Wyatt looked away, toward the mountains beyond the salvage yard. Sarah recognized what Evan had described, although the setting was different from any she had known. Silence was sometimes enforced without an explicit threat. Everybody understood the price of speaking and tried not to be the one who paid it.
"The bike stays where it is," Sarah repeated. "You can talk as much as you need to, but none of you is touching it. I'm calling emergency services."
Billy lunged a half step toward her, desperate to prevent that call, and Wyatt moved between them. He caught Billy by the front of his leather vest and held him there without striking him. For a few terrible seconds Sarah saw how easily the encounter could become a killing over a question that had nothing to do with her life.
"Don't," she said. "You hear me, Wyatt? Don't become the next thing that goes wrong here."
Wyatt's grip loosened. He backed away and told Billy to sit on a low concrete curb near the workshop wall, where all of them could see him. Evan moved several feet off to the side, his hands out in the open, while Sarah took her telephone from her pocket and called for help. She gave the dispatcher the location, the visible signs of a suspicious alteration, and the fact that nobody had started the motorcycle.
The woman on the line asked whether Sarah could move everyone away from the immediate area. Sarah said she could. She did not volunteer a guess about what the device was made of, because she had learned long ago that guessing became dangerous when other people mistook a guess for a fact.
"Is anybody injured?" the dispatcher asked.
Sarah looked across the lot. Wyatt was staring at Billy with a grief so sharp it made his face seem older; Billy was pressing his palms against his knees, trying to stop them shaking. Evan stood alone in the dust, looking young enough that Sarah thought of her father's apprentices from years ago.
"Not yet," Sarah said. "I'd like to keep it that way."
While they waited, Sarah put a handwritten CLOSED sign in the diner's front window and turned off the pumps. She walked the three riders toward the far end of the salvage lot, where a line of stripped buses offered shade without bringing anyone closer to the motorcycle. The diner had once been a place where stranded travelers passed a hot afternoon talking about the weather. Now it felt like the center of a storm that had not yet learned its own size.
Billy kept glancing at Wyatt, as though expecting the man to pronounce a sentence. Evan sat on the concrete step of an abandoned bus, his elbows on his knees, staring at the dust between his boots. Wyatt remained standing. He had taken off his leather riding cap, and without it Sarah could see that the gray at his temples was more extensive than she had first thought.
"Are you going to talk to the deputies when they get here?" she asked him.
"Depends what they ask."
"Somebody tried to kill you, Wyatt. That's a pretty straightforward question."
"Not in my world."