Vince looked back at Leo.
“You’re either good or lucky.”
“Dad said luck is what mechanics call things they forgot to diagnose.”
Vince smiled.
“When you’re old enough for a formal summer apprenticeship, call me.”
Leo’s expression changed.
“How old?”
“We can start a supervised youth program at sixteen.”
“That’s a year.”
“Machines will still exist.”
Leo hated waiting.
He waited anyway.
Meanwhile, word about Leo’s destroyed tools had spread through riders who had gathered that day.
Nobody handed him five thousand dollars torn from Silas’s mattress.
Instead, something happened that embarrassed him almost as much.
Boxes began arriving.
One socket set.
Then screwdrivers.
Torque wrench.
Multimeter.
Compression tester.
A retired mechanic donated a rolling toolbox.
Someone mailed an old carburetor manual with fifty-dollar bills hidden between pages.
Teresa confiscated the cash until it could be documented properly.
Leo complained.
She did not care.
John gave him the silver Zippo again after the criminal case no longer required it as evidence.
Leo turned it over.
BIG JOHN.
“You want it back?”
John shook his head.
“Was never coming back to me.”
“I thought it was yours.”
“It was.”
“Now it’s yours.”
Leo put it in the top drawer of the toolbox.
He still did not smoke.
John checked.
Repeatedly.
Silas eventually pleaded guilty to several charges connected to the assault, robbery, and broader criminal activity uncovered at the salvage yard.
He did not receive some movie-style hundred-year sentence.
The process involved evidence, negotiated pleas, restitution orders, and multiple cases.
Leo testified once.
He hated it.
John sat in the back of the courtroom.
No vest.
Plain black shirt.
Because courthouse rules were courthouse rules.
Leo noticed.
Afterward, John asked:
“How’d I look?”
“Like somebody’s divorced uncle.”
John threatened to leave him at the courthouse.
Leo laughed.
The county restitution process valued the destroyed tools.
Money eventually arrived through court-ordered restitution and a victim compensation program, though not quickly.
By then, Leo already had replacement equipment.
He used part of the money to buy something else.
A locked metal cabinet.
Inside, he kept every damaged tool investigators returned.
The broken micrometer.
Bent screwdriver.
Shattered torque wrench.
Not because they worked.
Because they had belonged to Eddie.
Two years passed.
Leo grew.
Five-foot-three became five-ten.
Hollow cheeks filled.
The bruises disappeared.
Some instincts did not.
He still ate quickly.
Still slept with shoes near the bed.
Still hated anybody standing behind him unexpectedly.
Counseling helped.
Not magically.
Slowly.
At sixteen, he started the summer apprenticeship at Navarro Custom & Diesel.
Raymond drove him to Oakland the first morning.
John met them there.
Leo wore new work boots.
Clean jeans.
A dark shirt.
His father’s old canvas tool roll sat in the back seat even though most tools inside no longer worked.
Raymond asked:
“You taking that?”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
Leo shrugged.
“Dad comes too.”
Nobody argued.
Vince gave him the worst jobs first.
Sweep floors.
Clean parts.
Organize sockets.
Drain oil.
Wash motorcycles.
Leo hated it.
John loved watching him hate it.
“You think being talented means skipping the broom?”
“Yes.”
“Wrong.”
“I fixed your bike.”
“You won’t let that go until one of us dies.”
“Probably.”
By August, Vince allowed him to assist on real repairs.
At seventeen, Leo could rebuild carburetors faster than some adults in the shop.
At eighteen, he graduated high school.
John attended.
So did Teresa.
Raymond and Susan.
Vince.