He had repaired the bicycle enough to roll it across the yard, but one tire still lost air. In the morning he planned to make another attempt at patching it. If that failed, he would walk toward town while the sun was low. He had begun to accept that remaining in the desert would eventually become more dangerous than risking questions from strangers.
Before lying down he took Sully's lighter from the tin. He examined the dented hinge and the worn skull, then laid it on his chest for a moment. He could hear Sully's voice as clearly as if the big man were in the room: 'You don't have to stay invisible forever.'
Leo wanted to believe him. The trouble was that being visible had brought him nothing but danger for years. Adults saw a runaway, a troublemaker, a problem that belonged to an office somewhere else. His father had seen a child who could learn; Sully had seen a mechanic who could help. Neither man's respect had required Leo to explain why he deserved it.
He closed the lighter and placed it in his front pocket. He would carry it when he left. It was small enough not to slow him down and heavy enough to remind him that one good hour of work could still matter.
At sunrise he took the damaged bicycle behind the station and set it upside down. He was working the tire away from the rim when the first distant engine noise reached him. He stopped and listened. The sound belonged to an ordinary truck, not a motorcycle, and it was coming from the direction of the highway.
Another vehicle followed it. Then both slowed.
Leo slipped behind the garage wall and watched through a gap in the rusted siding as a dusty white law-enforcement vehicle turned onto the access road. It had a light bar on its roof and the word SHERIFF along its door. A silver Dodge Ram came close behind it, its front grille battered in a pattern Leo recognized instantly.
For a moment he could not make his legs move. The sight reached inside him and opened the same cold place he had felt on the night he escaped. The truck was Hank's. Of all the roads in Arizona, of all the abandoned buildings and forgotten stretches of desert, the one person Leo had spent three weeks running from had found him.
He moved without thinking, abandoning the bicycle and slipping through the rear of the station. There was a dry creek bed beyond the scrap yard, choked with sagebrush and broken fencing. If he reached it before the men circled the building, he might follow the wash into the hills and lose them among the gullies.
He heard a truck door slam.
'Check the back,' a familiar voice called. 'He can't have gone far.'
The words were ordinary, almost casual. That made them worse. Hank did not sound like a man searching for a frightened child. He sounded like a man reclaiming equipment he believed someone had stolen from him.