with a killer's patch on his jacket. "All right," she said mostly to herself and got her arms under him. "All right, let's go. " What followed was the hardest physical labor of Margaret's life. She was 74 years old, 5'4, and the man in the snow was easily 200 lb of dead weight wrapped in wet leather and frozen denim.
She could not lift him. She could not even really drag him in any traditional sense. What she did over the course of nearly 15 agonizing minutes was heave him a few inches at a time, planting her boots, hauling on the collar of his jacket, screaming at her own body every time her knees threatened to buckle, screaming at the storm every time it tried to steal her balance. "Move. " She gasped at one point to no one, to herself, to God. "Move, you stubborn old woman, move. " Halfway to the porch, her flashlight went dark.
The battery's dead or the cold too much for them, and she finished the last 20 ft in near total blindness, guided only by the dim glow of her own porch light and the desperate need to get this man somewhere warm before his heart simply stopped. She got him up the porch steps by main force and sheer terror, and she got the door open, and she got him inside, and then she collapsed on the floor beside him, her chest heaving, her whole body screaming in protest, snow melting into puddles around both of them on her kitchen floor. For a moment, she simply lay there staring up at her own ceiling, wondering if she had just done the bravest thing of her life or the stupidest. Then the man made a sound, a wet, ragged gasp, and Margaret forced herself back onto her knees. "Okay," she said breathless.
"Okay, let's see what we're dealing with. " She had been a teacher, not a nurse, but 31 years in a classroom teaches a woman how to handle a crisis without panicking. How to triage a dozen problems at once and address the worst one first. The worst one here, obviously, was the cold. She hauled every blanket she owned off the hall closet shelf and packed them around him, and she got the fire built back up to a roar, and she filled her largest pot with water and set it to warm on the stove, because some instinct told her that warming him too fast could be as dangerous as the cold itself. It was while she was cutting away the ruined sleeve of his jacket trying to get a look at the wound beneath that she found the first thing that told her this was no ordinary biker who'd simply run off the road in bad weather.
Strapped to his forearm, hidden beneath the jacket sleeve, where a normal search would never find it, was a small hard case. Medical, she thought at first, and when she unclipped it and opened it with trembling fingers, she found insulin, a glucose meter, syringes still sealed in their wrappers. A diabetic. A diabetic biker stranded in a blizzard hiding his own medical supplies like they were contraband. And beneath that, tucked into an inner pocket sewn crudely into the jacket lining, something else.
Small, plastic. A flash drive, black, unmarked, taped over on one end like someone had wanted to make sure it never accidentally came loose. Margaret stared at it for a long moment. The firelight throwing shadows across her kitchen. The wind screaming outside like it wanted back in.