school wrestling team, and she could still bench-press calves. She was Team Vagenya’s new jackman.

The front tire carrier, Jeanne Mowbray, was the only girl in a family of construction workers from Ohio, so carrying a heavy tire was not a novelty to her, or to her counterpart, rear tire carrier Sigur Nelson, a flaxen-haired farm girl from Minnesota, who looked as though she was only working in Cup racing until her application to be a Valkyrie was approved.

The two tire changers were less striking physical specimens, because they did not have to lift the tires. The skill they had was not strength, but the dexterity to manipulate the lug nuts and the drill. The oldest of the over- the-wall gang was forty-one-year-old Kathy Erwin, granddaughter of a Carolina racing family. She knew both Tuggle and the team’s chief engineer Julie Carmichael, so there was some talk that she got the job through her connections, but even if that were the case, she was exceptionally fast at tire changing, so it hardly mattered.

The second tire changer, Cindy Corlett, was a small, serious girl with a pixie face and long, tapering fingers.

“Are you a mechanic?” Taran had asked her in disbelief.

The dark-haired girl had smiled and shook her head. “Musician,” she said. “Bluegrass fiddle. I’m good with my hands, you see.”

“But why on earth would you want to change tires on a race car then?”

“I guess I come by it naturally,” said Cindy. “Back in Ozark, Arkansas, my family was always about two things: picking and racing. I decided I’d like to try both. My daddy is just thrilled to death about this. I promised to get him a hot pass to Bristol.”

So there they were, with a spectrum of backgrounds and home states, each with a different reason for being on board, and each with a second skill to benefit the team. When they weren’t needed on pit crew, they would drive the hauler, work as a mechanic, serve as the computer technician, assist the fabricators-there were many talents needed to field a stock car. It made sense to hire people who could serve in more than one capacity. Taran would be the computer person.

She hoped that she would become friends as well as coworkers with this collection of strangers, and that she would be a valuable member of the team. Taran had never been much of a joiner, and she tended to be shy around new people, but she thought that having a common goal might make it easier for her to connect with the rest of the crew. She didn’t think she’d ever get over being intimidated by Tuggle, but she did hope that sooner or later she could find the courage to say something to Badger Jenkins. Something besides “I love you.” Surely he had forgotten about that.

CHAPTER XI

Get Shorty

“I’m supposed to do sports card shots of him?” Melanie Sark lowered her camera and peered at the young man in the purple firesuit who had just entered the studio door.

“We don’t call them that in motorsports,” said Tuggle. “Folks say hero cards.”

Hero cards? Sark stared at her. “I would rather swallow my tongue,” she said.

Tuggle shrugged. “Just a figure of speech. ’Course you might want to remember that it is a dangerous sport.”

“Yeah, we could call them idiot cards.”

“How about autograph cards?”

“Fine. Autograph cards.” She glanced again at the young man loitering out of earshot in the doorway, talking on his cell phone. “All right, how do you expect me to do an autograph card for him? He’s the size of a mailbox!”

Tuggle shrugged. You could tell that this girl hadn’t been in motorsports very long. What was she used to? NBA players? Badger wasn’t even unusual for a Cup driver.

“This is NASCAR,” she reminded the new team publicist. “At Speedways, you always want to watch where you step.”

Sark wrinkled her nose. “Dog poo?”

“Jeff Gordon.” Tuggle held out her hand at about shoulder height to illustrate the point. “Now on the autograph cards, we’ll say Badger is five foot seven.”

Sark smirked. “Why don’t you say he’s the Emperor of Japan while you’re at it?”

“Well, they might be about the same height,” Tuggle conceded. “He’s got a beautiful nose, though, Badger does. He ought to write his Welsh ancestors a thank-you note for that perfect bone structure. You should see some of his old autograph cards. He photographs well. And it’s all in the camera angles. You can make him look tall.”

“Yeah, if I stand in a drainage ditch. Okay, thanks for bringing him over. You can have him back in an hour.” She peered doubtfully at the young man in the doorway, who seemed to be waiting for permission to enter. “Will I need an interpreter?”

Tuggle smirked. “Just listen slowly-he’s from Georgia.”

Badger Jenkins turned around and around, surveying the empty building lit with studio lights. “How you doin’?” he said, extending his hand and summoning his brightest smile.

Sark lifted the camera and took a step backward. “Save it, Frodo, I’m not into this sport. I just needed a job, all right? And apparently my job is to make you look good, so that you come across as a combination of Superman and Tom Hanks.” Her tone of voice indicated the magnitude of that task. “Let’s do the photos first, okay? We can work on the interview after that. Five minutes ought to suffice for it. Stand there with your arms folded. That’ll be the car shot.”

With a puzzled frown, Badger looked around at the empty studio. “But there’s no car here,” he said.

Sark rolled her eyes. “Duh. I’ll take the shots of you first, and then digitally I’ll paste in shots of the race car behind you. That way I can fudge a little. Put you in at one hunderd percent, maybe paste the car in at eighty.”

“Why?”

“So you’ll look bigger.” She peered at him through the lens. Assuming the eager-to-please expression of a Westminster show dog, Badger faced the camera with a pasted-on smile. Sark sighed and lowered the camera. “Lose the smile, sunshine,” she said. “You’re supposed to look tough, aren’t you?”

Badger nodded, relaxing his features into a solemn, slightly baffled expression.

The light in his eyes is the sun shining through the back of his head,” muttered Sark, supplying the caption to the imaginary photo. This would be a perfect episode to include in her notes for the secret article. Height fraud in NASCAR. Or the art of illusion in sports photography. She would jot down a few particulars later, but now she had to get on with a more pressing assignment: making Badger Jenkins look imposing.

“You look about as scary as cottage cheese,” she told him. “Try again.”

As she knelt on the floor a few feet in front of him and lined up his image in the viewfinder, the transformation took place. Badger put on his dark sunglasses, sat down on a stack of tires, and assumed his characteristic pose- leaning forward slightly; legs spread wide apart; tapered, sinewy hands clasped at belt level; with an expression of stern intensity ennobling that chiseled, perfect face. He had the calm of one who knows he is the most dangerous thing around and the stillness of a coiled spring.

Sark blinked. Where the hell did he come from? The diffident and affable Badger Jenkins had vanished, and in his place was a warrior angel, beautiful and terrible to behold. He took your breath away. And he looked a foot taller than Badger really was.

“Da-amn,” she whispered, looking up over the camera, half expecting to see the real Badger standing off to the side of the room, but no, it was him sitting there on the stack of tires, like Hollywood’s idea of a combat general- handsome, strong, and damn near irresistible.

He had enough sense not to move or speak or break the pose. Without a word, Sark clicked the shutter, adjusted the angle, snapped again. Scarcely daring to breathe, she spent the whole roll on that one pose, at slightly varying heights, angles, distances, chasing the play of light across the planes of his face, and trying to imagine an

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