Wyatt did not smile. "Sarah, I'm serious."
"So am I. I gave the deputy their plate. I don't plan to go after them."
He relaxed a fraction. The fact that she had reported the men rather than confronted them seemed to surprise him, and Sarah resented that enough to say so. She was a mechanic, not a fool, and she had managed this place without his approval for a long time.
The deputies came that afternoon to inspect a camera mounted above the repair bay. Sarah's father had installed it after someone stole copper wire from the salvage yard, and Sarah had replaced its recording unit the previous spring. It captured the pickup and part of the parking lot, though not every angle. The investigators copied the relevant footage and gave her a receipt describing what they had received.
One deputy asked whether she had been threatened directly. Sarah repeated the taller man's words and distinguished them from the conclusions she had drawn. She understood the difference between what a camera showed and what a person believed had happened just outside its field of view. Martin had taught her to make that distinction with machines, and she was beginning to see how much it mattered with people.
After the deputies left, Wyatt asked to use the diner's landline. He made one call with his back to the room, listened through several long silences, and finally said, "You still owe me a conversation, Dutch." He waited, then added, "If you want the charter to survive this, don't come looking for a fight. Come looking for witnesses."
The voice on the other end was too low for Sarah to understand. Wyatt held the receiver tighter as he listened. Finally he said, "Because Graham tried to kill his own brother, and because the rest of us have been pretending we didn't see what he was becoming."
He hung up and remained by the phone. Sarah asked whether Dutch was somebody she should be afraid of. Wyatt told her that Dutch's real name was Ronald Voss, that he led an independent Nevada group whose members had known both brothers for years, and that he had refused to participate in Graham's newer business arrangements.
"He'll come?" she asked.
"He said he'll bring people who can tell the truth about what they were asked to do."
"How many?"
"Maybe twenty."
Sarah imagined twenty motorcycles arriving in her gravel lot and shuddered at what that might do to the remaining customers. "Tell them not to park on top of my water line. The ground's soft near the pumps."
"That your biggest concern?"
"It's a concern I can actually do something about."
The meeting with the federal investigators came sooner than either expected. At four o'clock a plain sedan pulled in behind Deputy Mercer's SUV, and a lean man in a faded blue shirt stepped out carrying a canvas folder. He introduced himself as Brian Walsh, a special agent working with a joint task force investigating organized crime and weapons trafficking. He was in his late forties, with close-set eyes and the worn patience of someone who had heard too many invented explanations.