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.

Vance drove the truck east with the heeler asleep on the bench seat and the brass key warm in his pocket. The address on the paper led him out past the dry flats, where the road climbed a low ridge and the sky started to gray. He meant to reach the new car before sunrise, sign for it, and be back on the route by noon. Then he crested the ridge and saw the cairn. It sat in the middle of his lane. Stacked rocks, sun-bleached, a wagon wheel jammed in the top. Vance braked hard and stepped out. The heeler hopped down and sniffed the base. Vance knew the mark. Wheelmen left them when they claimed a route. Someone had heard about his dead coupe at the Bend. Someone was moving on the line while he was off it. He kicked the cairn over and threw the wheel into the brush. The rocks did not matter. The message did. He drove faster after that. The address turned out to be a white mansion set back behind an iron gate, all tall windows and trimmed hedges, the kind of place a man buys when he wants other men to come to him. Vance parked the truck at the gate and walked up the drive in his tuxedo. A houseman met him at the door, took the brass key, and led him around to a side court. The new car waited there under a tarp. The houseman pulled the cover. Vance looked at the low wedge body, the scissor doors, the badge on the nose. A Lamborghini, fresh from the crate, paint still wet-looking in the early light. He signed the paper on the hood. The houseman handed him a fob and stepped back. Vance opened the driver's door and the heeler jumped across his lap into the passenger seat. He took the new car straight for the route. Two miles short of Cutter's Bend he saw the other driver pulled off on the shoulder, hood up, a second cairn half-built beside the front tire. The man turned at the sound of the Lamborghini and his face went flat. Vance did not stop. He held the throttle steady and passed close enough to throw grit across the rival's boots. In the mirror the man stood in the dust and watched the new car go. Vance had the route back. He also had a car he had never driven, a Bend that had killed his last one, and a wheelman behind him who now knew exactly what he was up against.

Vance drove the new car a mile past the rival and pulled onto the shoulder. The heeler sat up and watched him. He killed the engine and listened. The rival had seen the Lamborghini. The rival would not sit on the shoulder long. He would call ahead, or ride ahead, and he would put something on the road before Vance could make a clean run. Vance had to find the staging point first. He turned the car around and took a service track that cut north of the route. The dog braced against the door as the low nose scraped gravel. A half mile in, he saw smoke. A small wooden hut sat on a stone foundation with crates stacked against the walls and a metal chimney leaking gray. A spiked-tire ATV stood out front, jerry cans strapped to its rack. Vance stopped the Lamborghini behind a rise and stepped out. He walked the last hundred yards. The hut door was open. Inside he saw bolt cutters, fuel cans, and an empty crate marked with a hardware stamp. The crate had held spikes. Vance counted three more crates like it, all empty. The rival had already laid the trap. Vance ran back to the car. He drove the service track east until it rejoined the route, then pushed the Lamborghini hard toward the Bend. Two miles short of Cutter's Bend he saw them. A wide bed of metal spikes covered both lanes, half-buried in the dust, set across the only clean line into the corner. He braked. The car stopped twenty feet from the edge of the field. The heeler whined once. Vance got out and looked. The spikes ran shoulder to shoulder. He could not drive around. He could not drive through. He opened the trunk, pulled the floor mat, and walked to the edge of the field. He worked one spike loose, then another. The dog stood guard at the road. Behind him, on the long straight he had just taken, he heard the high whine of a small engine climbing. The ATV was coming up the route. Vance had cleared three feet of road. He needed twelve. He dropped the mat and ran back to the Lamborghini. He could not clear the field in time. He swung the car off the shoulder, onto the hardpan beside the road, and drove the desert line his old coupe had never dared. The low body scraped twice. A rock cracked something under the floor. He cleared the spike field, bounced back onto the asphalt past it, and stopped. The Bend was a mile ahead, open and his. But the car was hurt, the rival was close behind on a vehicle built for this ground, and the record run he had come for would have to wait until he knew what the Lamborghini had left.