Chapter 36
Luke
I’ve put off this moment long enough. I know what he’s going to say, I know what he’s going to show me, yet seeing it for myself has felt too tangible, too painful.
But it’s time. I’m no longer a coach. My criminal case is in the slowdown of pretrial discovery, with no news on the forensic evidence yet from Allison.
So aside from some private lessons I’ve started with kids from the area, I have time on my hands.
Before Trinity starts filming the documentary, before I jump in with both feet, I have to hear and see this for myself.
I ease my Jeep into the lot of the suburban strip mall, the tires crunching over the last stubborn patches of snow. Most of the drifts have melted into gray slush, pulled back from the curb. The streetlamps cast long, wet reflections across the asphalt.
I pull into a space but leave the engine running, debating whether I should turn around and go.
My eyes pass over the stores. The nail salon with its neon OPEN sign fluttering irregularly, one of the letters half-dim.
A dry cleaner, its conveyor of plastic-wrapped shirts frozen mid-rotation.
A Thai take-out place. A karate studio, dark and shuttered.
Stop stalling. I kill the engine and walk to the bike shop anchoring the corner, its large window featuring rows of bike frames hung like skeletons.
A bell dings as I enter. Trinity is talking with Tom Henley, who apparently used to own the store but stayed on after he sold it. In his late sixties now, his shoulders are stooped but his eyes look sharp. A gray ponytail bobs along his shoulders as he turns to me.
“Tom Henley, Luke Rankin,” says Trinity.
“It was your bike, okay.” He sizes me up. “You’re lucky you’re in one piece.”
“So I’ve heard. You were hired back then by the family? The woman involved in my accident, Carmela Muller? You were a consultant or an expert or something?”
His bony shoulders rise. “Don’t know about that. When it comes to bikes, I’ve done it all. If it has two wheels, I’ve designed it, tested it, repaired it, or sold it. This lawyer found me and asked me my opinion about the bike, okay. And I gave it to him.”
We follow him through a set of swinging doors into the workshop area.
The space is tighter, warmer, lit by a row of bright task lamps that throw sharp circles onto cluttered workbenches.
Tools hang in precise outlines on pegboards: wrenches, chain whips, spoke keys.
The air smells like rubber and metal. Half-assembled bikes perch on repair stands.
“The bike is gone?” I ask.
“The bike itself? I’m sure it is. I don’t have it. But we took a lot of photographs, in case they were needed for court.” He nods to Trinity. “Until this young lady reached out, they’d been sitting in a file cabinet for twenty-eight years.”
We gather around a table, an enormous block of wood, scratched and scarred on the surface.
Trinity holds up her phone, recording a video.
Henley opens his folder and removes the photographs from a plastic sheath.
He spreads them across the table methodically, like pieces of a puzzle.
The prints are weathered, of course, the colors washed out, edges curled.
All that’s left of my mountain bike, post-accident photos of a contraption unsuitable for motion.
The frame is twisted in on itself, the top tube bent into a sharp, unnatural angle, paint scraped down to raw metal.
One wheel lies flat, spokes fanned out like snapped ribs, while the other is still attached but warped into an oval, bowed outward from the impact.
The handlebars are crushed against the mangled front fork, brake cables dangling like torn tendons.
I hear my sister’s voice, her hand laced in mine, as I sat in bed for weeks after the accident, the exchange we’d have on a daily basis. Are you gonna let this break you? she’d ask.
No, I’d say. I won’t let this break me.
Henley’s fingers hover over one of the photographs, not touching, just pointing.
“See this brake line?” His voice is steady.
“When an accident severs a cable, you get fraying, strands bent out in all directions, okay, like hair after it’s been yanked.
But this…” He leans closer, squinting at the faded image.
“This end is square. Flat. It doesn’t look torn. ”
“It looks cut,” I say.
“Right. And look here,” Henley goes on, moving his hand to another photo.
“Rear line’s the same way. Same kind of cut.
Nice and clean. Weird enough that it happens once.
But tell me—what are the odds both the front and back brake lines snap the same way?
” He shakes his head. “Doesn’t happen, okay. Not in any crash I’ve ever seen.”
“So you’re saying…” My voice catches, dry in my throat.
“Someone didn’t want that bike to stop,” Henley says firmly, his eyes fixed on the photos. “This wasn’t an accident. This was sabotage. That’s exactly what I told the lawyer,” he says to Trinity. Then back to me: “Somebody cut the brake lines on your bike, son.”
I came here knowing he would tell me this, knowing his conclusion, but his words don’t sting any less. “I rode my bike to school that day and parked it in the racks,” I say. And despite knowing the answer to this question, too, I ask it: “Any chance the lines were cut before then?”
“Not unless you rode all the way to school without ever once applying the brakes,” says Henley. “Which is basically impossible.”
Of course it’s impossible. The six blocks to school? I probably used my brakes a dozen times. The brakes were fine when I racked my bike that morning.
“Anyone else have access to your bike?” asks Henley, his curiosity piqued.
My throat catches. “Someone walked the bike from the racks over to the fence a few feet away and handed it over to me. We called him the ‘gofer.’ ”
Henley draws a deep breath. “So I guess the question is, who was the gofer?”