"News travels."
"In this shop, news teleports." Vic straightened, wiped his hands, and jerked his chin at the workbench. "Come here. I'm going to show you something, and then I'm going to deny it."
He picked up a long screwdriver. "Your daddy knew this one." He pressed the tip against the engine case and the handle to his ear, and closed his eyes, listening. "Bad lifter sings. Good lifter hums. You can chase it with gauges for an hour or you can listen for ten seconds, if you know what you're listening for." He handed Owen the screwdriver. "You try."
Owen listened. The engine's insides came through the steel like a song through a wall — ticks and hums and one faint, off-key note, third cylinder, exhaust side.
"There," Vic said, before Owen could say it. "You heard it." It wasn't a question. Vic took the screwdriver back. "Don't tell Tommy I showed you. He'll want a parade."
That was Vic's version of I'm proud of you. Owen understood it perfectly.
"Wouldn't dream of it," Owen said.
He was still smiling when Ray came out of the office with the old Dymo label maker — the kind you squeeze, chunk-chunk, letter by letter — and a strip of fresh label tape. Ray peeled the backing off and stuck it crooked on Owen's shirt, right over the heart.
O. CARTER — TECHNICIAN.
"There," Ray said. "Official."
Owen looked down at it. Technician. Not junior. Not the kid. He ran his thumb over the raised letters, and the shop went on around him — the air wrench stuttering, Tommy singing off-key, the smell of oil and hot metal — and he thought about the envelope on his mother's kitchen table, and the wrench with his father's initials, and the bike that had started on the second kick this morning.
Behind the shop, through the open back door, he could see Garrett in the wash bay with Midnight and a bucket, going over her inch by inch. Getting ready.
Dawn tomorrow. They'd ride.
Chapter 14
Elena's Run
The shop went quiet at six. Not the quiet of an empty building — the fluorescent hum was still there, and the smell of solvent, and the tick of cooling metal — but the particular quiet of a place where the day's work is done and only the important things are left.
Garrett stood at the workbench with the route map unrolled under the task light, holding the corners down with a spark plug, a torque wrench, and his coffee mug. Owen came in from the lot with two fresh cups from the diner and set one down without being asked, the way he'd learned to do for his father years ago. Men who are thinking don't want questions. They want coffee.
"Come here," Garrett said. "Look at this."
The map showed the county in creases and coffee stains — Copper Junction at the center, Route 66 running through it like a spine. Garrett's finger traced the highlighted route: east out of town on 66, the long straight pull through the flats, the turn at Seligman, the loop back through the canyon road.
"Hundred and forty miles," Garrett said. "We leave at dawn, we're back by noon. Support truck in the rear — that's you — and Marcy rides sweep. Same as every year."
Owen studied the route. "How many riders?"
"Last year, sixty-three. This year —" Garrett's mouth did something complicated. "Word got around about last night. About you. I think we'll see a hundred."
He was quiet for a moment. Then he rolled the map's edge under his thumb, and Owen recognized the gesture — a man deciding to say the thing he'd been carrying.
"You know what the run's for," Garrett said. "The money."
"The mobile clinic."
"County mobile clinic. Mammograms, checkups, the basic stuff — for women who can't get to Flagstaff, or won't." Garrett took a drink of his coffee. "Elena's idea. All of it."
He told it properly, the way Owen had never heard it told. Not the short version men gave at the bar — my wife passed, we do a ride — but the real one.
She rode her own bike. That was the first thing, and Garrett said it like it was the most important thing, because to him it was. A cherry-red Sportster, loud pipes, faster than Garrett on a good day and she never let him forget it. She hadn't been decoration on the back of his bike. She'd been the one who planned the routes, who argued about the charity split, who once rode two hundred miles in the rain because a donor in Kingman wanted to meet face to face.