Seven minutes later, the truck passes again, going the other direction. Still slow. I don't look up. I track the truck in my peripheral vision, the dark shape moving past the lot. I know he's looking at the crowd. He's looking for Stormy and I know he's finding him because Stormy is standing at the serving station in that hot pink shirt that you could see from the International Space Station.
The truck keeps going. A half-hour passes. No truck.
The crowd is shifting into the late-night mode. Louder. Looser. The beer has been flowing for three hours. The conversations have gotten bigger, the laughter has gotten louder and the music has gotten turned up twice.
This is the time of the night where the lot becomes a living thing, a single organism of noise and bodies, and inside it the individual movements are hard to track. A man could walk through this crowd and not be noticed if he wasn't driving a truck. If he was on foot. If he parked somewhere else.
If he parked across the street.
Shit!
The thought hits me and I look up. Across the beach road, the overflow sand lot sits in the darkness, unpaved, unlit, the kind of lot that fills up during the summer and sits empty in September. I can see shapes in the dark. The outlines of a few vehicles, maybe three, maybe four, people who parked over there because the main lot was full.
And one shape that might be a truck.
I can't tell. It's too dark, too far. But the shape is the right size and it's parked facing the bar. If I were a man who wantedto watch a parking lot full of bikers without being seen, that's exactly where I'd sit.
My phone is in my pocket. Mickey is twelve minutes away. One ring.
Not yet. I don't know he's here. I don't know for sure that shape is his truck. If I call Mickey on a shadow and it turns out to be a tourist's SUV, I've burned the signal.
Stormy picks up a tray from the serving station. Three plates of brisket, two of ribs, coleslaw, extra sauce. Takes them to a table of bikers. Clears another table of dirty dishes and turns back toward the inside of the bar. He walks through the open front of the bar with the tray balanced on his palm. The pink shirt is the last thing I see before he disappears into the interior.
Movement across the street. The dark shape. A figure stepping out of the vehicle, illuminated for a half second by the dome light before the door shuts. Man-shaped. Average build. Walking across the sand lot toward the beach road. Walking toward the bar.
The dome light was on for less than a second, but it was enough to see the silhouette, the posture, the way a man walks when he's made a decision and stopped thinking about consequences.
The figure crosses the beach road. Steps onto the shoulder. Enters the edge of the parking lot, on the far side from the grill, moving through the spaces between bikes, between groups of people, a man walking into a crowded bar on a Saturday night.
Nothing unusual. Nothing alarming. He doesn't look dangerous. He looks like a customer.
He's heading for the open front of the bar. The inside. The place where Stormy just walked in carrying a tray of dirty dishes.
Eddie sees him. I watch Eddie's head turn, track, and then Eddie's hand comes up and touches Denny's shoulder. Denny looks and the recognition moves through the people who know—not a wave, not a commotion, just a tightening. A shift in posture. Men who were relaxed becoming men who are alert.
Denny looks at me across the lot. I meet his eyes and nod once.
I set the tongs on the grill. I don't plan to pick them up again. I close the vents on Big Bertha, shutting down the airflow. The coals begin to die. The grill is done for tonight.
I pull my phone from my pocket, find Mickey's number and press call. It rings once. I hang up.
Twelve minutes.
The countdown has started.
I walk through the crowd, past the tables and the people who are eating and drinking. They have no idea what's about to happen. Then there are others who do know and whose eyes follow me as I pass.
Ron Jackson is twenty feet ahead of me, moving through the crowd toward the open bar. He walks the way he walked in my parking lot the first time. The body language of a man who belongs everywhere he goes. The charm is in his posture even now, even drunk, even furious. That's how deep it goes. The mask is the muscle memory.
But the walk is different this time. Faster. Harder. The stride of a man who saw a hot pink shirt and the wordsPROPERTY OF BIG TEX'Sand hasn't been able to thinkabout anything else for the past hour. The stride of a man whose patience has burned to ash and what's left is the thing underneath the patience. The dark thing.
He reaches the open front of the bar and steps inside.
I'm ten steps behind him. In my peripheral vision, I see the bikers move. Not all of them. The ones who know. Denny's guys. A few of the regulars who got the word. They drift toward the front of the bar, unhurried, beer bottles in hand, and they form a line. Not a wall. Not yet. Just men standing near the entrance, facing outward, blocking the view from the lot.
Someone reaches the outdoor speaker, and the music jumps—louder, much louder, a wall of sound that covers whatever's about to happen inside the way a wave covers footprints.
Sheila appears at the edge of the bar. She sees the man and me right behind him. Her hand goes to her apron pocket. Her fingers close around her phone.
