"Call someone you trust to stay nearby. I'll have Jack talk to the lawyer about immediate safety precautions."
I looked at the clock. I looked at the photograph of Hector, grinning beside a machine he had restored twenty years earlier. The garage was quiet enough that I could hear the lights humming overhead.
"Grip," I said, "whoever sent it knows I found that part."
"I know."
"They know where I am."
"Yes."
The words frightened me more than any reassurance would have. He didn't pretend that the danger was imaginary. He told me what I needed to do and waited until I repeated it back, just as Hector had when I was learning a difficult task.
After the call, I closed both locks, turned off the overhead lights, and left the workbench lamp burning. The text stayed on my phone. For a long time I sat in Hector's office chair listening to the building settle around me and feeling the space between doing a good job and living with what that good job had uncovered.
At last I lay down on the army cot in the office. I didn't sleep. Every creak in the roof sounded like a footstep, and every passing engine seemed to slow outside the door. I gave myself ten seconds to be afraid, then ten more, and then I stopped counting because there were too many things I couldn't fix with a wrench.
At four fifteen in the morning I made coffee strong enough to wake the dead. The sky beyond the office window was still black, and the shop smelled of dust, stale air, and the welding work I'd finished the day before. I had slept perhaps twenty minutes, never long enough to stop listening for someone outside. The threatening message remained on my phone, absurdly small for something capable of changing the way I heard every sound.
My mother called at six. She usually called on Sunday evenings, not Wednesday mornings, which told me somebody had spoken to her. She had a tired voice from years of dispatching ambulances and medical vans, but she could detect strain in mine faster than anyone else.
"Caleb, somebody sent me a video of all those motorcycles outside Hector's shop. Are you all right?"
I considered telling her nothing. That had been my strategy since the funeral: keep working, keep the worst details to myself, and let her believe I was handling things. But for the first time I could see how silence might turn into its own kind of danger. Ray Delgado had spent eight months telling himself that not speaking was protecting people.
"I found something wrong with a customer's motorcycle," I said. "It may have been tampered with. I've told the owner and we're getting the proper people involved. Someone sent me a threatening message, but I'm not alone with it."
There was a pause. "Are you in danger?"
"I don't know. That's the truth."
"Then don't turn the truth into something easier because you're worried about my reaction. Hector didn't raise you for that."