The Sound of a Dying Engine
The teaser first.
Picture a seventeen-year-old girl on her knees in the dirt floor of an old Nebraska barn, her forearms black with grease nearly to the elbows, holding a socket wrench with the concentration of a surgeon holding a scalpel.
Outside, one hundred and ninety motorcycles sat silent across the field.
Not idling.
Not revving.
Silent.
For nearly two hundred men and women who had spent their lives believing that motorcycles were meant to be heard, the silence was almost frightening.
Every rider was staring toward the barn.
And inside that barn, the girl named Josie Callaway was leaning over an engine that most professional mechanics had already declared dead.
Four days earlier, none of them knew she existed.
Four days earlier, Samson Deacon Rays had never heard her name.
He had certainly never imagined that a seventeen-year-old farm girl would become the person standing between him and the loss of the motorcycle he had owned for nineteen years.
But four days earlier, Deacon was simply a tired man riding west with a dying engine beneath him.
Route 30 stretched across the Nebraska heat like a ribbon laid over a furnace.
The fields on both sides of the road had turned the color of old straw. Corn stood in rows beneath a white sky. Grain silos rose above the horizon, silver and enormous, reflecting sunlight hard enough to hurt the eyes.
Deacon Rays rode alone.
His Harley-Davidson shook beneath him.
He knew every vibration.
Every click.
Every cough.
Every complaint.
A motorcycle was never just a machine to him.
A machine talked.
You just had to know how to listen.
At first the sound had been small.
A faint metallic tapping beneath the deeper growl of the engine.
Then came the vibration.
Then the knock.
Deacon's right hand tightened around the throttle.
"No," he muttered.
The motorcycle answered with another ugly metallic clatter.
He eased off the throttle.
The bike coughed.
He coasted.
Then the engine died.
Deacon rolled to the shoulder and stared ahead.
There was nothing behind him but highway.
Nothing ahead but heat.
He swung one boot down.
The motorcycle leaned beneath him.
For a long moment he simply stood there with both hands resting on the handlebars.
He was six feet five inches tall, broad enough to make doorways look narrow, with a beard the color of iron filings and a face burned dark by nineteen years of wind, sun, and open road.
On the back of his black leather vest was the patch:
HELL'S ANGELS — SACRAMENTO.
Beneath it, stitched smaller:
NOMAD.
Nineteen years.
Nineteen years of highways, deserts, mountain roads, broken bridges, bad weather, cheap motels, good friends, funerals, fights, laughter, and long stretches of silence.
He had broken down in Nevada.
He had broken down in Wyoming.
He had once rebuilt half an engine beneath a highway overpass in the rain.
But never had his Harley stopped in a place that felt as empty as this.
He looked at the distant grain silos.
A sign said:
MILBROOK — 1 MILE.
Deacon sighed.
"Fine."
He put the motorcycle into neutral.
Then he began pushing.
One mile.
It took him almost thirty minutes.
By the time he reached Milbrook, sweat had soaked through his shirt. Dust clung to his boots. His beard was damp. His temper was held together by nothing more than discipline.
Milbrook had one traffic light.
One diner.
A hardware store.
Three garages.
And, apparently, not a single mechanic willing to touch his motorcycle.
Kravitz Hardware was a narrow brick building with an old-fashioned bell above the door.
A woman in her sixties stood behind the counter.
She had silver hair, glasses hanging from a chain around her neck, and the expression of someone who had spent her entire life watching men come into town convinced they knew everything.
Deacon bought a bottle of water.
"Anybody here work on old Harleys?"
She shook her head.
"Cliff's Auto used to."
"Used to?"
"Now he mostly changes oil and tires."
"Denny's?"
She shook her head again.
"Whitfields?"
"He doesn't work on motorcycles."
Deacon stared at her.
"Anybody?"
The woman sighed.
"Cliff looked at it already, didn't he?"
"Yeah."
"What'd he say?"
"Not worth the labor."
She nodded.
"Denny?"
"Same."
"Whitfields?"
"He said if it doesn't have four wheels and air conditioning, he doesn't want it."
Deacon took a long drink.
"It's rebuildable."
"I believe you."
"Timing issue, probably."
She shrugged.
"Ain't many people around here who know old engines anymore."
Deacon put the bottle on the counter.
"Somebody does."
"Maybe."
She looked through the front window.