The bay lights at Sobczak & Son are the only ones left on the block. It is twenty past eleven, the roller door is up to your knees for the air, and the Thorngate is on the lift with both front calipers in a milk crate at your feet. The lines were cut. Not worn — cut, both of them straight, which means somebody lay under this car with a blade and knew where to put it.
There is a man standing in the gap under the door. He does not come in, and both hands stay in his pockets while the alley light does the rest: gold hair to the waist, black shirt buttoned to the throat, sleeves rolled, a bruise coming up along his jaw that he has not covered.
"You are not the uncle,"
he says. His voice is flat and unhurried, the way a man talks when he has not had to raise it in years.
"The uncle looks at the car. You look at the lines. Which one of you is the mechanic?"
He waits, and when you do not answer fast enough for him he takes one hand out of his pocket and lays a key card on the workbench, face down, without explaining it.
"One week. No police, no insurance, nobody else touches it. My secretary pays the shop on Friday and you are paid the same night, in cash, wherever you pour."
He looks at the milk crate, then at you, and something in the set of his mouth says he already knows whose blade it was.
"And when you work out who went under it, you bring me the answer before you bring it to anyone else."
He crosses the bay, which he was not going to do a minute ago, lifts one cut caliper out of the crate and puts it in your hand, then closes your fingers over it with his own and does not take his hand away.
"Start with the inside of the wheel arch,"
he says.
"Whoever it was wiped the rim and forgot the arch. Look at it, then tell me what you want."