Chapter 4: The Race
Simon had been running quarter-mile races since he was fifteen.
It had started as a way to cover the cost of the Supra — the purchase, the parts, the endless hours of modifications that turned a good car into something genuinely dangerous. He'd done that inside a year. After that, every dollar he won went into a single savings account he didn't touch for anything else.
Current balance: thirty thousand dollars.
It sounded like a lot until you held it up against the actual cost of four years at an American university. Tuition, housing, textbooks, fees — the full number came out somewhere around two hundred thousand dollars. Thirty thousand was a down payment on a problem.
His parents could maybe pull together another ten or fifteen, if things went well on the Deepwater Horizon and nothing unexpected came up. They were good people doing hard work in dangerous conditions, and the math of their lives didn't leave much margin. One bad month, one medical bill, one equipment failure — and the margin disappeared entirely. Simon had understood that about their situation long before they'd tried to explain it to him, and he'd stopped expecting rescue from that direction without any bitterness about it. It was just the reality.
America had student loans, of course. America always had student loans. But Simon knew exactly what those loans looked like on the back end — he'd read enough, in both his lives, to understand that signing one was less like getting help and more like agreeing to a very long, very specific kind of trouble. Smart people with good jobs spent decades climbing out of them. Simon had no intention of spending his thirties still paying for his twenties.
So he raced.
It was illegal. It was also, when you were good enough, the fastest legitimate cash available to someone his age. And Simon was very, very good.
By eleven PM, the Supra was dialed in.
He'd spent the better part of three hours in Dom's garage going through the checklist — tire pressure, fuel mixture, NOS lines, the twin-turbo boost curve. Letty had been working on her own car across the bay, occasionally offering commentary he didn't ask for and that was usually right.
Simon pulled the Supra up to where she was wiping down a wrench and rolled down the window. "I'm picking up Meg first. Go ahead — I'll meet you there."
Letty pointed the wrench at him. "Don't be late."
"I won't."
He wasn't.
Meg's house was dark when he idled up to the curb — dark except for the second-floor window, which lit up about forty-five seconds after he sent her the text.
He watched the window slide open. Meg's head appeared, checked both directions like she was crossing a street, then disappeared again. A minute later she was back — backpack on, dressed in sweats, moving with the practiced ease of someone who had done this particular exit route enough times to have it memorized.
She grabbed the window frame, swung out onto the roof overhang, crossed to the big oak tree at the corner of the house, and came down through the branches like it was a completely normal thing to do. Which, for Meg, it was. Cheer captain since sophomore year. The girl could move.
She dropped the last four feet, cleared the fence in one step, and was in the passenger seat before Simon had finished watching.
"Go," she said.
"Yes ma'am."
She was already pulling off her sweatshirt before they hit the end of the block.
Simon kept his eyes on the road while Meg changed — sweatpants to a short skirt, sneakers to heels, plain t-shirt to something considerably less plain — all in the passenger seat of a moving car, with the practiced efficiency of someone who had decided long ago that this was simply part of the evening's logistics.
"Drive smooth," she said, flipping down the visor mirror. "I'm doing my makeup."
"Done it before," Simon said.
She smiled and uncapped her mascara.
By the time she was finished, Simon was pulling into the spot where the race was already taking shape.
The location changed every week — a stretch of industrial road, a closed-off boulevard, whatever the scouts had cleared. Tonight it was a long straight shot through a warehouse district on the east side, the kind of road that felt built for exactly this purpose even though it wasn't.
Word traveled fast in this world. By the time Simon arrived, there were already a hundred people lining both sides of the street — racers, spectators, people there for the atmosphere, people there for the money, a few who were just there because it was a Tuesday night and this was the most interesting thing happening in a twenty-mile radius.
Simon parked and stepped out, Meg taking his arm as they walked toward the starting area.
"Simon!"
"Hey, man — good to see you."
"Let's go, Simon!"
He nodded back, shook a few hands, kept moving. After three years on this circuit, his face was known. That came with its own dynamics — expectations, challengers, the occasional person who'd bet against him and wanted a conversation about it afterward. He'd learned to navigate all of it.
Dom was near the front with Letty and a few others from the crew. He looked at Simon as they approached, then at his watch.
"Made it," Simon said.
"Barely."
"Barely counts." Simon looked out at the strip. Five cars were lined up or positioning. "What's the structure tonight?"
"Same as always," Dom said. "Two grand a seat. Winner takes everything."
Simon did the math without making a face. Five cars meant ten thousand dollars sitting in one pot. "I'm in."
Dom nodded toward a compact guy in a yellow jacket working his way through the crowd with a lockbox. "Hector's running the money."
Hector materialized at Simon's elbow a moment later. "Lewis. Good to see you, man."
"You too." Simon looked at Meg.
She'd already retrieved the folded bills from her bag — she handled the entry fee on race nights because Simon liked to keep both hands free near the car — and handed them to Hector without being asked.
Hector counted it, nodded, marked it down, and moved on.
While the logistics sorted themselves out, the crowd pushed the spectator cars back to form two long walls on either side of the strip. Someone produced red spray paint and marked a start line and a finish line on the asphalt — rough, functional, good enough.
Two girls Simon vaguely recognized from previous races walked the paint down the center of the road, calling out measurements, getting it right.
Then it was time.
Simon climbed back into the Supra, closed the door, and sat quietly for a moment in the dark of the cockpit. Five cars at the line. All of them serious. All of them fast.
The twin turbos alone might not be enough tonight. He'd clocked the other entries coming in — there was a built LS-swapped Camaro on his left that looked like it meant business, and a heavily modified Evo two spots down that he didn't have clean data on.
He reached to the center console and flipped open a recessed panel. A small screen rose from the dash — custom install, took him six weeks. He tapped through two menus and watched the twin pressure gauges on the console begin to climb as the compressor spooled up, pulling in air and packing it tight.
Compressed air: building.
He cracked the valve on the liquid nitrous tank mounted behind the passenger seat. The lines pressurized. The second gauge found its mark and held.
When he hit the button — compressed air and nitrous together, injected directly into the intake — the engine wouldn't know what decade it was. Neither would anyone watching.
Simon closed the panel, settled back into his seat, and put on music. Something with a tempo that matched where his head needed to be. He let one full song play out, eyes half-closed, running the launch sequence in his mind. Clutch feel. Shift point. The exact moment between grip and wheelspin.
The radio crackled.
Hector's guy on police scanner: All clear. Go when ready.
Hector stepped to the front of the line, facing the cars, and raised both hands.
Simon's right foot found the brake. His left pressed the clutch to the floor. He dropped into first gear, fed in throttle until the engine was screaming against the resistance, the rear tires barely holding on the edge of their traction limit.
Hector's hands came down.
Simon released the brake.
The Supra launched — not accelerated, launched, the way something leaves a catapult — front end floating for a half-second before the tires bit and drove it forward with everything it had.
He was already a car length ahead before anyone else reached second gear.
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