"Something's wrong underneath the throttle," he told Reese. "She idles, she starts, but when I ask her to pull she hesitates. Been getting worse for a few weeks."
Reese crouched by the machine and studied the engine. "Could be a fuel problem. Could be ignition. Give me a day, Raven, and we'll get her sorted."
"The memorial ride is coming," Cole said. "I want this bike, not a substitute."
He did not explain why. Nobody at Thunder Ridge needed the explanation because they knew about the ride. Every year the club crossed a long stretch of Arizona desert to a small cemetery outside a town whose name had almost disappeared from the maps, where several men they had ridden with were buried. Cole had begun the tradition after the death of a rider named Tank, a man who had once stayed beside him in a roadside rainstorm when his Harley failed and other riders kept going. That memory lived in the chipped paint on the tank, and it made the annual ride something more serious than a gathering of motorcycles.
Emily remembered Tank's name because she had heard Cole say it quietly over the phone during the previous autumn. She also knew the significance of that chip, though Cole had never told her directly. When customers admired the flawless paint, someone inevitably asked why such a careful owner had left one damaged place untouched. Reese always answered that Cole did not allow that spot to be painted, and the conversation usually ended there.
On the Monday when the Harley arrived, Emily was breaking down a parts shipment thirty feet away. She heard the idle settle into a low pulse, then catch almost imperceptibly before returning to rhythm. The sound made her stop with a carton in her hands. It was not dramatic, not a clatter or a grind, only a repeated irregularity with a pattern that seemed connected to a rotating component rather than a random interruption.
She waited through another cycle. The same hitch came back. Her eyes moved toward the cam chest, then toward the floor because Reese had started talking to Cole and she did not want either man to mistake her attention for an invitation to explain herself. She wrote down the first part number Reese requested, checked the stock, and found herself still listening.
At lunch, she took a scrap of brown packing paper and made three small columns. In the first she wrote the symptoms Reese had described. In the second she wrote the systems already inspected, and in the third she wrote questions that would distinguish several possible faults. She did not consider it a repair plan, only a way of keeping her mind quiet enough to work through what she was hearing. She folded the paper and tucked it into the pocket of her work shirt when someone came through the parts-room door.