Chapter 4
CHAPTER FOUR
Dawson had both arms buried in the engine compartment when Justin’s boot nudged his knee.
“Reading high again.” Justin crouched beside the rig, phone out, squinting at the data logger. “Same problem we had in Portage.”
“Wastegate.”
“You said that last time.”
“And I was right last time.” Dawson worked the socket onto the bolt and gave it a quarter turn. The housing wasn’t hot enough to feel through his gloves, so he stripped the left one and used his bare hand to check the clearance by touch.
Justin came around to his side and crouched, peering in.
He was built like a fence post—tall, narrow, all angles—and he folded himself into small spaces like he’d been designed for engine bays.
Straw-colored hair shoved under a backward cap, a sunburn across his nose that had been there since May.
He stood close enough that his shoulder pressed against Dawson’s while they both stared into the guts of the thing.
“If it’s the wastegate, I’m going to have to pull the whole assembly.”
“Just the arm. Twenty-minute fix if you stop arguing with me about it.”
Justin grinned and flicked the brim of his cap up. “I’m not arguing. I’m considering my options.”
“Your options are let me fix it or blow up on the track.”
“See, when you put it like that, I’ll shut up.” Justin bumped Dawson’s shoulder and stood, pulling a water bottle from the cooler behind the rig. He drank half of it and poured the rest over the back of his neck. “Kyle’s been asking if you have time to help him out.”
“Kyle can ask me himself.”
“He’s afraid of you.”
“Kyle’s six-three and two-forty. I highly doubt I somehow intimidate him.”
“And you told him his rig was held together with duct tape and prayers.” Justin tossed the empty bottle into the bin. “I’m pretty sure he cried a little. You hurt his feelings.”
“He’ll survive. And his rig is held together with duct tape and prayers.”
Justin laughed—the loud, carrying kind that made people in the next pit look over.
Dawson shook his head and went back to the repair.
This was how it had been since high school.
Justin talked. Dawson worked. Somewhere in the middle, they’d built a friendship that didn’t need much tending, just the occasional afternoon in a barn or a pit area with their hands in the same engine.
The pit area ran the full length behind the grandstand—packed dirt, generators humming, the occasional blue-white flash of a welder under a canopy.
The announcer’s voice carried from the track, half-swallowed by engine noise.
Every time a rig launched, the vibration climbed through Dawson’s knees and settled in his chest.
He’d been out here since noon. Justin’s rig was slotted for the modified class in the evening pull, and Dawson had promised him a full rundown before he staged.
The wastegate was the priority, but he’d already been over the driveline, tightened the roll cage mounts, and swapped a cracked fuel line Justin hadn’t noticed.
Justin competed. Dawson made sure the thing didn’t kill him.
He pulled the bad part and turned it over in his hands.
The pivot pin was scored—metal that should have been smooth was worn down to a rough edge.
He dug into Justin’s toolbox for a replacement, found one that would work, and started fitting it.
His shoulders were loose. The grit of the fairgrounds under his knees, diesel and hot metal in the air, his hands moving through a job they knew by feel.
This was the version of himself that made sense.
“We’ve got a tourist.”
Dawson looked up. Justin had his arms crossed, chin tipped toward the fence line.
Leo Vargas stood on the other side of the chain-link with his fingers curled through the wire wearing gleaming white sneakers, dark shorts, a linen shirt that fit like it was custom tailored.
The fairground sun had put color across his cheekbones and the bridge of his nose, and his hair was still perfect despite the heat, which shouldn’t have been the detail Dawson noticed first, but was.
Their eyes met. Leo didn’t look away.
Dawson turned back to the part in his hands. “That’s the new Stags player.”
“No shit? The one from Florida?” Justin leaned sideways to get a better look. “What’s he doing back here?”
“How would I know?”
“He’s staring at you, man.”
“He’s staring at the rig.” Dawson seated the new pin and tested the swing. Smooth. He started threading the part back into the housing.
When he glanced up again, Leo had moved along the fence toward the gap where the chain-link ended at the staging lane. Closer. Not coming in, but not walking away either. Just drifting toward the opening like he couldn’t decide.
Justin looked at Leo. Looked at Dawson. A grin spread across his face that Dawson didn’t like one bit.
“Hey!” Justin called toward the fence, one hand raised. “Florida! You coming in or what?”
Dawson was going to kill him.
Leo came through the gap and picked his way across the pit area, stepping around spare tires and oil-dark puddles in white sneakers that would never recover. He stopped a few feet from the rig. Up close, there was sweat at his temples.
“Hey.” The smile was wide, immediate. Ready before Leo had even planted his feet.
“Hey.” Dawson didn’t get up.
Leo looked at the rig. Looked at Dawson. Looked at the rig again, like he’d never seen one before in his life. And maybe he hadn’t. He was a city guy through and through.
“I’m Justin.” Justin wiped his hand on his jeans and offered it. “This is my rig.”
“Leo.” He shook. His eyes moved over the rig—the roll cage, the exposed engine, the chassis that looked like it had been built in somebody’s garage because it had been. “What does something like this cost to put together?”
Justin blinked. Then grinned. “You want the number with or without the discount Dawson gets on parts through his brother’s shop?”
“It’s not a discount. I just charge you what’s on the invoice, much to my brother’s chagrin.”
“It’s a discount if the rest of the guys are paying retail.
” Justin leaned against the roll cage. “Depends on the build. A stock class rig, you can get in for fifteen, twenty grand if you’re smart about it.
Modified like this? We’re somewhere north of fifty, and I stopped counting because it was making me nauseous. ”
Leo’s eyebrows went up. “Fifty thousand dollars. For this.”
Something shifted in Dawson’s chest. For this. Like the rig was a curiosity. It was obvious he thought spending that much money on a machine with no purpose off the track was a huge waste of money.
“It’s a motorsport,” Dawson said. He kept his voice flat. “People spend money on motorsports.”
“No, I know. I just—” Leo caught himself.
His hand came up, rubbed the back of his neck.
“I didn’t mean it like that. I’ve never seen anything like this up close.
The stuff out on the track was intense, but back here it’s—” He gestured at the engine bay, the tools, the pit area around them. “It’s a whole operation.”
Justin, who hadn’t noticed any tension or didn’t care, clapped a hand on the roll cage. “Wait till you hear it run. Thirty-two hundred horsepower. Your eardrums will file a restraining order.”
“Thirty-two hundred…” Leo said it like he was trying to fit the number into something he understood. “I don’t even know what that means.”
“It means loud,” Dawson said.
He reached for a shop rag and wiped his fingers. His shoulders had tightened to the point he was getting a headache. He rolled his neck from side to side and kept working.
Leo had moved closer to the rig, hands in his pockets, and Dawson caught something in the air that didn’t belong out here—clean, deliberate, warm underneath. Not cologne, exactly. Whatever it was, it cut through the diesel and the dirt like it had been designed to.
“So you’re—racing? Competing?” Leo glanced at the track. “What do you call it?”
“Pulling,” Justin said. “And yeah, evening pull. Modified class. If Dawson’s done fixing my shit by then.”
“It’d go faster if you weren’t busting my chops.” Dawson stood, and the movement brought him inside arm’s reach of Leo. Close enough to catch the smell of expensive cologne. He stepped back toward Justin’s toolbox to keep from leaning in to get a better sniff.
Leo had leaned in toward the engine compartment, studying the part Dawson had just replaced. He didn’t ask what it was. Instead, he looked at Dawson and said, “How do you know what’s wrong? With all this going on in there, how do you look at it and know where the problem is?”
Nobody asked Dawson that. No one really wanted to know how he knew so quickly, only what it was going to cost and how long it’d take.
“Experience,” he said. “You listen to the engine. Feel how the parts move. When something’s not right, it stands out if you’re paying attention. I guess you could say it’s instinct.”
Leo was quiet for a second. “That’s like hockey.”
“We have to be able to read the plays,” Leo explained. “Before it happens. You feel where the puck’s going to be, not where it is. It’s not something you can teach someone—you either see it or you don’t.” He paused. “Or you learn to see it, I guess. After enough years.”
Dawson hadn’t expected that. A connection drawn between his hands on an engine and Leo’s instincts on the ice. Leo wasn’t looking at him for a reaction. He was staring at the track, half-squinting against the sun, still working through the thought.
“Yeah,” Dawson said. “Something like that.”
Justin, who’d been watching this exchange with his head moving back and forth like he was at a tennis match, pointed at Leo.
“I like this guy.” He dug into the back pocket of his jeans and pulled out a lanyard with a laminated pass. “Here. Staging lane pass. You can watch the pull from right behind the line—way better than the grandstand.”