Clutch's Collision (Daytona Intimidators MC #15)

Chapter 1

He killed the engine and dropped out of the cab, boots hitting standing water.

Rain hammered his shoulders and ran off the brim of his cap in streams. The highway was empty this time of night—two-fifteen on a Tuesday, nothing moving but long-haul semis half a mile apart and whatever wildlife was stupid enough to cross four lanes in the dark.

The driver was pacing the shoulder, phone pressed to his ear, gesturing with his free hand like whoever was on the other end could see him.

Mid-forties, polo shirt plastered to a soft gut, loafers soaked through.

Not a scratch on him. Walked away from a wreck that had sheared his front quarter panel clean off and bent the frame hard enough that the driver's door would never open again.

"You the tow?" the man called over the rain.

He crouched at the front end and checked the undercarriage.

Frame was torqued but the axle was intact.

Towable. He unspooled the winch cable, looped the J-hook under the frame rail, and started the pull.

The sedan groaned against the guardrail and then came free with a shriek of metal on metal that cut through the rain.

"Is it totaled?" the driver asked, hovering too close. "My wife's going to—"

"Stay on the shoulder."

The man stepped back.

Clutch worked the winch until the sedan sat square on the flatbed, then climbed up to chain the wheels.

Rain ran into his eyes and he wiped it with the back of his wrist, his hands so permanently creased with grease and road grime that the water beaded off them like wax.

Up here, with the highway empty and the work simple and the rain drowning everything to white noise, the ghosts were easy to keep down.

They weren't always.

He'd spent thirteen years on this same stretch of interstate, and the wrecks he remembered weren't the ones with crumpled metal and insurance claims. They were the ones with blood on the asphalt and the sound a person makes when they know they're not walking away.

A multi-car pileup three years back—four vehicles, one fatality, and Clutch holding the dying man's hand for forty minutes because the paramedics were twenty miles south on another call and nobody else had stopped.

That was the night he'd understood something simple. He was always the one who showed up. And showing up alone wasn't enough.

The Intimidators had given him something the highway couldn't. Brothers who showed up with him.

He secured the last chain, slapped the flatbed twice, and climbed down. The driver was still on his phone, pacing, complaining about the deductible. Alive and ungrateful, which was the best kind of wreck to work.

"We're rolling," Clutch told him. "Get in the cab."

The compound sat two miles off A1A, a converted beachside motel that had traded tourist money for outlaw purpose years before Clutch had ever prospected in.

He pulled the wrecker through the main gate just after three, the sedan still chained to the bed, and parked it in the far bay where it would sit until the insurance adjuster bothered to show up.

Salt air hit him the second he stepped out—thick, warm, carrying the ocean from just over the dunes.

The Florida night hadn't cooled a single degree.

Humidity sat on his skin like a second shirt and the compound smelled the way it always did: exhaust, sea breeze, fried food from whatever one of the prospects had burned in the kitchen six hours ago.

Tiki torches still guttered along the courtyard path.

The late crew was scattered around the fire pit, four or five brothers nursing beers in low chairs, the orange glow catching chrome and ink and the lazy drift of cigarette smoke.

Somebody had the radio on inside the clubhouse, classic rock bleeding through the propped-open door, and two bikes were still ticking cool in the front row—recent arrivals.

Clutch logged the recovery in the shop office, a cramped room that smelled of motor oil and stale coffee, the logbook open on a desk buried under parts catalogs.

Midnight rollover, I-95 mile marker 271, single vehicle, no injuries.

He wrote it in the same steady hand he'd used for a thousand entries before and closed the book.

The garage pulled him in the way it always did.

He grabbed a shop light and slid under the lift where Deacon's Road King had been waiting two days for a brake job nobody else wanted.

The caliper was seized—salt air and neglect, the usual coastal story—and Clutch worked the bleeder valve with patient hands, letting the repetition settle him.

Under a bike, elbow-deep in brake fluid and rust, the world made mechanical sense. Problems had causes. Causes had fixes. You found the seized part, freed it, bled the line, put it back together. Clean.

People weren't clean. Wrecks weren't clean. But the garage always was.

He had the caliper freed and was reassembling the bracket when boots scuffed the concrete near his head.

"You're dripping on my floor."

Clutch slid out. Throttle stood over him with two beers sweating in the heat, still dressed from whatever business had kept the president up past midnight.

Dominic Acosta at three in the morning looked the same as Dominic Acosta at three in the afternoon—controlled, calculating, running numbers behind eyes that never turned all the way off.

Clutch took the beer and sat up against the lift column. "Deacon's brakes are done."

"Deacon can buy you a drink for it." Throttle dropped into the folding chair by the tool bench, stretching his legs out and crossing his boots at the ankle.

The garage was quiet around them—just the tick of cooling engines from the yard, the hum of the compound generator, and the distant wash of surf. "How was the pull?"

"Hydroplane. Guy walked away."

"Lucky."

"Stupid. Bald tires in the rain."

Throttle grunted. That was agreement, in Throttle's language. He drank and looked out through the open bay door at the row of bikes gleaming under the security lights, chrome catching the orange glow from the courtyard torches.

"Got a situation with the dog," Throttle said.

Clutch raised an eyebrow. The president's dog—a neurotic, ninety-pound shepherd mix named Diesel who'd been rescued from a fighting ring two years ago and had never fully recovered from it—was a known compound problem.

The animal trusted exactly three people on earth: Throttle, Throttle's old lady Nina, and whoever the groomer was who came out every few weeks to handle what nobody else could get near.

"Diesel bit a prospect," Throttle said flatly.

"Which one?"

"The loud one."

"Prospect probably deserved it."

"Prospect definitely deserved it. Dog still can't be biting people.

" Throttle took a pull of his beer. "Nina's got the groomer coming out Thursday.

Only person that animal doesn't lose his mind around.

She's good—been handling him two years, never flinched, never got bit. Does all the nervous ones."

"Mobile groomer?"

"Yeah. Runs a van. Dana something. Comes out, handles Diesel, handles whatever else the old ladies throw at her, never complains." Throttle shrugged. "Nina swears by her. Says the woman talks a ninety-pound psychopath into a bath like it's nothing."

Clutch filed the name. Dana. The groomer who handled the dog nobody else could touch. It meant nothing to him—a service provider, a name on the compound schedule, someone else's concern.

He finished his beer, tossed the bottle in the bin, and turned back to the brake assembly. The caliper was clean, the line was bled, and the rotor needed one more pass before it was road-ready. Simple work. Honest work. The kind that didn't leave ghosts.

Outside, the Atlantic pushed its slow rhythm against the shore, and the compound settled into the deep hours, tiki torches burning low and the last brothers drifting toward the bunkhouse.

Clutch worked until his hands found the quiet his head couldn't manufacture on its own, the garage holding him the way it always did—grease and chrome and the certainty that some things, at least, could be put back together.