in orderly rows on scarred wooden benches. The place looked chaotic to outsiders, but the crew knew exactly where everything belonged, including one faded photograph nobody ever moved from the wall beside the office.
In that photograph, Luther was twenty-seven and laughing at something beyond the edge of the frame. His dark hair was wind-tangled, his sleeves were rolled to the elbows, and his fingers were stained with blue paint. He stood beside a black motorcycle whose tank carried the same jawbone-and-serpent emblem the girl had just placed before them. He had painted the tank himself, using a fine brush in the middle of a night when the rest of the crew had gone home. The painting was his private joke and his signature, and after he died nobody in the club had felt right reproducing it.
Gregory had been fifty-eight when the crash happened. He was sixty-seven now, a broad man whose once-black beard had gone white and whose left knee complained whenever the weather changed. Loss had slowed him without making him soft. He still settled disputes with a look, still kept the accounts nobody trusted anyone else to understand, and still remembered the exact sound of Luther's engine coming around a curve. Seeing those initials on the napkin did something that the anniversary rides and memorial dinners had never managed: it made the old grief sudden again.
"Hollow never told us he had a sister," Terry said. He was leaning against a toolbox, a paper cup of cooling coffee in his hand, his earlier smile gone. Terry had three children, an ordinary house with a swing set, and an instinct for trouble developed during too many years watching people come to the garage with stories that did not add up. He looked carefully at the girl, noticing the bruise-colored shadows beneath her eyes and the way she measured the distance between herself and the open door. "He told me about you," she said, "just not the other way around."
"What's your name?" Gregory asked. "Sky," she said. After another second, she added, "Sky Holloway."
She spoke her brother's surname with care, like something she had carried through places where nobody had bothered to learn it. Gregory set the napkin down between two clean sheets of paper rather than folding it again. "How old were you when Luther died?" he asked, and the girl answered, "Five." The number made the years between the photograph and the garage doorway feel stranger, not smaller.
"Five," Jimmy repeated quietly. He was the shop's painter, thirty-nine now, with tattooed wrists and a stubborn belief that a person who understood color could learn to understand almost anything. He had watched Luther work years earlier, had stolen every useful trick he could, and had