The first thing the men noticed about the girl was how small she looked beneath the Iron Jaws garage sign. The second was that she did not run when somebody laughed at her.
Fourteen years old, with dirt on her sneakers and a backpack that appeared to weigh almost as much as she did, she stood in the doorway and asked whether anybody needed a motorcycle painted.'
She said she would work for tips, and the room responded the way a room full of tired mechanics responds when something sounds impossible: with a few surprised chuckles and a dozen skeptical looks.
Then she took a wrinkled paper napkin from her jacket and unfolded it on Jimmy's workbench. The laughter stopped before anyone had finished breathing it out. Drawn in cheap black ink was a jagged jawbone wrapped around a serpent, its tail disappearing into a curl of flame. Beneath the design sat two initials, LH, and a date almost nine years old. Gregory Moss, the last surviving founder of the Iron Jaws, came out of his chair so abruptly that the legs scraped across the concrete like a warning.
"Where did you get that?" he asked. He did not raise his voice, but Jimmy had known him twenty-three years and had never heard him sound quite like that. The girl kept one hand on her backpack strap, as though prepared to leave at the slightest change in the room. "My brother drew it," she said. Gregory looked at the little flames, at a deliberate break in the serpent's jaw that only a handful of people had ever known was there, and asked for the name he was already afraid to hear. "Luther Holloway," she answered.
For a moment the garage might as well have been empty. The radio continued playing an old guitar solo, a pneumatic hose hissed somewhere near the far wall, and a truck rolled past on the highway outside. None of those noises seemed to reach the men standing around the workbench. Luther Holloway had been dead for nine years, and the Iron Jaws had spent those nine years believing that everything he left behind had already been accounted for. Nobody had expected a young girl to walk through their door carrying the one drawing he had refused to let anyone copy.
The Iron Jaws garage stood beyond the last useful streetlight on a frontage road where the pavement gave way to crushed stone. Its steel siding wore three different shades of gray because repairs had been made whenever somebody had enough money, enough daylight, and a sheet of metal that roughly fit. The sign above the entrance had been hand-painted twice, but the older lettering still showed beneath it, a shadow of the day Gregory, Luther, and three other riders opened the place. Inside, three motorcycles occupied the lifts while oil-dark tools waited