Ticking Beneath the Chrome

Cole Mercer saw the yellow sundress cut through blue exhaust before he heard the girl scream. Dusty canvas sneakers slapped the blacktop, arms waving hard toward the row of twelve idling engines.

“Don’t turn them!”

Cole lifted two gloved fingers into the morning heat.

One by one, the throttles died. Twelve engines dropped into silence, leaving only hot chrome ticking against the sun. Boone rested a hand on his throttle, eyes narrowed at the road.

The girl skidded to a stop five feet from Cole’s front tire. She bent over her knees, small chest heaving for air under thin yellow cotton. A sweat-stained bootlace hung around her neck, tucked beneath her collar.

“Talk,” Cole said.

“Men,” she gasped, wiping dust from her upper lip. “Under your bikes. Last night.”

Boone snorted, his heavy utility lighter snapping open and shut. “Kid, if this is a prank—”

“Hold,” Cole said.

He swung his boot over his Harley and knelt on the cracked asphalt. Heat radiated through the knees of his denim. He reached under the crankcase of the machine to his left, fingers tracing the tubular frame.

His knuckles hit cold resin.

Cole pulled. A neodymium magnet released with a dull pop. The pod was matte black, the footprint of a playing card, with a lithium cell and an insulated lead spliced toward the ignition harness. A tiny radio-frequency receiver gleamed behind a plastic seal.

Boone swore under his breath.

Cole moved down the line on his shins. He crawled through grit and oil stains, hands sliding beneath each motorcycle. Second bike, pod. Third bike, pod. Fourth, fifth, sixth.

By the ninth machine, the younger riders stepped back from their handlebars, hands off the grips.

Cole crawled beneath the eleventh bike, peeled away the eleventh black box, and dropped it into the gravel. Then he slid under his own Harley, the lead machine at the front of the line.

His fingers found only bare painted steel.

No pod. No magnet. No splice. His undercarriage sat clean as a fresh weld.

Cole pushed himself upright, dust coating his forearms. He counted the black boxes resting in the gravel: eleven.

“Why’d they skip yours?” Boone asked.

Cole did not answer. He had scheduled a maintenance delay to sign parcel tax forms while the pack rode north. Eleven dead ignitions forty miles out in the canyon would have left the clubhouse empty.

He turned to the girl. Her sneakers were worn thin at the toes, and her fingers rolled a metal shape hidden under her collar.

“What’s your name?” Cole asked.

“Emily,” she said. “Emily Reed.”

The lot went quiet again, colder this time.

Boone stopped the flick of his lighter. “Daniel’s girl?”

Emily gave a sharp nod. “He was my dad.”

Cole looked at the child’s chin, the stubborn set of her jaw that mirrored a face buried six years in county dirt. A missed phone call from an August afternoon flared in his memory, unreturned and permanent.

“Where were you when you saw them?” Cole asked.

“Behind the kitchen dumpster,” she said, her voice dropping. “My dog barked at the wire fence. Two men in a dark truck. They had no lights on. They slid under the pipes like snakes.”

“Did you see a mark on the truck?”

“A white bird on the door,” Emily said. “Faded out.”

Boone stepped forward. “White Falcon Protective. Curtis Vale’s old muscle.”

Cole stood tall. The morning sun glared off State Route 18, where heat shivered above the blacktop toward the northern bluffs. If those boxes had pulsed at speed, eleven men would have spilled into the ditch.

“Boone. Call Sheriff Ortiz.”

Before Boone could pull his phone, tires churned gravel at the road entrance. A blue county cruiser rolled past the diner sign, followed close by a station wagon driven with both hands white on the wheel.