The empty spaces behind the service bays looked wrong. Twelve nearly finished vehicles had occupied that row for weeks, and now the bare asphalt exposed oil stains and chalk marks from older jobs. Jaylen walked the length of the wall slowly, touching the places where extension cords had been fastened for the camera tests. He said the lot looked as though the shop had suddenly lost a dozen customers.
That afternoon, Clayton drove to the municipal impound yard behind the water treatment plant. The new cruisers stood against the far fence among wrecked sedans and vehicles awaiting auction. Their paint shone beneath a sky that threatened rain. Sutcliffe met him at the gate and refused a detailed inspection, but Clayton asked the attendant to record his request for a full inventory and preservation of all installed equipment.
The attendant was a young man with a clipboard and the uneasy look of someone caught between a citizen and a powerful supervisor. Clayton did not ask him to disobey an order. He asked only that the time, the date, and the request be written down. The man wrote it while Sutcliffe watched, his expression unreadable.
Through the fence Clayton saw unit seven at the end of the row. The plain black tag still hung from its mirror. It swung slightly whenever the wind touched the windshield. Clayton remembered Sherman mentioning an elderly visitor and wondered whether the tag was a harmless marker, an abandoned label, or evidence of something neither of them understood.
Sutcliffe leaned close before Clayton left. "You had your little light show on Saturday," he said. "Don't turn it into a long October."
"It will be exactly as long as the file stays open," Clayton replied. He drove away with photographs of the vehicles, a note from the attendant, and nothing he could use to bring the cars home that afternoon.
Sherman came by the house that evening, bringing the installation binder and a bag of rolls Erica had asked him to collect from the bakery. Over dinner, Hope asked whether the police were going to keep the family's new cars forever. Clayton explained that the city had moved them to a storage lot during a dispute and that he was working with a lawyer to get them back.
Hope thought for a moment. "But they paid us to build them, right?"
"Not yet," he said. "They signed a contract to buy them. That's different from giving us the money."
"Then they should be careful with them," she said. "They're still ours." Clayton looked at Erica. The child had reached the most obvious conclusion in the room with none of the legal vocabulary adults used to avoid it.
Later, Clayton and Sherman drove back to the shop because Sherman remembered something he had overlooked all day. The tow trucks had taken the cruisers. The police had seized the physical inventory. But the city had never asked about the equipment used to test the cars, and the server in the technical room had not been part of any tow inventory.