The first time Leo Gallagher heard the motorcycle, he thought it was thunder rolling across the desert. There had not been a cloud above the abandoned Sinclair station all afternoon, but he had learned not to trust what his exhausted mind told him.
Seventeen days of sleeping outdoors could make a rustling sheet of metal sound like footsteps and a jackrabbit sound like a man coming to drag him home. He stopped turning the wheel of a broken bicycle and listened until the sound came again.
This time he recognized the uneven roar of a motorcycle engine that was working much too hard to stay alive.
He climbed onto the edge of a collapsed tire rack and peered through a window with only half its glass remaining. On the old highway, a large touring motorcycle staggered toward the station, its rider fighting to keep it upright. The machine coughed, backfired, and rolled across the gravel with a metallic clatter that made Leo wince. A moment later the engine died, leaving a silence so sudden that Leo could hear grit tumbling down the wall behind him. The rider planted a boot in the dust and sat absolutely still.
Leo knew enough about engines to understand that the motorcycle was in trouble. He also knew enough about people to understand that he should stay hidden. The man straddling the bike was enormous, broad through the shoulders, with a faded denim shirt beneath a black leather vest and a thick beard gray at the chin. When he took off his helmet, Leo saw blood darkening the shoulder of his shirt. Then the man turned slightly, and the red-and-white winged skull on the back of his vest caught the final light of the evening.
Hells Angels. Leo had seen the same insignia on television and once on a group of riders passing through Reno with engines so loud that they had made the windows in his father's garage tremble. He knew almost nothing about the men who wore it, only stories told in voices that suggested it was better not to ask questions. The rider leaned over the dead machine, cursed, and struck the handlebar with the heel of one gloved hand. Leo moved away from the glass and told himself to let the stranger deal with his own problem.
He lasted perhaps thirty seconds before looking again. The man had opened a saddlebag, found a roll of tape, and was trying to contain a leak near the engine with the sort of stubborn determination Leo remembered seeing in men who were about to make their troubles worse. A dark stain spread beneath the motorcycle. The rider's injured shoulder seemed to be affecting every movement he made, and he kept looking over his shoulder at the empty highway. Whatever had happened to him, it had not been a simple breakdown.
Leo felt the words form before he decided whether to speak them. "Tape won't hold that," he called through the broken window. The man straightened so fast that Leo recoiled, then slowly appeared in the doorway with his hands where they could be seen. "The machine's losing more than one fluid," he said, trying not to sound like a frightened boy. "And if you keep trying to start it, you'll make the damage worse."