"I only need to move far enough to reach him. Then this bike gets loaded, and I go get my shoulder cleaned up." Leo nodded, relieved that the man had actually listened.
The relief lasted until Sully asked, "What about you?" Leo looked around the station as though seeing it for the first time from another person's perspective. A broken office window, a mattress made of folded cardboard, and rusting machines that had been abandoned long before he was born. He could not make the place sound less lonely by calling it temporary. "I'm working on a bicycle," he said.
Sully's jaw tightened. "Kid, that wasn't what I asked." Leo moved toward the tool bench, unwilling to face the question. "I'll figure something out."
Sully reached into his vest and took out a folding money clip, then stopped when Leo backed away. The boy's reaction was instinctive and immediate, and the biker understood that money offered too quickly might feel like another means of ownership. He put the clip away.
"Can I at least know why you're out here?" Sully asked. Leo concentrated on wiping a wrench clean. "People looking for me," he admitted. Sully waited.
"One of them's supposed to take care of me." The large man leaned against the workbench, his expression changing in a way Leo couldn't read. "And does he?" Leo kept wiping until the metal shone through the grease.
"Not the way he's supposed to." The words seemed to scrape their way out of him. Sully looked at the blue paint on the wrench handle and then at Leo's careful movements. "You got somebody safe I could call?" he asked.
Leo thought about the caseworker who had accepted Hank's version of the fall, the school counselor who had been transferred, and the relatives whose addresses were already old. "No," he said. "Not anybody who'd know where to find me."
Sully did not announce a solution. He looked again toward the highway, the fading sky, and the road he needed to leave before the men who had forced him off it returned. "I'm not asking you to trust a guy you met tonight," he said. "But I want you to remember my name, and I want you to keep this." He took a tarnished silver Zippo lighter from his vest, its face engraved with a skull that had been worn smooth at the edges by decades of handling.
Leo hesitated. "I don't smoke." Sully almost laughed. "Good. Keep it that way." He placed the lighter on the bench between them.
"I got that when I was younger than you probably think I ever was. I've carried it through years I wouldn't recommend to anybody." Leo looked at it but did not reach for it yet. Sully pushed it a little closer and said, "You kept a man alive tonight by telling him the truth instead of what he wanted to hear. That deserves remembering."