as soon as he was ahead of it—slipping back into the right-hand lane just as a pale yellow Lexus blew past, going the other way. The driver of the Lexus pounded her horn, but the meep-meep sound of it was almost immediately lost in the overpowering wail of the truck’s air horn.
Vince had spotted the Lexus coming and for a moment had been sure he was about to see his son go head-on into it, Race one second, road meat the next. It took a few moments for his heart to come back down out of his throat.
“Fucking psycho!” Vince yelled at Lemmy.
“You mean the guy in the truck?” Lemmy hollered back, as the blast of the air horn finally died away. “Or Race?”
“Both!”
By the time the truck swung through the next curve, though, LAUGHLIN seemed to have come to his senses or had finally looked in the mirror and noticed the rest of the Tribe roaring along behind him. He put his hand out the window—that sun-darkened and veiny hand, big-knuckled and blunt-fingered—and waved them by.
Immediately Roy and two others swung out and thundered past. The rest went in pairs. It was nothing to pass once the go-to was clear, the truck laboring along at barely thirty. Vince and Lemmy swept out last, passing just before the next switchback. Vince cast a look up toward the driver on their way by but could see nothing except that dark hand hanging out against the door. Five minutes later they’d left the truck so far behind them that they couldn’t hear it anymore.
There followed a stretch of high open desert, sage and saguaro, cliffs off to the right, striped in chalky shades of yellow and red. They were riding into the sun now, pursued by their own lengthening shadows. Houses and a few trailers whipped by as they blew through a sorry excuse for a township. The bikes were strung out across almost half a mile, with Vince and Lemmy riding close to the back. But not far beyond the town, Vince saw the rest of the Tribe bunched up at the side of the road, just before a four-way intersection, the crossing for Route 6.
Beyond the intersection, to the west, the highway they’d been following was torn down to dirt. A diamond-shaped orange sign read CONSTRUCTION NEXT 20 MILES—BE PREPARED TO STOP. In the distance Vince could see dump trucks and a grader. Men worked in clouds of red smoke, the clay stirred up and drifting across the tableland.
He hadn’t known there would be roadwork here, because they hadn’t come this way. It had been Race’s suggestion to return by the back roads, which had suited Vince fine. Driving away from a double homicide, it seemed like a good idea to keep a low profile. Of course, that wasn’t why Race had suggested it.
“What?” Vince said, slowing and putting his foot down. As if he didn’t already know.
Race pointed away from the construction, down Route 6. “We go south on 6, we can pick up I-40.”
“In Show Low,” Vince said. “Why does this not surprise me?”
It was Roy Klowes who spoke next. He jerked a thumb toward the dump trucks. “Bitch of a lot better than doing five an hour through that shit for twenty miles. No thank you. I’d rather ride easy and maybe pick up sixty grand along the way. That’s my think on it.”
“Did it hurt?” Lemmy asked Roy. “Having a thought? I hear it hurts the first time. Like when a chick gets her cherry popped.”
“Fuck you, Lemmy,” Roy said.
“When I want your think,” Vince said, “I’ll be sure to ask for it, Roy. But I wouldn’t hold your breath.”
Race spoke, his voice calm, reasonable. “We get to Show Low, you don’t have to stick around. Neither of you. No one’s going to hold it against you if you just want to ride on.”
So there it was.
Vince looked from face to face. The young men met his gaze. The older ones, the ones who’d been riding with him for decades, did not.
“I’m glad to hear no one will hold it against me,” Vince said. “I was worried.”
A memory struck him then: riding with his son in a car at night, in the GTO, back in the days he was trying to go straight, be a family man for Mary. The details of the journey were lost now; he couldn’t recall where they were coming from or where they’d been going. What he remembered was looking into