Chapter 3
The transmission was fighting him.
Clutch lay on his back under the lifted Dyna, arms overhead, working a stubborn countershaft bearing that had decided today was the day it fused itself to the housing.
Sweat tracked down his temples into his hair and the shop fan pushed hot air around without cooling anything.
Standard Florida afternoon — ninety-two degrees, humidity thick enough to swim through, the garage bay doors open wide to catch whatever breeze came off the coast two miles east.
He'd been at it for an hour, the patient back-and-forth of a man who understood that forcing metal only broke things. The bearing would come. It always did. You just had to outlast it.
The garage phone rang.
Clutch ignored it. Prospects answered phones. That was the entire point of prospects.
It rang again. Then a third time, and he heard boots on concrete — Deacon passing through on his way to the yard, pausing long enough to grab the receiver off the wall mount.
"Intimidators garage." A pause. "He's under a bike. Who's—" Another pause, longer. Deacon's boots turned toward him. "Clutch. It's for you. Some woman, says Throttle gave her this number."
Clutch slid out from under the Dyna and took the phone with a greasy hand.
The voice on the other end was trying very hard to sound like it wasn't falling apart, and that effort told him more than the words did. Controlled breathing between sentences. Pauses where the air shook. The kind of calm that was all surface, stretched tight over something about to crack.
"I'm sorry to call. I don't — Throttle said if I ever needed anything, this was the number. I'm Dana. The groomer. I come out for his dog."
The name clicked. Tuesday. The woman who handled Diesel.
"I'm here," Clutch said. "What happened?"
It came out in fragments. Cops at her first appointment.
Burglaries across her client neighborhoods.
Her van seen, her prints inside every house, her access to every alarm code.
The detectives hadn't arrested her, but they hadn't needed to — the accusation was in the questions, and the questions were a noose.
"I didn't rob anyone." Her voice cracked on the word and she hauled it back together so fast he almost missed it. "I groom dogs. That's all I do. But someone used my routes and my — they used everything I built to —"
She stopped. He could hear her breathing through it, refusing to let the next sound be a sob.
Something in Clutch's chest shifted. Not pity — he'd burned through pity years ago on the highway, holding strangers together while they bled out.
This was different. This was a woman whose whole world was caving in around her and she was standing in the rubble with her jaw locked, refusing to fall.
That kind of spine didn't ask for sympathy.
It grabbed you by the throat and made you pay attention.
"Where are you?" he asked.
"I don't — I drove. After the detectives left, I just drove.
I'm parked outside someone's gate on A1A, I don't even know whose.
I can't go home. If they're watching my clients' houses they could be watching mine, and I don't know who —" The breathing hitched again.
Held. Steadied. "I don't know who else to call. Throttle's not answering."
"Throttle's in Daytona on club business. Won't be back till tonight."
Silence. He could feel her calculating, running out of options in real time.
"Stay where you are," Clutch said. "Text me the address. I'm coming to you."
"You don't even know me."
"I know Throttle trusts you with his dog, and that dog doesn't trust anyone.
That's enough." He was already moving, crossing the garage toward the bay where his bike sat, phone clamped between his ear and shoulder while he grabbed his cut off the hook by the door.
"Don't move, don't call the cops back, don't talk to anyone. Just sit tight."
"I —"
"Dana."
The name came out with an authority he hadn't planned, the voice he used when a wreck scene was going sideways and someone needed to stop panicking and listen. It landed. He heard her go quiet on the other end — not submissive, not scared. Listening.
"I'm on my way," he said. "Twenty minutes."
He hung up before she could argue and swung a leg over the bike.
Deacon was watching from the tool bench, arms crossed. "Problem?"
"Throttle's groomer. Someone framed her for a string of burglaries using her client access. Cops are circling."
"And you're riding out alone because...?"
"Because she's scared and she called us, and showing up four deep is going to make a woman who just got interrogated by Major Crimes feel like she's trading one problem for another.
" Clutch fired the engine, the V-twin catching with a rumble that shook the bay floor. "Tell Throttle when he gets back."
Deacon shook his head but stepped clear of the bay door.
Clutch rolled out of the compound and hit A1A heading north, the coastal highway unspooling under his wheels in a ribbon of hot asphalt and salt wind.
The Atlantic glittered to his right, blue-green and flat under the afternoon sun, tourists dotting the sand like confetti while the road hummed with the easy traffic of a Florida Tuesday.
Palm trees strobed past overhead. The air tasted like ocean and exhaust and the particular heat that baked off pavement after eight hours of direct sun.
He rode fast but not reckless, weaving the tourist traffic with the automatic precision of a man who'd spent half his life on these roads.
His mind was already working the problem — burglary ring, service worker access, a frame job tight enough to make detectives show up at a client's house.
That wasn't amateur. That was someone smart, someone patient, someone who understood that the people with keys and codes and schedules were invisible enough to take the fall.
And they'd picked the groomer. The woman who handled a hundred-pound rescue dog with nothing but her voice and her hands, who'd earned the trust of every wealthy household on her route one skittish purebred at a time.
They'd looked at everything she'd built and decided it was useful, and when they were done with it, they'd leave her holding the bag.
Something hot and unfamiliar tightened behind his ribs.
Not his usual calm. Not the detached steadiness that had carried him through a thousand roadside disasters.
This was more specific. More personal. A woman he'd never met had called his garage and refused to cry, and now he was riding thirty over the speed limit to reach her.
He didn't examine it. He just rode.
The address she'd texted led him to a stretch of A1A where the estates sat back from the road behind coral-stone walls and wrought-iron gates, the kind of neighborhood that smelled like money and new landscaping.
Her van was impossible to miss — the Pampered Paws logo bright against the white paint, parked at a crooked angle outside a gate that wasn't hers, pulled over the way someone pulls over when their hands are shaking too hard to drive straight.
Clutch killed the engine and swung off the bike. He could see her through the windshield — small, sun-streaked ponytail, both hands gripping the steering wheel like it was the only solid thing left in her world. She was staring straight ahead at nothing. Not crying. Not moving. Just holding on.
He walked to the passenger side and opened the door.
She flinched — hard, whole-body, the reaction of a woman who'd spent the last four hours waiting for the next bad thing.
Then she saw the cut, the Intimidators patch, and something in her face shifted.
Not relief exactly. Recognition. Like she'd placed a bet on a stranger and was about to find out if it paid.
Clutch folded himself into the passenger seat like he'd done it a hundred times, the van creaking under his weight, his knees jammed against the dash between a caddy of grooming shears and a box of dog treats.
The van smelled like lavender shampoo and fear and the sharp undercurrent of someone who'd been sitting in a closed vehicle in the Florida heat for too long.
He looked at her. Really looked.
She was smaller than he'd expected. Compact, with the kind of ropy forearm muscle that came from wrestling large animals into submission, and eyes that were red-rimmed but dry. She'd been crying earlier. She wasn't now. Her jaw was set in a line that dared him to comment on either fact.
"You're Clutch," she said. Not a question.
"Yeah."
"You're bigger than you sounded on the phone."
"Most people say that."
Something flickered across her face — not a smile, but the ghost of one, the reflex of a woman who used humor as armor and hadn't quite put it down even now. It lasted half a second before the weight came back and crushed it.
"I didn't steal anything," she said. "I need you to know that before I say anything else.
I have never taken a single thing from any client's home.
Not a pen, not a treat, not a dollar. I built this business on trust and someone is —" Her voice caught.
She swallowed it whole. "Someone is using it to destroy me. "
Clutch watched her fight for control and win, and the thing behind his ribs tightened another notch.
"Tell me," he said.