Iron Jack held up a hand. 'Leave the kid alone.' He placed the evidence back on its cloth. 'If somebody put a trap in our sergeant's bike, I'm going to want the truth to survive, too.'
Grip walked to the open bay and stared toward the street. The rows of headlights and dark silhouettes continued beyond the reach of the shop lights, and the warm night air carried the smell of cooling engines. Caleb wondered what it was like to have enough men ready to answer your call that an entire industrial park could be swallowed by their arrival. Then he wondered what it would feel like to have no one among them you could safely trust.
'I've ridden with Skinner six months,' Grip said quietly. 'Not long by our standards, but long enough to think I knew what sort of man he was. He hauled that bike when I couldn't get away from work. He sat at my kitchen table.'
Caleb said nothing. He understood, on a smaller scale, the hurt that came from discovering that familiarity could be mistaken for loyalty. Aaron had once hired a helper who disappeared with tools and customer's deposits, and Caleb remembered that his uncle had been more wounded by the deceit than by the missing money.
Grip turned back toward the bench. 'When the bike started dying on the highway, Skinner was the first to say I should stop riding it. Said I was getting too old to take chances. He kept offering to take over the lead position for the run.'
'It could be coincidence,' Jonah said from beside the lift. 'Until you have proof, it's coincidence worth examining. Don't put a man's guilt inside a piece of steel just because you're angry with him.'
Grip's expression hardened, but he didn't challenge the advice. He knew too much now about the danger of deciding what an engine ought to be doing before looking at what it was actually doing. Caleb thought it was the first time he had seen his uncle's lesson travel from a machine to a person in front of him. It was not an easy journey.
A commotion rose near the edge of the light outside. Several men turned, and Dutch came walking through the gap between the motorcycles with another rider beside him. The younger man wore a black vest over a faded gray shirt, his face streaked with sweat and grease from a day that had clearly not gone according to plan. Caleb recognized him from a photograph on the repaint invoice, standing behind Grip's red bike while a painter posed with a spray gun.
Skinner looked younger than Caleb expected, perhaps twenty-five, with a narrow face and restless eyes. One of his wrists was gripped by Dutch, but the enforcer released it when they reached the shop entrance. Skinner stopped just beyond the threshold and looked at the motorcycle on the lift. His face changed before anyone spoke.
'What happened to Ruby?' he demanded.
Grip took a step toward him. 'The kid found something in her frame.'