Boone stuffed the rag back in his pocket. He looked at the bike, and he looked at her, and something moved under his beard that might have been the start of a smile or might have been the start of something much worse. Josie couldn't tell. She held onto her handlebars.
"Alright, kid," Boone Haskett said. "Show me."
* * *
She leaned her bicycle against the post office flagpole and came around to the right side of the Harley, where the engine's guts were. Up close it smelled of hot oil and gasoline and old leather and, faintly, of cigarettes, though she didn't see any on him.
"When it quit," she said, "did it sputter first? Like it was choking? Or did it just stop?"
"Just stopped."
"Like you turned the key off."
He was quiet a second. "Yeah. Like that."
"Has it done that before? Before the shop?"
"Couple times. Always when it's hot. Sits for half an hour, starts right up like nothing happened." He crossed his arms. They were very large arms. "Shop said that was vapor lock. Said the old carb was boiling the gas."
Josie nodded, because that was a thing that happened, and Aitona said you never laughed at another mechanic's guess until you'd proved your own. She crouched down by the front cylinder. The spark plug wires came off the coil and snaked down to each head. She glanced up at him.
"Do you have a spare plug?"
He did. It was in a canvas tool roll in the right saddlebag, along with a set of combination wrenches gone dark with years, a plug socket, a roll of safety wire, and a sandwich bag of assorted nuts. He watched her look at the tool roll as if she was reading it, and she was, sort of. You could tell a lot about a person by what they carried. This was a man who expected to break down somewhere far away from help, and had, and would again.
She pulled the boot off the front cylinder's plug wire, fitted the spare plug into it, and used a pair of pliers with rubber-dipped handles to hold the spare plug's metal body hard against the cooling fins of the cylinder head.