Chapter 9 Nine

Tank decided on Saturday. I was torquing the rear axle nut on the Ducati when he walked over and crouched down beside me without invitation. He didn't look at me. He picked up a socket wrench from the floor and turned it over in his hands like he was checking it for damage.

"Reaper's been with the club eleven years," he said quietly.

I kept working. "Okay."

"He rode with Dutch before Dax was VP. Before Marcus died." Tank set the wrench down. "He was the one who organized the search when Marcus's bike went off the road. Spent three days out there."

I stopped turning the wrench. "Why are you telling me this?"

"Because I've been watching him for two months and I couldn't figure out what was wrong." Tank stood up and wiped his hands on his jeans. "You've been here five days and you walked straight into it."

He went back to his side of the garage without another word.

I lay there under the Ducati and turned that over. Tank had been watching Reaper for two months and said nothing to Dax. Either he didn't trust her with it yet, or he was building the same kind of careful case she was building, brick by quiet brick, making sure before he moved.

Or he was telling me now because he'd run out of time.

I finished the axle nut and slid out from under the bike.

Reaper was standing in the garage doorway.

He wasn't looking at Tank. He was looking at me, with the flat, patient expression of someone who had already made a calculation and was waiting for the right moment to act on it. Three seconds, maybe four. Then he turned and walked away.

I picked up my tools and said nothing.

That afternoon Dax ran me on the championship course for the third time. We did four passes. On the second pass I found a tighter line through the mile two camber shift that Tank had flagged, running the approach wider the way he'd said, and the exit opened up clean in a way it hadn't before. I felt the time in it immediately, not a guess, a fact, the same way you feel a correctly torqued bolt, the resistance landing exactly where it should.

On the fourth pass Dax pulled up beside me on the back straight and held up two fingers.

Two seconds off.

I nodded and pushed harder into the final section.

We stopped in the empty lot after and she wrote in her notebook without speaking. I sat on the Ducati and drank from the water bottle I'd started carrying in the inside pocket of my jacket. The industrial edge of Coldwater sat around us, ugly and quiet, chain-link and concrete and the distant sound of a freight train somewhere to the east.

"You found something in the camber shift," she said without looking up.

"Wider approach. Tank mentioned it."

She looked up then. Not surprised exactly. More like something had confirmed itself. "Tank talked to you."

"This morning. In the garage."

She closed the notebook. "What did he say?"

"That he'd been watching Reaper for two months." I looked at her. "He came to me, Dax. Not you."

She was quiet for a moment. The freight train sound faded out. "Tank and Reaper came up together. Same year, same sponsor. They've covered for each other since before I was VP." She looked down at the notebook in her hands. "He's been trying to find a way to be wrong about it."

"Is he wrong?"

"No." Flat and final. "But knowing that and moving on it are two different things when the person you're moving on is the closest thing you have to a brother."

I didn't say anything to that. There wasn't anything useful to say.

We rode back to the compound in silence and I spent the evening in the garage, working through a final check on the Ducati's brake lines, going over every centimeter of cable housing, every bleed point. Methodical. The kind of work that demanded enough attention to keep your mind from running too far ahead of itself.

Reaper came into the garage at nine.

He didn't come to his own bike. He came to mine.

He stopped at the front of the Ducati and looked it over the way a man looks at something he's trying to find a fault in. Then he looked at me.

"Good bike," he said.

"She runs well."

"You do all the work yourself?"

"Every bit."

He nodded slowly, still looking at the bike. "Dax trust you with the full course layout yet? Time splits, corner entry points, all of it?"

I looked up at him. His face was open, easy, nothing in it that looked like what I knew it was. "We're getting there," I said.

"Smart to keep some things close until you know a rider's ready." He gave the Ducati one more look. "She's careful like that. Always has been." He walked out.

I put down the cable I was holding and looked at the garage door for a long second after he left.

He was fishing. Carefully, patiently, with the easy manner of a man who'd been doing it for years without getting caught. Trying to find out exactly how much Dax had given me. How deep inside the real operation I was. Whether I was a threat or just a fast rider she was using to win a race.

I picked the cable back up and kept working.

An hour later I was locking up the Ducati's brake line when I heard it. A sound from the far end of the garage, near the back storage room. Small, specific. The kind of sound a phone makes when a message sends.

I didn't move for a full five seconds.

Then I stood up slowly, kept my back to the storage room, and ran through everything Dax had said. Act normal. Don't change anything. Stay exactly what you look like, a mechanic who rides fast and doesn't ask questions he shouldn't be asking.

I picked up my jacket and walked out of the garage.

I went straight down the hall to Dax's office and knocked twice.

She opened the door in four seconds, which meant she hadn't been asleep.

"Reaper was in the garage tonight," I said. "He was asking how much of the operation you'd given me. Fishing for what I knew."

She stepped back and let me in.

"And after he left," I said, "someone used a phone in the back storage room."

Dax looked at me for a long moment. Then she crossed to the desk, opened the bottom drawer, and pulled out a small black device I recognized as a signal detector. She held it without turning it on.

"I swept the storage room last Tuesday," she said. "It was clean." "It's not clean anymore."

She turned the device over in her hands once. Her jaw was tight, the only thing on her face that gave anything away.

"Go to your room," she said. "Lock the door. Don't open it for anyone except me."