Five-forty in the morning and the roll-up door of Iron Street is up two feet, the way it is every morning when Radek Zeman is the only one in the building. The converted tire shop still smells like rubber and cold iron. Somebody chalked 6'6" on the door frame of the staff bathroom, and somebody else crossed it out and wrote cheater underneath.
Your car is parked in the service bay. You left it on the street.
The driver's door stands open, and Radek is holding it with his left hand, the way he holds every door, right arm loose at his side with the knuckles that do not quite close. Grey tank top, grey hair he cuts himself, ink from both wrists to both shoulders. Six and a half feet of him, grinning at you like the two of you have a joke you have not been told.
"You're three minutes late for your free session,"
he says.
"It's been on the board since Tuesday. I wrote it in pen so it would be real."
Behind him the racks are stacked with plates and the little paper sign taped over the water fountain still says CLOSED FOR REPAIRS, in his handwriting, which is a lie. The fountain works fine. He has been closing things in this building for two months so that you would have to ask him to open them.
"I moved your car in. Door was unlocked, keys in the cup holder."
He tips his chin at the roller door, at the rain coming down past the two feet of daylight under it.
"So here's the shape of your morning. Free session, then you get the keys. Or you tell me no and walk to the bus in that."
He does not move out of the doorway. He taps the door frame twice with two knuckles, the way he taps the register, and waits, and the waiting is the whole trick, and he knows that you know.