"All right," she said. "I'll wait for your signal. But if they try to hurt you, I am not promising to remain polite."
Daniel gave a brief smile. "And whatever happens, don't come in early. Let them show us who they are."
He ended the call and sat for another minute with both hands on the wheel. Across the street, the showroom windows rose two stories above a sweep of pale stone, and a black Meridian coupe occupied the center of the display under a circle of immaculate white lights. Daniel had already seen its specifications, inspected its title status, and checked that it was genuinely available for sale. The car itself was not the mystery; he was there to test the people who stood around it.
Twenty-five years earlier, his father had wanted something much less extravagant. Frank Brooks worked at a transmission shop on Eighth Street, beginning before sunrise and coming home with hands that smelled of gear oil no matter how thoroughly he washed them. Daniel's mother, Elaine, was a nursing assistant at a hospital on the other side of town, and her shifts often ended after the last reliable bus connection. She sometimes waited under a shelter while the streets emptied, her feet aching, her coat pulled tight around her shoulders against winter wind.
For three years Frank put money aside from overtime jobs, weekend repairs, and the occasional engine he rebuilt at the kitchen table after everyone else went to bed. He placed the folded bills and coins in a blue coffee can with a loose lid, and every few weeks he and Daniel counted the contents together. By the time Elaine's birthday approached, they had saved four thousand two hundred dollars, enough for a substantial down payment on a dependable preowned car. Frank had seen a sedan advertised at Sterling Prestige Motors and believed the dealership would be safer and more reliable than purchasing from an unknown private seller.
Daniel had been sixteen, with the long legs and impatience of a boy who was beginning to understand money but had not yet learned how deeply it could affect the way people spoke to you. He remembered his father brushing off his boots before entering the showroom, as if that small gesture could protect the carpet from a working man's presence. He remembered Frank setting the coffee can gently on the counter, explaining that he wanted a car for his wife, and asking to see the used sedan in the window. Most painfully, he remembered the laughter that followed.
Victor Sterling had been younger then, with darker hair and the sharp confidence of a man enjoying his first years in charge of his father's dealership. He had looked from Frank's jacket to the coffee can and back again before asking whether someone was filming a joke. When Frank explained that he could finance the balance, Victor told him to take his rusty can outside before it stained the carpet. Frank apologized, actually apologized, for having walked in and taken up the man's time.