The bleeding had mostly stopped, but the uneven pupils bothered her, and she said, "So, you might have a concussion. I've had concussions. That's not reassuring." She pressed the clean rag to the wound with one hand. Your pupils aren't the same size.
That one, she pointed to his left eye is bigger. "You need a hospital." "No hospital." He said it quietly, but absolutely. She looked at him for a moment. "
Why not?" He held her gaze. "Because I've got enemies who know which hospitals to watch." There was a silence in which Emily processed this information with the focused practicality of someone who had been raised in a garage and had learned early that some situations didn't benefit from asking every question you had. He's fine, she said.
But if you pass out, I'm calling an ambulance. Fair. He said she cleaned and dressed the wound with the efficient competence of someone who had sutured her own hand once with a needle and fishing line at 19 because the nearest urgent care was 40 minutes away and she'd had a deadline. When she was done, she stepped back and looked at him. "I'm Emily Carter," she said. "
This is Carter Cycles. My father built it." He met her eyes. "Daniel Walker," he said. "People call me Dax."
And now she looked at the vest. The patches she'd been avoiding looked back at her. The top rocker, the center patch, the bottom rocker. She'd been born in Texas and raised surrounded by bikers, and she knew exactly what she was looking at, and she held the knowledge of it steady in her chest without letting it change her expression. He's Dax, she said.
Emily, he said, "You want coffee?" She said, "It's midnight. It's raining, and I'm not done working." "But I can put a pot on." Something moved behind his eyes.
It wasn't quite surprise. It was closer to recognition. The kind that happens when you have spent a very long time preparing for a specific reaction and someone gives you a completely different one. Yeah. He said, "Coffee sounds good."
She put the coffee on and while it brewed, she went back out to his Harley. She hadn't planned to do it right then. She'd planned to get him stable, make sure he wasn't actively dying, and then figure out what to do with both of them. But the bike was sitting in her lot in the rain, and she was a mechanic, and a mechanic can't leave a sick machine alone any more than a doctor can walk past a patient on the floor. She got the Harley inside the garage, out of the weather, and she looked at it under the lights.
It was a Road King older. She'd guess 2015 or 2016. The kind of machine that had been ridden hard for years and maintained by someone who knew what they were doing. The paint was genuine roadw woric. This was a bike that had been places.
She started with the obvious. The reason the engine had been cutting and catching and found it quickly Fuel line connection had worked loose, probably from the fall, and the resulting inconsistent fuel flow had given the engine that ragged voice she'd heard from the road. Easy fix. She had the right fitting. She got it done in 8 minutes.
Then she did what she always did when a bike came into her shop after a crash. She checked everything. She checked the front end. She checked the rear. She checked the electrical.
She checked the controls. She was checking the brake system when she found it. She stopped. She crouched lower and looked again, turning the flashlight at a specific angle because she needed to make absolutely certain she was seeing what she thought she was seeing. She was The rear brake line had not been damaged in the crash tonight.
It had been cut. Not all the way through. Not in a way that would announce itself immediately. It had been cut in a precise deliberate way. Deep enough that it had been on the verge of failure for however many miles Dax had been riding and it had finally given enough that the brake had gone soft.
If he tried to stop fast on the highway if a car had pulled out if something had run across the road, the brake would have failed completely and at highway speed with one brake gone and a man who had no reason to believe his equipment wasn't trustworthy. The result would have been a coroner's report, not a mechanic's bill. Emily knelt beside the bike for a long moment. The rain was still hitting the roof above her. The coffee had finished brewing, and she could smell it from the kitchen corner.
She could hear Dax breathing from across the garage, steady now, which meant he wasn't actively deteriorating. She took a slow breath. Then she stood up, walked to her parts shelf, and found the brake line she needed. She was halfway through the repair when he spoke from behind her. "You found something."
It wasn't a question. She hadn't heard him get up and she had the brief detached thought that a man that size moving that quietly was a relevant data point. She didn't stop working. "Sit back down. You had a head injury."
Emily. She set the flashlight down and turned to look at him. He was standing 4 ft behind her, one hand on the workbench for balance, and his eyes were on the brake line she was replacing. " "She watched him look at it. She watched him understand what he was seeing. "
the old line," he said. His voice had changed. "Where is it?" " "She reached to the side and picked up the section of line she'd cut away. " "She held it up so he could see it in the light. "
See the cut?" The silence that followed was the kind that has weight. "How long ago?" Dax said. And his voice was very quiet.
Do you think that was done? Given how far it had deteriorated and the pressure you'd have been putting on it at highway speed, Emily said, "Not tonight." This was done sometime in the last day or two. Whoever did this knew exactly how much to cut. Not enough to fail immediately.
Enough to fail when it would be catastrophic. Dax looked at the brake line. He looked at Emily. You're Hell's Angels, man. She said, " "Not an accusation, a simple statement. "
Somebody tried to kill you tonight." She set the cut brake line on her workbench. And you found your way here. He was quiet for a moment. "You're fixing it," he said. "