"Your uncle trusted you with this place," she said instead. "Don't confuse the bank being impatient with him being wrong."
She returned to her truck before I could answer. The sandwich tasted like turkey, mustard, and the kind of kindness that becomes almost unbearable when you've been living without enough of it. I finished it at the workbench, washed my hands, and prepared the test that would tell me whether the problem could be reproduced without taking a dangerous chance on the road.
The dynamometer occupied a shed behind the garage. Hector had acquired it secondhand after helping an older mechanic close his business. It was not a glamorous machine. Its paint was scuffed, its enclosure had been patched, and the computer that recorded speed and load took an unreasonable amount of time to start. But it could run a motorcycle under controlled conditions while keeping people outside the danger area, and for the last year of Hector's life he had insisted I learn its safety checks as carefully as its controls.
Before starting, I examined the straps, guards, emergency shutoff, ventilation, and sensors. I photographed the setup so I could compare it afterward and leave a record of the test. I knew what the equipment could do, and I also knew what it couldn't: a successful run would not, by itself, certify an unfamiliar, damaged frame for highway use. I would have to inspect anything structural independently before anyone rode it.
At one fifteen the engine fired. Its exhaust note filled the little building with a sound so rich and settled that I understood why Grip had kept going back to those five shops. It was the voice of a motorcycle promising that nothing was wrong. I watched temperatures stabilize and built the load gradually, listening for misfires and watching the ignition signal from an external test instrument I'd borrowed from a friend.
The bike behaved normally for the first few minutes. It responded smoothly, held steady power, and gave me nothing but the evidence of a well-cared-for old engine. My confidence rose just enough to frighten me. Then the instrument trace flickered.
It happened before the engine stumbled. A tiny interruption appeared in the signal, so brief that I might have dismissed it as noise if I hadn't been waiting for something unusual. A minute later it happened again, followed by a sudden drop in engine power. I shut the test down, hands steady only because Hector had made safety procedures a habit long before I had enough experience to understand why habits mattered.
The engine returned to normal at idle. That was the cruel part. The moment it was no longer under the conditions that caused the failure, it acted innocent again. I looked at the recording twice and felt the first real change in the day: I had not fixed anything, but I had captured the failure in a way five previous repair invoices never documented.