Chapter 9: The Supplier Breakfast
Grace Hartwell was halfway through a budget review when her phone buzzed on the conference table.
The message was from Nina Kowalski, and it held only a photograph and six words.
Please tell me you see this.
Grace opened the picture. Morning light filled the flagship showroom on South Lamar, and beside the matte black Sovereign, brass bright against its flank, stood an old man in a plain jacket and jeans, studying the machine.
Her father.
She enlarged the photograph, noted the suited man smirking behind Elias, and called Nina before she could talk herself out of it, heart hammering hard.
"You saw it," Nina said.
"I saw it. When was it taken?"
"Four minutes ago. Maybe five."
"Is he still there?"
"By the Sovereign, like he has all day."
"Does anyone know who he is?"
"Nina."
"Cal greeted him. Offered him coffee, I think. Sal would know him anywhere, but Sal is back in service. The floor people have never seen him in person, Grace. Most of them started after the move."
"He walks one store every year," she said. "No warning, no entourage. He watches how people are treated when nobody important is supposed to be watching."
"That is a lovely tradition," Nina said. "Today it worries me."
"It worries me too. Who is the man in the suit behind him?"
"Jared Kessler."
"The Closer."
"Has he spoken to my father?"
"I believe he has."
"From your tone, it was not a welcome."
"No. It was not."
"Do not intervene," she said. "Do not announce him, do not rescue him, and do not let anyone tidy this up before Vic sees it plainly."
"Where is Vic?"
"At the supplier breakfast across town, being charming about brake components."
"I am calling him now. Keep your eyes open and your mouth shut, Nina, and thank you."
Across town, Vic Romano sat under a patio umbrella with a plate he had not touched, listening to a supplier explain, for the second time, why a shipment of brake pads deserved a celebration.
His phone vibrated. He saw Grace's name and stood so quickly his chair scraped the concrete.
He walked to the edge of the patio before he answered.
"Grace. What is wrong?"
"My father is on your showroom floor."
"He is standing beside the Sovereign at the flagship. Nina just sent me a photograph. He arrived unannounced, in a plain jacket, and your floor does not know him."
"Today? He chose today, during launch week?"
"Nobody called you, Vic," she said, before he could ask, "because nobody there knows they are looking at the owner."
Vic swore, quietly and with feeling.
"I am twenty minutes away," he said. "Maybe twenty five with traffic."
"Has Jared been near him?"
"Grace."
"Nina believes Jared has spoken to him. She did not describe a welcome."
Vic was already moving between the tables, keys in his hand.
"Tell her I am coming," he said. "Tell nobody else."
"He will hate being announced, Vic. He came to see the store as it is."
"Then I will not announce him. But I will be in the building when whatever is happening finishes happening."
"Call Omar," she said. "Have him keep a discreet eye on the floor. No fuss, no hovering where Jared can use it."
"I will call him from the car. Grace, why did your father not tell me?"
"Because telling you would have changed the floor. That is the point of the walk."
"It is a fine point," Vic said. "It is playing hell with my morning."
In his car, with South Lamar traffic thickening ahead of him, Vic called the showroom and asked for Omar Hassan by name.
"Omar," he said. "It is Vic. Listen carefully, and do not react where anyone can see you react."
"I am listening," Omar said.
"There is an older gentleman beside the Sovereign, plain jacket, jeans, white hair. I need your eyes on him and on anyone who talks to him."
"I see him now," Omar said. "Cal was with him earlier. Jared has been with him too."
"Tell me exactly what you have seen," he said.
"Nothing I can prove from the door. Voices carry badly over the music. But the gentleman has not sat down, and nobody has offered him a chair that I noticed."
"Keep watching. If Jared raises his voice, you move closer. If anyone lays a hand on that man, you stop it, politely and completely. Do you understand me?"
"I understand. Who is he, Vic?"
"A man whose name you will hear soon enough. Until then, he is a guest in our store, same as anyone else who walks in off South Lamar."
"That should have been enough," Omar said.
"It should have been," Vic said. "Watch the floor. I am coming."
Chapter 10: Hands on the Push Bar
The sound reached the service door, a coughing engine that caught, stumbled, and quit.
Cal Turner looked up from his cloth. "That is not a happy starter motor," he said.
Elias, coffee in hand, listened to the silence that followed. "No," he said. "That sounded final."
Through the open bay door they saw the rider in the lot, thumbing the starter beside a heavy touring bike. Nothing answered but a thin click.
Cal set the cloth down. "Stay and finish your coffee, sir. I will go give him a hand."
"You would rather I stayed?" Elias asked.
"I would rather that coffee get drunk while it still remembers being warm," Cal said, grinning. "But you are welcome where you please."
Elias set the cup on the bench. "Then I please to come along."
Outside, the rider pulled off his helmet and stared at the dead machine, broad and sunburned, with a gray braid.
"She quit on me," he said. "Right at your gate. Two thousand miles without a hiccup, and she chooses your lot to retire."
"They do like an audience," Elias said.
"Battery?" Cal asked, crouching by the side panel.
"New in March," the rider said. "Terminals are tight, I checked. Lights come on, starter just clicks and gives up."
Cal nodded slowly. "Could be the relay, could be the solenoid. Sal will know in about ninety seconds. Want us to push her in?"
"You would do that?" the rider asked. "I figured on a tow truck and kissing my afternoon goodbye."
"Free of charge," Cal said. "That is my job, the good part of it."
Inside the showroom, a young couple circled a pearl white cruiser near the window. The woman raised her phone, then lowered it.
"Excuse me," she said. "The light is better by the door. Could you help us roll it just a few feet that way, so I can get a clean photo for my dad? He is buying it, but he could not come today."
Jared Kessler barely looked up from his tablet. "I sell motorcycles," he said. "I do not move them around for photographs."
"It is only a few feet," the man said. "We are not sure how to shift it without dropping it."
"Then do not shift it," Jared said. "Service moves bikes. Sales closes deals. Take the picture from where it stands."
"The photo is for my father," the woman said quietly. "He rode for forty years. He wants to see the whole profile."
"And I want three more units closed before Saturday," Jared said, turning back to his tablet. "We all have dreams."
The woman lowered her phone and walked away without another word.
Out in the lot, Cal had taken the left side of the touring bike. "Feet flat," he told the rider. "Lean from the hips, not the shoulders. She is six hundred pounds of opinionated metal, so we ask nicely."
Elias stepped to the rear and set both hands on the push bar beneath the luggage rack, its chrome hot from the sun.
"Sir, you do not have to do that," the rider said. "Honestly. I hate asking a man your age to shove my bike across a parking lot."
"You did not ask," Elias said.
"Still," the rider said.
"My brother used to say a motorcycle only weighs too much when nobody helps," Elias said. "Ready when you are, Cal."
"On three," Cal said. "One, two, three."
The bike rolled slowly, tires whispering over the asphalt, Cal steering from the bars, Elias and the rider leaning in behind.
"Easy," Cal said. "Watch the crack there. Good. You have done this before, sir."
"Once or twice," Elias said.
Cal laughed. "Did bikes die this politely in the old days? Right at a dealership door?"
"They died wherever they pleased," Elias said. "Mountains. River crossings. Once in a car wash, though that one was our fault."
"Our?" Cal asked.
"My brother and I," Elias said. "We pushed that one four miles. He sang the whole way, badly, so I would keep walking just to get home and away from the singing."
They eased the big bike up the ramp and through the bay door, where Sal Ricci was pointing at an open lift.
"Put her there," Sal called. "Starter relay, I am guessing. Click and quit, right?"
"Right," the rider said, astonished. "How did you know from over there?"
"Forty years of listening to bikes lie to me," Sal said. "Coffee is inside, and the push is free. Do not argue. The owner would haunt me."
Elias stepped back, breathing a little hard, and wiped his hands on the shop rag Cal handed him. Past the service door, across the showroom floor, the matte black Sovereign sat in its pool of light, brass glinting, waiting.