Finally he aimed the flashlight beneath the frame, following the ground strap toward a bolt obscured by road dirt. There was no obvious broken wire. Owen could see a faint greenish stain in the narrow space where the metal met the strap. He had seen the same discoloration on a dozen salvage-yard engines and on the old Mustang Thomas had repaired years ago.
"Three," he said quietly.
"What?" Garrett demanded.
"Three problems. Timing, fuel, and electrical ground. Any one could make her difficult to start. Together, they made her look dead."
The words carried farther than Owen intended. Garrett repeated them sarcastically for the crowd, turning a diagnosis into a punchline. Dale shook his head. Curtis let out a small laugh. Nolan watched the carburetor without quite understanding why the boy had named it so quickly.
"You found three problems standing there with a flashlight?" Garrett asked.
"I found evidence of three. I still have to confirm them."
Eleanor's eyes narrowed in approval. That was the answer she wanted, not the boast the crowd was eager to hear. A person who understood the difference between evidence and certainty might make something useful of the next few minutes, even if the boy failed to get the machine running.
At 7:47 the young man holding the phone raised his free hand. "Ready?" he called. Owen rolled his shoulders once, centered the toolbox near his left knee, and glanced at the old wrench. He remembered Thomas on a cold morning outside the shop, demonstrating the importance of pausing before a difficult repair.
"Ready," Owen said.
"Five minutes," the boy with the phone shouted. "Go!"
The stopwatch began. Every screen in the lot swung toward Black Fury, and Garrett stepped close enough to cast his shadow across the engine. Owen ignored him. His world narrowed to metal, sound remembered, tools, and the small amount of time he had purchased with a bargain that might cost him whatever remained of his dignity.
In the crowd, somebody began chanting that he would have to crawl. Another voice joined in. Eleanor kept her eyes on the work, unwilling to surrender even a second to the spectacle. She had seen talented technicians freeze under less pressure than this, and she knew the next few moments would reveal something beyond the location of a fault. They would reveal whether Owen could think while surrounded by people who desperately wanted him not to.
Time behaved strangely once the stopwatch started. For the people standing behind the folding chairs, each second seemed like an invitation for another joke. For Garrett, it was an opportunity to watch the boy fail under the weight of the entire parking lot's attention. For Owen, the surrounding faces lost their edges almost immediately, because the next step required the kind of concentration he had practiced on hot garage floors since childhood.