When fourteen-year-old Sky Holloway pushed open the steel door of the Iron Jaws garage and asked if she could paint motorcycles for tips, the laughter came almost immediately.
It was not vicious laughter.
Not at first.
It was the instinctive reaction of grown men who had spent decades around engines, welding torches, cracked knuckles, road scars, and custom paint, suddenly confronted by a girl who barely reached the shoulder of the shortest man in the room.
Then Sky unfolded a stained diner napkin and laid it on the workbench.
The oldest man in the garage went pale.
Nine years had passed since Gregory Moss had seen that emblem.
Nine years since anyone inside Iron Jaws had dared to paint it.
A broken jawbone wrapped around a coiled serpent, the serpent’s tail disappearing through flames, with the initials L.H. hidden inside the lower curve.
Luther Holloway.
Hollow.
Gregory’s dead brother in everything except blood.
And the trembling girl standing on the opposite side of the workbench had just said Hollow was her brother.
The Iron Jaws garage sat at the industrial edge of town where pavement deteriorated into gravel and the streetlights became increasingly unreliable until, several blocks beyond the last warehouse, they disappeared entirely.
Nobody wandered there accidentally.
A mechanic looking for a shortcut might pass the building once.
A delivery driver might stop at the wrong address.
Everyone else knew exactly where they were going.
The building itself looked older than some of the motorcycles inside it.
Corrugated steel walls had been repaired over the decades using mismatched panels in different shades of gray. A faded red stripe ran beneath the roofline, though weather had reduced most of it to rust-colored ghosts. The front windows were coated with enough dust, smoke residue, and road grime that looking through them from outside was nearly impossible.
Above the steel entrance hung a hand-painted sign.
IRON JAWS MC
MEMBERS ONLY
The letters had been repainted at least six times.
Inside, the garage had its own weather.
Heat from welding torches.
Cigarette smoke.
Coffee.
Oil.
Solvent.
Old leather.
Metal warmed by engines.
Three motorcycles rested on lifts beneath fluorescent lights. One had its transmission spread across a workbench in careful rows. Another was little more than a frame with wires hanging from its neck. The third belonged to a customer who had requested a flame job that Jimmy Russo had already repainted twice because he hated his own first attempt.
Classic rock leaked from a paint-splattered radio sitting above a refrigerator.
Somebody had been arguing about carburetors.
Somebody else had been telling the same story about a traffic stop for the hundredth time.
Gregory Moss sat near a portable heater even though the afternoon was not particularly cold, reading invoices through wire-frame glasses and muttering about people who never paid on time.
Gregory was sixty-three.
He was the oldest surviving founding member of Iron Jaws.
His hair had gone almost entirely silver, and the beard along his jaw was thick enough to hide the scar that ran beneath it. Age had slowed the way he stood from a chair, but not the way men listened once he was standing.
He had been there when Iron Jaws was six men, four unreliable motorcycles, and a rented storage unit.
He had also been there the night they buried Luther Holloway.
That was why Gregory noticed the girl more carefully than everyone else.
The door opened.
A thin figure appeared against the afternoon light.
Jimmy looked up first.
He was painting the side of a fuel tank with a narrow brush, laying down the orange edge of a flame.
“Lost, kid?”
The girl shook her head.
She did not enter immediately.
One sneaker remained outside.
The other touched the cracked concrete just inside the door.
Her body looked ready to reverse direction without warning.
She wore a dark green jacket at least two sizes too large. Both sleeves had been folded repeatedly until her hands were free. Beneath it was a faded gray sweatshirt. Her jeans had been repaired at one knee with mismatched thread.
Her backpack looked worse.
The fabric was faded nearly white around the seams. One strap had been sewn back together. A small metal zipper had been replaced with a loop of string.
Her brown hair had been dragged into a messy ponytail that looked as if she had tied it without a mirror.
Jimmy lowered his brush.
“You need somebody?”
“No.”
Terry Brennan leaned against a rolling toolbox nearby, holding a mug that everyone knew contained something stronger than coffee.
“This isn’t a public shop.”
“I know.”
“Then what are you doing here?”
The girl took another step inside.
“I can paint.”
Jimmy glanced toward Terry.
Terry looked toward Gregory.
Gregory said nothing.
“Paint what?” Jimmy asked.
“Bikes.”
Someone behind him laughed.
Sky looked toward the sound but did not retreat.
“Helmets too,” she added. “Fenders. Tanks. Signs. Whatever.”
Jimmy almost smiled.
“You planning to invoice us?”
“I’ll work for tips.”
That earned more laughter.
This time several people joined.
A fourteen-year-old girl offering custom motorcycle paintwork inside a garage where men had been arguing about hand-laid pinstriping since before she was born was absurd enough to be funny.
Sky waited.
Jimmy finally put his brush down.
“All right, Picasso. You got a portfolio?”
Sky’s right hand disappeared into the oversized jacket.
Several men instinctively watched the movement.
She slowly removed a folded paper napkin.
Nothing else.
She walked to the bench.
Placed it down.
Then unfolded it.
Jimmy leaned closer.
His expression changed first.
Terry stopped drinking.
Gregory looked up from the invoices.
The drawing was done in ordinary black ballpoint ink.
But there was nothing ordinary about the line work.
A jagged jawbone curved across the lower half of the image. A serpent coiled through it, body wrapping around bone and disappearing behind narrow tongues of flame. The jaw had one tooth missing near the center.
That missing tooth mattered.
So did the way the serpent’s eye was drawn.
Three short cuts instead of a circle.
Inside the shadow where bone met flame were two letters.
L.H.
Beneath them was a date.
Gregory stood so fast the rear legs of his chair scraped violently against the concrete.