1 #2
Ricky stepped out first. Square jaw, mirrored shades. Handsome in that way that makes you dislike someone at first glance. He didn’t shake my hand.
“This the legend?” he asked.
“Faster than you,” Cole said, already walking past him.
“Bullshit.”
The words sat there, heavy.
Then came Emily.
She moved quiet, calm. Wore her gear like it was part of her. Her eyes—dark, unreadable—found mine without blinking.
“He has to qualify.” Ricky said coldly. “Everyone does.”
Cole sped off down the runway and dropped a small plastic cone at one end, then circled back and dropped another in front of the trailer.
“You want in?” he said, motor idled down but still humming. “Let’s see it. Pick a bike . . .”
He pointed at the two parked near the trailer.
I knew enough to know they were both 1,000 cc motors.
Liter bikes. Bigger than any bike I’d ever ridden.
Superbikes through and through—first gear on either of them will get you past 90 mph.
Not mine. No warm-up. No prep. Just a stopwatch in his hand and Ricky already grinning, ready to watch a crash.
“Cole, I’ve never ridden a bike like—”
“Straight shot, loop the end, run it back. I clocked it just under twenty-eight seconds. You hit that, you’re in.”
“And if I don’t?”
He killed his bike and got off. “Then you’re gonna die in that garage.” Moving a little closer, a courtesy to be out of earshot from the others. “Just like Dad.”
I mounted the Yamaha. Gloves tight. Teeth clenched tighter.
The others stepped back.
The bike screamed to life, sharp and angry. I rolled slow to the start, looked at the road ahead. It was chipped and twitchy in spots—just enough to shake you loose if you weren’t locked in.
My shoulder throbbed. My ribs too. Old injuries that reminded me every day how I should already be dead.
You can’t ride like you used to.
I dropped the visor. Tapped it twice.
Throttle. Gearshift. Gearshift. Go.
Pistons churning at an unimaginable rate. The road blurred. Reality, a mirage. The old familiar feeling of wind resistance begging me to slow down. Gearshift. Hit the halfway cone, banked the loop tight, burning rubber out of the turn, as I leaned hard—too hard. Gearshift.
I felt the rear slide, catch, snap.
Almost.
I didn’t let go. My gut tightened as I felt my front wheel lift off the ground from acceleration.
I corrected. Tucked. And by the time I hit the middle of the straightaway the second time, I forgot how to breathe. Not because I was scared. Because I didn’t want it to end.
Finished clean.
The engine ticked down. My heart didn’t.
Cole didn’t smile. He just looked at the stopwatch, then at me.
“Twenty-six five.”
Ricky scoffed. “Barely. He almost dumped it at the turn.”
“But he didn’t,” Emily said. “That’s where he shaved off the time.”
I looked at her. It was the first time she looked back like she meant it.
That night we stayed in a broken motel that smelled like warm Fabuloso.
Cole was distant after my ride. Spent a lot of time on the phone.
Ricky’s girlfriend, Sónia, met us there with a twelve-pack of Lone Stars.
She was easily the most likable out of any of us.
A team mom of sorts. How she got involved in all this was hard to believe, but I guess love will make a girl do crazy things.
“Did he pass?!” she shouted affectionately with a thick but adorable Portuguese accent, before burying herself in Ricky’s arm.
“Sónia! Put—her—there,” she said, struggling to pronounce her h’s and th’s, extending a handshake toward me, before turning to Ricky with a smile. “This is how you say this, no?”
“Billy.”
“Your brother, Cole, he say you were a racer! He say you were the fastest in all the land. And he say—”
“Okay, okay.” Ricky cut her off, smothering Sónia in his arms, pulling her into their room.
“It is nice to meet you!” Sónia waved before their door closing ended the conversation.
Emily sat alone on the balcony, hair in a ponytail fresh from the pool, confident in her Kmart bikini, watching the still darkness above the parking lot like she expected it to answer her.
I stopped next to her. She had a magnetism to her.
Out of everyone there, she was who I wanted to be friends with most, but also who I was most intimidated by.
I didn’t know what to say.
So she spoke first.
“You cut the throttle in the loop. You were scared.”
“Everyone’s scared.”
“No. Just the ones that wanna live.” A beat. “Why’d you pick my bike?”
“Yours was the R1?”
She didn’t answer.
“Stacked gearbox, better center of gravity. Zero to one hundred miles in under six seconds. I knew the controls already from a magazine.”
“You’d never ridden an R1 before?”
I shook my head honestly.
“You read about it in a magazine . . .” She took a long pull of her cigarette, pretending to be unimpressed as she exhaled, flicking ash. “Well, I’ll be goddamned . . .”
Inside the motel room, Cole sat on the bed across from mine, peeling the label off a beer bottle.
“You’re in now.”
“You ever gonna tell me what the job is?”
“You’ll see. First one’s not far from here. Low profile. But fast.”
“So . . . You do knock over banks . . . Right?”
He looked at me. Quiet. Not surprised.
“Well, we’re not delivering pizzas . . .”
Neither of us laughed. Just sized each other up.
“We only hit towns without police helicopters. That’s the rule.
Everyone else can’t catch us. Multiple escape routes already mapped.
We have a plan A. We have a plan B. We have a plan C.
We go in heavily armed only because a little fear prevents conflicts.
The more submissive the bystanders are, the safer things are.
Absolutely no casualties. Nobody here is a killer.
” He paused for a moment, as I took it all in.
“Fuck these banks. They’re insured. We’re not stealing people’s money, we’re stealing the banks’ money. They never give people like us loans. Not from families like we’re from. So fuck ’em. We go in. Bank employees these days, they tell them to just hand over the money. We go out. We ride off.”
I lay in bed later, staring at the ceiling fan clicking above me like it might fly off at any second.
I had the answer now. No smash-and-grabs. Precision work. Tacticians on wheels.
“I wish I could give you more, Billy. All I can give you is a chance” was the last thing Cole said to me that night.
I was in.
Even if I wasn’t ready. Even if I didn’t want to be.
I couldn’t slow down.