was buying it for parts, and Raymond had surprised them both by answering that he intended to drive it. She had looked toward the garage, where forty years of her husband's abandoned projects lay stacked in boxes, and told him he could take the car if he promised not to let it rot again.
The promise had become six years of weekend labor. Raymond tracked down replacement panels from salvage yards in three states, rebuilt the 396-cubic-inch engine with a retired machinist named Elton Price, and argued for months with a paint specialist named Gus about the precise depth of green he wanted. Gus called it midnight green, though in direct sunlight the finish held a faint blue undertone that seemed to move as a person walked past it. Raymond had chosen that color because, as a boy, he had watched an elegant green muscle car pass through a neighborhood where his family could not have afforded to rent a garage, much less buy the house attached to one.
He did not talk much about the memory. There were parts of growing older that became easier when you could finally afford the things you had once only admired through a bus window. There were other parts that never stopped following you, regardless of the address on your driver's license. Raymond knew both truths well, and the Chevelle had come to represent more than expensive machinery because of them.
At forty-seven, Raymond was a detective sergeant with twenty-two years in the Garland City Police Department. He had entered the academy at twenty-five, after several years of college, odd jobs, and a marriage that began when he and Sandra were young enough to believe every difficult thing could be solved with work. His father, a city bus driver who had spent thirty years learning which streets changed character after dark, had shaken his hand on graduation day and said only, "Good. Now remember that the badge is not your personality."
His mother had been less restrained. She had cried through the entire ceremony, scolded him for not ironing his collar correctly, and invited half the church to dinner afterward. She was gone now, as was his father, but Raymond kept both their voices inside him. In twenty-two years of policing, he had found that the best decisions were often the ones that would have made those two ordinary people willing to sit across from him at the kitchen table afterward.
He became a detective at thirty-one, a detective sergeant at thirty-eight, and eventually led investigations in the Major Crimes Division. The cases had brought commendations, difficult testimony, a few sleepless nights he never explained at home, and a reputation for refusing to force evidence into a theory merely because the theory was convenient. Younger detectives learned that Raymond could tolerate mistakes if they were admitted early. He had far less patience for polished reports designed to conceal a fact somebody wished had not occurred.