Vance Troughburn's Arc

Chapter 1 of 3

Vance Troughburn stood in his shop bay at four in the morning and listened to his engine die. The coupe ticked on the lift, oil weeping from a cracked pan, a rod knocking like a man at a locked door. He wore the tuxedo he always drove in. The bow tie hung loose around his collar. He had pushed the car through the Troughburn route three nights running, chasing a record no wheelman had ever set, and tonight the car had finally told him the truth. It would not survive Cutter's Bend a fourth time. A blue heeler watched him from the doorway, ears up, one paw lifted. The dog had wandered in two weeks ago and stayed. Vance did not name it. He fed it jerky and let it sleep under the workbench. Now it whined once, low, like it understood the knocking better than he did. He walked out past the lift, past the pegboards of wrenches and the stacked tires, and stopped at the far wall. Pinned there was a photograph he never took down. A torn fuselage half-buried in sand. Broken landing gear. The wreck sat ten miles past Cutter's Bend, where a driver before him had run out of road and luck on the same night. Vance had watched it happen from his rearview. He did not talk about what he drove before the route. He kept the photograph instead. He pulled a brass key from his tuxedo pocket and turned it in his palm. The amber stone in the bow caught the shop light. A man he would not name had handed it to him last week, along with an address and a price, and had said the car waiting at that address would hold the Bend at speeds the coupe could only dream of. Vance had told the man he would think about it. He had been thinking about it ever since, while his rod knocked and his oil pan wept and the route kept the record locked away from him. He rolled the dead coupe off the lift and pushed it into the back bay. He killed the shop lights. The heeler followed him to the side door, tail low, eyes on the key in his hand. Vance locked the garage behind him and walked toward his truck. The new car was waiting somewhere out past the dark, and Cutter's Bend was waiting after that, and the record was waiting after that. He opened the passenger door for the dog. The dog jumped in.