I’m a biker, and I’ve stopped for a hundred stranded cars over thirty years. That night on Route 9 was the first time I almost wished I hadn’t.
It was past midnight. Cold. A little Honda sat crooked on the shoulder with the hazards blinking, back tire flat to the rim.
A girl stood next to it. Maybe nineteen. Arms wrapped tight around herself, and not from the cold.
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I pulled my Harley up slow so I wouldn’t scare her. Killed the engine. Told her my name and that I’d have her rolling in ten minutes.
She didn’t say thank you. She just kept looking back at the car.
My name’s Dale. I’ve been riding since before this girl was born. Sixty-one years old, gray in my beard, knees that crack when I kneel down and crack louder when I stand back up. I ride a black Road King that’s older than most of the cars on that highway and runs better than half of them.
People see the leather and the patches and they lock their doors. I’ve watched it happen at gas stations my whole life. A mother pulls her kid a little closer. A man puts his body between me and his wife. I’m used to it. I stopped expecting anything different a long time ago.
But I never stopped pulling over.
My old man taught me that. He was a mechanic, hands black to the wrist every day of his life, and he had a rule he said more than he said anything else. You see somebody stuck on the side of the road, you stop. Doesn’t matter who they are. Doesn’t matter what they think of you. You stop, because someday that’s going to be you out there, and you’ll want somebody to do the same.
So I stopped.
That stretch of Route 9 is bad road to break down on. No streetlights. Fields on both sides going black into nothing. The kind of dark where your headlight only reaches so far and everything past it could be anything.
The girl was shaking. I figured it was the cold at first. It was maybe forty degrees out and she had nothing on but a thin gray hoodie and jeans worn through at the knee.
“You got a spare?” I asked her.
She nodded. Pointed at the trunk without really looking at it. “In there. I think.”
“You think?”
“It’s not my car,” she said. “It’s my boyfriend’s.”
Something in the way she said it sat wrong with me. Boyfriend. She said the word like it tasted bad, like she was reading it off a card somebody handed her.
I knelt down by the flat and pulled my flashlight off my belt. The tire was destroyed. Not just flat. Shredded down to the steel belt, rubber hanging off it in strips. She’d been driving on it flat for miles, long enough to chew the whole thing apart. Whoever taught this kid to drive hadn’t taught her to pull over when something underneath the car starts screaming.
“How long you been out here?” I asked.
“Couple hours.”
“Couple hours? In this cold?” I looked at her thin hoodie. “Why didn’t you flag somebody down? Call somebody?”
She didn’t answer. She just wrapped her arms tighter around herself and looked off down the dark highway, north, the way we’d both come from. She kept doing that. Looking north. Like she was waiting for something.
Or watching for it.
That’s when I heard it.
A sound from the back of the car. Soft. Muffled. Like something shifting its weight against the inside of the trunk.
I went still. I’ve got good ears, even at my age, better than my eyes these days. I stayed down on one knee with my hand flat on the ruined tire and I listened with everything I had.
It came again. A small sound. A whimper.
I looked up at the girl. Whatever color was left in her face had drained right out of it.
“Pop the trunk,” I said.
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She shook her head. Fast. Too fast. “It’s nothing. It’s just bags. Stuff shifting around.”
“That ain’t bags.”
“Please.” Her voice cracked straight down the middle. “Please just fix the tire. We have to go. He’s coming and we have to be gone before he—”
She stopped herself. But it was too late. He. Now we were getting somewhere.
The sound came a third time, and this time there was no pretending. It was a cry. A small, scared, human cry, and worse than that, it was a cry that got quiet on its own. Cut itself off. The cry of somebody who’d learned the hard way that crying loud only makes things worse.
I know that sound. I wish to God I didn’t.
I stood up. My knees screamed at me but I didn’t feel a thing.
