Mac’s grease-stained right fingers found the four three-quarter-inch hex bolts at his left elbow.
The metal was hot. The vibration of the Goss-Heidelberger tower ran straight up the bones of his forearm, humming in his teeth like an idling diesel engine. One hundred and fifty seconds remained on the central tachometer.
The big brass needle was quivering right at the edge of the red zone. Every stroke of the giant platen downstairs slammed against the concrete foundation with the weight of a dropped locomotive, sending shockwaves through the soles of their boots.
“Mac, don’t do it,” Julian said.
The clerk’s hand clamped down hard on Mac’s canvas shoulder. Julian’s grip was tight, his knuckles white under the harsh yellow maintenance glare.
He had seen the tool in Mac’s right hand--a stubby, double-ended dog-leg wrench pulled from his hip pouch. It was an old Craftsman wrench, its chrome long ago chipped away by thirty years of road salt, battery acid, and diesel sludge.
“Kid, let go,” Mac said.
“If you jam that housing into a twenty-ton planetary clutch, the torque won’t just stall the cylinder,” Julian said. His voice dropped into the fast, clipped tone he used whenever a customer passed a bad check. “The kinetic shock will travel up the arbor.”
