Day 70. Strength 26.6. Stamina 25.5. Agility 15.3. Intelligence 18.3.
It's four miles from my front door to the front door of Grindstone, and if you walk it at three twenty in the morning it takes an hour and eleven minutes, and the whole way there's nobody out but you and the sprinklers.
I know the number because I timed it. I'd also timed the Intelligence set at the kitchen table before I left, which I'd moved to 2:55, which meant the alarm had been 2:45, which meant I'd slept about five hours. I knew what five hours does. I'd decided one night of it was fine. I'd decided that alone too, at nine p.m., with the folder from Copper Vale on the table next to the legal pad, but there wasn't anybody to decide it with at nine p.m., so I'm not sure that one counts.
It was eighty-eight degrees. At three in the morning. The streetlights on Cave Creek buzz, it turns out. You never hear it in a car. A man in a reflective vest was hosing down the front of a gas station, and he lifted the hose to let me past and didn't ask about the shield.
I had the shield on my back on two luggage straps, because I wasn't going to leave thirteen pounds of Marisol Vega's steel in an empty house, and by the second mile the bottom rim had found the same place on my lower back every step, like the hip shelf used to. It's a funny thing to know about yourself, that you'll find a way to rest on anything.
I opened the door at 4:31. Pulled while I turned. It went first time.
* * *
Coach came in at five past five and saw the shield leaning in the corner behind the desk where it had never been, and then she saw me, and then she went and looked out the front window at the lot.
"Where's your car?"
"On a truck in a shop on Cave Creek."
"Since when?"
"Yesterday. Four o'clock. On the 51."
"Coming back from where?"
She knew. I could tell from how she stood. She had her coffee in one hand and the cane in the other and she wasn't leaning on either of them.
"Tempe," I said. "Copper Vale. Teresa Haskell."
"Hm." She drank some of the coffee. "Did you sign anything?"
"No."
"Good." She turned and walked toward the back, toward the switches, and I thought that was it. Then she stopped at the end of the desk without turning round. "How did you get here?"
"Walked."
"From your house."
"Yes."
She stood there for a second. Then she went and turned the back lights on in order, one, two, three, four, five, six, and didn't say anything else about it all morning, and at a quarter to nine she put me on the floor with the steel and did not shorten the set by a minute.
* * *
The shop called at 11:40.
The man on the phone was nice about it, the way doctors are nice about it. The radiator had split along a seam. The head gasket had gone, probably yesterday on the freeway, maybe a week ago and yesterday finished it. The AC compressor, separately, had been dying for a month, which I knew. He'd written it all up.
"Twenty-eight hundred," he said, "give or take. And I'll be honest with you, son, Kelley Blue Book on that car is about twelve hundred."
"What would you do?"
"Me? I'd let it go." There was a pause. "Guy two lots down'll give you four hundred for it as is. He'll come get it. You won't have to pay me for the tow back."
Twenty-eight hundred dollars was seventy-six days of burn. Four hundred dollars was eleven. I'd worked both out before he finished saying the second number. A car that costs more to fix than it's worth is just arithmetic. The rest of it took longer.
Grindstone opens at 4:40. No bus runs on Cave Creek before 5:15. Thirteen pounds of steel doesn't go on a bus anyway, I'd looked it up, they let you take a bike but not a weapon, and a shield is a weapon if a driver decides it is. Dives are on Saturdays, in lots off dirt roads, forty minutes out of town.
And I'd stop paying for insurance, and gas. I worked that out too. About a hundred and fifty a month. It brought the burn down to about nine-fifty.
"Okay," I said. "Tell him okay."
I put it in the thread from the hallway, because it was easier than saying it four times. Car's dead. Bike now. I'm fine.
* * *
Coach was in the lot at noon with her truck running.
I'd never seen her truck. It was a white Ford from the nineties with a toolbox across the bed and a handicap tag on the mirror and a dent in the tailgate shaped like somebody had backed into a post a long time ago and decided it was fine.
"Get in," she said.
"I was going to walk."
"I know you were. Get in."
I got in. The AC worked. It was so cold it hurt my teeth. The cab smelled like coffee and old vinyl, the radio was off, and the only thing on the dash was a pair of reading glasses folded on a gas receipt.
She didn't say where we were going. She drove like she walks, slowly and without wasting anything, and she didn't take the freeway. She took Cave Creek all the way down to Northern and across, and somewhere around Seventh Street I worked out we were going to Grand.
"You called her," I said.
"I called her."
"Does she sell bikes?"
"She sells whatever came in." Coach changed lanes without looking, which she can do because she'd already looked. "What time will your alarm be?"
"Three thirty."
"And bed?"
I hadn't done that one yet. I did it. "Nine thirty."
"And what about the carry at night? The yard's not under a hundred till nine."
"I don't know yet."
"Hm," she said. That was all. She drove another mile. "Monday we'll talk about it."
* * *
Marguerite had the bike out on the sidewalk in front of the shop when we pulled up, leaning on its kickstand in the sun.
"Salomé Reyes drove," she said, before either of us was out of the truck. "Write down the date. She hasn't been in this shop in her own vehicle since the Obama administration, she sends people, she phones, she does not drive." She had a pencil through her bun and a second one behind her ear. "Hello, Miles. How's the Vega shield? You're carrying it right, I heard. I hear things. Is the strap holding? It was a new strap."
"It's holding."
"Good." She turned round and patted the bike's seat like it was a horse. "Trek. Aluminum frame, twenty-one speed, the rear derailleur is new, the front one is not, the tires are both new because I'm not an animal. A man traded it in for a buckler in May and I gave him too much for it, so you're getting it for less than I paid, which I'm telling you so you'll come back. One-forty. Rack's twenty-five. Lights are eighteen, front and back, and you'll take the lights, because I'm not selling a bicycle to a boy who rides at three in the morning without them. Salomé told me three in the morning. Don't look at her. She was right to."
I didn't look at Coach. Coach was looking at a rack of helmets as if they'd personally disappointed her.
"One eighty-three," I said.
"One eighty-three," said Marguerite. "Plus tax, minus tax because I like you. One eighty." She took the cash and counted it twice and put it in her apron. Then she leaned on the bike.
"Your man with no patch came back," she said. "Tuesday. Bought every pair of rated glasses I had. Twenty-two pairs. I asked him what for and he said for eyes."
"Did he say anything else?"
"He asked if I'd sold any steel lately." She looked at me, and then at Coach, and then back at me. "I said I sell steel every day. Which I do."
* * *
Coach drove me home with the bike in the bed of her truck, lying on a moving blanket she'd brought from somewhere, and she didn't talk on the way, and neither did I.
At my curb she left the engine running. I got the bike down and stood it on its kickstand on the sidewalk. The lights were still in their package. It was a hundred and eight and the street was empty, and somewhere down the block Mrs. Ferreira's dog was barking at something that wasn't me.
Coach put the window down.
"Three thirty," she said.
"Three thirty."
"And what is it you do at three forty?"
She asked it the way she asks me what my shoulders are doing. Like she already knew, and wanted to hear whether I did.
"Same thing I do at four ten," I said.
She looked at me through the window for a second longer.
"Hm," she said, and put the window up, and drove away down the street at about eleven miles an hour.