Ordinarily, I pay little attention to the ebb and flow of Quincy's business, especially when the object of my day's work holds a certain fascination for me. Consumed by the challenge and nostalgia of some projects, I can sit at my bench and listen to Quincy jabber without actually registering a word he's saying, both of us laboring to the accompaniment of the music of my youth, the hours slipping by like a train on greased rails.

It should have been this way for me with Andy Loderick's mini-bike. When Loderick first wheeled the homemade, motorized two-wheeler in for me to see, I almost took the job of refurbishing it for free. He said he had built the thing himself over thirty years earlier when he was just fourteen, using an old bicycle frame and a Briggs & Stratton lawnmower engine in accordance to some mail order plans he'd ordered from an ad in a comic book, and now that his mother's passing had brought him home from Pennsylvania where he'd gone off to college and remained, he'd hauled the stout but rusted little bike out of her garage in the hopes that I could recondition it for the entertainment of his two sons.

I told him I would do exactly that, or die trying.

Unfortunately, the bike had come to me less than twenty-four hours after R.J.'s funeral, and O'Neal Holden's final words to me at the cemetery were still rattling around in my head. I was running scared, and I had been for a long time.

O' thought I had no reason to run, any more than he did. He had always been steadfast in this opinion, and I had never been able to decide whether that made him the smartest man I knew, or the most blind. Either way, before I'd picked up the phone less than a week ago to hear the news of R.J.'s death, I'd been capable of acknowledging the possibility, however remote, that O' was right and I was wrong. It was the only hope I had worth living for.

But no more. Now, R.J. was dead, murdered in a cruel and gratuitous fashion that reeked of malice, and I had come home from