Chapter 35: Thirty five

Colt stayed in the garage for three hours.

Not because anyone asked him to. Because the circuit map was on the workbench and the outside apex option was annotated in three different pencil weights and he was a rider who had spent eleven days on Stone's circuit running the wrong line and he needed to understand why.

Hitch pulled up a stool without being asked and the three of us worked through the chicane complex with the specific focused energy of people who had temporarily set aside everything outside the problem in front of them. Dax stayed at the far workbench present, watching, saying nothing.

Tank stood at the garage entrance the entire time.

At four o'clock Rivera arrived.

She came through the compound gate in the grey sedan with Carrow and stood in the garage doorway looking at the scene Colt, Hitch, the circuit map, the pencil annotations with the expression of a woman recalibrating an operational picture that had just changed shape significantly.

She looked at Dax. Dax gave her the minimal nod that meant it's what it looks like and it's genuine.

Rivera pulled a chair to the workbench.

"Mr. Kane," she said. "I'm going to need several hours of your time."

Colt looked up from the map. "I know." He looked at me briefly. "After this."

Rivera looked at the map. At the outside apex option. At the pencil annotations in my handwriting covering three weeks of preparation.

"After this," she agreed.

She sat back and waited and Hitch walked Colt through the outside apex entry for the fourth time and I watched Colt's hands move across the map the way a rider's hands moved when they were translating circuit geometry into physical memory tracing the line, feeling the arc, building the approach in the body before the body had done it.

He was fast in his processing. Faster than I'd expected.

At six o'clock he sat back and looked at the map for a long moment.

"I've been running the middle apex for eleven days," he said.

"I know," I said.

"The entry speed differential is significant." He looked at me. "You've been running the outside option since when."

"First night on Stone's circuit," I said. "Day one."

He absorbed that. "And you ran the middle apex for Cole's camera."

"Eight laps of theater," I said. "Four laps of the real approach to maintain my own calibration."

Colt looked at the map one more time. Then he looked at me with an expression that was complicated enough that I couldn't fully read it respect maybe, or the specific feeling of a professional encountering something they've underestimated.

"Your father taught you that," he said.

The garage went quiet.

"Taught me what," I said carefully.

"To look for the line nobody else has found." He looked at the map. "There's always one. On every circuit, in every technical section one line that's faster than the established approach because the established approach became established before someone looked hard enough." He paused. "My father told me once that the difference between a good rider and a great one was whether they trusted their own eyes over everyone else's history."

He said my father the way people said things they'd been carrying for a long time and were setting down carefully.

"Kane told you that," I said.

"He told me a lot of things that were true," Colt said. "That was one of them." He stood and pushed the stool back. "The rest I'm going to tell Rivera."

He looked at me one more time.

"The outside apex," he said. "Entry speed?"

I told him.

He nodded once, the way riders nodded when they'd committed something to the internal database they ran their racing from.

Then he walked to Rivera's chair and sat down and started talking.

I covered the Ducati and left the garage to give them the room they needed.

Dax was in the yard.

She was standing near the main house door with her coffee and the particular stillness that meant she was processing something large and giving it the space it required. I stood beside her and looked at the compound the bikes in the shed, the lights coming on in the bunkroom windows as the evening settled, the ordinary texture of a place that was becoming something different from what it had been.

"He's going to testify," I said.

"Yes."

"That's Kane's son testifying against Kane's organization." I paused. "Rivera didn't plan for that."

"Rivera plans for outcomes," Dax said. "Not routes." She sipped her coffee. "Colt coming here today wasn't something anyone constructed. That was his choice."

"Same as your choice to go to Dutch's testimony," I said.

She looked at me sideways. "Rivera confirmed you can attend," she said. "Chen Wei's son has standing in proceedings related to the destruction of his father's business. Her words." A pause. "We go together. Two weeks from Thursday."

I looked at the compound lights coming on in sequence as the evening moved through the buildings.

"Dax," I said. "When the final is over and the arrests are processed and Rivera closes the case what does this compound become."

She was quiet for a moment. "Something honest," she said. "Whatever that looks like." She looked at the Iron Wolves logo above the garage door. "Stone wants a formal alliance. Mutual protection, shared circuit access, coordinated territory management. Clean arrangement, documented, nothing under the table." She paused. "Gravel thinks we should open the compound garage for public mechanical services. Community presence."

"Hitch would run it well," I said.

"That's what Gravel said." She looked at me. "And Chen's Garage opens when."

"After the final," I said. "Same answer as everything."

She nodded. Inside the garage Rivera's voice was a low continuous thread questions, follow-up, the systematic architecture of someone building testimony that would hold under cross-examination.

Colt's voice answering. Steady, detailed, the voice of someone who had been waiting for the right room to say things in.

My phone buzzed. Murphy.

I almost let it go to message and then answered because Murphy didn't call at evening hours without a reason.

"Someone came to the garage today," Murphy said. His voice had the careful quality it got when he was delivering information he thought I needed but didn't want to alarm me with. "After hours. Knocked on the back door."

I stood straighter. "Who."

"Didn't give a name. Young, dark jacket, said he had information about the championship final that he'd only give to you directly." Murphy paused. "I told him I didn't know how to reach you. He said he'd come back tomorrow at noon."

"Murphy," I said. "Did he say anything else."

"One thing." A pause. "He said to tell you Voss sends his regards."

The compound yard was very quiet around me.

Voss. Dutch's loyalist, Kane's second registered rider, the man who had voted against my ratification and walked out of this compound three weeks ago and gone straight to the Death Dealers.

Sending his regards through Murphy's back door after hours.

"Murphy," I said. "Lock up. Don't open for anyone tonight. Gravel is there tell him I called."

I ended the call and looked at Dax.

She read my face before I said anything. "What."

"Voss made contact," I said. "Through Murphy. Wants to meet me tomorrow at noon."

Dax set her coffee down very carefully on the step beside her.

"Voss is Kane's registered rider," she said. "He has no reason to make private contact with you unless "

"Unless Kane doesn't know about it," I said.

We looked at each other in the compound's evening light with Rivera's voice threading through the garage wall behind us and the circuit map still spread on the workbench inside and three weeks left until the final.

"Rivera," Dax said.

"Rivera," I confirmed.

She was already moving toward the garage.