“You got five seconds to give me one reason I shouldn’t throw you out of here.”
That was the first thing the road captain of the Hells Angels chapter ever said to Skyla Hart.
She did not flinch.
She did not run.
She reached into the back pocket of her jeans, pulled out a crumpled napkin, and held it up with one hand.
Eighty bikers went completely silent.
She had not knocked.
That was the first thing anyone noticed.
Most people, even people who had legitimate business there, even men who had been coming to Garland’s Garage for twenty years, knocked.
Or they honked from the parking lot.
Or they called ahead and waited to be waved inside.
Nobody simply walked through the side door like they owned the place, stepped over a transmission housing lying on the concrete floor, looked around at more than thirty men covered in grease and engine smoke, and called out clearly over the grind of an impact wrench.
“Hey, who’s in charge around here?”
The impact wrench stopped.
Jimmy Rourke, the 62-year-old road captain for the chapter, looked up from the Harley Softail he had been leaning over.
Jimmy had been wrenching motorcycles since the bicentennial.
He had personally thrown four different people out of that garage during the previous calendar year.
He looked at the girl standing in the middle of the floor.
Then he looked at Devlin, who happened to be closest to her.
Devlin was staring at the girl as though she had materialized from thin air.
“What the heck is this?” Jimmy said, more to the universe than to anyone in particular.
She was young.
Young enough that Jimmy’s first instinct was to glance toward the door to see whether there was a parent somewhere behind her.
Eighteen, maybe nineteen.
Her blond hair was tied back in a ponytail that had mostly given up, loose strands falling around her face.
She wore worn canvas sneakers, jeans with a paint stain on the left knee, and a denim jacket roughly two sizes too large.
The jacket was the kind of faded denim that had probably been blue fifteen years earlier.
A backpack hung from one shoulder.
She looked around the garage the way someone looks around a room they are pricing.
Not afraid.
Not impressed.
Just measuring.
“I asked who’s in charge,” she said again, apparently deciding that thirty seconds of silence had not answered her question.
“I’m not trying to be rude. I just need to know who to talk to.”
Jimmy set down his socket wrench.
Then he straightened.
He was six feet two, with forearms like ship rope, and there was a reason grown men in that garage tended to create a little more distance when Jimmy Rourke stood to his full height.
The girl did not step back.
“You walked into a private garage,” Jimmy said. “So let’s start with that. You want to tell me how you found this place?”
“Word gets around.”
“Word?”
Jimmy repeated it as though deciding whether the word was amusing or about to become a problem.
“What word, specifically, got around?”
“That this is the chapter garage,” she said. “And that you’re the people to talk to if you want real work in this part of town.”
Somebody near the back, probably Rico or maybe Strand, let out a short laugh.
It was not quite mean.
It was not friendly either.
“Real work,” Jimmy repeated.
“I paint,” the girl said.
She shifted the backpack on her shoulder as though settling in.
“Custom work. Murals, gas tanks, fenders. I don’t use stencils. I don’t trace. I do it freehand, and I’m fast, and I’m good.”
She paused.
“I’ll work for tips until you decide whether you want to keep me on regularly.”
Another pause.
“My name is Sky. Skyla Hart.”
The garage remained quiet for about three seconds longer than was comfortable.
Then Jimmy laughed.
Not a polite laugh.
A deep, shoulder-moving laugh.
Once Jimmy started, three or four others joined him.
Within ten seconds, half the garage was laughing.
Not maliciously.
It was simply how men sometimes reacted when something surprised them enough that they had no immediate category for it.
Sky stood in the middle of the laughter and waited.
She did not smile.
She did not look embarrassed.
She did not look away.
She waited the same way a person waits for weather to pass.
When the laughter faded, Jimmy wiped one eye with the back of his hand.
“Kid,” he said, not unkindly, “you’ve got some stones walking in here and saying that.”
“I’m not a kid.”
“You’re what, eighteen?”
“Eighteen and four months.”
“I’ve been painting since I was nine,” Sky continued. “I’ve done work for shops in Raleigh and Greensboro. I’m not asking for charity. I’m asking for a shot.”
“We’ve got a guy,” Jimmy said. “We’ve got three guys. We don’t need a painter.”
“You’ve got guys who do tribal designs and flames,” Sky said. “I can see two of their pieces from here.”
She nodded toward the far wall, where two finished tanks were hanging.
“They’re decent.”
Jimmy’s eyebrows rose.
“They’re not exceptional.”
The room got quieter.
“I’m exceptional.”
The laughter disappeared completely.