Chapter 4: Pinetop

Pinetop sat in the hills forty minutes west of Bramwell, a former logging town that had died and come back as a racetrack. The track had been built in the seventies on the flat top of a cleared ridge, a two-mile road course with a half-mile dirt oval grafted onto the back, and over the decades the town had grown back around it, bars and parts stores and a diner called the Greasy Spoon that served biscuits and gravy at four in the morning on race weekends. On a Saturday night in July the place smelled like high-octane fuel and fried dough and the crowd was already three deep along the fence.

The town of Pinetop itself sat at the bottom of the ridge, a handful of streets with a population of maybe six hundred on a weekday and several thousand on a race weekend, and the whole economy of the place ran on the track the way a mill town runs on the mill. There was a tire shop on the main drag that only sold race rubber. There was a bar called the Last Lap that had checkered flags painted on the ceiling. There was a laundromat that doubled as a transmission shop, and nobody in Pinetop thought that was strange, because in Pinetop everything eventually came back to cars.

Dani trailered the Nissan in behind her dad's truck, which she'd borrowed by telling Marco she was helping a friend move a parts car. The lie had come easy and sat heavy. She'd backed the trailer into the pit area with the precision of someone who'd done it a hundred times, even though she'd done it four.

The car wasn't ready, not really, the turbo was on but untuned, the ECU running a base map she'd pulled from a forum, the tires a set of used Federal 595s she'd bought for eighty dollars from a kid who'd corded them and wanted them gone. The car looked rough. Faded paint, mismatched wheels, a hood that didn't quite line up because she'd bent the hinges loading it. It looked like what it was: a twenty-year-old car built in a back bay by a twenty-year-old kid with a die grinder and a parts budget that came in installments.

Dani didn't care what it looked like. She cared what it did.

She changed into her firesuit in the back of the truck. The suit was secondhand, bought off eBay, too big in the shoulders and too short in the leg, and she rolled the cuffs and cinched the belt and pulled her helmet on. The helmet was matte black, no graphics, no name, and she'd taped over the vents with black tape because she liked the look of it. Nobody knew her here. That was the point.

Pinetop ran an open drift night on Saturdays, fifty bucks to enter, run what you brung, judged on line and angle and style, and the field tonight was forty cars deep. She'd registered online under the name Maren, her mother's maiden name, the same name she used for everything racing because it wasn't Costa, and Costa wasn't supposed to be racing.

She walked the paddock. She always walked it. She liked to see the cars before she drove against them, read the builds, spot the weaknesses. There were the usual suspects: a group of S-chassis Nissans, a couple of old Corollas, a guy with a Miata and a supercharger that sounded like a sewing machine on meth. There was a V8-swapped 240 with a loping idle that probably couldn't hold a slide past second gear. There was a kid in a BMW who kept revving his engine at nobody.

And there was a Skyline.

Dani stopped.

The car sat at the far end of the paddock under a canopy, black, R34 GT-R, the body so clean it looked wet. The wheels were deep-dish Volks. The wing was stock but carbon. The engine bay, open and propped, gleamed. A crew of three moved around it in matching black shirts, and the shirts had a logo she couldn't read from here and a single word printed across the back.

ROOK.

She'd heard the name. Everyone in the eastern drift scene had heard the name. Rook held the course record at Pinetop, set two seasons ago, a lap nobody had come within a second of since. Nobody knew who Rook was. He never showed his face. He ran the car, set the time, disappeared. The forum had a thread four hundred pages long speculating about his identity and the only thing anyone had agreed on was that he drove a Skyline and he was fast enough to be boring about it.

Dani walked closer. She told herself she was scouting. She told herself she wanted to see the car that held the record she was going to break.

She got within twenty feet of the canopy before one of the crew, a kid in a black shirt with a clipboard, stepped into her path. But she'd already looked through the open side of the tent. On the roll cage of the Skyline sat a black helmet with a mirrored visor, the kind that caught light like dark glass. The kind she'd pressed her mouth to two nights ago in a parking lot outside a 7-Eleven.

"Closed paddock," the kid said. Not mean, just a wall.

"My bad," Dani said. She smiled under her helmet, though he couldn't see it. She turned and walked back toward her own pit, and she didn't look at the Skyline again, and she told herself the helmet meant nothing, that half the paddock had a black helmet with a mirrored visor, that she was the kind of person who saw what she wanted to see, and that was stupid, that was a coincidence, that was the kind of thing a person who was losing their mind would think.

She got in her car. She started it. The turbo spooled with a sound like a sharp intake of breath, and she pulled out of her pit and onto the staging lane and she forgot about the Skyline and the boy and the helmet and the kiss, because in three minutes she was going to line up against a field of forty cars and she was going to drive, and driving was the only thing that had ever made the world quiet enough to hear herself think.

The staging official waved her forward. She pulled to the line. She revved the engine, the turbo screaming, the rear tires breaking loose on the warm-up burnout, and the crowd along the fence roared, and she dropped the clutch and the Nissan launched and the world went sideways and loud and fast, and Dani Costa was, for two whole minutes, exactly who she was supposed to be.

She qualified twelfth. Not great, not bad. Good enough for a car with an untuned map and corded tires and a driver who'd never run this track at speed.

Twelfth out of forty. In a car she'd built with her own hands in a back bay in Bramwell.

She parked the Nissan back in her pit and killed the engine and sat in the sudden silence with her helmet in her lap, breathing hard, her hands shaking with the leftover adrenaline, and she smiled so wide it hurt.

Tomorrow was the main event. Tomorrow she'd find out how fast she really was.

She pulled off her helmet and shook her hair loose and she walked toward the Greasy Spoon to get a water, her firesuit unzipped to the waist, the sleeves tied around her hips. The kid from the Rook paddock was leaning against the fence eating a corndog. He glanced at her, then at her car, then back at her, and he gave her a small nod.

"Twelve's not bad for a car that looks like that," he said.

"Thanks," Dani said. "I think."

"No offense."

"Some taken."

He grinned. He pointed his corndog at the black Skyline. "You know who holds the record here, right?"

"Rook," she said.

"Rook," he confirmed. "Nobody's touched his time in two seasons. Some people think he doesn't exist. Some people think he's three guys. Some people think he's a ghost."

He took a bite. He chewed. He shrugged. "I think he's just some guy who's really, really fast."

Dani looked past him at the Skyline gleaming under its canopy. The word ROOK on the backs of the crew shirts. The clean black car and the closed paddock and the record on the board that she was going to break, or die trying.

"He's not a ghost," she said.

"You sound sure about that."

"I'm sure about that."

She didn't tell him why she was sure. She didn't tell him about the black helmet on the roll cage, the mirrored visor she'd kissed outside a 7-Eleven two nights before, because the whole point of Maren was that nobody knew, and the whole point of being sure was that you didn't have to prove it to anyone, you just knew, the way she knew a car was lean by the sound of it, the way she knew when to release the string, the way she knew, standing in the paddock at Pinetop with the smell of funnel cake and race gas in the air, that she was going to see that boy again, and that the next time she saw him, she was going to beat him.

"How do you know?"

She thought about the helmet on the roll cage, the mirrored visor, about the way her chest had gone tight when she saw it. She didn't have an answer that made sense, so she just said, "Ghosts don't hold lap records."

She walked on toward the Spoon. Behind her she heard the kid laugh, a short surprised sound, and she smiled.