PART 3 — THE SECOND HARLEY
The police sealed the garage.
Nobody was allowed to touch the motorcycles.
Nobody except me.
I was asked to identify every bike that had received one of the six brackets.
I checked the work orders.
Hammer.
Eli.
And two others.
I stopped breathing.
“What’s wrong?” Hammer asked.
I looked at the second work order.
“There’s another motorcycle.”
“Whose?”
I didn’t answer.
Because the rider was already standing ten feet away.
His name was Marcus Reed.
He had been an Iron Lantern for eleven years.
Quiet.
Reliable.
The kind of man nobody noticed until something went wrong.
Marcus looked at the paper in my hand.
“You said mine was fine.”
“I said it passed inspection.”
His face tightened.
“Same thing.”
“No.”
I walked toward his motorcycle.
“It’s not.”
I crouched beside the rear wheel.
The bracket was covered in road grime.
At first, I saw nothing.
Then I remembered Noah’s flashlight.
“Give me the light.”
He handed it to me.
I angled it across the metal.
A thin shadow appeared.
Exactly where it shouldn’t.
Marcus stepped backward.
Hammer grabbed his shoulder.
“Don’t move.”
Marcus looked confused.
“What?”
I touched the crack with the tip of my screwdriver.
A tiny metallic click sounded.
The same click.
The same failure.
The parking lot went silent again.
Marcus stared at the bracket.
“When were you going to ride?”
He swallowed.
“After lunch.”
“Where?”
“I-40.”
Nobody said anything.
Noah closed his eyes.
For two years, he had believed his father died because nobody listened.
Now everyone was listening.
The police removed Marcus’s motorcycle from the lineup.
Then they found something else.
The bracket on Marcus’s bike wasn’t from the original shipment.
The casting mark was identical.
But the serial number had been filed away.
Someone had deliberately removed it.
The officer looked at me.
“Could you have done that?”
I stared at him.
“Yes.”
That answer shocked everyone.
I didn’t look away.
“I could have.”
Hammer stepped forward.
“You saying you did?”
“No.”
I pointed at the workbench.
“I’m saying whoever did this knew how I work.”
The officer frowned.
“How?”
“They knew where I stored parts.”
“They knew which bikes I inspected.”
“They knew which defects I’d overlook.”
And then I looked at Noah.
“They knew about Eli.”
The boy’s face went pale.
I opened the old work-order archive.
There was one document I hadn’t checked.
Eli’s original inspection sheet.
I pulled it up.
The signature at the bottom was mine.
But the handwriting wasn’t.
Someone had forged my name.
Hammer leaned over my shoulder.
“Wire…”
I stared at the signature.
For eighteen years, I’d signed thousands of work orders.
I knew my own handwriting.
That wasn’t it.
Then I noticed the date.
The inspection had supposedly happened two days before Eli’s crash.
But I had been out of state that entire week.
I looked at Noah.
His father’s death hadn’t been caused by a mechanic’s mistake.
Someone had used my name to make it look like one.
And now the same person had placed another cracked bracket on Hammer’s motorcycle.
Then Marcus’s.
Three bikes.
Three riders.
One dead.
Two nearly dead.
And somewhere outside that parking lot, two more brackets were still missing.
The police officer’s radio suddenly crackled.
“Unit three, we have a problem.”
Everyone turned.
“What kind of problem?”
A pause.
Then:
“We just found another motorcycle on the shoulder of I-40.”
Hammer’s face went blank.
“Whose?”
The officer listened.
Then looked directly at me.
“It’s registered to an Iron Lantern.”
And before anyone could ask who, Noah whispered:
“My dad knew him.”