Chapter 2
The rod let go at sixty-five miles an hour on the highway east of Sparks, and the Harley died under him like a horse that had been shot.
Jackpot felt it before he heard it — the deep mechanical thunk that traveled up through the frame and into his hands, followed by the instant loss of power that turned a thousand pounds of motorcycle into a sled.
Oil smoke poured out from under the engine.
He feathered the clutch, let the bike coast to the shoulder on what momentum was left, and put both boots down on hot gravel as the last of the rpms bled out.
He sat there for a ten-count, listening to the engine tick and the traffic blow past, and then he swung off and crouched beside the lower end and looked at what used to be a functioning motor.
The oil was already pooling under the cases.
A thrown rod, punched clean through the block.
The bike wasn't going anywhere under its own power until somebody who knew what they were doing opened it up and put it back together.
He stood on the shoulder of the highway with sage flats running out to the mountains on both sides and pulled out his phone.
The tow yard was forty minutes out. The compound was farther.
But a quarter mile back, on the frontage road that ran along the industrial stretch, he'd passed a two-bay shop with a hand-painted sign and a lot full of cars.
Mercer's.
He called the number off the sign, and a woman answered on the third ring with a voice that was already mid-argument with somebody who wasn't him.
"Mercer's. Hold on." A muffled exchange — something about rotors and Thursday — and then she was back. "Yeah."
"Threw a rod on the highway, quarter mile east of you. Harley Dyna. I need a tow into your bay."
A pause. He could hear an impact wrench in the background and a radio playing something with too much bass. "I'm full up till Thursday."
"I don't need Thursday. I need a tow off the highway and a lift to set it on. I'll pull the motor myself if you've got the space."
Another pause. Longer this time. He could almost hear her deciding. "You know what you're doing, or are you going to strip my threads and leave parts on my floor?"
Something about the question — the flat way she asked it, no apology in it, no charm — pulled a grin out of him that he wasn't expecting. "I know what I'm doing."
"Quarter mile east?"
"Yeah."
"I'll send Paul with the flatbed. Twenty minutes." She hung up without saying goodbye.
* * *
The flatbed showed up in fifteen. A stocky guy in his thirties with Ybarra stitched on his shirt loaded the Harley without asking questions about the cut Jackpot was wearing, which meant either he didn't know what it was or he was smart enough not to care.
They rode back to Mercer's in the cab with the windows down and the hot wind coming through, and Paul Ybarra said almost nothing, which suited Jackpot fine.
He saw her before the truck stopped rolling.
She was under the lift in the left bay with a breaker bar in her hands, sleeves shoved past her elbows, dark hair knotted up off her neck with pieces falling loose around her face.
She was arguing into a phone wedged between her ear and her shoulder, and her voice carried out across the lot clear enough that he caught every word.
"—I don't care what the catalog says, Ray, I'm looking at the part right now and it's wrong. No. No. Because the flange is two millimeters off and it won't seat, that's why. Send me the right one or credit me, but don't tell me what I'm holding in my hand."
She hung up, tossed the phone onto the workbench, and went back to the breaker bar without missing a beat.
Jackpot leaned in the bay doorway and watched her work.
He'd spent twenty years reading rooms. Card tables, casino floors, bars full of men who lied for a living — he'd learned to see who was holding and who was bluffing before they opened their mouths. It was the thing he was best at, maybe the only thing, and he'd built a club on the back of it.
This woman wasn't reading clean.
She worked like she'd been doing it since before she could drive — no wasted motion, no hesitation, hands moving between tools with a rhythm that was muscle memory and nothing else.
She was built for it, wide through the shoulders and hips, forearms roped with the kind of muscle that came from years of breaker bars and torque wrenches.
When she leaned into the lug nut, she used her whole body, and the thing cracked loose like it was afraid of her.
But it was the mouth that got him. The quick grin she threw at her mechanic.
The way she cussed a regular named Charlie by his first name and got it right back and laughed low and easy, a sound that carried warmth through the whole shop.
She ran the place like she'd been poured into it, and every person in the building orbited her without thinking about it.
He couldn't get a clean read. She didn't soften when she saw the cut. Didn't harden, either. Just looked at him, looked at the bike on the flatbed, and jerked her chin toward the empty space at the back of the right bay.
"Tow fee's sixty. Bay rental's forty a day. You break it, you buy it, and you clean up after yourself."
"Fair."
"Tools on the pegboard are mine. Ask before you touch them."
"Yes ma'am."
Her eyes came up to his for the first time, and he felt the hit of it in his chest like a door swinging open into a room he hadn't known was there.
Dark eyes, steady, with something in them that wasn't softness and wasn't hardness but was the kind of certainty that came from knowing exactly who you were and not needing anyone else to confirm it.
She held the look for two full seconds, and then that slow grin came, just the corner of her mouth, and heat came off her the way it came off an engine that had been running all day.
"Don't call me ma'am. I'm not your grandmother."
"What do I call you?"
"Dana. And you are?"
"Jackpot."
She looked at him like she was deciding whether to laugh. "That your real name?"
"It's the one that matters."
She held his eyes for another beat, and the grin didn't move, and something in the air between them pulled tight like a chain under load.
"All right, Jackpot. Bay's yours. Try not to get oil on my floor."
She turned her back on him and went back to work, and he stood there watching the swing of her hips across the concrete and the grease-dark line of her forearms and the heavy knot of hair coming loose at her neck, and he thought: trouble. The good kind and the bad kind, both at once.
* * *
He had the motor pulled and the cases split by the time the sun went down.
She'd come by twice — once to check that he wasn't destroying her lift, and once to hand him a bottle of water without being asked.
Both times she'd looked at his work, and both times he'd seen the flicker of approval she didn't bother hiding.
He knew engines. She could see that he knew engines.
It was a language they shared, and it made the space between them smaller every time she crossed the bay.
He was washing his hands at the utility sink when he saw the back of the lot for the first time in the fading light.
The car frame sitting against the back fence stopped him cold.
Sedan chassis. Stripped to the bones. No wheels, no engine. He walked to it and crouched and ran his thumb over the doorjamb where the VIN plate should have been. Ground smooth. Clean, professional work. The front quarter panel was a shade off from the rest of the body — swapped, re-skinned.
A re-VIN teardown. Somebody had taken a stolen car apart, swapped the identifiers, and dumped what was left on an honest shop's lot.
He knew the play. He knew it the way he knew a stacked deck, because it was the same swindle the casino houses ran on his mother and on every other working person who got in the way of somebody with money and no conscience.
Plant the evidence, make the honest person look dirty, and wait for them to fold.
Victor Salas had been running the east flats this way for a year, eating up shops and yards one by one, and this was his signature — not a threat, not yet. A setup. The frame before the fire.
Jackpot stood in the dark lot and looked at Dana's shop with its hand-painted sign and its two full bays, and the anger that moved through him was the old kind, the kind that had made him build the Wreckers in the first place.
A woman running an honest shop on her own ground, and a man like Salas putting a frame on her lot to take it from her.
The house playing the same trick on the same people, and expecting them to fold the same way.
He walked back into the bay. Dana was closing out the register, hair down now, a black streak of grease across her forehead she didn't seem to know about.
"The car frame on your back lot," he said. "How long has it been there?"
She went still. Not scared — contained. The way a person goes when they've been carrying something alone and someone else just put a hand on it. "I found it tonight. When I was closing up."
"You know what it is?"
"I know exactly what it is."
"You call the cops?"
"And tell them what? That somebody left a stripped car on my lot?" The edge in her voice wasn't anger. It was the sound of a woman who had already run the math and come up short. "That's exactly what Salas wants. I call it in, and suddenly I'm the one explaining where it came from."
She knew. She already knew the whole play, and she was standing in it alone.
"Salas has been taking shops on this stretch for a year," Jackpot said. "Yours is next."
"I figured that out when Loss Gutierrez closed his doors." She met his eyes. "I'm not closing mine."
That was the moment. Not the slow grin or the heat or the way she'd handed him the water — this.
The flat certainty in her voice when she said she wasn't folding.
The backbone in it. She was standing on ground that was about to burn and she wasn't moving, and something in him responded to that so hard it almost hurt.
He wanted to touch her. He wanted to put his hand on the back of her neck and pull her in and tell her she wasn't standing out here alone anymore. Instead he said, "I know who sent that frame. And I know what comes after it."
"What comes after it?"
"Fire."
She didn't flinch. She looked at him the way she'd looked at the seized lug nut — like it was a problem, and problems were what she did.
"Who are you?" she said. Not his name. She already had that. Who are you.
"I'm the president of the Reno Wreckers MC. And Salas just put that frame on ground my club claims."
Before she could answer, headlights swept across the lot.
* * *
The black crew-cab nosed in off the road slow, the way a predator checks a kill site. Same truck. Same tinted windows. It rolled past the front of the shop, swung wide around the lot, and came to a stop near the back fence where the frame sat in the dark.
Jackpot was already moving. He stepped out of the bay and into the lot, putting himself between the truck and Dana's shop, and she came out right beside him — not behind him, beside him — with a tire iron hanging loose in her right hand.
The passenger window came down two inches. Inside, the rangy man with the ball cap flicked his lighter once — the little flame caught the dark, there and gone — and looked at the two of them standing in the open.
The lighter flicked again. The man's eyes moved from Jackpot's cut to Dana's face and back.
Then the window went up. The driver put it in gear, and the crew-cab pulled off slow, taillights shrinking toward the highway.
Jackpot watched it go. He'd seen the plates. Nevada, commercial. He had them memorized.
Beside him, Dana lowered the tire iron. Her hand wasn't shaking. Her jaw was set, and her breath was steady, and she was looking at the road where the truck had been with the expression of a woman who had just decided something.
"That's the same truck," she said. "From this afternoon."
"I know."
"He was checking to see if I found the frame."
"He was checking to see if you ran."
She turned her head and looked at him, and the lot was dark and the flats were quiet and the only light was the sodium glow from the shop's security lamp throwing shadows across both their faces.
"I don't run," she said.
Jackpot looked at her — grease on her forehead, tire iron in her fist, standing on her own ground at ten o'clock at night with a predator circling her shop and not a tremor in her — and the pull he'd felt in the doorway that afternoon doubled and then doubled again, something that went past attraction into territory he hadn't been in for a long time.
"No," he said. "I can see that."
The crew-cab's taillights disappeared onto the highway, and the two of them stood in the dark lot with the planted frame behind them and the smell of oil and sage and hot concrete in the air, and neither of them moved to go inside.