The desert wind passed between them.
For the first time that morning, Cole Mercer forgot the black boxes.
He forgot the engines, the charity ride, the sheriff’s department, and the strange fact that his motorcycle alone had been spared.
Because six years earlier, on a rain-dark highway outside Red Mesa, Daniel Reed—mechanic, former Iron Vulture, and the man who had once been closer to Cole than a brother—had died after his pickup left the road and went through a guardrail.
Cole had helped carry his coffin.
He had also spent the years since Daniel’s death wondering why the two of them had allowed pride, anger, and unfinished conversations to turn an old friendship into silence.
Now he looked into the girl’s dark brown eyes and recognized something he should have seen immediately.
Daniel’s eyes.
“You knew my dad?” Emily asked.
Cole drew in a breath that felt unexpectedly difficult.
“Yeah,” he said.
His voice came out rougher than he intended.
“I knew him.”
Far down State Route 18, sirens began to rise above the desert.
And as Cole looked from Emily to the motorcycles behind her, an uncomfortable thought took shape.
The girl had not merely saved them from something placed beneath their bikes.
She had brought Daniel Reed back into Cole’s life.
And Cole had the sudden, irrational certainty that the two things were connected.
Sheriff Lena Ortiz arrived forty minutes later, followed by two deputies and a county bomb technician who had driven out from Mesa after the Roadhouse owner reported suspicious devices attached to multiple motorcycles.
By then the Iron Vultures had moved well away from the bikes, while Maggie Torres, the sixty-two-year-old owner of the Desert Roadhouse, had taken Emily inside and given her lemonade, scrambled eggs, and a lecture about running across hot asphalt in thin shoes.
Cole stood beneath the Roadhouse awning as Sheriff Ortiz approached.
She was in her early forties, with dark hair pulled tightly behind her head and an expression that suggested she had developed a permanent resistance to other people’s theatrics during her years in law enforcement.
“You touch anything?” she asked.
“No.”
“Anybody move a device?”
“No.”
“Anybody start a bike after the girl warned you?”
“No.”
Ortiz looked faintly surprised.
“Congratulations. For once, a group of bikers has made my morning easier.”
Boone, standing behind Cole, muttered something about public appreciation.
Ortiz ignored him.
The specialists worked for nearly two hours, photographing each device before carefully removing it, while deputies closed part of the lot and took statements from everyone who had stayed at the Roadhouse overnight.
By early afternoon, Ortiz had a preliminary answer.
“They don’t appear to be conventional explosives,” she said.
Cole folded his arms.
“Appear?”
“That’s the word I used.”
“What are they?”
“Tracking equipment, at least partly. There are other electronic components we’re still evaluating.”
“Could they interfere with the motorcycles?”
“Possibly.”
“Could they hurt somebody?”
Ortiz held his gaze.
“I don’t answer questions I don’t have answers to.”
Cole respected that.
He glanced through the Roadhouse window.
Emily sat in a booth, her feet not reaching the floor, while Maggie placed a plate of fries in front of her.
“What was an eleven-year-old doing outside after midnight?” Ortiz asked.
“That’s what I’d like to know.”
Maggie answered when they went inside.
Emily lived with her aunt Rachel in the small caretaker’s cottage behind the Roadhouse, where Rachel had rented cheaply for the past four years while working night shifts as a licensed practical nurse at a rehabilitation center in Red Mesa.
Emily’s mother had left when she was four.
Nobody at the Roadhouse seemed eager to discuss the details, and Cole did not ask.
Last night, Maggie explained, Emily had been asleep when the family dog began barking.
“She thought it was a coyote,” Maggie said.
Emily nodded.
“Lucky only barks like that when something’s outside.”
Instead of leaving the cottage, Emily had looked through the bedroom window, where she saw a dark pickup truck rolling into the parking lot with its headlights off.
Two men climbed out.
One moved between the motorcycles.
The other watched the Roadhouse.
“Did you recognize either of them?” Ortiz asked.
“No.”
“Could you see their faces?”
“Not really.”
“The truck?”
“Dark. Maybe black.”
“License plate?”
Emily shook her head.
Then she frowned.
“There was something on the door.”
Ortiz leaned forward.
“What?”
“A bird.”
Cole looked at her.
“What kind?”
“I don’t know. White. With wings like this.”
She spread her hands.
Boone, who had been leaning against the counter, became still.
Cole noticed.
“So did I.
“What?” Maggie asked.
Cole did not answer immediately.
Before he could, the front door opened and a woman in blue medical scrubs hurried inside.
“Emily!”
The girl jumped from the booth.
“Aunt Rachel.”
Rachel Reed crossed the room quickly and wrapped Emily in both arms, holding her with the fierce desperation of someone who had spent the drive imagining every terrible outcome.
“You could have been hurt.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You do not go outside when strange people are in the parking lot.”
“I know.”
“You call me. You call Maggie. You call 911.”