Page 12 of Hard Check
Justin, who hadn’t noticed any tension or didn’t care, clapped a hand on the roll cage. “Wait till you hear it run. Thirty-two hundred horsepower. Your eardrums will file a restraining order.”
“Thirty-two hundred…” Leo said it like he was trying to fit the number into something he understood. “I don’t even know what that means.”
“It means loud,” Dawson said.
He reached for a shop rag and wiped his fingers. His shoulders had tightened to the point he was getting a headache. He rolled his neck from side to side and kept working.
Leo had moved closer to the rig, hands in his pockets, and Dawson caught something in the air that didn’t belong out here—clean, deliberate, warm underneath. Not cologne, exactly. Whatever it was, it cut through the diesel and the dirt like it had been designed to.
“So you’re—racing? Competing?” Leo glanced at the track. “What do you call it?”
“Pulling,” Justin said. “And yeah, evening pull. Modified class. If Dawson’s done fixing my shit by then.”
“It’d go faster if you weren’t busting my chops.” Dawson stood, and the movement brought him inside arm’s reach of Leo. Close enough to catch the smell of expensive cologne. He stepped back toward Justin’s toolbox to keep from leaning in to get a better sniff.
Leo had leaned in toward the engine compartment, studying the part Dawson had just replaced. He didn’t ask what it was. Instead, he looked at Dawson and said, “How do you know what’s wrong? With all this going on in there, how do you look at it and know where the problem is?”
Nobody asked Dawson that. No one really wanted to knowhowhe knew so quickly, only what it was going to cost and how long it’d take.
“Experience,” he said. “You listen to the engine. Feel how the parts move. When something’s not right, it stands out if you’re paying attention. I guess you could say it’s instinct.”
Leo was quiet for a second. “That’s like hockey.”
“We have to be able to read the plays,” Leo explained. “Before it happens. You feel where the puck’s going to be, not where it is. It’s not something you can teach someone—you either see it or you don’t.” He paused. “Or you learn to see it, I guess. After enough years.”
Dawson hadn’t expected that. A connection drawn between his hands on an engine and Leo’s instincts on the ice. Leo wasn’t looking at him for a reaction. He was staring at the track, half-squinting against the sun, still working through the thought.
“Yeah,” Dawson said. “Something like that.”
Justin, who’d been watching this exchange with his head moving back and forth like he was at a tennis match, pointed at Leo.
“I like this guy.” He dug into the back pocket of his jeans and pulled out a lanyard with a laminated pass. “Here. Staging lane pass. You can watch the pull from right behind the line—way better than the grandstand.”
Dawson stared at him. Justin only had two staging passes. One for Dawson, one for himself. He’d just given Leo his. It would serve Justin right if the officials gave him shit about being in the staging area without it. Driver or not, they checked everyone.
“You sure?” Leo took the lanyard.
“Wouldn’t offer if I wasn’t.” Justin clapped him on the shoulder. “Dawson’ll show you where to stand. Right, Dawson?”
Dawson was going to kill him. Slowly. With the scored pivot pin.
“Yeah,” he said. “Fine.”
Justin winked at Dawson and headed for his helmet.
Dawson ledLeo to the spot behind the starting mark, where the crews stood during pulls. Close enough to feel the heat off the exhaust.
“You’re going to want earplugs,” Dawson said.
Leo patted his pockets. Pulled out the foam plugs Ski had given him earlier, now lint-covered and slightly crushed. He held them up.
“Those’ll work.” Dawson pulled his own pair from his back pocket and rolled them in. “When he launches, make sure you’re out of the way. Dirt goes everywhere.”
“Got it. Earplugs in, stay out of the way. Anything else?”
“Yeah. It’s loud.”
“You keep saying that.”
