Gene Reese heard the squeal start outside Casa Grande, and he knew exactly what it was.
He was ninety years old and driving a 2004 Buick LeSabre west on Interstate 8 across the Arizona desert, with a garment bag hanging in the back window and a road atlas open on the passenger seat. His great-grandson was graduating from Marine Corps boot camp in San Diego at nine o'clock Friday morning.
Gene planned to be there. He'd told his granddaughter he'd fly. Then he'd looked at what the airlines wanted for a ticket and what they'd do to his knees, and he'd decided he'd drive.
Noah was nineteen. He'd written Gene exactly one letter from boot camp, five lines long, in pencil.
The last line said, Grandpa Gene, I hope you can come. Gene had read it maybe fifty times, and it was folded in his shirt pocket now.
The squeal came and went. It was the high, thin whine of a belt slipping on a pulley, the kind of sound most people turn the radio up to drown out.
Gene turned the radio off.
"Hang on, old girl," he said to the Buick. "Just get me to Yuma."
She didn't get him to Yuma.
Forty miles past Gila Bend, out in the empty creosote flats where the mountains stand up bare and brown on both sides, the squeal turned into a slap and then a flutter under the hood. The battery light came on. A minute later, the steering went heavy in his hands, like he was suddenly driving a tractor.
Gene knew all three of those things together meant the same thing. The serpentine belt was gone.
He saw the blue sign for a rest area a half mile ahead and got the Buick into it on momentum and muscle. He parked in the shade of the ramada, turned off the engine before it could overheat, and sat for a minute with his hands on the wheel.
It was 1:20 on Thursday afternoon. San Diego was two hundred and thirty miles away.
He got out and opened the hood, which took some doing.
The belt was lying in pieces in the bottom of the engine bay, chewed to strips. Every pulley it was supposed to turn was standing still. The alternator.
The power steering. The water pump.
Gene had been a motor sergeant in the Army for part of his twenty-six years. He'd kept trucks running in places that didn't have rest areas. He could have changed that belt in fifteen minutes, if he'd had a belt.
He did not have a belt.
He also didn't have a cell signal, he discovered. One bar came and went.
He tried to call his granddaughter twice and both calls dropped. He stood in the hot wind beside the Buick with his phone in his hand, an old man in a pressed white shirt and a 1st Cavalry Division ball cap, and for the first time all day he felt every one of his ninety years.
That was when he heard the motorcycles.
There were eight of them.
They came off the interstate in a long rumbling line and rolled into the rest area slow, one behind the other, chrome and black paint flashing in the sun. Big touring bikes, loaded down with saddlebags. The riders wore black leather vests over their T-shirts, covered in patches, and boots and sunglasses and bandannas, and every one of them looked like somebody you'd see on the evening news.
They parked in a half circle on the other side of the ramada. Right around Gene's Buick.
Gene closed the hood. He didn't hurry. But he reached into the back seat and found the tire iron, and he stood beside the front fender with it hanging at his side.
He was ninety years old and he'd been in two wars. He wasn't going to be robbed in a rest area without making somebody work for it.
The biggest of them got off his bike and took off his sunglasses.
He was maybe sixty, heavy through the chest and shoulders, with a gray goatee and arms covered in faded tattoos. He walked toward the Buick slowly, with his hands loose and away from his body, and stopped about ten feet away.
He looked at the hood. He looked at the tire iron. Then he looked at the back of the Buick.
On the bumper there was a sticker, sun-faded almost to white. A yellow shield with a black stripe and a horse's head. The patch of the 1st Cavalry Division.
Beside it, the Arizona license plate said VETERAN across the bottom.
The big man looked at the sticker for a long time. Then he looked at Gene's ball cap. Then at Gene.
He didn't say a word. He turned around, walked back to his motorcycle, took a phone out of his saddlebag, and walked a little way off with it held to his ear.
He talked into it, low and fast. Gene couldn't hear what he said.
The other seven riders hadn't moved. They sat on their bikes and watched Gene.
Gene's hand tightened on the tire iron.
The big man put the phone away and came back. He stopped at the same ten feet.
"Sir," he said. "Don't go anywhere. I've got some more friends coming."
And down on the interstate, from the east, Gene heard the low thunder of a lot more motorcycles.