Owen knew the thing about ghost faults before he ever touched a wrench. His father had said it the way other men said grace: an intermittent problem only exists while it's happening, and it stops existing the second you look straight at it. You couldn't chase it. You had to set a trap and wait.
So he set his trap.
He rolled Midnight into the middle of the bay and told everybody to give him room. Tommy dragged the tool carts back. Vic leaned against the parts counter with his arms folded, watching like a man at a cockfight he didn't bet on. Garrett paced the painted yellow line at the edge of the bay, back and forth, back and forth, his boots loud on the concrete.
"You're going to run her till she's hot," Owen said. It wasn't a question.
Garrett stopped pacing. "She'll die on you. That's the whole problem."
"That's the whole point."
Owen thumbed the starter. Midnight caught the way she always caught cold — eager, strong, that deep-chested rumble rolling off the cinderblock walls. He let her idle. He didn't touch the throttle. A ghost fault was shy; you didn't poke it, you let it come to you.
He stood beside the bike with his hands in his pockets and listened the way Jack had taught him — not with his ears, exactly, but with the bones of his face, the fillings in his teeth. An engine told you everything if you stood close enough and stopped thinking in words. Right now she was telling him she was fine. That was the lie. The truth was coming.
Minutes ticked. The shop clock hummed. The heat came off the cylinders in waves you could see if the light was right, and the smell of hot oil and hot metal filled the bay, and Owen waited. At fourteen minutes his shoulders started to ache from stillness. Somewhere behind him, Vic muttered something about a wasted night. Owen didn't turn. He was thinking about Abby's braces, and about the way his mother had looked at the bet slip on the counter — not angry, just tired, the way she looked at everything since the hospital bills started coming. Five thousand dollars. Or a month of sweeping the lot. He pushed both thoughts away. Jack's voice, clear as the clock's hum: Don't wish it fixed, son. Find it broken.
At sixteen he felt the first hiccup through the soles of his boots — a stumble so small anyone else would have missed it.
There. She was getting warm enough to talk.
At eighteen minutes the misfire found its rhythm. A stumble, a catch, a stumble. The idle went ragged at the edges. Garrett took a step forward and Owen held up one hand without looking at him, and Garrett — to his credit — stopped.
"Kill the lights," Owen said.
Tommy hit the switches. The fluorescents died with a sigh, and the bay went dark except for the red eye of the exit sign and the sodium glow leaking under the roll-up door. Owen crouched by the coil, close enough that the heat kissed his face, and watched.
And there it was.
With every misfire, a thread of blue light no thicker than a hair jumped across the ignition coil's body — a tiny, furious arc, there and gone, there and gone, like a secret being whispered in Morse code. A hairline crack in the casing, invisible cold, opening up hot, letting the spark escape to ground instead of going where it belonged.
Owen let out a breath he hadn't known he was holding.
"There you are," he whispered.
But a man didn't stop at the first answer. Jack had taught him that too — the first thing you find is usually only half the story, and the other half is the part that strands you on the highway at midnight. So Owen stayed in the dark and followed the plug wire with his eyes and his fingertips, inch by inch, from the coil to the plug, feeling for the spot where the insulation had gone thin.
He found it where the wire crossed the frame rail. The loom had worn through there years ago, and the wire had been rubbing bare metal every time the engine shook — which was always. He pressed his thumb to the chafed spot and wiggled the wire the way vibration would, and in the dark he saw the spark jump sideways to the frame, a bright little kiss of blue.
Two faults. Partners. The cracked coil bled spark when hot; the chafed wire bled it whenever the bike shook hard enough. Either one alone might have let her limp along. Together, they killed her dead at twenty minutes, every time, like clockwork.
He stayed crouched a moment longer, committing it to memory — the exact angle of the crack, the exact spot on the rail. A mechanic's memory was a map of failures. His father had carried a thousand of them in his head. Now Owen had two more of his own.
Owen stood up. His knees cracked. "Lights."
The fluorescents stuttered back to life. He blinked in the glare, and he was aware that his hands were shaking — not from fear, from the particular electricity of having been right. He looked at Garrett.
"I found it," he said.
Garrett stared at him. "Found what."
"The reason she dies. Crack in the coil opens up hot — you can see the arc in the dark. And the plug wire's chafed through where it crosses the frame, grounding out under vibration." Owen wiped his palms on his jeans. "Battery's fine. Fuel's fine. ECU's fine. Everybody was looking at the big expensive things. It was two small cheap things, working together."
Vic pushed off the parts counter. "Kid got lucky."
"Maybe," Owen said. He didn't care. He turned to Tommy. "I need the parts cage. New coil — OEM or better, I don't want the discount one. New plug wire set, the good silicone ones. Fresh loom, the split kind, and a bag of the good zip ties, not the brittle ones. Dielectric grease. And a wire brush."
Tommy was already moving. Owen stood in the middle of the bay with Midnight ticking as she cooled, and he allowed himself exactly one breath of triumph — in through the nose, out through the mouth, slow — and then he got to work.