For the first time, some of the tension left his shoulders.
Leo called Angela Ruiz.
She had retired two years earlier.
But she answered.
“You better have a good reason.”
“I have a kid.”
“You always have a kid.”
“This one needs somewhere tonight.”
Angela sighed.
“Address?”
Leo smiled.
Some people kept showing up.
Later, after Evan was safe and Sully had finally gone home, Leo locked Desert Iron for the night.
He stood alone in the parking lot.
Phoenix lights glowed beyond the industrial buildings.
Traffic moved along the distant freeway.
Nothing looked like the Mojave station anymore.
Leo closed his hand around the Zippo.
He thought about seventeen-year-old himself.
Starving.
Bruised.
Certain that invisibility was the closest thing to safety.
He wished he could tell that boy what was coming.
Not that everything would become easy.
It would not.
Not that every adult would become trustworthy.
They would not.
Not that the fear would disappear.
Some of it never did.
He would tell him something smaller.
Hold on three more days.
That would be enough.
Three days until the horizon began shaking.
Three days until 247 engines came over the rise.
Three days until someone looked at Hank Dawson and asked Leo instead of Hank what had happened.
Three days until the silver Zippo returned to his hand.
Three days until escape stopped being the only future he could imagine.
Leo locked the front door.
Inside the shop, beneath fluorescent light, Sully’s Road King waited on the lift.
The motorcycle was older now.
So was Sully.
So was Leo.
But the machine still carried the same shape, the same heavy presence, the same connection to a night when a frightened boy had stepped through a rusted doorway and offered the only thing he believed still had value.
His skill.
Leo had thought he was fixing a motorcycle.
Sully had believed he was paying a debt.
Neither understood the transaction yet.
Years later, Leo finally did.
The Road King had given him one hour in which he was not a runaway.
Sully’s return had given him one afternoon in which he was not alone.
Everything afterward gave him something larger.
A life in which he no longer needed to disappear.
He slipped the Zippo into his pocket.
Turned off the shop lights.