Cody, the young one, spoke for the first time. "Wait, timing chain?" he looked at Reese, then at Marcus. "We didn't even—we never pulled the timing cover."
"Did we pull the timing cover?" "No," Reese said quietly. And there was something almost sick in his voice. "We didn't.
We spent 3 days on this bike," Cody said. It was dawning on him in real time, the whole shape of it: they had never once looked where the problem actually was. Nobody answered him because there was nothing to say.
Cole hadn't moved. He was still looking at Emily, and something in his face had begun to shift, the fury draining out slow, replaced by something more complicated. Something he clearly didn't have a name for yet. He walked to her jacket, which she'd hung on the peg by the counter, and he looked at her, asking without asking, and she nodded once.
He reached into the flannel and pulled out the old timing chain, held it up in the light, and turned it slowly in his big scarred hands. He'd owned motorcycles for 40 years. He didn't need anyone to explain it to him. He could see the stretch. He could see the wear on the tensioner. He could see plain as day that this part, this worn ruined part, had been buried deep in the guts of his engine, exactly where a person had to actually know what they were doing to even think to look.
How long? Cole said, still holding the chain his back to her. Had this been going? Months. Emily said it was slipping the timing a little more every week.
That's why it kept getting worse. No matter what they replaced, they were chasing symptoms. She hesitated and then said the rest of it because he deserved to know the rest of it. Another few thousand miles in that chain would have jumped completely. Probably under load, probably at speed.
Cole went very still. Every rider in that garage understood what she just said. A timing chain jumping at highway speed wasn't a breakdown. It was a wreck. It was a man going down at 70 mph on a machine that had suddenly violently died beneath him.
"You're telling me," Cole said, turning around now slow, "that this bike was going to kill me on the ride." "I'm telling you," Emily said evenly, "that it wasn't going to make the ride. And I'm telling you, I wasn't going to stand here and let you take it out on the highway when I knew what was wrong with it and nobody would listen."
And there it was, the thing under all of it. Nobody would listen. She hadn't fixed the bike to show them up. She hadn't done it for credit or to prove a point or to make three men look like fools. She'd done it because she couldn't stand in that garage and watch a man she'd never even really talked to climb onto a machine that was going to throw him into the pavement when she and only she could hear it screaming what was wrong.