Saddlebags packed and a bedroll lashed across the back. Written by a big man easing off it slow the way big man in their 60s do after 400 miles of panhandle wind. He was tall heavy set. Gray in the beard and his cut red Hells Angels across the top rocker and Texas across the bottom. The winged death's head between them.
The small diamond patch riding over the heart. He came in out of the wind rubbing his left arm and asking about a slow leak in his back tire. And Bird wrote up the ticket. The name on it was Rock. And the big man went to lower himself into the plastic chairs by the window to wait.
He never made it to the chairs. Bird was halfway back to the bay when he heard it behind him. A grunt a stagger and then the awful heavy sound of a big man going down all at once. No hands out. The way people fall when the lights go off inside them.
Del Rock hit the concrete face first and did not move. And by the time Bird got to him, the man's lips were going blue and his chest wasn't working and there was no pulse under Bird's shaking fingers at all cardiac arrest. Bird didn't know the words for it. He knew the shape of it because a nurse had drilled it into a room of bored group home kids one long afternoon two years back. Hands stacked, elbows locked.
Push to the beat of that old disco song and Bird had been the one in the back who paid attention. Because Bird always paid attention. Because paying attention was how a kid with no one stayed a step ahead of the next bad thing. He rolled the big man over, tore the shirt open, found the spot, stacked his hands on the wide steel chest, locked his elbows and pushed. He pushed hard the way she'd said, hard enough to crack, 100 beats a minute, counting under his breath.
The man's chest gave and came back under his palms. Bird pushed again and again. Sweat ran into his eyes and his shoulders started to burn inside the first minute because doing it right is nothing like the movies. It's brutal. It's your whole body.
Your knees grinding on concrete and your spine bowing over and your hands going numb. And Bird was a 140-lb kid driving his entire weight down into a 240-lb man over and over on a hot shop floor that smelled of oil and rubber. That was when Randy Fisk came out of the office. Fisk was a lean, sour man who ran his shop on thin margins and old grievances. And what he saw when he came around the counter was not a dying customer.
What he saw was his counter unmanned, a bay backed up, two cars of paying customers watching through the window, and his teenage sweep-up kid kneeling on the floor over some outlaw biker making a scene running off business. Colson, the hell are you doing? Get up. Fisk's voice cracked across the shop like a belt. You are not a paramedic.
That is a liability. You do not touch him. You hear me? There's customers. There's a line out that door.