The moment you did that, you stopped being an innocent old woman who happened to find an injured stranger. You became a witness. Maybe worse than a witness. In his mind right now, you are someone actively protecting evidence that could put him and everyone connected to him behind bars for the rest of their lives. He held her gaze unflinching despite the pain etched into every line of his face.
People like that do not let witnesses become inconvenient. They make witnesses become disappeared. The word hung in the kitchen air like smoke. Margaret felt something cold settle behind her sternum. Not fear exactly or not only fear.
Something closer to clarity. Closer to the specific sharpening focus she used to feel decades ago, the moment a fire drill bell went off in her classroom and 30 pairs of eyes turned to her for direction. There was no room in that feeling for panic. There was only room for the next necessary action. "Then we get that drive out of this house today," she said, "before he decides he's tired of waiting. " "How my leg is broken in two places, Margaret?
I can't drive, I can't ride, I can barely stand up without the room spinning. And even if I could, they've almost certainly got eyes on every road leading off this ridge by now. " Margaret was already moving toward the hall closet, pulling out an old canvas bag her husband used to use for hunting trips. Her mind racing through every option and rejecting each one in turn. Call the state investigator directly, but with what? Her landline that anyone could tap or a cell signal that barely functioned in the best of weather up here.
Drive him herself in her own truck down roads that Pierces people were surely already watching. Hide the drive somewhere on the property and wait, but wait for what? For Pierces to lose interest, for the storm to somehow undo what had already been set in motion. "There's a man," West said suddenly, and something in his voice made Margaret stop and turn back to him. Someone I should have called the second I woke up in your house instead of hiding it from you like a coward.
His name's Duke. He's not exactly law enforcement. " A ghost of something that might have been a bitter smile crossed his face. "He's the president of my club, the Hells Angels chapter I ride with. And before you say anything, before you let everything the sheriff's office ever told you about people like us crowd back into your head, you should know that if I get one message to him, one message telling him where I am and what's happened, there is not a corrupt deputy in this county who will be able to touch either one of us. " Margaret stood very still, the canvas bag hanging forgotten from her hand. "You want me to call a motorcycle gang? " she said slowly, "to come here, to my home.
I want you to call the only people on this earth right now who have both the reason and the ability to actually protect you. " West said, and there was nothing pleading in his voice now, only a terrible plain honesty. "I know what you were told about us. I know the patch on my jacket probably scared you half to death the second you saw it lying next to me in the snow. But Margaret, listen to me. Everybody in my club knows what I was carrying and why.
Some of them have brothers who got hooked on product that came through this county because men like Pierce made sure it never got stopped at the border. This isn't just loyalty to me. This is personal for every single one of them. " For a long moment, Margaret said nothing at all. She thought of the sheriff standing in her kitchen two days ago, hat in his hands warning her about dangerous men passing through the county. She thought of Pierce's badge number invented on the spot and the plain white card with no department marking sitting on her table like an unexploded device.
She thought finally and inevitably of her son Daniel and the strange twisting feeling in her chest whenever West mentioned that someone had once helped him the way she was helping him now, someone he clearly still grieved though he had not yet told her who. "How do you get a message to him? " she said without a phone that works and without leaving this house. Relief flooded West's face so fast and so total that Margaret understood in that instant exactly how frightened he had actually been of dying up here alone, an unknown worse than the fear of Pierce, worse than the fear of the storm. "There's a number," he said, "a dead drop line we call it. Goes straight to a burner Duke keeps for exactly this kind of situation.
If your landline still works, even a little static, and all I can get a message through in under a minute. Code words, nothing that'll mean anything to anyone listening in, but Duke will understand exactly what it means. " Margaret was already crossing to the phone mounted on her kitchen wall, an old rotary relic she'd never bothered replacing because it worked just fine for calling her sister twice a month, and lifted the receiver to her ear. Dial tone thin and crackling with static, but there. "It's alive," she said, and carried the phone across the room to where Wes sat, setting it in his lap along with the cord stretched to its absolute limit. His hands shook as he dialed, whether from cold or fear or blood loss.