"Graham knows my bike didn't kill me. Every hour I pretend I can deal with this myself, he gets another hour to hurt somebody else."
He looked toward the salvage yard, then at the business records lying beside her register. "I don't want your father's place to become another thing my brother takes from somebody."
Sarah nodded. She did not offer forgiveness for things she could not yet understand. She told him to keep the appointment and tell the truth, and Wyatt accepted the instruction without a joke.
They might have left together that evening if the road had stayed clear. But just before the sun reached the low western ridge, a delivery truck pulled across the access road half a mile from the diner and stopped at an angle. Sarah watched its brake lights glow through the desert shimmer. A dark pickup followed, and then a third vehicle turned off the highway and disappeared among the low hills east of the salvage yard.
Noel, who had been loading tools into his truck, looked at Sarah. He said nothing, but his face told her he had noticed the same thing. Wyatt came out of the workshop and stared toward the road until the last red light vanished.
"That's not traffic," he said.
Sarah already had her phone in her hand. She called the dispatcher, gave the location and what she had seen, and stepped back into the diner. Through the windows, the desert seemed to grow suddenly enormous and very empty. The ordinary sounds of the Junction—the cooler, the old clock, the distant rattle of a loose roof panel—continued as if nothing had changed.
Then the power went out.
For a moment, nobody moved. The refrigerator compressor fell silent, the fluorescent strips above the counter went dark, and the Junction settled into the deep twilight that existed just before the desert lost the last of its sun. Sarah could hear Noel breathing beside the register. Wyatt was already looking out the front window, following the faint movement of headlights along the access road.
"The breaker?" Noel asked.
"Not a breaker," Sarah said. "The road lights are out too."
Her telephone screen glowed in her hand. She was still connected to the dispatcher, who told her that units were being sent and asked whether she could leave by another route. Sarah explained that the property had an old service track, but that she did not know whether it was clear. She was unwilling to lead two civilians out into a desert road where strangers had just begun blocking traffic.
"Get to a safe location," the dispatcher said. "Stay on the line if you can. Officers are approaching from the west."
Sarah led Noel and Evan toward the rear of the building. Wyatt followed with a small flashlight, looking over his shoulder more often than Sarah liked. They crossed the lower salvage yard at a walking pace and followed the broad service path toward the hillside storage bunker. Sarah had spent most of her childhood going up that path to fetch old engine blocks for Martin, but it felt longer in the dark.