He pushed open the door to the lot.
The sky over the desert was paling in the east, a thin gray-gold line under the stars. Sunrise wasn't here yet, but it was coming, the way it always came, whether you were ready or not. The stars were thinning. A coyote called once from the arroyo and didn't call again. The air smelled like creosote and cold dust — the particular perfume of the desert before the sun. The crew's bikes stood in a loose row, dew on the chrome. And there, by the picnic table, Garrett Steel sat with his head back and his eyes closed, his beard catching the first light.
Owen walked across the lot, his boots loud on the gravel in the cold still air. Garrett's eyes opened before Owen reached him — the instant, total wakefulness of a man who'd spent years sleeping with one ear on the road. Owen stopped in front of the big man, and he said the words he'd been carrying since midnight.
"Garrett. She's ready. Come fire her up."
Chapter 10
Fire It Up
Garrett woke to a hand on his shoulder and a kid's voice saying words that didn't make sense, and then they did.
He sat up too fast and the coats slid off him and the cold hit his face, and the lot was gray with almost-morning, and the crew was already stirring — men unfolding themselves from truck beds and doorways, bleary, hungover from waiting, from the long night of telling each other the bike was dead and the kid was dreaming. They gathered without being called, the way men gather around something that matters, forming a loose half-circle in front of the bay.
Garrett's knees popped when he stood. Around him the crew was already moving — Preach folding the coats, Dog shaking dew off his vest, a dozen men forming up without a word, the way they'd formed up for a hundred rides. Nobody said the bike was dead now. Nobody said anything at all. He was fifty-two years old and he'd slept sitting up on a picnic table and every part of him hurt, and he didn't care. He walked into the shop with the crew behind him, and there she was.
Midnight. Under the fluorescents. Black and patient and whole.
Owen stood beside her with his hands at his sides, and the boy looked wrung out — hollow-eyed, grease to the elbows, hair standing up in every direction — but he was standing straight. Garrett stopped in front of the bike and just looked at her for a long moment. Fourteen months. Fourteen months since he'd heard her run right. He'd told himself it didn't matter, that a bike was a bike, that Elena wouldn't have wanted him moping over a machine. He'd told himself a lot of things.
"Eighteen minutes," Owen said quietly. "That's when she used to die. Give her twenty. Give her thirty."
Garrett swung his leg over. The seat took his weight the way it always had, the way it had a thousand times with Elena's arms around his waist and her chin on his shoulder, calling directions over the wind. He put his hand on the throttle and looked down at the starter button, and his thumb was shaking, and he hated that the kid could see it, and he thumbed it anyway.
Midnight caught. The rumble rolled off the cinderblock walls and through the soles of his boots, and the whole crew leaned in without knowing they were doing it. For one terrible, wonderful second he was twenty-eight again, and Elena was swinging her leg over behind him, laughing about something, and the whole world was ahead of them.
She stumbled once — one hiccup, eighteen seconds in — and Garrett's heart stopped, and then she caught herself and settled, and the idle evened out into that deep, rolling, uneven music that was hers alone, the lope of a big V-twin with a cam Elena had picked out herself because she liked the way it sounded at stoplights.
One minute. Two. The clock hummed. Nobody spoke.
At five minutes, Preach let out a breath like a tire deflating. At ten, somebody laughed, high and disbelieving. At twelve, Dog sat down hard on the curb and put his head in his hands. Even Vic uncrossed his arms — and that, more than anything, told Garrett it was real. At fifteen, Garrett realized his eyes were wet, and he didn't wipe them, because the vibration was coming up through the frame and into his hands and his chest, and it felt — God help him — it felt like her. He remembered the third winter they'd spent building her, Elena in coveralls three sizes too big, holding the trouble light and naming every part as he installed it, like she was introducing them to the family. Not a memory of her. Her. In the shake of the bars the way she'd shaken his shoulders laughing. In the heat off the cylinders. In the sound.
Twenty minutes. The mark where she always died. The idle didn't waver.
The lot erupted. Men shouting, back-slapping, somebody's hat in the air. Tommy was jumping up and down like a kid. Vic stood with his arms crossed and his mouth working, and then he nodded once, slow, the way a man nods when he's been wrong and knows it. Ray stood in his office doorway with his arms folded, and he was smiling — actually smiling, the first time Garrett had seen it in a year.
Garrett sat on the bike and let the noise wash over him, and he put his hand flat on the tank, and he said it low, for no one but her: "There you are, darlin'."
Then he killed the engine. The sudden quiet rang. In the quiet he could hear the desert again — a dove somewhere, the tick of cooling metal, his own breathing, rough and wet. He stood up — slowly, his knees complaining — and he looked at Owen Carter, eighteen years old, standing straight in the middle of the bay with his father's patience still on him like a coat.
The bet was won. Everybody knew it. But Garrett did it right anyway. He reached into his vest, into the inside pocket where he kept the serious things, and he pulled out the cash roll — the five thousand, banded and fat — and he held it up so the whole shop could see it, and then he walked it across the concrete and pressed it into the kid's hands.
"Count it," Garrett said, his voice rough. "Count every dollar. You earned every dollar."
Owen took it with both hands, the way you'd take something heavy. The crew was still cheering, and the sun was coming up over the desert, and Midnight sat ticking as she cooled, patient as ever — ready, at last, for Elena's Run.
Chapter 11
Counted Out