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“Plus, it’s too dark to ride on any farther,” he said, pushing his bike the rest of the way in. “And this way we can save time and make up the difference tomorrow when we don’t have to pack up the tent.”

“Yeah, but—”

Just then a door at the top of a pair of concrete steps squeaked open and Lindt appeared. “C’mon in, fellas,” he said to us, before shouting over his shoulder, “Cedric! Toto! Clean this place up! You’ve got company!”

Win turned to me. “
Cedric
and
Toto
. Don’t they sound like fun? Maybe you’ll even get a prison nickname,” he whispered as he sprang up the steps and into the hallway.

I wondered how long I’d wait before I told my mother about this night—if I ever had a chance—but I followed Win up the steps anyway. Inside a small kitchen area were two guys wearing orange coveralls. The first guy was a head shorter than me, but thick and square. His hair stuck out at funky angles, and he blinked his eyes repeatedly in the fluorescent light. “I’m Cedric,” he said, extending a hand covered in small, fuzzy tattoos. One outline was of a dagger. “He’s Toto,” he said, gesturing toward the
bigger guy, who merely nodded and sat back down in a folding chair before turning up the volume on the action movie he was watching.

“No manners, that one,” the deputy said. “Cedric, show these guys where the shower is. Toto, wash those dishes. You guys gotta clean up after yourselves. We have to have some kind of order around here.” Lindt sounded a little embarrassed at the condition, and maybe the comfort, of his prisoners. I was still trying to figure out what the hell these guys could have done to deserve a prison term where they apparently cooked their own meals and watched cable all night.

Cedric led us to a small closet at the end of the hall. “Shower,” he announced, pulling open the heavy metal door. The inside was like a large phone booth, a nozzle poking out of one wall above a single metal button. “Gotta push this to make the water come out. No hot or cold. Just warm. Wear shoes,” he said pointing at the floor. “Toto’s got wicked fungus on his foot. Guy’s nasty,” he said, reaching for a pair of white towels on a rack outside the door.

“Thanks,” I said.

“You guys eat?” he asked me.

I shook my head.

“Burger drive-in around the corner’s open till midnight. They deliver, but we walk up there sometimes too. It’s like a knockoff White Castle, but better. Get a whole bag of little cheeseburgers for, like, four bucks,” he said.

“Okay,” I said, wondering again what kind of place this was.

“Listen, my wife’s waiting on me to call her, and then I’m
going to turn in early,” he announced. “Toto and me gotta take the cruisers to the car wash tomorrow, and then we mow down by the city building.”

“Thanks for your help,” Win said.

“Turn down the damn TV, Toto!” Cedric yelled as he passed by the open lounge area. He disappeared at the other end of the hall behind a door with a huge bolt on the outside and what looked like a big mail slot about chest high.

Deputy Lindt poked his head out of the room next door. “In here, guys,” he said. Win and I entered the cell. It was about the size of my bedroom at home. A pair of small sealed windows hovered a few inches from the ceiling. One wall held two bunks, braced against cinder blocks painted a sickly shade of greenish gray. The opposite wall had a small, low toilet without a real seat to speak of. The white porcelain was chipped, and rust marked the areas near the bolts that secured it to the floor. Where the tank might have been on a normal toilet there was a grimy little sink with a single knob and faucet.

“I keep telling Chris we ought to figure out some way to pull something like this along behind us on our bikes,” Win said, surveying the toilet-sink combo like a museum piece.

Lindt smiled. “I know it looks gross, but it’s clean. We make the guys disinfect and everything,” he said. “Mattresses, too.” He gestured toward the green vinyl rectangles on the flat metal shelves that would serve as our beds. “You guys got sleeping bags, right?”

“Yeah. This will be great,” Win said.

With little else to say, he nodded his acknowledgment. “Feel
free to spread your gear out in the garage if you need to dry stuff out,” he said. “I’ve got to head back out on patrol. Not that anything’s going to happen in Hudson. Nothing ever really does.”

“We were thinking of going to get some of those cheap burgers,” I said.

Lindt nodded. “Tell ’em I sent you. He’ll toss in the fries for free.”

“You are well connected,” Win joked.

Lindt smiled again and stepped outside the cell. He pointed to the bolt. “Locks on the outside. Oscar—the guy on the desk tonight—will lock up Cedric and Toto when the movie’s over. I’ll tell him to leave your door open.”

“That’d be great,” Win said.

Lindt nodded and started to walk away, one hand trailing on the doorframe. “All the way from West Virginia, huh?” he asked.

Win nodded. Lindt shook his head. “Wish I had time to hear about it,” he said, tapping the door frame with his fist and then disappearing.

An hour later Win and I had eaten our way through a paper sack full of greasy hamburgers and both taken our turn in the shower stall. We’d hung up our wet clothes in the garage and set a few things out to dry before returning to our cell. Win sat on the lower bunk, holding a pen and one of the postcards he’d bought back in Indiana. “Who should I write to?”

“I don’t care, Win,” I said. All I wanted was to go to sleep.

“Seriously. Don’t all those great people write letters from jail and stuff? You know … Emerson, Martin Luther King … the ones we read in American Lit.”

“They were in jail because they were wrongly imprisoned. We’re in jail because you thought it would be fun,” I pointed out. “You’re not likely to end up on anyone’s reading list anytime soon.”

“Just tell me who to write to,” he said.

“Your parents.”

“No, really,” he said, poking my mattress from beneath with his pen.

“
Really
, I don’t care,” I said, trying to adjust my sleeping bag beneath me so my skin wasn’t in contact with the mattress. I stuck to the plastic, but my bag kept sliding all over the place. Between that, the volume of Toto’s current movie choice, and the smell of disinfectant, I was starting to think that this wasn’t going to work.

“Fine. I’ll write to your mom and tell her about life in the joint,” he said.

“Leave my mom alone. Torment your own,” I said, turning toward the wall.

Suddenly the lights snapped off and the TV went quiet. “Curfew,” called Oscar, the night deputy we’d met on our way in from dinner. Toto’s metal chair scraped along the floor, then I heard him stand and shuffle back to his cell. A moment later keys jingled on a belt as Oscar came behind and locked it up. Then he stopped at our door. “You guys okay?”

“Great,” Win said.

“Let me know if you need anything,” Oscar replied.

“You bet,” Win said in the darkness.

The footsteps died away.

I was almost asleep. One of the guys next door farted. “Did you ever dream when we were back in the physics closet at school that we’d someday be sleeping in a jail cell in Hudson, Wisconsin?” Win asked.

I ignored him.

“I mean, it’s kind of epic, you know? Bike trip magic.”

“Go to sleep, Win,” I said.

“Yeah … okay,” he said.

I didn’t sleep well. I had to readjust the sleeping bag beneath me, and halfway through the night one of the guys next door must have lit a cigarette, because smoke poured through a hidden vent and into our cell. When I heard a different deputy shout back at Cedric and Toto to get up, I was relieved that day had arrived and I had fulfilled my obligation to take advantage of this life experience.

“That was the crappiest I’ve slept the whole trip,” I said, sitting up and rubbing my eyes.

Win didn’t reply. I hopped down, my bag slipping to the floor behind me. I turned to Win’s bunk.

It was empty.

I looked around the tiny cell. Empty.

I couldn’t put words to what I was worried about. What I thought might have happened. It was a little bit like finding all that money. I stepped quickly into my shoes and tossed my sleeping bag over my shoulder. “Win?” I called out as I pulled open the door.

The lounge and hallway were empty. I could hear Cedric and Toto stirring in their room.

I bolted through the hall and into the garage. Something in me expected to find his bike missing. But it was there, and so was he.

Win was spread out on the floor, his ground pad unrolled, asleep next to the bikes.

My heart slowed.

I walked over and toed him in the elbow with my shoe. “What the hell are you doing out here?” I asked, stuffing my sleeping bag back into its sack.

Win threw his forearm across his eyes. “Sleeping. I couldn’t in there. The smell or the air was getting to me.”

“You should have told me,” I said.

“You were asleep,” he pointed out.

“But you could have left a note.”

“Chris, I went, like, thirty feet,” he said.

I shook my head. “Scared straight, then?” I said, switching my Tevas for my biking shoes.

“Something like that,” he said. “Early start? Pop-Tarts on the road?”

“Breakfast of champions,” I said, shoving the stuff we’d laid out last night back into panniers. Win sprang up and shoved his sleeping bag into a stuff sack; I reached down and began rolling up his ground pad.

“What’s this?” I asked as one of Win’s postcards covered in loopy handwriting emerged from beneath the pad.

He dropped the sleeping bag and snatched the postcard quickly out of my hand. “Nothing,” he said. “For my … my uncle. To let him know where we are,” he said.

I shook my head. “You need to call him again.”

“I will.” He crammed the postcard into his handlebar bag. “Let’s get out of here, though. Weather’s good. Bet we’ll hit Minnesota by lunch. Just stay close,” he ordered, cramming the last of his gear into his panniers. “You wouldn’t want me to wander off like that again, right?” he said, rolling his eyes.

“Shut up and ride,” I said, embarrassed a bit at the panic I’d felt, but still wondering if it wasn’t justified.

“And thus, the coefficient of the variable is indeterminable,” my calculus professor said from the front of the room. I wasn’t paying attention—even though this had become a favorite class. Not because I was that big of a math geek, but because Dr. Noelle Liston was young, funny, and way more beautiful than a PhD in math had a right to be.

But even her looks couldn’t keep me committed to math today. My mind wandered back to the postcard that I’d been carrying around for the last couple days. I reached into the front pocket of my backpack, slid it out, and reread it for the hundredth time. Two days had passed since Mr. Coggans’s visit. I hadn’t heard from him or Ward.

And as if it weren’t enough that I was freaked out about all of
this, my anger and jealousy of Win had grown. The muscles I’d discovered over the summer were atrophying as I applied my mind to theoretical physics, while Win was probably riding centuries to drop off a lousy postcard. Once I realized it was from Win, I did so many push-ups and chin-ups in my dorm room that my arms throbbed the next morning. It was a stupid way I tried to punish him, when he didn’t even have a chance to compete. But it was all I had. Any relief I’d felt at knowing Abe Ward was wrong was flooded away by the knowledge that Win was still out there riding—
happy
. Meanwhile, I was busting tail at school
and
dealing with his dad.

People around me started to twitch as the class drew to a close. “Don’t forget to do the sample problems for Tuesday,” Dr. Liston shouted above the din.

I slammed shut a book that easily equaled the weight of all my gear on the bike trip and shoved it into my bag as I headed for the door.

Outside I found a familiar face awaiting me.

“Hey,” I said without breaking stride.

“Nice to see you, too, Chris,” Ward said as he fell into step beside me. Today he looked like he could be a nontraditional student—dressed casually in jeans and a polo. No gun.

“I’ve got to go change for work,” I said.

“But you don’t work on Thursdays,” he said, reminding me he had my schedule—my life—in that little notebook I’d seen him jotting things in.

“I switched shifts with a guy. He’s taking mine right before Labor Day so I can leave earlier,” I said.

“Ah,” he muttered.

I shoved open the door. “I’m kind of in a hurry.”

“Have you heard from Win?” he asked me. I stopped walking.

“No,” I lied, shaking my head and trying to look surprised by the question. The postcard felt like it might burst into flame at any moment. I realized even as I said these words that I was protecting Win for one reason only: habit. “I thought you figured he was, you know,
unreachable
.”

He shrugged. “Just a theory. There are other possibilities to consider. Leads to pursue.”

“Such as?”

“Well, I’m really not at liberty to say,” he said.

I smiled. He had nothing. Which meant Coggans still had nothing. Which still made me happy on some ridiculous level.

“Well, good luck, I guess,” I said, resuming my pace back to the dorm.

“I know Coggans came by to see you,” he said.

“Yeah, thanks for the warning.”

“He isn’t going to let this go, Chris,” he said, lingering behind me.

“He never lets anything go,” I shot back without turning, though I could read the subtext. He’d made that clear two days ago.

“He’s convinced you know something. He doesn’t like feeling that he’s being made a fool of.”

“I can’t help what he feels,” I said, still without slowing.

“Chris, Winston Coggans is in a position to make things financially difficult for your family,” he said.

I froze. “What did you just say?”

“He asked me to mention that to you,” he said, the regret clear in his voice.

I turned to face him. “He’s threatening me?” My face flushed hot.

Ward didn’t respond, just looked off into the distance.

“This is insane,” I said, turning to head up the steps to my dorm.