You Fired the Backbone of Detroit novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Rainey Motor Works

Nick sketches the supercar he has drawn for ten years on a glass wall and takes a ninety-day bet; the owner's nephew gives him a dead paint booth.

Rainey Motor Works sat behind a chain-link fence in Warren, and the sign out front was missing its second R.

I parked my truck beside a row of unsold pickups with dust on the windshields.

It was ten to seven on Monday morning.

The woman from the gate was waiting inside the glass door with two paper cups of coffee.

"You came," Cleo Rainey said.

"I had nowhere else to be."

"That's the best reason there is."

She handed me a cup and led me up a flight of metal stairs into an office with one whole wall made of glass.

An old man sat behind a desk covered in stacked folders, with reading glasses hanging from a cord around his neck.

He was heavy and white-haired, and he stood up slowly.

"Clifford Rainey," he said, and shook my hand with a grip that surprised me. "My daughter says you're the best chassis man in Michigan."

"She's never seen me work."

"She's seen your drawings. I'd like to see what's in your head."

He pointed at the glass wall.

Cleo set a grease pencil in my hand.

"Garland has my notebook," I said.

"Then draw it again," Cleo said.

I looked at the empty glass for a long second.

Then I started with the wheelbase, because everything starts with the wheelbase.

I drew the long nose, the low roof and the engine sitting behind the seats where the weight belonged.

I drew the carbon tub and the pushrod suspension, the wide rear tires and the little vents behind the doors.

The pencil squeaked on the glass, and nobody talked.

Ten years of drawings came out of my hand.

When I finished, I stepped back and wiped my hand on my jeans.

"Two seats," I said. "Seven hundred horsepower. Two hundred miles an hour, and it doesn't try to kill you at ninety."

"What's it called?" Clifford asked.

"The Nine. It's the ninth drawing."

"What happened to the first eight?"

"They killed people."

Clifford laughed once, a short surprised bark, and rubbed his chest.

"I've wanted to see that car for years," Cleo said quietly.

"I saw your toolbox at the engineering fair in 2021, with the ninth drawing taped inside the lid."

"You remember that?"

"I remember everything about it."

I didn't know where to look, so I looked at the car on the glass.

The door banged open behind us.

A man in a gray quarter-zip pullover walked in with a protein shake in his hand.

He had gelled brown hair and a gym tan in October, and he touched his watch when he saw me.

"Dwayne," Clifford said. "Our new chief of the project."

"Nobody told me we had a project."

"I'm telling you now."

Dwayne Rainey looked at the glass wall for about two seconds.

"That's a Garland reject," he said. "I've heard about this thing. It never made it past the first board review."

"It made it to ninth," I said.

"And then it died."

"Then they fired the man who kept it alive."

Dwayne smiled without any humor in it.

"Uncle Cliff, Rainey has eleven weeks of cash."

"We build trucks. You want to spend it on a toy for a guy who just got walked out of his last job?"

Clifford didn't answer him.

He walked to the glass and stood in front of my drawing with his hands behind his back.

"Detroit used to build the fastest cars in the world," he said. "Now we build cup holders."

He turned around.

"Here is my offer, Mr. Danner. Ninety days from today is the January auto show."

"The fourteenth," Cleo said.

"If a running Nine rolls onto that show floor, you're chief engineer and you own five percent of this company."

"And if it doesn't?"

"Then you walk out with nothing, and so do I."

"I'll take it," I said.

"You haven't asked about the money."

"I'll ask when I see the car."

Cleo laughed behind me, and it was the first time I'd heard it, low and a little rough.

Clifford held out a pen, and I signed the page without reading the second paragraph.

"I'll show you your workspace," Dwayne said, still holding the shake.

He took me down the stairs and across the lot to a low gray building by the dumpsters.

It was an old paint-booth annex with a cracked concrete floor, a broken roll-up door and a smell of old solvent.

A rusted lift stood in the corner with a pigeon sitting on it.

"Space heater's in the closet," Dwayne said. "Budget's whatever you find in the couch."

"This is it?"

"This is your department."

He tapped his watch.

"Eighty-nine days, Danner."

He walked off whistling.

I stood in the doorway of my department and the pigeon looked at me.

"Okay," I told it. "Let's go to work."

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