Fast & Wet (The Fast 2)

Eleven

Emily

“Enhance. Enhance,” I joke to Zane, one of the factory engineers who’s helping me in the lab today as we analyze my tire photos. We have them pulled up onto an oversized monitor hung on the wall.

“It’s not CSI, Emily,” he says. Zane is American, too, so we’ve been making jokes us Yanks would know.

“Maybe we need to turn the lights out and look with flashlights, that’s when you find all the good clues.”

Most of my pictures are trash, blurred beyond recognition because I was jogging when I took them. But there are two that might be useful if only Zane would enhance like television shows indicate we should be able to do.

I’ve spent the better part of my time between races digging up as much information as I can because Olivier still has not sent me the promised materials data. I emailed him a reminder and got an out of office notification.

I even found a French student at Cambridge to help me request the patent information Concordia has on record in France, but that’s going to take twelve weeks or more, and now I have to tutor someone else for the favor. But, without a tire from this season in hand, preferably a destroyed tire, I’m on my own to ferret out clues.

But I’m not going to be underestimated. I’ve had enough of that to last me a lifetime. I am smart and damn good at what I do. To hell with anyone who wants to put me in a corner and thinks otherwise.

“Wait, go back one photo,” I tell Zane and move closer to the giant wall monitor.

He clicks back one photo and blows up the image. “What?” He asks, fixing his glasses to look closely.

“Can you zoom in any more right here,” I point to a corner of the image.

Zane tries, but the resolution blows out if we zoom in any more. “What are we looking at?”

It’s hard to tell because this is a shitty cell phone photo, and most of it is blurred, but there might be something. “Right here,” I tap the monitor, “what do you see?”

“Cracks in the rubber?”

I nod. I really want someone else to see what I see, though, because it could be nothing, and I don’t want to bring bias in. And I am definitely biased now after Dante’s accident scared the bejeezus out of me.

“I don’t get it,” Zane finally shrugs. In fairness, he did not spend nine months of his life learning everything there is to know about tires. He spent his graduate year learning about computational fluid dynamics, which also sounds fascinating if I'm honest.

“Do those cracks look random in pattern to you, or do they run perpendicular to the grain?” Both of us have our noses pressed into the monitor and are cocking our heads from side to side, trying to figure it out.

“Perpendicular. Maybe?”

“Ugh, you’re no help, Zane,” I put my hands on my hips and step back.

“What does the crack orientation have to do with anything?”

“The way the cracks form tells a story. Perpendicular cracks can be from ozone…”

“What are you guys doing?” Zane and I both jump and spin around to find Cole with one eyebrow cocked, looking at the magnified tire photo on the wall, and my smattering of papers spread out around me like a tornado has been through.

“Looking at cracks,” Zane shrugs.

“As one does,” Cole smiles at me with that panty-melting grin he does so well.

I’ve seen Cole a handful of times at the factory since we’ve been back. He’s being pretty professional, I have to admit. He’s conveniently available when I’ve had questions, but he isn’t underfoot or making me uncomfortable in any way.

A couple of times I’ve caught myself wishing he were around more, actually, but I’ve been pushing that down and trying to focus on work. Because I’m good at that.

“What’s up?” I ask him. His hands are in his jeans pockets, which just makes his pants tight in that area, and I try not to glance down. He’s gotten scruffy since we’ve been home for the last several days, and it makes him look even more impossibly rugged.

“Dante said you wanted me to tell you when I’d be in the simulator?”

“Oh yeah, I forgot. When are you doing that?”