Chapter One
Danica Dyers leaned beneath the hood of the 1969 Plymouth Roadrunner, tightening down the terminal cables of the battery. It was the last step for the custom build. They’d been chasing electrical problems for hours, the engine being stubborn and not turning over, but Danica was confident they’d found the problem. Sometimes, the cars just needed to feel like they had a say in what happened next, but a skilled mechanic always soothed the rumble.
“Try that,” Danica said, leaning back and wiping her hands on the red towel hanging from her pocket. Grease stained her fingers just as it stained her jeans and tank top, but it was part of the job. The life of a mechanic was spent smelling like oil and scrubbing grease and grime from beneath fingernails, but it was also one of the most rewarding jobs, especially since Danica had made such a name for herself.
Leo, her lead mechanic, turned the key of the machine, and they both grinned when the engine rolled over and began to purr with the smoothness that was expected. The shop filled with the rumble and the other mechanics in the shop cheered, as was customary when a new engine came to life for the first time.
Danica grinned and patted the car’s quarter panel. “Good girl.”
“Damn, Danica,” Leo said, stepping from the car and closing the door. They’d let the Roadrunner idle for a few minutes and then go through testing the smaller things. It would go fast now that the engine was running smoothly, no hiccups in the purr. “I don’t know how you do it. You built this engine in less than two days.”
“You helped,” she pointed out, winking at him.
Leo snorted and shook his head. “I handed you the tools and parts you asked for. Sometimes, I think my certifications are useless here when you’re so capable.”
“I hired you for those certifications and your skill, Leo. Never doubt yourself.”
Danica chucked him under the chin like a kid, even though he was only a few years younger than her twenty-nine years. She couldn’t help it. She’d known Leo since they were kids, had looked at him like a brother more than anything else. As kids, they’d both spent days in the garage with her father, watching as he worked on his race cars. At some point, they’d both began to learn from him, until they’d both known their way around an engine with their eyes closed. It had been a no brainer when Danica had gone off to trade school, and a few years later, Leo followed. Danica had been proud when Leo walked across that stage and had offered him a job right away in the shop she’d built from the ground up. As it turned out, business was good for the daughter of Daniel Dyers, and it got better when they realized she had the same skills as her father. Once, she’d been in the driver’s seat, but since then, she’d hung up her race helmet and taken on the mantle of mechanic, instead. As one of the premier racing and custom mechanic shops in Indiana and with a steady stream of customers coming in the door, she was able to pay Leo and her other mechanics the salaries they’d earned. She pushed to make more every day, to reach higher, to make her father’s memory proud, even if he would have been disappointed to know she’d given up racing.
Danica picked up her tools and tucked them away into the large rolling tool box at the side, making sure each piece was in the correct place. She was meticulous about her tools, and the shop knew it. If anyone borrowed her tools and it wasn’t put back, she raised hell. If the tools weren’t where they were supposed to be when she needed them, then what good was it to have tools at all?
Going over to the sink, she began to wash her hands with the orange soap that got most of the grease off. She’d have to use a nail brush later to remove the grime from beneath her nails, but she just needed to be somewhat presentable. It was already six in the evening, and it was Wednesday. She had somewhere to be.
“I’m going to head on over to the orphanage, Leo. Would you let Dolly know she can call Mr. Link and inform him his Roadrunner is ready for pick up?”
“One of these days, that man will stop making bets with you,” Leo teased, shaking his head.
Mr. Link was a long-time customer of the shop, had been coming around since it opened. He’d known her father and was close friends with him when he was alive, so it made sense that he would jump at the chance to come to the shop. Mr. Link had been her first custom build, a 1967 Chevy Impala. They’d modified it, adding nearly three hundred more horses under the hood, until the beautiful purple car had practically growled. Since then, Mr. Link had brought car after car to be built, until one day, the bet had come about. Danica would have a week to get the car done, to put in a new engine, and for every day she finished early, he would add five hundred dollars to his invoice as a sort of tip. She’d finished five days early on this one.
Danica grinned. “It’s a game at this point. We’ve had the same bet on the last three cars he’s dropped in. He ends up paying extra every time and says one day, he’ll figure out how my superpowers work. Still, he keeps making the bet.”
Laughing, Leo wiped his hands on a rag and nodded his head. “I’ll let Dolly know and take care to close up shop. I still have work to do, or I’d go with you. You go on now and tell the kids I said hello. I’ll be up there tomorrow to take the boys fishing.”
“Don’t forget you promised you’d bring candy,” Danica warned, knowing Leo would never forget.
“Oh, how could I? They’d murder me if I forgot the candy. I can’t show up empty-handed.” Leo grinned, but as Danica pulled the hair tie from her hair and shook it out before she began to scrap it back into some semblance of order, his smile softened. “You know he’d be proud, right?”
Danica paused and met Leo’s eyes, but she wasn’t really seeing.
The squeal of breaks. The sounds metal made as it’s ripped to pieces. Flames and screaming, screaming, screaming. . .
She blinked her eyes and the image disappeared, letting her focus on Leo again.
“Yeah.”
“You should fix up his car—”
“I gotta go,” Danica interrupted him, turning from the knowing eyes of her friend and heading toward the exit. “Don’t forget to tell Dolly. See you later!”
But Leo knew she was running from the past and the heaviness that came with memories of her father. She wasn’t going to be driving the car, couldn’t, not yet.
Probably not ever if she couldn’t even look at it without seeing the flames that had once engulfed it.