He picked up but off the seat and hurled it down onto the workbench, and it hit the steel with a crash that echoed off every wall of Thunder Ridge Customs, and three grown men flinched. And Cole Walker turned around and his voice came out low and shaking with something that was one part fury and one part fear and one part something none of them had ever heard from him before. And he said the words that would bring the whole garage to a standstill.
"Who," he said, "fixed my Harley?" Silence. Nobody moved. Nobody breathed. Reese looked at Marcus. Marcus looked at Cody.
Cody looked at the floor. I asked a question, Cole said. And now he was walking slow and heavy down the line of them. Somebody went into my bike. My bike without asking me. And I want to know who.
He stopped in front of Reese. Was it you? Oh, no. Raven, on my life, it wasn't me. He stepped to Marcus.
You? I swear to you, Cole, I wanted to rebuild the whole thing. I wouldn't have I couldn't have done that. I don't even know what they did. He stopped in front of Cody and Cody, 24 years old and out of his depth, opened his mouth and closed it again and finally just shook his head because for once in his life he had nothing to say.
Cole stood in the middle of his own garage surrounded by his best men and every one of them had just told him it wasn't them and he believed them. That was the thing. He looked in their eyes and he believed them. And that made it worse because it meant someone else was in the room. Someone he wasn't even looking at.
Then who? He said quieter now, turning slowly in a circle. Somebody in this building fixed my motorcycle, and nobody's got the guts to say it. His eyes swept the room. I'm not going to ask again. And that was when it happened.
Reese lifted his hand, not to point at himself, slowly, almost like he couldn't believe he was doing it. Like the answer had just arrived in his head from somewhere he'd never thought to look. Reese lifted his arm and pointed past Cole, past the bike, across 30 feet of concrete floor, at the parts counter, and one by one, the other men followed his eyes. Marcus turned, Cody turned, and their arms came up, too. All three of them now pointing at the same place, the one place in that garage nobody ever looked, the one person nobody had ever once thought to consider.
Cole Walker turned around to follow their hands. And there stood Emily Carter, 42 years old, blonde hair pinned back, gray flannel clipboard in one hand. The other braced quietly against the counter. The woman nobody saw, the woman they called the parts girl. The woman who had spent three days listening to an engine cry out the truth while three men argued over everything but the answer.
She met Cole's eyes. She didn't look away.