One knelt beside the motorcycle nearest the warehouse door. Another opened the toolbox. Their hands disappeared under a seat and near the metal frame, and small objects changed hands without conversation. Zara could not see exactly what they were doing, but she saw something box-shaped disappear beneath the first motorcycle, followed by a faint red flash in the darkness.
She reached into the pocket of her hoodie for the old phone her mother's cousin had given her. The screen was cracked at the top and the battery rarely lasted through a school day. The camera was poor in low light, but it was better than nothing. She turned the brightness down, checked that the sound was muted, and began recording through the gap.
Her hands shook, making the image jump. She steadied one wrist against the dumpster and kept filming. One man's jacket lifted as he bent over a motorcycle; a metallic badge clipped near his belt reflected the security light. Zara felt her stomach tighten. Police officers were supposed to stop people from doing dangerous things, not sneak through parking lots attaching mysterious objects to vehicles.
A second man stood briefly beneath the streetlight. He was white, middle-aged, with short graying hair cut close to his scalp, and his face was turned toward the alley for no more than a few seconds. Zara held her breath so hard her chest hurt. The man looked past her hiding place, then spoke to someone by the van and returned to his work.
She heard fragments of voices but not enough to make sense of them. The men spread out through the motorcycles, moving in a way that made it difficult to tell how many machines they had touched. After several minutes they gathered their tools, checked the lot once more, and went back to the van. It rolled away quietly, its headlights remaining dark until it turned onto the larger road.
Only after the sound vanished did Zara move. Her knees ached from crouching, and her fingers were so stiff that she almost dropped the phone. She checked the recording, watched the figure beneath the streetlight appear on the small screen, and decided to send a copy to the email account she used for school assignments. The upload progressed slowly, pausing twice before the confirmation finally appeared.
She should have called her mother then. She knew it later, and for a long time she would blame herself for not doing it first. But she had watched people in the neighborhood call for help and then spend hours explaining why they deserved to be believed. She wanted one more piece of proof, something she could show someone who would otherwise tell her she had misunderstood what she saw.