The rider did not get off his bike in a hurry. He sat for a moment after the engine died, as if he were listening to the silence he had just made, and then he swung one heavy boot off the pegs and planted it on the gravel with a crunch that Leo heard clearly across the lot. He was a mountain of a man. That was Leo's first thought, and it stayed with him, because there was no better word for it. He was broad in the shoulders and tall in a way that made the diner door look smaller behind him. He wore heavy denim, jeans and a jacket that had seen many miles, and over it a leather vest that Leo recognised at once, even from a distance, because everyone in Fresno knew what that vest meant.
On the back of the vest, and on a patch at the front, was the unmistakable red and white winged death head. Leo had seen that symbol before, on television and on the backs of riders passing on the highway, and he had heard the stories that went with it, stories told in low voices by grown men at the trailer park who said the name Hells Angels as if it were a weather warning. A fully patched member of the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club. Leo said the words to himself, not aloud, and his mouth went dry. The man was not a picture. He was real, and he was standing twenty feet away, and his boots were planted in the same gravel where Leo had been searching for coins.
Leo did what any sensible ten-year-old would do. He stepped back, quietly, behind the rusted dumpster, and he made himself small. The dumpster smelled of old grease and sun-warmed metal, but its shadow was cool, and its bulk hid him from the lot. He crouched there, his knees up, his rag still folded in his back pocket, and he watched through the narrow gap between the dumpster and the diner's wall.
The giant man adjusted his dark sunglasses with one hand, a slow, practised movement, as if the glasses were part of his face and he was simply settling them back into place. He looked at the diner, at the lot, at the road, without seeming to look at anything in particular. Then he pushed his way through the diner's glass doors without looking back. The doors swung shut behind him with a soft sigh, and the bell above them gave a single tinny note. Inside, Leo could hear the murmur of voices rise a little, and then settle again, as the other customers noticed the new arrival and then pretended, very carefully, not to have noticed.
Leo stayed behind the dumpster for a long minute, breathing slowly, letting his heart slow down. He was supposed to be on his way home. He had promised his mother he would come straight back. He had searched for two hours and found nothing, and the sensible thing, the safe thing, was to walk the mile home now, empty-handed, and tell Diane the truth. But his eyes kept going back to the motorcycle.
It stood alone in the lot now, in the full sun, and it was a terrifyingly beautiful piece of engineering. Leo had never used the word engineering in his life, but he understood what it meant when he looked at that bike: every part fitted, every line meant, every piece of chrome in its place. The black paint caught the light and threw it back in deep, dark waves. The tyres were thick and clean. The seat was leather, worn in the middle where a rider sat, but cared for, not cracked. It was a machine that someone loved, the way his mother loved the chipped mug she drank from every morning, not because it was perfect, but because it was hers and she had kept it.
But after miles of highway riding, a thick layer of pale gritty dust coated the front fender and the shining chrome primary cover. Leo could see it from where he crouched: a fine, pale film, like the dust that settled on the trailer's windowsills in a windstorm, dulling the shine underneath. The dust was worst on the fender, where the road had thrown it up, and on the primary cover, where it clung in a soft grey veil. The exhaust pipes, which had glinted so blindingly when the bike rolled in, were dusty too, lower down, where the heat and the road had done their work.
Leo's hands itched. He did not know why, exactly, except that he had spent his whole summer wiping things clean: his mother's forehead, the trailer's small table, the diner's windows when Marty let him, his own sneakers when he wanted them to look less worn. Cleaning was something he knew how to do. Cleaning was honest work. And here was a beautiful thing, dusty from the highway, standing in the sun, waiting, in a way, for someone to care for it.
He thought about the rule he had grown up with, the rule every boy in his neighbourhood knew without being taught in words. You did not touch another man's vehicle. You did not lean on it. You did not open its doors. You certainly did not touch the prized possession of an outlaw biker, a man with a winged death head on his vest and a beard like a storm cloud and boots that crushed gravel. To touch that bike was to ask for trouble, and Leo had enough trouble already. His mother was sick. His pantry was empty. His lights would go off on Friday. Trouble was the last thing he needed.