Leo picked it up. It was heavier than he expected, cool at first and then warm beneath his fingers. "I didn't save your life," he protested. "You helped me get off a road where someone might've come back," Sully answered.
"Don't argue with a grateful man. We're both tired." He held out a hand, and Leo shook it, aware of the immense difference in size between them.
Before leaving, Sully gave him a sealed bottle of water from the motorcycle's remaining gear and a small package of food. He told Leo that a legitimate service station lay farther down the highway and that help could be arranged there, but he did not pretend it would be a simple walk in the heat. He asked one more time whether Leo wanted him to call someone safe. Leo said no, not because he believed the station was safe but because the possibility of being returned to Hank still frightened him more than the desert did.
Sully studied him, then looked at the battered motorcycle. "I'm coming back through this part of Arizona," he said. "If you're still here, we'll talk again about what comes next." Leo nodded, not believing promises easily anymore. The biker settled his helmet over his gray hair, started the Road King, and eased it down the gravel with unusual care. The engine's low rumble dwindled toward the west until the darkness swallowed it.
Leo stood in the forecourt holding the lighter. He wanted to shout after Sully that he was seventeen, that a man named Hank Dawson had hurt him, that other children remained in that house and would pay for his escape if nobody stopped him. He wanted to believe the motorcycle's departure was the beginning of something instead of another adult vanishing down a road. But the words stayed lodged in his throat. He went back inside, set the lighter beside his father's photograph, and slept for nearly five hours without dreaming.
Sully did not make it far before his friend arrived with a trailer. The friend was Arthur Callahan, a man so large that the nickname Ox had followed him since high school, and he took one look at the Road King's damaged components and whistled. "You rode that out of the desert?" he asked. Sully shook his head.
"I moved it just far enough for you to find me. A kid at an abandoned gas station helped me." Ox glanced toward the road they had traveled and said, "A kid?"
"Seventeen, maybe," Sully answered. "Skinny as a fence post, smart as anyone I've met with a wrench." Ox helped secure the motorcycle and then drove Sully to a clinic in Kingman, where the wound on his shoulder was cleaned and examined. As he sat beneath fluorescent lights waiting for the doctor, Sully told Ox about the boy's bruises, his reluctance to explain where he lived, and the way he had backed away when offered money. Ox listened without jokes.
"You should've brought him with you," Ox said at last. Sully stared at the floor. "He wouldn't come, and I wasn't going to grab him." The last thing that kid needed was another grown man deciding what happened to him. Ox considered that and nodded.