Seventeen-year-old Leo Gallagher was freezing inside an abandoned Arizona garage when the desert finally made a sound that did not belong there.
An engine. A large one. A sick one.
The noise came from somewhere beyond the darkening ridge west of the abandoned Sinclair station, first as a distant growl and then as an uneven thunder that echoed across the empty stretch of old Route 66. The engine accelerated, coughed violently, backfired twice, and then settled into the ugly metallic clatter of a machine being forced to continue long after something inside it had begun to fail.
Leo lifted his head from the folded army blanket beneath him.
He did not move.
For three weeks, movement had become something he considered before allowing himself to do it.
Every car door could mean a deputy.
Every truck could belong to Hank Dawson.
Every distant voice might belong to someone carrying a photograph with Leo’s face on it.
He had survived twenty-one days by assuming that anyone looking for him was dangerous until proven otherwise.
The garage around him smelled of dust, dried oil, rust, and the faint remains of gasoline that had probably seeped into the concrete before Leo was born. Once, the building had been a busy service station, back when old Route 66 carried families toward California and long-haul truckers stopped for fuel beneath the red-and-white Sinclair sign.
Now half the roof sagged.
Three windows had no glass.
The office door hung from one hinge.
Sand blew through cracks in the walls and collected beneath two dead hydraulic lifts whose steel arms had frozen in place decades earlier.
Behind the station lay a graveyard of American machinery.
A 1954 Buick with no hood.
A Ford pickup with its cab crushed beneath a fallen beam.
Four refrigerators.
A washing machine.
A stack of wheels.
Several motorcycle frames stripped almost completely bare.
To most people, the place would have looked useless.
To Leo, it was the first place in three weeks that had felt even remotely like home.
His father had made sure of that.
Patrick Gallagher had been a mechanic in Reno.
Not simply a man who changed oil and replaced parts from catalogs, but the kind of mechanic other mechanics brought problems to after they had already spent money guessing.
Patrick listened before he touched anything.
That had been his rule.
“Machines talk,” he once told Leo while rebuilding an old Panhead on a Saturday afternoon. “Most people just make too much noise to hear them.”
Leo had been six.
His feet did not reach the floor from the stool.
Patrick placed Leo’s palm against the side of the running engine.
“Feel that?”
Leo nodded even though he was not sure what he felt.
“Don’t lie.”
Leo immediately shook his head.
Patrick laughed.
“Good. Again.”
They stayed there for nearly ten minutes until Leo finally noticed the slight irregular vibration beneath the steady pulse of the motor.
“There.”
Patrick smiled.
“That’s it.”
“What is it?”
“You tell me.”
“I don’t know.”
“That’s okay.”
Patrick leaned closer.
“Knowing something is wrong comes before knowing what it is.”
Leo remembered that sentence more clearly than he remembered most things from school.
Patrick died when Leo was ten.
Cancer.
Fast.
Unfair.