The rider stared at him. "Who the hell are you?" he demanded. His voice was low, rough, and surprisingly tired for a man who looked capable of picking up the motorcycle by himself.
Leo swallowed and answered, "Leo. Leo Gallagher." The stranger's eyes moved from Leo's hollow cheeks to his thin wrists, the clothes that had gone too long without washing, and the old station behind him. "You living in there, Leo Gallagher?"
Leo did not answer that question. Instead, he looked at the motorcycle and said, "I think I can help." The rider let out a dry laugh that made Leo's stomach tighten. "You think you can fix a damaged Road King with whatever's inside that pile of rust?" he asked.
Leo shook his head. "I think I can get you somewhere safer than this shoulder. That's different from saying I can fix it for good."
For the first time, the man looked at him as though he had said something worth hearing. He glanced down the highway again, toward the broad empty land fading into the night. "You got tools?" he asked. Leo nodded toward the station.
"Some. They're not pretty, but most of them still work." The rider pushed his helmet onto the seat, stood carefully, and said, "Show me."
Three weeks earlier, Leo Gallagher had been looking at a different door. It belonged to a second-floor bedroom in a foster house on the outskirts of Flagstaff, and it had a broken lock that Hank Dawson had promised to repair for six months. Leo had lived in that room for fourteen miserable months. Before that came three other placements, one temporary relative who could not afford to keep him, and a series of interviews in offices where adults spoke about him as if he were a package that had been delivered to the wrong address.
Leo's father, Patrick Gallagher, had been a master mechanic in Reno. Patrick restored motorcycles when the bills allowed and repaired anything else with wheels when they did not. His garage had smelled of clean metal, coffee, and the peculiar dusty sweetness of rubber warmed by sunlight. Leo remembered the radio playing old rock songs above the workbench and his father's habit of making him identify tools by touch while keeping his eyes closed. "The engine doesn't care what your last name is," Patrick used to say. "You listen to it, you tell the truth about what's wrong, and you don't promise a repair you haven't made."
Patrick had died when Leo was ten, killed in a road accident on a winter morning when black ice caught his pickup truck between Reno and Carson City. Leo remembered two men standing in the kitchen and a woman with a clipboard who kept calling him sweetheart while asking questions whose answers