"Bay Three," Ray said. "Light's busted. Has been for a month."
"Perfect," Owen said.
Chapter 5
Midnight
Long after the crowd thinned and the grill smoke faded off into the desert night, Garrett Steel sat on an overturned oil drum in the corner of Bay One and watched the kid work.
He'd sent most of the crew home. Or they'd gone on their own — the betting pool had lost its flavor once Owen stopped performing for it and just got quiet. Tommy and Marcus stayed, because they were mechanics and mechanics couldn't leave a mystery alone, but they'd retreated to the workbench with coffee, talking in low voices. Ray moved around the edges of the shop doing Ray things, which mostly meant being present without being in the way.
And Owen Carter was in Bay Three — the dark bay, the one with the busted light — with Midnight on the lift and a trouble light, and he'd been in there for an hour.
Garrett could see the glow of the trouble light through the bay door, moving slow and deliberate. Every now and then it would go still for a long time. The kid was thinking. Garrett recognized the stillness. He'd done enough of it himself, back when his hands still did what he told them.
He leaned back against the cool cinderblock wall and let himself remember, because the night had that quality — the desert cooling outside, the shop humming, a machine waiting — and because Midnight had always been a remembering kind of bike.
Three winters. That's how long it took.
He'd bought the frame in the fall — a wreck, bent neck, somebody else's abandoned project — and Elena had stood in this very garage with her hands on her hips and said, "Garrett Steel, you have lost your mind," in exactly the tone that meant she was already in love with the idea. She'd been the one to pick the black. Not gloss black, not show black — deep black, midnight black, the color the desert sky got an hour after the sun went down. She'd spent a whole Saturday at the paint shop arguing with the mixer until the color was right, and when the tank came back she ran her hand over it and whispered, "There you are," like the bike had been hiding inside the paint all along.
The pinstriping was hers too. Thin silver lines along the tank and fenders, done by hand, her tongue caught between her teeth the whole time. Her hands had been as grease-stained as his by the end of the first winter. She'd learned to gap plugs. She'd held the flashlight.
She'd insisted on the first real ride, too — not around the block, but out past the county line at dusk, the two of them on a bike held together with hope and lockwire. She'd laughed the whole way with her arms around his waist and her helmet knocking against his. When the rear fender strut cracked outside Winslow, she'd held the flashlight and talked him through the roadside fix, and by the time they limped home she knew more about motorcycles than half his crew. She'd been the one to say, on the night they first fired it up, "Listen to that — that's ours."
Ours. Three winters of ours.
The cancer took fourteen months. That was the number Garrett carried: fourteen. Fourteen months since the hospice bed in the living room. Fourteen months since he'd held her hand — her hand, thin as a bird's wing by then — and she'd told him, with the morphine making her brave, "You ride that bike, Garrett. You ride it like you mean it."
He'd promised. He'd held that bird's-wing hand and promised, and she'd smiled like she knew exactly what the promise would cost him. Fourteen months, and he still reached for her side of the bed. He still bought two coffees at the drive-through before he remembered.
The Elena's Run charity ride left at dawn, two days from now. Two hundred riders, maybe more, raising money for the county cancer fund in her name. Garrett had organized it. Garrett had told the newspapers he'd lead it. And he was going to lead it on Midnight or he wasn't going to lead it at all — that was the part nobody understood, not even Ray. Any other bike would get him down the road. Only Midnight would get him there.
That's why the bet. That's what the five thousand dollars really was — not pride, not showmanship. Desperation, wearing pride's jacket. He'd watched three good mechanics fail and he'd felt the ride slipping, felt her slipping, and he'd done the only thing he knew how to do when something mattered: he'd put a price on it and dared the world to collect.
The trouble light in Bay Three went still again. Garrett watched it, unmoving, and realized his hands were clenched on his knees.
He thought about the kid's eyes when he'd said "Deal." He thought about himself at eighteen in Tulsa, telling a shop full of men he could rebuild a seized Shovelhead, and the old-timer who'd finally said, "Let the boy try," and how that had changed everything.
He thought about Jack Carter, who'd been a good man and a better mechanic, and about the boy Jack left behind sweeping floors and changing oil, carrying his father's toolbox like a reliquary.
The light moved again — slow, purposeful. Working. Listening.
Garrett Steel, president of the Iron Rail riding crew, fifty-two years old, a man who did not pray and said so, leaned forward on the oil drum, folded his big hands, and whispered into the humming dark of his own garage, to no one at all:
"Come on, kid."
Chapter 6
The Ghost Fault