"You think." Garrett moved close enough that Owen smelled whiskey beneath the tobacco on his breath. "You walk around washing cars and stocking shelves and now you're going to save a machine my father built? You don't know a thing about this bike."
"I know somebody changed the original fuel system," Owen said. "And I know there's a mechanical timing fault somewhere, because of how it turned over. I can't tell you exactly what without checking."
For a moment Garrett was caught off guard by the specificity of the answer. Then he decided it must have been a guess. He grabbed Owen's shirt at the front and shoved him backward. The boy stumbled several steps before catching his balance near the wall.
"Don't lecture me about my father's machine," Garrett said. His voice had a threatening softness that brought the nearest conversations to a halt. "You want to lecture somebody, find another street."
Owen was frightened. He had no illusions about his size or his ability to defend himself against a much larger man surrounded by friends. His pulse raced and his knees felt light in a way that made him briefly afraid they would give out. But he had heard the engine, and the sound would not leave his head. The problem existed independently of Garrett's opinion, and it seemed wrong to walk away while a possible answer stood untouched.
"Five minutes," he said.
The phrase traveled through the crowd quickly. Garrett asked what he meant, and Owen repeated the offer with enough clarity for several phones to capture it. He would have five minutes to make Black Fury run. If he failed, he would wash every motorcycle in the parking lot for free; if he succeeded, he would take the five thousand dollars and Garrett would apologize publicly.
Garrett looked at the money beneath the beer bottle. He had offered an hour because the hour was a safe amount of time, long enough to make his challenge seem generous while still protecting his expectation that nobody would succeed. Five minutes was absurd. A person could spend that long searching for a dropped bolt on a motorcycle like Black Fury.
"All right," he said. "But you crawl through the lot when you lose. Everybody here gets to watch."
Owen took a breath. "If that's the bet, I'll take it."
Garrett spat into his hand and extended it. Owen hesitated only long enough to consider whether shaking would make him complicit in his own humiliation. Then he shook. He wanted the agreement witnessed, and sixty people now had cameras aimed at them. Whatever happened next, Garrett would not be able to claim the challenge had never been made.