Garrett smiled a hard, humorless smile. "Exactly. That's why the money stays on the table."

Then, a quiet, steady voice came from the shadowy gloom behind the crowd.

"I can fix it."

Everyone turned.

The voice belonged to an eighteen-year-old kid who had spent the last three hours silently kneeling beside an old, rusting rolling toolbox in the far corner of the shop, scraping baked-on grease off discarded exhaust gaskets.

His name was Owen Carter. And he looked completely, utterly out of place among the hulking bikers and veteran mechanics. He was thin, slight of frame, and wore faded, grease-stained denim work clothes three sizes too big for his slight body. His messy brown hair fell forward into his eyes, and a broad smudge of black engine oil was smeared across his left cheekbone.

Garrett turned his massive frame around, staring down at the boy with a look of genuine, unadulterated disbelief.

Then he laughed—a loud, booming sound that echoed off the high steel rafters.

"You?"

The service bay fell into an uncomfortable, heavy silence after Garrett's booming laugh died down.

Frank, the shop manager, stepped forward quickly, his face flushing dark red with deep embarrassment. "Owen, get back to cleaning the oil drain pans in the wash bay. The men are trying to work here."

Owen Carter did not shrink back or bow his head. He held his ground beside his rusted toolbox, wiping his small, calloused hands on a dry cotton rag. He did not look at Frank; he looked straight into the hard, intimidating eyes of Garrett Steel.

"I've been listening to the starter motor for the last three hours, Mr. Steel," Owen said softly. His voice lacked any hint of bravado, smugness, or adolescent arrogance; it was merely a calm, even statement of observed mechanical fact. "You're all looking at the electronic fuel injection and the computerized ignition because it's a modern custom build. But that's not where the problem is."

Garrett lowered his chin, his gray-streaked eyebrows drawing together into a dangerous, dark line. He had no patience for fools or loudmouths, but there was something strangely unnerving about the boy's calm, steady posture. Most eighteen-year-olds trembled or shrank back when Garrett looked at them with his full attention. This boy did not even blink.

"Is that so, kid?" Garrett asked, his tone dripping with thick sarcasm as he took two slow, deliberate steps toward Owen. "The three best mechanics in the county have been breaking their backs over this rig since two o'clock. Frank over there built his first custom engine before your daddy was out of diapers. And you're telling me we're all blind?"

"I'm telling you the engine isn't starving for fuel," Owen replied, stepping away from his toolbox and walking calmly toward the center of the bay. "It's suffocating."

A few of the younger bikers chuckled under their breath, but Frank frowned, his eyes narrowing slightly as he watched the boy approach the black cruiser.

Owen had been working at Iron Rail Garage for less than six months. He was a quiet, soft-spoken orphan from the impoverished north side of town who had walked into the shop one morning asking for swept floor space and a place to store his battered pedal bike during rainy days. Frank had hired him out of pure pity, paying him minimum wage in cash to sweep up metal shavings, dump the heavy oil traps, clean the restrooms, and scrub down the service lifts at night. Owen rarely spoke, never complained, and spent his fifteen-minute lunch breaks reading old, yellowed technical manuals on small-engine repair that he kept tucked inside his canvas backpack.

Owen stopped two feet from the sleek motorcycle. He did not reach out to touch it. He knew the unwritten law of the garage world: You never put your hands on another man's machine without explicit permission.

"You've got a micro-vacuum lock inside the secondary crankcase breather housing," Owen explained, pointing a slender, oil-stained index finger toward a tiny, chrome-plated aluminum cover tucked just behind the rear cylinder head. "When Frank swapped the air intake assembly last month to install that custom chrome cowl, he used an aftermarket synthetic seal that was three-thousandths of an inch too thick for the recessed groove. When the cylinder head heats up from running, the metal and rubber expand. The rubber seal expands inward, closes the microscopic air pathway to the upper crankcase, and creates a high-pressure vacuum lock. The electronic control module senses the pressure spike and instantly cuts power to the ignition system to prevent the engine block from cracking."