Arthur was behind a half-dismantled Chevrolet, his shoulders bent over an alternator that refused to come loose. He wore grease-stained overalls and a battered Dodgers cap that looked older than Chloe. A cigarette smoldered in an ashtray fashioned from a truck piston on the workbench. When Chloe called his name, he looked up with an impatient expression that disappeared the moment he saw her face.
"Chloe?" He set down the wrench he was holding. "What happened?"
She stopped a few feet away and tried to smile. "I need a ride, Arthur. Not a lift. Something I can drive myself. I have forty dollars."
Arthur took one look at the money and then at the bruises she had made no effort to hide. He did not ask whether Richard had done it. His shoulders lowered and he wiped both hands on a rag he was too distracted to put away. "Sweetheart, forty dollars won't buy a decent set of bald tires around here," he said. "And if that's what I think it is on your face, we need to talk about getting you somewhere safe."
"I need to be out of town before he wakes up," she replied. "He'll be watching the buses. He has friends who work dispatch. Please don't tell me to call somebody who'll send me right back to him."
Arthur looked toward the front gate, as if he expected a county cruiser to arrive simply because Richard's name had been spoken. "There are people above him," he said. "State investigators. People who don't answer to his sheriff."
"Can you promise he'd never find out who I talked to?" Chloe asked. Arthur opened his mouth, then closed it again. "That's what I thought. I know you're trying to help. I need to get far enough away to ask somebody who isn't afraid of him."
Arthur rubbed his face with the rag and stared past her at the rows of disabled cars. For an old man who spent his days arguing with engines, he suddenly looked as if the simplest problem in the world had become impossible. "I've got a pickup waiting on a transmission," he said. "An old Honda that hasn't turned over in a year. Neither one is something I'd put you on the road in."
"Anything," Chloe whispered. "If it moves, I'll make it work."
He hesitated long enough that she knew he had already thought of something and was trying to decide whether telling her would be worse than refusing. Finally he reached for a ring of keys, locked the office, and gestured toward the far side of the yard. "Come on," he said. "There's one thing. And I'm telling you right now, I don't like it."
They walked between towers of crushed sedans and old trucks whose windows had turned opaque with dust. Broken engines sat on pallets beside piles of tires, and loose sheets of tin rattled whenever the wind rose. Arthur glanced back repeatedly to check that Chloe was following. Near the back fence, where tumbleweeds had caught in the wire and nobody had bothered to clear them, stood a motorcycle almost swallowed by rust.