The Grade She Couldn't Forget

Chapter One: Widow's Grade

I shoved Emmett Cray and his Harley backward off the stop line hard enough that his back tire screeched sideways across the crosswalk, and for one full second every rider on that street looked at me like I was the only dangerous thing at that intersection.

Emmett had the green light. I knew that. The whole line of Saturday-morning traffic idling along Larkspur's Main Street knew that. So when a woman nobody recognized came off the curb at a dead run and body-slammed a two-hundred-pound biker clean off his own idling motorcycle, there was exactly one reasonable conclusion available, and it wasn't the right one.

Emmett hit the pavement hard, the bike toppling beside him with a metallic shriek, and before he'd even stopped sliding, four members of the Ridgeback Riders had already closed a half-circle around me. I'd clocked their bikes idling at the light from the diner counter ninety seconds earlier, six of them two abreast, patches I didn't recognize, the loose confidence of a group that had never once had reason to expect trouble on this particular stretch of Main Street. I hadn't planned on becoming that trouble myself. My body had simply moved before the rest of me caught up, the same way it had moved exactly once before in my life, on a different grade, half a second too late to matter. A broad-shouldered woman I didn't know stepped bodily between me and Emmett. A younger rider lifted his phone and started filming, thumb rock steady, the way you film something you expect a lawyer to ask for later.

Emmett stayed down on one elbow beside his fallen bike, staring up at me with an expression caught exactly between you're out of your mind and you just saved my life, though he clearly hadn't worked out yet which one was true.

Emmett turned toward the hill. Whatever he saw beyond that storefront window burned every ounce of anger out of the riders around me before he'd even finished turning his head.

A forty-foot Deveraux Hauling box truck came over the crest of Widow's Grade doing what had to be sixty through a twenty-five zone, drifting lane to lane in the particular loose, sickening way of a rig whose driver had stopped being able to do anything about its speed several seconds earlier. It blew the red at Main and Larkspur Creek Road three-tenths of a second after Emmett's front wheel would have been sitting dead center of that intersection, missed his handlebars by a truck's width, and finally slammed into the empty bike rack outside the feed store forty yards down, glass and splintered wood exploding across the sidewalk in a spray that would have been Emmett Cray's body six seconds earlier.

The truck's engine kept idling in the wreckage, oblivious. Nobody moved for a long moment except the kid with the phone, who slowly panned it from me to the smoking grille instead. Somebody was already shouting for a first-aid kit. Somebody else grabbed the diner's fire extinguisher off its mount, though the engine had gone quiet the second it hit the bike rack and there was nothing burning, only steam and glass and the low, wrong stillness of a man who wasn't going to answer anybody's questions.

Garrett Holloway, president of the Ridgeback Riders, reached the cab first. Through the shattered driver's door he found a man in his fifties slumped over the wheel, unresponsive, no visible mark from the crash itself — the specific stillness that told anybody who'd ever worked a road that whatever had happened to that driver had started well before the truck ever crested that hill.

"Ma'am." The woman who'd stepped between me and Emmett hadn't moved an inch, though every trace of warning had gone out of her voice. "How in God's name did you hear that thing coming before the rest of us even caught the horn?"

"What the hell was that?" he said.

I didn't answer. I was watching a reflection sliding across the hardware store's plate glass on the opposite side of the street — a long, dark shape gathering speed down the grade of Widow's Hill behind us, moving with a low mechanical whine that had nothing to do with a working set of brakes.

Then a horn sounded, one unbroken blast that didn't let up for breath.

I kept my eyes on the glass. "Because he couldn't see what was coming," I said, quiet enough that only Emmett heard it, and something in my own voice sounded twenty years younger than I felt, the exact tone I used to take reporting a bad grade over the CB before anybody in dispatch wanted to hear it.

I looked at the wreckage, at the truck's crumpled grille, at the lazy drift of radiator steam curling up through a hole punched clean into a feed store's brick wall, and felt something in my chest go very cold and very familiar, the exact way it had eleven years ago on a different grade three states from here.