You Fired the Backbone of Detroit novel · Chapter 19 of 24

Chapter 19: Midnight Lap

The test track outside Brooklyn was a two-mile oval with a long straight, and at midnight on Christmas Eve we had it to ourselves.

I had sent the crew home to their kids at six, over Marty's loud objections.

Floodlights hummed over the pit lane, and frost glittered on the asphalt in the white light.

The Nine sat in the lane with its engine ticking, low and wide and black.

Cleo stood beside the passenger door in her coat with her arms wrapped around herself.

"You said ride with you," she said.

"I did."

"I thought you meant a walk."

"It's a two-seater."

I opened the door for her, and she folded into the carbon seat, and I buckled the harness across her chest myself.

She watched my hands do it.

I got in on the other side, and I started the engine, and the whole car woke up around us.

"Hold on to something," I said.

"What?"

"Anything."

I pulled out of the pit lane and took the first turn at a hundred.

By the back stretch she had stopped holding her breath.

The straight opened up ahead, black and endless between two lines of white light.

I put my foot down.

The Anvil came up through the floor into my spine, a deep wall of noise.

The car went flat and fast and quiet in the middle of all that sound.

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