12 grand, Cole said. Very quietly, which was always more dangerous than when he shouted. "You want me to spend 12 grand because you can't find a problem three of you have been staring at for 3 days. I'm telling you, Raven, an engine this old engine," Cole said, stepping close has run 25 years without a single one of you touching it. And the one time I ask you to fix one thing, you tell me to bury it and buy a new one.
Get out of my sight. Go get lunch, all of you. I need to think.
The three mechanics filed out into the lot, still arguing, and the door banged shut behind them. And for the first time in 3 days, the main bay of Thunder Ridge Customs went quiet. Cole stood over the Harley alone. He put one hand on the tank right on that chip spot near the seam, and Emily, watching from the parts room, the only other person left inside, saw the big man's shoulders drop. Saw him lean down and murmur something to the machine that she couldn't hear and knew she wasn't meant to.
And something in her chest broke a little because she understood exactly what he was feeling. She'd felt it herself kneeling over a broken engine that meant everything with the clock running out and no answer in sight. She knew what it was to love a machine that had carried you through the worst days of your life. She knew what it was to be afraid you were about to lose it.
Cole straightened up, wiped his face with the back of his hand, and walked out the side door toward the lot to join the others. And Emily Carter stood alone in the quiet garage looking at the black Harley across 30 feet of concrete floor. She looked at it for a long, long time. And then she made a decision that would change everything.
She told herself she wasn't going to touch it. She got as far as picking up her clipboard and turning back to the shipment. And she made it through checking off four whole items before she set the clipboard down again because the truth was she couldn't stand it anymore. 3 days. Three days of listening to that engine cry out exactly what was wrong with it, while three men who couldn't hear it argued over everything except the answer. It was like watching someone shout directions at a drowning man in a language he didn't speak.
"It's not my place," she told herself. "They'll fire me," she told herself. "If they catch me, Cole Walker will do a lot worse than fire me," she told herself. And then underneath all of it, in the quiet, steady voice that had gotten her through 18 years of doing exactly this kind of work under exactly this kind of pressure, another thought rose up. The machine is telling the truth, and nobody's listening, and I can't just stand here and let it die.
She crossed the floor. Her boots were silent on the concrete. Through the window, she could see the four men out in the lot. Marcus gesturing with a sandwich. Cody laughing Cole standing apart from them with his back to the building.
She had maybe 20 minutes, maybe less. She knelt down next to the Harley and the moment her knee touched the floor, something changed in her. It was the strangest thing to watch, though, there was no one there to watch it.
The tired woman from the parts counter, the one who flinched at nothing and endured everything, the one who said, "Bottom shelf bin 14." In a voice soft as dust, she was gone. In her place was someone else entirely. Someone with steady hands and calm eyes in a stillness that came from a place these men had never seen. Her breathing slowed, her head tilted, and she didn't reach for a single tool. She just listened.
She reached out and very gently laid two fingers against the engine block the way a doctor lays a hand on a patient's chest. She closed her eyes and she waited for the machine to tell her the truth. There she thought that hitch once every few seconds. Not random rhythmic. A random miss meant fuel meant spark meant the things these men had already chased and replaced, but a rhythmic miss that came around like clockwork that meant something mechanical, something turning, something out of time with itself.