Chapter 4: The Old Trailer Park
The morning air smelled of wet asphalt and pine needles. By the time the sun burned through the gray mist hanging over the auto body shop, Jax had already tuned the carburetors on his bike and was strapping a heavy canvas tool bag to the sissy bar.
“Up,” Jax said, tapping the toe of his boot against the leg of the cot where I had curled up with the wool blanket.
I sat up, rubbing my eyes and smoothing down my messy light brown hair. Without a word, Jax tossed me a heavy denim vest that was three sizes too big, the sleeves hanging down past my knuckles. “Put that on. Morning wind on the highway has teeth.”
I slipped my arms through the oversized armholes, the heavy denim smelling faintly of engine grease and leather. It made me look even smaller than I was, but when I zipped it up, the warmth immediately locked in.
We rolled out of the gravel yard just as the town was waking up, the big black Harley tearing a deep, guttural roar through the quiet morning streets. I sat right behind Jax, my small fingers gripping the thick leather of his belt loops as we accelerated onto Route 9, leaving the diner and Martha’s watchful eyes far behind in the rearview mirror.
We rode for forty minutes without stopping, the highway stretching out ahead of us like a cracked gray ribbon cutting through miles of dry scrubland and rusted barbed-wire fences. The wind roared in my ears, but I didn't care. For the first time in my life, I wasn't waiting for a bus or hiding under a kitchen table. I was moving forward.
Jax slowed the bike down as we reached the county line, turning off the paved highway onto a washboard gravel road marked by a crooked, sun-bleached sign that read Pine Ridge Estates.
It wasn't an estate. It was a graveyard of rusted metal and forgotten lives.
Row after row of abandoned mobile homes sat under the harsh morning sun, their aluminum siding peeled back like tin cans, their windows shattered or boarded up with rotting plywood. Tall yellow weeds choked the dirt driveways where rusted-out sedans sat on cinder blocks with missing tires.
Jax cut the engine, coasting the heavy bike to a stop beside a patch of dry dirt marked by a mail post with the number 14 hanging crookedly from a single rusted screw.
He swung his leg over the saddle and planted both boots firmly in the dirt, standing tall against the backdrop of the desolate lot. He didn't take off his helmet immediately. He just stood there, staring at the empty space where a double-wide trailer had once stood, leaving behind only a concrete foundation cracked down the middle like a broken jaw.
I slid off the back of the bike, my sneakers crunching on the gravel. I walked up beside him, my hand instinctively reaching into my jacket pocket to touch the folded paper.
“This is it,” I whispered, the wind carrying the words away across the empty lots.
Jax slowly pulled off his helmet, running a calloused hand through his long dark hair. His hazel eyes swept over the empty concrete pad, taking in the skeletal remains of the rusted propane tank and the wild blackberry bushes that had overgrown the old porch steps.
“Yeah,” Jax said, his voice hard and flat, though his fingers gripped the rubber handle of his handlebars tight enough to turn his knuckles white. “This is where I left her.”
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Before he could say another thing, the sharp crunch of heavy tires on gravel echoed behind us. A dusty dark-green Ford pickup truck with a county sheriff emblem on the door came sliding around the corner, kicking up a thick wall of white dust as it blocked the entrance to the lot.
The driver's side door pushed open, and Sheriff Vance stepped out, resting one hand casually on the butt of his sidearm as he squinted against the glaring morning sun, his eyes locked straight on Jax.
