"I'll need the room to myself." Another murmur through the crowd. Joker glanced at the men around him calculating something. "Done," he said.
"The room's yours, but there's a camera on the door. If anything happens to the bike—"
"Nothing's going to happen to the bike," Ethan said. "Except that I'm going to fix it." He turned back to the Harley and the men filed out of the room. He worked through the first night without stopping.
Not frantically, methodically. He moved around the bike the way he'd learned to move around engines since he was 12 years old working in whatever shop would let him through the back door doing jobs for food and floor space to sleep on instead of money. He'd learned from people who had no patience for formal education, road mechanics, backyard engineers, old men with lifetimes of knowledge they'd never written down because the only way to pass it on was hand-to-hand, eye-to-eye, the right question asked at the right moment. He worked without diagnostic computers.
He didn't have any. What he had was a particular quality of listening that had gotten him into trouble all his life. The ability to hear things other people filtered out, to locate information in sound and vibration and the behavior of metal under stress that most people never even thought to look for. Teachers had called it inability to focus.
Shop owners had called it a waste of time. He called it the only talent he had ever been sure he possessed. By 3:00 in the morning, he had removed and cataloged every accessible component in the engine housing. Each piece was laid out on a cloth on the floor in the order it had been removed labeled in Ethan's cramped handwriting on pieces of masking tape.
The room looked like the inside of a watchmaker's dream. And then he found the first hidden marking. It was on the inside surface of the primary engine casing, a surface that required full disassembly to access, a surface that no diagnostic tool would ever reach, and no visual inspection would ever reveal. Scratched into the metal.
Not stamped, scratched by hand with something sharp and deliberate. The letters VR. Ethan sat back on his heels and stared at those two letters for a very long time. VR, Victor Ryder.
He knew that name. He had known that name his entire life, the way you know the name of a wound. Not because you chose to learn it, but because it had been given to you before you were old enough to refuse it. His father's name.
His father who had walked away from a woman and a two-month-old child in a Phoenix apartment 19 years ago and never come back. His father who existed in Ethan's life as nothing more than an old photograph his mother had kept in a shoe box and a first name that Ethan had carried like a stone in his chest for every single one of his 19 years. Victor Ryder. VR.
Scratched into the inside of a $2.5 million Harley-Davidson engine casing in a Hells Angels compound in the Nevada desert. Ethan's hands were shaking. He pressed them flat against his thighs and focused on breathing. In and out, slow and steady.