'I rode far enough to get here.'
'Which means you were lucky. You know what that word means, Sully? It means don't do it again.'
He accepted the rebuke because he knew she was right. The boy had saved him from being stranded, not given him a warranty. The Road King had reached the repair shop sputtering and hot, and Teresa had insisted on treating the emergency work as evidence of a talented mechanic rather than a permanent solution.
Sully sat through the repair with more patience than Teresa had ever seen from him. His mind kept returning to the teenager with the battered shoes and the injured ribs. Leo had appeared out of a ruined building with nothing to gain, made a machine run by listening carefully, and refused to tell a stranger why he was afraid to be found.
Teresa noticed the silence. 'What's wrong?'
'You ever see a kid so hungry he stops noticing he's hungry?'
She set down a wrench. 'Sully.'
'He was out there alone.'
'How old?'
'Seventeen, maybe.'
'And you left him at the station?'
Sully rubbed the back of his neck. 'I was bleeding, and I had people looking for me. I gave him water and a number.'
Teresa looked at the road beyond the shop window. 'A number only works if somebody can use a phone.'
The remark stayed with him.
The men who had run Sully off the road were still a concern. Word had moved through his circle of riders, and friends from several states were gathering for a planned ride to meet him in Arizona. Some were angry about the highway ambush. Others were worried that a group of reckless men had begun settling old grudges by frightening riders on public roads. Sully had spent his life around men who treated small insults as matters of reputation; he knew how easily an injury could become a feud if no one chose to think ahead.
He had arranged to meet the riders outside Kingman on Tuesday morning. Their purpose was to find out who had forced him off the road and make sure it did not happen again. Sully could not make the situation gentle by calling it a meeting, but he had insisted that no one pursue a confrontation without first learning what had happened. He wanted witnesses, not a rumor that would grow teeth as it traveled.
On Monday evening, after Teresa finished the Harley, Sully tried the number written in his own phone. He stared at the unsent message he had prepared and then deleted it. He had no number for Leo. He only had the location of the ruined station and a memory of the boy's face.
'You still thinking about him?' Teresa asked.
'Yeah.'
'Go back.'
'Got two hundred men expecting me in the morning.'
'Then take one of them. You don't need an audience to give a child a sandwich.'
Sully shook his head, not because she was wrong but because he recognized the sharpness of the truth. 'I'm going back,' he said. 'After I meet the riders.'
Meanwhile, Leo had spent the third night beneath the roof of the station, unable to sleep through a growing windstorm. Sand whispered across the floor and gathered around the legs of the workbench. He checked the door twice and wedged a plank behind it, though he knew it would not stop anyone determined to enter.